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Thanks Ryan for this info!

I am relieved that I haven't spent hours for nothing

Hi Guys,

I have a massive project involving a migration of 4 sites into 1.

4 sites include:

1. **www.MainSite.com **
2. www.E-commerce.com
3. www.Membership.com
4. www.ResearchStudy.com

Goal of this project is to have 1-4 regrouped into Main Site

I will be following the best practice from this post https://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos which has an awesome checklist. I am actually about to start Phase 3: URL redirect mapping.

Because all of these sites have hundreds of duplicates, I figured I should first resolve the Main Site dup issues  before creating the URL redirect mapping but what about the other domains (2,3,4) though?  Should I first resolve the Dup issues on those ones as well or it is not necessary since they will be pointing into the Main Site new domain?

I want to make sure I don't overwork the programming team and myself.

Thanks For sharing your expertise and any tips on how should I move forward with this.

Thanks for your suggestions!

Our blog content is more informational than anything. I think we are pretty solid as far as kw selections for each of our services.

Digging deeper into the analytics is a good suggestions so we can understand where people are falling from the funnel. The truth is that we have some GA implementation issues lately so hopefully asap we will have access to this kind of data.

Our site is entirely mobile friendly

My coworker is a CRO specialist and is working on user testing but essentially focusing on testing the service scheduler. Are you suggesting that we need to also use A/B testing for service pages and blog as well?

Also do you know any tools or any methods to find "buzz" topics around carpet cleaning industry besides kw research, link analysis...?

Thanks for your suggestions John.

We are pretty active on social as well by posting every blog posts we create on fb, twitter, and google plus. We are also promoting services via sponsored posts. We are not really conducting any promotions such as giveaways.

Our blog posts generates close to 10000 visits but still has a very high bounce rate close 90% . I think the topics are good but not amazing per se. Despite adding internal links on those posts, the bounce rate hasn't really decreased so maybe the way the blog is structured is affecting us as well (look, design, feel) .

The client specializes in home, commercial and restoration cleaning services and offers carpet, upholstery, area rug, wood floor, drapery, tile and gout, stone and restoration services such as (water damage, fire damage, mold remediation). This company has over 40 franchises. Carpet cleaning service is their core service that gets them to the customer’s door, then technicians get to up sell on the secondary services (tile, upholstery, stone, wood…)

One of the main strategies we have implemented successfully is to be more visible at the local level was a local SEO strategy with every locations having their own unique landing pages for each of the services they would offer ( for instance the san diego location would a customized page for carpet, upholstery and all services they would offer). We have done a great job optimizing each of these locations. Optimization includes on page optimization, unique NAP information, local citations (manual insertions + Yext). We also added local markups and for some of the franchises we added review snippet. Link building around carpet cleaning has been conducted as well through guest posting and in links content. Most of our locations have a google business updated and optimized as well. We are working to get as many reviews as possible but it is still very challenging. In summary basic SEO tactics have been implemented following google’s guideline.

Traffic & rankings got us a positive progressive boost in mid 2013(April to August) but in april 2014 the site got hit by manual penalty affecting all carpet cleaning queries only. I was able to cleanup the mess within 2 months luckily but unfortunately we still saw a drop of %40 in traffic (vs 2013) on average in all carpet cleaning pages YoY (april to august).

2015 Q1 traffic has improved by 6% compared to Q1 2014 which is good but still not at the level we were. With the pigeon update and all the high authoritative directories (yelp, angieslist) taking over more and more of the organic real estate in the SERP and increase in competition we have had a hard time getting back to where we were (2013) and we may never get back unless another algorithmic change happens.

Another frustrating thing is local competition which has the worst sites as far as UX and content and still outranks us ( such as http://www.carpetcleaninglosangeles.com/). My main goal is to figure out a plan to increase traffic within the carpet cleaning pages and therefore increase conversions. Like it or not rankings for carpet cleaning queries is affecting our CC traffic, so working towards improving them is one way to go even though I shouldn’t focus all my efforts on just rankings.

2015 SEO main activities has been:
-local link building= somewhat successful (Seeing some rankings improvements but not consistent across all franchises)
-content marketing projects= quiet successful as far as traffic, branding and link acquisition but not seeing enough ROI
-new web design (launched late 2014)
-google business reviews
-local citations duplicate removal
-weekly blogging ( successful as far as traffic and branding)

Things I would like to work on:
-improve Bounce rate within site
-improve CTR by adding review snippets across all franchises
-add industry certification logos to build trust with users and improve conversion
-add before and after pictures of services performed
-site speed (has slowed down compared to the old site)

I would love get feedback on what other crucial components(that I am missing) can be done to improve most of these franchises rankings. I am a bit out of ideas as far as what else can be done.

Thanks!

Interesting!

I just checked on Ahrefs and it is not listed as Follow or Nofollow but as a 302. I thought temporary redirects would pass some kind of juice, right?

Hi Mozzers,

I am wondering how valid are those links <a href="http: www.domainlinking.com="" wp-content="" themes="" websitename="" directory-click-thru.php?id="51956&thru=www.domainlinked.com"">ANCHOR .  Not sure what are those? are these for tracking purposes?</a href="http:>

This link acts as a click though and displays the domain linked but I am not sure if these links passes as much juice as a link following this format  <a href="http: www.domainlinked.com"="">ANCHOR ? Are these should be worth pursuing or am I wasting my time with those?</a href="http:>

Thanks for letting me know!

Thank you Guys!

Hi Mozzers,

I am running into a situation where I am not sure what would be the canonical best practice.

I am working on an e-commerce site (magento)

Situation 1 :

site.com/category/subcategory/subcategory2/subcategory3/ is canonicalized to site.com/category/subcategory/subcategory2/

Situation 2:

if site.com/category/subcategory/subcategory2/  is canonicalized to site.com/category/subcategory/ wouldn't it make sense to have site.com/category/subcategory/subcategory2/subcategory3/ (situation1) canonicalized to site.com/category/subcategory/ instead of site.com/category/subcategory/subcategory2/ ? and if I am right would it hurt to have both situations 1 and 2 combined?

Thanks Guys!

I like this, and I agree with you about this concept. The client I am working with however does not want to give up his rankings for the specific geo terms, like the example you mentioned above.

Diaper service fremont - goes to diaper service fremont landing page
Diaper service hayward - goes to diaper service hayward landing page
Diaper service newark - goes to diaper service newark landing page

So, they think this strategy works as a way to keep the content fresh on their site as well as give them more ways to rank in specific locations that they are targeting. More pages means more chances to rank for specific geo targeted service keyword terms.

Would what you mentioned before like

Diaper cleaning  (one page) 
{content}
we serve

• city 1
• city 2
• city 3
• city 4

work more effectively than

Diaper cleaning [city name 1,2,3,4] (individual pages)

If i want to rank in those specific cities? Will that one good page, rank for many different local searches? or is the latter still more effective?

Howdy Moz community,

I had a question regarding canonicals. I help a business with their SEO, and they are a service company. They have one physical location, but they serve multiple cities in the state. My question is in regards to canonicals and unique content. I hear that a page with slightly differing content for each page won't matter as much, if most of the content is relevantly the same. This business wants to create service pages for at least 10 other cities they service. The site currently only have pages that are targeting one city location. I was wondering if it was beneficial to use a template to service each city and then put a canonical there to say that it is an identical page to the main city page?

Example: our first city was san francisco, we want to create city pages for santa rosa, novato, san jose and etc. If the content for the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, city were the same content as the 1st city, but just had the slight change with the city name would that hurt? Would putting a canonical help this issue, if i alert that it is the same as the 1st page?

The reason I want to do this, is because I have been getting concerns from my copywriter that after the 5th city, they can't seem to make the services pages that much different from the first 4 cities, in terms of wording of the content and its structure. I want to know is there a simpler way to target multiple cities for local SEO reasons like geo targeted terms without having to think of a completely new way to write out the same thing for each city service page, as this is very time consuming on my end.

Main questions?

Will making template service pages, changing the city name to target different geographic locations and putting a canonical tag for the new pages created, and referring back to the main city page going to be effective in terms of me wanting to rank for multiple cities.

Will doing this tell google my content is thin or be considered a duplicate? Will this hurt my rankings?

Thanks!

Hi Mozzers,

I am working for client that hasn't got penalized but has lots of junk seo directories that I would like to disavow. My question is should i try reaching out to webmasters (if they are existant) first and show proof to google? or should I just go ahead and submit the file without any reach out?will it still work?

Thanks!

hi mozzers,

I'm doing an audit on a website. I detected over 60 301s of this nature: www.example.com/help 301d to www.example.com/help/.

I believe these are completely useless and increase page load time. Am I right? should i kill those 301s?

Thanks

Hi mozzers,

I am running an audit and I noticed that the nav is appearing twice in the code (can't see it on the Text version). When looking closely at the code there is an Item called Menu (screenshot2  attached) pointing to www.example.com/#mobile-menu that is right in between both main menus.

I am assuming that the second nav is for the mobile version? Is this normal to display it this way or not? If it is why is it displayed so?

Thanks!

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Hi everyone!

I wanted to follow up with everyone who experienced the same issue. Unfortunately the moz crawler doesn't crawl any noindex,nofollow which proves its limits. There is another tool called screamingfrog that will allow you to crawl all the noindex, nofollow pages. This tool is literally saving me as I was able to detect many errors on the Beta Site. Without it we would have launched the new site and our SEO would have taken a major hit.

Thanks!

Hi Everyone,

I recently asked this question http://moz.com/community/q/will-a-geo-localization-site-create-thousands-of-duplicates and is somewhat related to this thread. If anyone could help me out answering this question, that would be great!

Thanks in advance!

Hi mozzers,

We are about to launch a new site and right now I am worried that this new site may create thousands of duplicate content which will harm all the SEO that has been done in the last few years.

Here is a situation:

You land on the example.com/Los-angeles page (geo located) but if you modify URI to example.com/chico then a pop up appears and ask you for the location you want to be in (pop up attached). When choosing chico the URI switches to example.com/chico?franchise=chico instead of /chico only. This site has over 40 different microsites so my question are all these arguments ?franchise=city going to be indexed and create thousands of dups? or are we safe because this geo localization happens thanks to javascript?

Thanks!

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Thanks for the reply!

I appreciate the detailed article! I am going to review my campaign again and go through the article to see what needs to be fixed, I will report back.

Thanks again!

Thanks for the detailed response!

My competitor oddly enough only has one page on his site which is his home page. He has one back link which is from the chamber of commerce, which I am already listed in. My competitor does not seem to be implementing any SEO strategies from what I can tell because his NAP information is not even on the homepage.

Thanks again for the help!

Thanks for the response!

The address is listed on my site, and on every page in the footer. Every page on my site has content that includes a mention of my brand name and the city it services. My domain name also has my keyword and city i service. My competitor who is ranking only has one page for his entire site which is the homepage. The page has a DA of 7 and a PA of 22 and he is ranked 1st with the geo modifier.