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I'm headed to the feature request also to add this request. This would be very helpful for the future. Thanks for providing the link Chiaryn!

Hi Anthony,

Has the business claimed its Local+ page? Perhaps a verified listing would help. Also some downstream local citations could possibly give it a boost. Scott also has a great point about making your link profile look more natural too, even though it's completely justified to have lots of links on the company name.

-EEE3

Okay, so this may not be the answer you're looking for, but maybe another tactic would better serve this hotel?

What about a marketing campaign something like "So off the grid even Google can't find it"? There are lots of adventurous people on this planet--and though the true cause behind the lack of street name, landline phone or zip code may be due to poor infrastructure and not because it's in the middle of a jungle reached only by canoe--you have an audience there.

As far as tackling the local issue, Mike Blumenthal and David Mihm might have some resources for you on their websites and blogs.

http://blumenthals.com/blog/

http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/

Best of luck to you.

P.S. A fake phone number is not a great idea. If you do go that route, please make sure someone familiar with the hotel is able to answer it. I heard at Local U stories of Google calling phone numbers to check on the location and make sure they were accurate.

Areas Served vs. Magician + Location

I agree with the developer and definitely think you should move toward an areas served approach, either via the nav menu or working the areas into your home page content once (don't make it sitewide footer links that look spammy). With this approach, you're next task is to create custom local landing pages with content relative to those areas (photos, history, places you've performed, your favorite "magical" places within the towns, etc.)

I have seen some local landing pages with exact match in the Nav menu. Personally, as a web user, I'd much rather click on a town name than see a dropdown list filled with "Magician Surrey" "Magician Hampshire" that looks exactly the same, save for the location.

There are quite a few experts in this area:
Mike Ramsey: http://niftymarketing.com/optimal-local-landing-page-infographic/ Linda Buquet: http://marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com/ and the forum here: http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/ Mike Blumenthal: http://blumenthals.com/blog/

The important thing to remember is take the time and effort to make these custom local landing pages UNIQUE and something a web visitor would get value from.

Exact Anchor Text in Nav Menu

Don't overdo it. Make your navigation menu links be something that your web visitor will understand without question. There may be certain times when it's okay to use exact match anchor text but do so SPARINGLY and don't sacrifice your web visitors for the sake of exact match anchor text. Adding keywords in your anchor text should make sense to your visitors.

Here's Matt Cutts answer about exact anchor text and not overdoing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ybpXU0ckKQ

I also use the technique of doing site:rogerlapin.co.uk magician hampshire and then seeing the top 10 pages google has for me and placing a text link from each of these pages in the body text.

A better technique would be paying attention to your content on your website and linking internally where it makes sense. Be careful with overloading your pages with links as well. The way I like to think of internal linking is much like you would see a newspaper or informational site providing links to give you more context about what you are reading.

Does Google only take into account the first link to a page i****t discovers? AND When doing link analysis I now see I have two links to each page but understand that google will only account for the first one (from the menu)

No. Google will crawl all internal links on a page up to a certain extent. If you have hundreds of links on a page, the crawler may abandon ship eventually and not crawl all of those links, which is why Moz and others have recommendations about the number of links on a page. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en (Keep the number of links on your page to a reasonable number.)

Link Priority:
There's a 2010 article from Rand saying that links higher up on the page are given more weight, however, it's three years old and one of the comments on that article says Matt Cutts debunked that idea, though I can't find the video. It seems like there hasn't been much conversation on first link priority since 2012. Here's another article from 2012 about internal link placement on the page: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2185977/Anatomy-of-an-Internal-Link

There's also a video from Matt Cutt's about the history of page rank and multiple instances of the same link on the same page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYWlEItizjI

I don't have a definitive answer here as far as link priority and order on the page. Maybe you can find more resources in the Q&A on that topic, such as this one: http://moz.com/community/q/duplicate-internal-links-on-page-any-benefit-to-nofollow

Hope all of this gives you some guidance and a lot of resources

I would add 301 redirects as a best practice even if they don't have any juice to pass on to the new links. Just make sure they are being redirected to a similar relevant page or a page that makes sense.

Also, the way you're searching is not going to be how a consumer searches, so to see if these older pages are currently hindering your keyword strategy (I'm assuming you might be worried that two pages would be jockeying for one term?), perform a search as your customer would using the keyword only.

If you see these old pages in the search results and they're ranking higher than your newly optimized pages (which would better serve the customer), then you might have an issue only as it relates to conversion and bounce rate.

I would strongly recommend you 301 the old pages.

Thanks Andy! I'll add the second step of the URL removal tool.

Hi Melissa,

If I read your question correctly, you've run into a situation where your mobile URLs for your mobile website are appearing in desktop searches? Do you have a sitemap on your mobile website that is properly formatted for mobile websites? That's a strong indication that your website is in fact a mobile website and should not appear in desktop search results, only mobile search results.

Here's a great resource on mobile sitemaps: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34648

Hope that helps.