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Cool JohnnyRoc,

Don't trim unnecessarily. Consider canonical tagging content groupings rather than deleting pages. It's a practice used, for example, when you're trying to rank for "patriotic tshirts" that come in multiple sizes.

D

Johnnyroc,

Take a look at the answer to the question asked immediately after yours - "is there a tool that I can use to scrape and see [competitor's] meta tags". The answers provided will also help you learn more about what your competitors are doing.

Thanks for sharing Matt-Antonino.

That's good to know!

I don't think you can use Screaming Frog for that. It will certainly give you a ton of information about a single website, but it doesn't allow you to scrape Google search results and derive meta data for the top X results. Unless I'm missing something....

I'm not aware of a way to do that using the Moz toolset. Try SEMRush. You can plug in the URL of your competitors and see their top keywords.

Frustrating isn't it? Trying to get accurate link data? None of the tools are totally reliable and each one gives you a different answer.

MajesticSEO makes it easy to see which links are new and lost during a specific time frame. They have free and paid versions of the tool, with (obviously) more functionality available to paid subscribers. That said, if you register and confirm ownership of a domain, you can see details for free.

See if it gets you what you need.

(1) Profile your intended audience to make sure you're addressing their information want and needs and sharing it in the right places.

(2) Consider just asking them - set up a survey.

(3) Include calls to action that specifically ask visitors to bookmark, link to and share your content.

(4) Consider syndication with canonical tagging - if nothing else, it has the potential to drive more traffic and time on site which can help your rankings.

(5) Are you using the right medium? Perhaps your (profiled) audience prefers short how-to videos or screen-casts? (Think of Whiteboard Friday.)

(6) Are you using hashtags and reaching out to the few bloggers that do exist and publish in your industry?

"There are some outliers - companies that just barely participate in the local search ecosystem. Examples include Judy's Book, Angie's List and Manta. These companies share their data with others (most notably Google), but are not paid subscribers to data aggregator services or data. If you want to get listed on those directories, you have to create the entries yourself."

Quoted from a post on my blog.

Hi Sarah,

I'll take a stab at answering your questions, but have to say I have not yet used Moz Local. I plan to at the next opportunity.

It's hard to predict if Moz Local might help with the domains you had difficulty with without knowing the types of problems you ran into. Moz Local is, in my opinion, an educational and time saving tool for local SEO. It will help identify duplicates so you can be aware of them and take appropriate action. It won't solve the problem for you.

Moz feeds the data aggregators and the big-hitters that require manual verification. Would it be duplicating your efforts? I'm sure there's overlap. How much is hard to say.

I don't believe you can cherry-pick the domains you want. For that you'd be better off using a citation builder like Whitespark.ca. They check for duplicates and hand-submit citations. It can get expensive though at $4-$5 a pop, especially when you're talking about 70 locations. They do offer discounts for volume though.

Hope that helps.

D

Just FYI, someone specifically asked if canonicalizing a page will prevent it from being indexed last year on Moz. It's was a good discussion. Pay particular attention to what Dr Pete has to say on the matter.

Sounds like you have a plan! Great.

What pages are folks landing on when they do a local search? If it's the services page, you'll lose the ability to rank for those pages locally if you do a canonical. Are you showing up for local search terms in organic search results or local search results? If you go with a single site and dedicated local pages with local phone numbers, you'll be able to rank in both organic and local search results.

If your facility pages "tend to perform about the same as other local companies that are our biggest competition" and your goal is to gain an advantage, I'm thinking your best bet might be to grow your citations and reviews. I'm usually a big fan of consolidation so you can maximize the value derived from your SEO efforts, but it would be very disruptive to transition to a single site. Is management prepared and willing to shoulder that?

If you're not ready to rock the just boat yet, perhaps you should do an apples to apples comparison of your local facility sites to your competitors to see if a boost in citations or reviews could help bump you higher.

I'm just not hearing a pressing need from you...

Hi KH,

What are your analytics telling you? Which site or sites are performing well? Were there overriding reasons to take that direction a few years ago and now the business has changed? Are most of your customers local? Is proximity important to them?

Logically I would expect results to be not as good as they could be if your efforts were consolidated into a single domain with dedicated local pages but am curious to hear answers to those questions first.

That was supposed to have been "great question". Wonder how that happened!

I find the Moz interface doesn't play well with my iPad. Course my brain and fingers might not have been coordinating well after midnight either.

Your idea is an excellent one. Especially if it embraces the TAGFEE or a similar code that facilitates and encourages openness and sharing.

How about a sampling of some of the terms you used to rank highly for and now are not?

Perfect video to answer my last question.

Thank you.

Do you have any notices in GWT Katie?

Hi Anders.

You've put some thought and research into this and I really appreciate it. Thank you!

The duplicate bookmarks article is interesting and a possible root cause. I can't see what host or pages are linking to my client's site at all. I just know there are 90,160 inbound links from a single source (at 1194.196.0.36) to the home page. But the second discussion you posted seems like it might be a feasible explanation as well. Just no way to know for sure...

I'm wondering if I should ignore or disavow these links. I don't see any drastic change in visitor behavior recently, but given the client is fairly new, I  have no idea how long these links have been around. What do people think? Should I ignore or disavow?

Thanks again Anders!

Donna

Please share if you identify any good ones. I know I'm interested and expect others would be as well. Brest question!

Hi Anders.

Thanks for helping. I notice that too, yet can't seem to find any evidence of Apple linking to my client.

I also used the link DTOX tool to see if they had a record of 90k incoming links from a single source. No luck.

I emailed at&t global network to see if they could help, and they want to see server logs of abusive links. I don't have that. All I have is an entry in Google webmaster tools saying we have 90,000 incoming links from 194.196.0.36.

I'm feeling stuck if you have any other suggestions. You or anyone else viewing this post....

The links are logged in Google Webmaster Tools.