Neither of my sites has a robots.txt file. I guess I have never been bothered by any particular bot enough to exclude it.

Is there any SEO advantage to having one anyways?

Back in August of 2013 Google created a form that allowed people to submit small websites that "should be ranking better in Google".

There is more info about it in this article http://www.seroundtable.com/google-small-site-survey-17295.html

Has anybody used it? Any experiences or results you can share?

*private message if you do not want to share publicly...

You do not need to change your domain name. Just add BC and Canada to the title tags, description, and a few more places in the page text.

When I first went to your site I thought it was about Langley, VA (where the CIA is)

You should add "BC" and "Canada" to your title, description, and page text. Maybe Google is just confused about what city your site is about?

Also your first h1 tag is really messed up. It's a handful of links, images, and text. I think it should just be the important text. After that you have more h1 tags, and for some reason they are capitalized as H1. You should only have one h1 that is just text.

You also have a whole bunch of H2's (capitalized) that are just vague section names. One or two h2's that directly relate to your site's purpose would be much better.

All your html code should really be lower case letters (I think).

Have you done all the "local SEO" stuff to tell Google that your site is only about Langley BC?

To prevent overlapping your page URL's focus it may better to do the following for dog training and whistle training:

www.mysite.com/dog-training/

www.mysite.com/whistle-training/

That also keeps the words the page focuses on as close as possible to the front of the URL.

Hi Rob. I'm guessing your site is not responsive?

So is the navigation issue related to what is clicked to go from page to page? If the buttons are just too tiny, you may be able to enlarge them using CSS for handheld devices like the iphone. If it is because of dropdowns that require a mouse click to operate correctly, then you may have to replace them with different type of dropdowns.

Or if a site rework is planned, then going responsive fixes these "small device" issues. I use Twitter Bootstrap for responsive and love it.

If it is just one thread on a forum that was flooded with bad links, you could delete that thread. Make sure that any traffic to the associated URL's get a true 404 response.

My understanding is that doing so shows that you did not want those incoming links and that you are not gaining any advantage from them. If you do another Reconsideration Request, you should probably tell them that the targeted page was deleted.

Hi Mark,

I asked a similar question here and on a few other SEO forums a few weeks ago. Here is what I learned...

PPC (Bing Ads and Google Adwords) is very easy to fix. Just go into the settings for your campaigns and only target the countries you want your ads to show in. Later if you find that your results are poor in certain cities or states or provinces, you can even exclude them. Targeting your ads this way works very well and is very easy to do.

Limiting Organic results is not worth the effort. Though you can add a huge list of excluded IP's to your htaccess, you then slow down your site because of the computing effort needed to check each new visitor. What is worth the effort, is to go into Google Webmaster Tools and declare your targeted country or region. What I was told by a number of different responders was that doing so means that Google will not count poor site performance outside your targeted country against you.

For example, my US targeted site has a generic Bounce Rate of 60%. When I dig deeper I find that traffic from countries like Phillipines and India have a bounce rate pushing 80%, but that traffic from the US has a bounce rate of only about 45%. Since I have declared the US as my targeted country, Google is supposedly not counting poor performance from other countries against my site. I have set up "Segments" in my Google Analytics to only show US visitors, and that really helps get a realistic uncontaminated overview of how my true customers are interacting with the site.

Hi Wesley,

I am using Constant Contact for rating requests. I have had good luck breaking the customer history up into 1 month chunks, and also including the customer's first names in the file of contact info I upload. That way the past customers get a semi-personalized email that starts like this...

Hello Mike,

Please tell us how happy you are with the tools you purchased back in July 2013.........

My guess is that I will reach some point as I go farther into the past where the number of good reviews I get becomes minimal, and then we will stop at that point.

We do use Shopper Approved to collect and publish the ratings. I know there are divided opinions over if it is better to collect them on your own site or use a service. I like using a service because: 1) it is easy, and 2) I get Stars to show in my PPC ads.

It can be done in a many ways. With Bootstrap it could be done these ways:

Long detailed Title with many words

Short Title with few words

or

Long detailed Title with many words
     Short Title with few words

Or if you are coding it yourself, then create similar class names and in your CSS file define at what screen widths they are declared   visibilty:visible; or  visibility:hidden;    - This is not cloaking, there is always a version of the text visible to the user.

Hi Rafael,

In a responsive design you can definitely change any font size you want for different device widths, even h1 text.

You just give the h1 a class, or put it in a div with a unique class. Then in the CSS file you can use media queries to change anything like this...   font-size:12px; line-height:16px; color:red;

I do it often to put my h1, h2, h3 tags anywhere I want on the page and make them any size or style I want without messing up the look of the page.

Are you converting a site to responsive, or just trying to hack a few things on a fixed with site?

If you are really making the page responsive, then I suggest using one of the pre-designed responsive site systems. I use Twitter Bootstrap. It's free and very easy to learn, even for a non-programmer. With Bootstrap your problem would be solved either by using a single title and changing the font-size for different device widths, or by presenting different versions of the title on different device widths. Like this...

Brand New Xbox One 500 GB Black Console

Xbox One 500 GB Black Console

In Bootstrap the class "hidden-desktop" actually means it is only visible on devices that are NOT desktops - which are tablets and phones. They tell you which screen width ranges are considered to be which device type. You can go to my site on a PC and pull the screen width across from wide to narrow to see how a Bootstrap site reacts to varying screen widths.

If you are just trying to hack a few repairs, you will need to do it in the CSS file with "media queries". Not too hard, but takes a little learning and experimentation to figure out. Your page HTML will need to have a "class" or "id" added to any element you want to adjust with the CSS.

I think that some grouping is good. It's likely to make the Hummingbird happy, and it minimizes duplicate content issues.

But the keywords in the group need to synonyms, or nearly so.

I recently combined two separate pages that used to be focused on "clothes drying rack" and on "laundry drying rack". To the customer, these words were interchangeable.  Afterwards the new combined page read better to the visitor and it made the site navigation more logical. Still waiting to see what it does for the ranking...

But I wouldn't combine "soccer ball" and "volley ball" - even though they look the same and kids may use them interchangeably. People interested in one are not interested in the other...

I only took a quick look at a few pages, but it appears a little thin. There's not much content on each page.

Also I couldn't tell what the purpose or the focus was. Is it meant to be a resource where people for reviews of language-learning programs? If so, there is not much depth to the reviews so they are unlikely to rank well. Or is it meant to be a record of one person's quest to learn lots of languages? If so, I wouldn't expect much organic traffic because few would search for such a topic to read about.

Suggestions: If the focus is reviews - get some more in-depth content there. Leave the blog pages day-to-day musings.  Also do add meta-descriptions to the blog pages.

How long ago did you do this?

Google is often pretty slow to change things. Sometimes it takes weeks for a simple change like a page title to start appearing in the results...

Hi Ian,

There is a way around it, but first an opinion on duplicate content. I think that duplicate content issues are really about duplication across websites, not duplication within websites. Store ABC is expected to have a fair amount of text that repeats across it's own pages. The problem arises when both Store ABC and Store LMN and Store TUV all have the same bits of content (like product descriptions).

But anyways, if you really do not want to have your lists of consumables repeated on multiple pages, just turn the lists into images....

Then on the Machine A page display the image of the list and give it a file name and alt tag like "Machine A Consumables" and "Consumables for Machine A".

And on the Machine B page display a COPY of the image of the list and give it a NEW file name and alt tag like "Machine B Consumables" and "Consumables for Machine B".  Etc, etc...

For the visitor, there is no difference between reading the words from text or an image. (unless they have sight issues and are using a screen reader)

Does this solve the problem?

Hi Colin,

For sure Disavow the bad domains that are linking to you (whole domains, not just pages). If you are comfortable working with your htaccess file you can follow the guidelines in this article to get those bad domains to automatically prune links to your site (assuming they are automated sites) by 404'ing incoming visits from those bad domains. This tricks the site's bots into assuming your site is gone and so they delete the links to your site. Works for some spa,,y sites, but not all.   http://www.boxaid.com/word/simple-alternative-google-disavow-tool/

The sad truth though is that for awhile the bad links were probably boosting your ranking, and there removal (by Disavow, by Google's algorythm, and maybe by 404ing domains) will cause your rank to fall. You will have to build good links to replace the seething mass of bad ones...

Hi Chris,

I have a couple of small ecommerce sites and ran into the same problem with MOZ Recommended list. They are wonderful intelligent folks - but way too pricey for small businesses.

What I did was search the Forum for questions that sounded like they matched the problems I was experiencing. Then started a list of who answered them in a way that sounded intelligent, that I could understand, and that were polite. You can then check the profile of the MOZ members who answer questions in a way you like. Some will run small SEO firms, or work for small firms. Then put together a Request For Quote (RFQ) and send copies to 3 or 4 of your favorites.

It really does not take that long. Just an evening searching and reading the Forum, then an afternoon to write the RFQ.

After that I did have a hard time choosing just one - I wanted to work with them all but the budget did not allow ;-(

Good luck!

My experience has been Yes, for some things...

Doing it for internal page links should make your SEO better by eliminating the chance the search engines will misunderstand those links. And if a page of yours gets scraped, the internal links on that page will at least count towards your site

Doing it for IMPORTANT images will insure that the search engines can correctly index those images. Also it makes it possible for social media like Pinterest to use those images, and for others like Facebook to display an image from your page when that page is Shared.

I usually don't bother with absolute URLs for things like CSS files. Or for images which do not need to be indexed or shared, like buttons and icons and such.

This is a real-life problem on my ecommerce store for the drying rack we manufacture: Some people call it a Clothes Drying Rack, while others call it a Laundry Drying Rack, but it's really the same thing. Search volume is higher for the clothes version, so give it the most attention.

I currently have 2 separate pages with the On-Page optimization focused on each name (URL, Title, h1, img alts, etc)  Here the two drying rack pages: clothes focused page and laundry focused page

But the ranking of both pages is terrible. The fairly generic homepage shows up instead of the individual pages in Google searches for the clothes drying rack and for laundry drying rack. But I can get the individual page to appear in a long-tail search like this: round wooden clothes drying rack

So my thought is maybe I should just combine both of these pages into one page that will hopefully be more powerful. We would have to set up the On-Page optimization to cover both "clothes & laundry drying rack" but that seems possible.

Please share your thoughts. Is this a good idea or a bad idea? Is there another solution?

Thanks for your help!

Greg