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Thanks David. Very helpful info.

Ok then you should be all set if your tests on GWMT did not indicate any errors.

Yup, I understand that you want to see your main site. This is why I recommended blocking only /Blog and not / (your root domain).

However, many blogs have a landing page. Does yours? In other words, when you click on your blog link, does it take you straight to Blog/posts or is there another page in between, eg /Blog/welcome?

If it does not go straight into Blog/posts you would want to also allow the landing page.

Does that make sense?

Well what Martijn (sorry, I spelled his name wrong before) and I were saying was not to forget to allow the landing page of your blog - otherwise this will not be indexed as you are disallowing the main blog directory.

Do you have a specific landing page for your blog or does it go straight into the /posts directory?

I'd say there's nothing wrong with allowing both Blog/Post and Blog/post just to be on the safe side...honestly not sure about case sensitivity in this instance.

Correct, Martijin. Good catch!

Hey There,

I would direct you to this very similar thread. Seems like it will likely answer your question.

Well, no point in a blog that hurts your seo

I respectfully disagree with Martijin; I believe what you would want to do is disallow the Blog directory itself, not the whole site. It would seem if you Disallow: / and _Allow:/Blog/Post _ that you are telling SEs not to index anything on your site except for /Blog/Post.

I'd recommend:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /Blog/
Allow: /Blog/Post

This should block off the entire Blog directory except for your post subdirectory. As Maritijin stated; always test before you make real changes to your robots.txt.

Thanks, Miriam!

Hey Thomas,

It is considered acceptable to create a country specific domain for each nationality your company is active in, in fact, this is what many large international businesses do; for instance Adidas has adidas.co.uk, adidas.de, etc.

However, it is not necessary to do so, and you would need to begin building links back up from "ground zero". It seems it would be both more SEO-friendly and cost effective to go ahead and use a new folder, or subdirectory, for each country.

Check out this previous Moz thread for more info.

This article may help explain directory structure to you a little bit.

At any rate...I'd recommend subdirectories as your best bet, so you're on the right track. Hope this helps!

Hey There,

You can actually reach the Google Places team via phone. They are one of the only divisions I know of that you can actually talk to "in person".

I wrote a blog entry detailing exactly how to do this a short while ago: http://www.got2web.com/google-plus-seo-local-plus-claiming.html

To summarize the important bit from it:

**"Visit this address to get the process started: http://support.google.com/places/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1399021&page=ts.cs **

**Under "Which verification method did you try" select " I tried PIN verification for a single listing" .  At the next prompt, check "The status is NOT needs action". At the verification method prompt, check "Postcard"  and then last check "Yes" when asked "Have you waited 15 days". **

You will be given a "call us" link and a contact form. Never mind the form and click the call link. You'll enter your name and number and a real live Google rep will call you within a minute."

I would call and then explain to them that you'd like to change your address. You should not have to re-verify at all.

Hope this helps!

I can't get it to work for anything other than restaurant search terms at the moment. Can you confirm you've tried it and it worked for something non-food industry oriented? Also curious about what contributes to their numbered rating system and how to possibly optimize for that now.

Sorry to answer your questions with more questions!

I was just looking at it on Chrome for the sample term "italian restaurant". It also works in Firefox for me. Are you running a Mac? I'm on one of our office PCs right now.

Local Carousel is pretty cool, Linda. I did not know it had launched yet!

I assume they finally switched over a proprietary rating system and it's not Zagat based any more (I can only get the carousel to come up for restaurants)?

Well said, Marcus.

With regards to question number one in my initial post, I can only assume that Moz and other ranking platforms will in fact broaden the local search radius to a national level by default.

That again raises the question of what to do if you or an entity you represent wish to rank internationally...

Marcus,

I totally agree that this is a good thing and can't deny it's pretty helpful for us. I think in general it's pretty cool to see a tech giant taking major strides toward helping small businesses compete and building local community networks up. Kind of refreshing actually...

If you take a look at the following, it actually appears that you cannot turn location based search off now; just widen the geographical area.

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/179386?hl=en

To clarify; I am talking about pure organic results, not a 7-pack (formerly 10-pack?). Take a look at the attached image to verify if you'd like.

As I said, you can change the target location using the Search Tools function, however I can't see that many people knowing to do this and the query automatically detects your location by default.

web-design-query.png

With regards to the co-occurrence of the keyword and brand comment, I'd just like to point out that in this case they are effectively the same thing. From a branding perspective, if you are choosing a name for your business you could not do better than incorporating a relevant keyword you're trying to rank for.

You can of course change your location from the auto detected one to whatever you wish using search tools, but I doubt most would do that.

Hey All,

I think it's a known fact at this point that when signed into a personal Google account while doing a search, the results are very oriented around keywords and phrases you have already searched for, as well as your account's perceived location; for instance when I wanted to check one of my own web properties in SE listings I would sign out or it would likely appear first as a false reading.

Today I noticed something very interesting: even when not signed in, Google's listings were giving precedence to locality. It was to a very extreme degree, as in when searching for "web design," a firm a mile away ranked higher than one 1.5 miles away and such.

It would seem that the algos having this high a level of  location sensitivity and preference would actually be a boon for the little guys, which is, I assume why it was implemented. However, it brings up a couple of interesting questions for me.

1. How is this going to affect Moz (or any SE ranking platform, for that matter) reports? I assume that Google pulls locations from IP Addresses, therefore would it not simply pull the local results most relevant for the Moz server(s) IP?

2. What can one do to rise above this aggressive level of location based search? I mean, my site (which has a DA of 37 and a PA of 48) appears above sites like webdesign.org (DA of 82, PA of 85). Not that I'm complaining at the moment, but I could see this being a fairly big deal for larger firms looking to rank on a national level.

What gives? I'd love to get some opinions from the community here if anyone else has noticed this...