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Go with Erick's recommendation. It sounds like you just need to get the bloat cleaned up by minifying and compressing. Also check how many plugins you have actively running. The more plugins you have running, the slower it will be because you site will need to load javascript from all those files before the page can completely load - That eats away at speed.

It won't hurt, but it really won't provide much detail either. It would be like verifying the www vs non-www version (or http vs https) in Search Console. Basically what's going to happen is that you'll see the larger data set in the version that users are being redirected to. It's always worth verifying all variations because that will give you a good indication if something broke and users are seeing the old domain. It could help identify duplicate content issues due to canonicalization or redirect failures quicker if you see a lot of data showing in that view of Search Console.

It can only help in the long run and it's easy to apply, so it makes sense to take care of. I can't really think of a reason not to do it.

I would think the parameters wouldn't count, but the root URL would (eg; search engines ignore anything after the "&" or "#" in the URL). I think Google devalues affiliate links, because those aren't "editorial" links - they're essentially paid links. It's really hard to say whether the links will be determined as "affiliate" by Google since the author is adding that in the tagging (that word may serve as a flag). My recommendation is to reach out and ask if they can change that URL tagging, since you're not an affiliate and don't want to be seen as one. UTM parameters are common for campaign tracking, and they don't influence the URL in terms of passing juice or whatever, so really you can put whatever you want. Those exist so you can define attribution models more effectively to learn what campaign provides the best ROI for your company/website.

I'd try to change that parameter, and maybe making the case that the author adding parameters like that to your URL is hurting your tracking (getting mixed in with real affiliates). It seems kind of weird to me that an author would add a tracking parameter like that without someone asking, but maybe that happens more than I realize.

Let me know how it works out - I haven't seen this case before so if others have experience I'd be interested to see how people have handled it in the past.

I would recommend reviewing Google's guidelines on Link Schemes very closely. If you offer a discount if someone links to you, I'd consider that on the same level as a paid link or paid endorsement. The other thing you need to really watch if you're having customers review your business is the FTC guideline regulating the disclosure of paid endorsements if you're planning on offering some sort of payment or discount.

If a customer links to you because you did a great job, then it's cool. If you tell them what URL to link to and what anchor text to use, then it's going to be seen as manipulation. Getting customers to review your business or link to you is a good idea; you just need to make sure you're doing it the right way. You don't need a discount if the customers really loved what you did.

I'm also in the camp of not putting footer links from a client site to mine. If you put it there because you work on a client's site and it's passing juice to your site, then it kind of seems like it's only there to benefit your ranking. I've seen this debate go back and forth, so I'd really like to see other opinions (preferably contradictory to mine) to see why designer/developer links in the footer would be good. I think they would be fine if you no-followed the link, so it wouldn't pass any benefit. If you only wanted it for traffic, then cool, but really how qualified would that traffic be? Curious to see other thoughts.

Google removed the ability to change your location in search results. There are a few hacks to get it back, but it's not simple like it used to be (click of a button). Here's an awesome thread from the Local Search Forum explaining the hacks you can use to emulate the location setting.

Let us know how that works out for you.

Keyword research will be key, and that's really going to be where you want to focus down. Find related terms, long tail, and opportunities you may not have considered in the past. Don't get too held up on the head terms to start - Optimize for long tails (with head terms in them), then once those get traction you'll see progress on the head term. You really need a process/strategy around keyword research. It's not as simple as going to Keyword Planner and picking a few; competitive analysis and proper research is key to the whole process.

When I talked about page depth, there is only so many clicks a user will take on a site before they move on. Basically what I meant is to organize the architecture of the site (navigation) so that the user needs as few clicks as possible to reach the products. Fewer clicks (hops) for the user also means fewer hops for Googlebot. Fewer hops between products means more quality pages indexed, more quality pages indexed means a wider spread of keywords to be found on, more keyword rankings = more traffic. Optimize for the customer first, since that's how you make money. Make the site easy to navigate, and you'll see a lot of benefit from that.

Unless the business locations are franchises and independently run, I'll say keep it all under one domain. Build location landing pages out for the different locations with unique content. Splitting them to separate domains will create more work for you (and the company) to maintain and build the authority. If you use location page silos, then you can keep content and links under one domain and consolidate your efforts. The divide and conquer approach won't work well if you don't have a pretty sizable staff (and budget) to work on both sites simultaneously.

If you keep it all under one powerful domain you can have a setup like:

Homepage > Location 1 (general) > Specialized services for location 1

Homepage > location 2 (general) > specialized services for location 2

That way you're able to capture traffic using each unique location page and more specific traffic for the services. All are sharing a benefit from the homepage authority, and you'd be able to internally link to the other locations so customers can easily find all the business offices. It's a little cleaner than replicating another site on a new domain... plus you need to think about creating all unique content for the other site, and making sure it's optimized... That would be a lot of extra (not needed) work.

Keep it simple - one primary domain, and local landing pages for the new locations.

product specific keywords will be very competitive, because someone searching for those terms are very likely to convert to a purchase. You need to layer your approach a little bit when trying to drive customers in. The product pages will have the specific brand + model numbers, but then you will need to layer those under family/category pages that are more general. Those category pages should be optimized for slightly less competitive keywords (longer tail) which can catch users at the top of the funnel. Using remarketing can help bring those users back to the site at a later time when they're more likely to purchase.

Another thing to look at is navigation structure and internal linking. I would suggest running a tool like screaming frog or the Moz site audit to get an idea what might be going wrong. Fix the technical issues that might be holding you back. Screaming Frog is an awesome tool to get a really good idea what's going right, and what's bombing (tech wise). Some product pages may be more optimized than others, or they may have a better navigation path which could explain how they're ranking well (linked directly from homepage or another authoritative page). There's a lot of scenarios to why, but without knowing the site I'll say to take a good look with Screaming Frog. Pay attention how deep the product pages are within the site.

What's the point of the new domains in relation to the primary domain? Are you planning on using them to cover niche's unrelated to the main site? Are they different businesses branching off of the main company (subsidiaries on the main)? Depending on how you're planning on using them, there's a variety of different things you can do. There are a variety of ways to solve a problem so depending on what your goals are, the community may suggest something different.

Share a little more about what you're doing (you don't need to give away full specifics), and maybe we can come up with a good way to use them.

Do you need subscriptions from all of those tools to export backlinks? I thought the free accounts limited the view unless you paid. Do you have a way around it?

While I agree it may take longer to see some of the citations that are created with Yext, I don't think the duplicate information from Yext's data push is necessarily bad. It's not like you're duplicating an article - these are local citations which are treated a little differently. Yext is good because it helps create consistency in the local search ecosystem (which is a positive local ranking factor), but i don't think Google dings it for duplicate content. Businesses create hundreds of citations with the same information, yet rank very well. I see that as Google acknowledging the importance of some parts of the data, but ignoring or not positively counting others. Local citations are not "low quality" in the sense they'll help you in local search. Local directories (Yelp, Yellowpages, insiderpages, local newspaper business directories, etc) are valuable in their own way, but only if your intention is to improve local search presence.

To check if the citations are indexed do a site:{citationURL} search. If they're indexed, then Google has found them and is most likely counting them.

The two websites could be working against you, especially if they have similar information on them. Which website do you have tied to the GMB page? Is it the same as all the citations like you mentioned above?

Barry is reporting official word from Google this feature is dead due to low usage - Check it out here.

I think our speculation in the Local Search Forum thread actually turned out to be right.

It looks a lot like what Google's done in the past with other features, which is a strong indication they're going to remove that feature. I think it's fair to say that casual searchers wouldn't know that feature exists because it's hidden behind a couple other buttons, and why would they care? (Many of us mention that within that forum thread) The more likely scenario is that a typical searcher will use a geo-modified search query to indicate a change in location; not adjust a search setting. Like I mentioned in my last post, we're making a strong assumption based on past behavior - not definitely saying it's being removed, since that hasn't been officially announced.

I find it interesting this has been going on for almost a month and has primarily affected US-based searchers. This came around the same time as Google's slow killing of GMB pages by refocusing them from G+ into Maps (still in the process of changing). Not sure if there's a connection, but it was interesting to observe this happening at the same time.

Google's most likely removing this feature. See this great thread in the local search forum to learn more. To summarize our assumptions, it's because the only people that really used this feature were SEO's to check ranking. Normal searchers either modified the query or did nothing, since most people probably never knew that feature existed.

So all tools (including Search Console) have different link indexes they're going to show you. That's one reason why you're seeing a difference between tools. The other reason is that Search Console will only show a **sample of your links, not all of them. **To really find all internal links, you should use a crawling tool like Screaming Frog or Xenu then check inlinks and outlinks on your site. I wouldn't rely on Search Console to give as much insight on your internal linking.

To get a better understanding about your backlink profile my recommendation is to use a couple of tools (OSE, aHrefs, Majestic, etc) in addition to the data provided in Search Console. Export the backlink data from all sources into Excel, de-dedupe the data (so you're not looking at duplicate links), and that will help you understand your profile a little better. Using multiple tools will be a little on the expensive side, but will give you a much better understanding what's out there.

Like Justin said, make sure you have the correct version of your site verified in Search Console. Google will recognize multiple variations as different sites (HTTP/HTTPS/WWW/Non-WWW). You'll also want to set a preferred domain (www vs non-www) to help Google consolidate data.

If you want a tool that's more comprehensive & tracks a large group of your target keywords and competitors why not pay for it? Companies that put out good tools like that need to pay for server space and development time (which isn't cheap), so most will only give you a small taste of the program when you're on a free plan. Several thousand keywords means you're asking for a pretty large chunk of space to be dedicated to your project, so you'll have to pay to have meaningful data.

I just looked a Rank Tracker from Link Assistant, and that looks like a pretty good tool; you're not going to get much out of the free plan though. Sure you can run ranking checks, but you won't be able to save the results to compare over time and you won't be able to export. If that's $125 for a lifetime license, I'd say that's a pretty good deal. You could also check out SERPwoo for some affordable keyword tracking plans.

@Peter basically nails it. None of these tools will be completely accurate to what Google determines is a "bad" link, so it will be very subjective. You really should use a variety of tools (even link detox is a good one) to get a list of sites linking to you. The reason being is that all these tools have very different indexes, so you'll get a more comprehensive view of your profile... however that will be a little more expensive since you would need multiple subscriptions.

Like Peter said, you'd then want to download all the links into excel, dedupe, and review. I usually look at aHref Rank below a certain threshold and Trust Flow below a certain threshold (you need to either use a VLOOKUP or an INDEX/MATCH formula to combine the lists from all sources). After that you review those links manually, and add the "bad" ones to a disavow file. The "bad" ones are those that you would agree violates the Google Webmaster Quality Guidelines that fit into a link scheme definition. Once again, this is a subjective process so you'll really need to review the guidelines.

To do this analysis to the full extent that you'd want... I don't think there are free tools that will give you any meaningful data. Remember they need to maintain bots and their own software to expand their indexes, so the free trials will be very limited data (usually with no way to export). I'll also say this is a very tedious process and depending on the size of the site I would allocate anywhere between 5 (small site) and 40 hours (larger site) to tackle this process. Buffer in a little more if this is the first run, since there will be a learning curve for the tools and it will take time to put together a professional looking report.

Did you move the conversion points on the site? For example if you moved the phone number from the top of the page to a side bar element (widget), that could be enough to see a drop in leads. Not sure what the site is or what it looked liked pre and post redesign, but moving conversion points on the site even a little can cause a rise or drop in leads. Feel free to PM the URL or post it in the thread, and we could give more specific feedback.

Although they're not necessarily "bad" they aren't ideal. With a 301 redirect on your site you have an opportunity to update the link to the live page, which would be better as that wouldn't take extra resources to load. The other part is that you're losing link equity for each redirect (10-15%) search engines need to jump to. It would be better to use the final destination as the link on the site instead of a URL that's being 301 redirected. The more redirects you have on your page, the longer it will take the page to fully load and may cause a bad user experience (in addition to the lost "link juice").

Basically, it's better to have all URLs respond with a 200 (OK) response than be redirected for a variety of reasons - it causes a ranking impact and a user experience impact.

Get links to the page - that's how to build up the PA. If the page isn't going to attract links on it's own, then link internally through other more authoritative pages on your site. That would push equity to that page to increase it's PA.