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Kind of funny, but I just realized I piggybacked something onto your thread, but this is a discussion after all ; )

Great reminder Francisco!

I'd also add a request to NOT piggyback a different issue to someone else's Q&A, even if you think it's tangentially related.

It's fine if you want to comment "Me too" if you're having the exact same issue, but if you spin the question off into a different direction, you're less likely to receive an answer. (If you do that, there's a good chance your question is going to be at the bottom of the thread and might not be seen if someone's already answered the question above your added question.)

Prepare yourselves. This is a long question.

With the rise of schema and Google Local+, do you think Google will now have enough data about where a business is located, so that when someone searches for, a keyword such as "Atlanta Hyundai dealers" a business in Atlanta that's website:

• has been properly marked up with schema (or microdata for business location)
• has claimed its Google Local+
• has done enough downstream work in Local Search listings for its NAP (name, address, phone number)

will no longer have to incorporate variations of "Atlanta Hyundai dealers" in the text on the website? Could they just write enough great content about how they're a Hyundai dealership without the abuse of the Atlanta portion?

Or if they're in Boston and they're a dentist or lawyer, could the content be just about the services they provided without so much emphasis tied to location?

I'm talking about removing the location of the business from the text in all places other than the schema markup or the contact page on the website. Maybe still keep a main location in the title tags or meta description if it would benefit the customer.

I work in an industry where location + keywords has reached such a point of saturation, that it makes the text on the website read very poorly, and I'd like to learn more about alternate methods to keep the text more pure, read better and still achieve the same success when it comes to local search.

Also, I haven't seen other sites penalized for all the location stuffing on their websites, which is bizarre because it reads so spammy you can't recognize where the geotargeted keywords end and where the regular text begins.

I've been working gradually in this general direction (more emphasis on NAP, researching schema, and vastly improving the content on clients' websites so it's not so heavy with geo-targeted keywords).

I also ask because though the niche I work in is still pretty hell-bent on using geo-targeted keywords, whenever I check Analytics, the majority of traffic is branded and geo-targeted keywords make up only a small fraction of traffic.

Any thoughts? What are other people doing in this regard?

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.

Hi purpleindigo:

Reddit? If it's a service for unlocking phones, maybe you'll find something there?

One of the guest blogging services we use that we like is Ann Smarty's My Guest Blog. Just be careful to choose carefully. There are some spammy things in there but you can sort through and find some good ones. Cathy Stucker also has an email list for guest blogging that's good.

Anyway, best of luck to you.

A few ideas:

1. Do you have an email subscriber list? I'm a big fan of many companies who've sent me requests to give my information for awesome guides by submitting my information. HubSpot and Optify are two great examples of companies who are doing this right. It's not necessarily links, but you do get customer leads and customer leads bring sales. I've also shared links from some of these guides on G+ and Twitter, because I've found them so useful.

2. SlideShare - Another great place to get the word out about your guide.

3. Twitter/FollowerWonk - I've heard many times of excellent ways to search Twitter (using FollowerWonk, for example) to find qualified people specializing in your topic. Check out Will Reynolds presentation at MozCon2012 http://www.slideshare.net/wilreynolds/do-real-company-stuff-mozcon-2012-version

4. Search/Guest Blogging - This SEOMoz post by  Pratik Dholakiya is filled with tons of techniques to get guest blogs and attention. Check out the "Guest Posting Query List" http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-advanced-guest-blogging

Hope that helps.

I haven't tried this method out, but it might be what you're looking for http://www.businesshut.com/spam/google-analytics-referrer-spam/

If not there, check out http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/analytics - There might be an easier solution there.

Good luck!

I've been going through my monthly reports, and noticed something odd in the SEO Moz report section showing the visits from organic (non-paid) search engine results.

When checking this data against the same data in Google Analytics, everything for the most part seems to line up with the exception of two dates:

Jan 09 and Jan 23 of the SEO Moz report show 0 visits, but Analytics shows I do have visits on those days.

Any ideas why this would be in the report or what I'm missing?

IsePEAS hWBASOd

One additional thing you could do for the client is to seek out any external links to the alternate domains and see if you can update them so they now link to the main domain.

As far as a timeframe, I usually see a time period of two to three months for things to restore back to normal. The earliest changes I've seen have been a month.

As long as the new merge is, like you said, for usability reasons also, I imagine it's a great move for people using the website and it was a good thing to do.

You may want to beef up the content on the main domain for those terms that dropped in rankings, or try to do some guest blogging related to those keywords so you'll get links back to the main domain.

Dr. Pete has a really helpful article on this, particularly his tools to fix the issues of duplicate content: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world

We've tried Guest Blog It but have not had much success either. I'd recommend you try:

• My Guest Blog http://myblogguest.com/
• http://www.bloggerlinkup.com/

Either way, whichever you use, be sure you look over each opportunity carefully. This free eBook has a really good guide to check out each guest blogging opportunity (or linkback). http://www.analyticsseo.com/optimising-post-penguin-world-ebook

By the way, I'm not affiliated with any of these recommendations. Just comes from personal experience.

Good luck to you!

These pages are extremely light on the content, and they have barely any search traffic, if any.

A user reaches these pages by clicking on a call-to-action button (contact us, or get a quote, or make an offer). The resulting URL would pass through dynamic url parameters from the previous page, but the content on the page itself consists only of a form to fill out and one paragraph.

Though that one paragraph would have different text depending on which call-to-action button they clicked on, it's entirely the same in structure and code, with the exception of the parameter-laced URL.

We're still keeping the call-to-action buttons, but our developers are changing the form structure so there are not hundreds of these pages that are duplicate content. It's going to be a vast improvement for the user.

Thank you for all of your suggestions. I'll definitely use them in the future if we decide to re-purpose pages on our websites.

We're about to delete a bunch of unnecessary pages, largely responsible for our duplicate content woes. These are low traffic pages, and they were NEVER a good user experience.

I just want to check and make sure I'll be setting up the proper way to account for their absence:

1. Set up 301's for all of them so they point to related pages

2. Remove them from the Sitemap

3. Also remove any internal links that previously pointed at them.

Is there anything else I'm missing here? Or any additional moves I can make that I'm not thinking about?

Thanks!