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Hi,

We work on quite a few local campaigns for clients and saw a fair bit of movement in the UK in late January/early February. Did anybody else notice this? Some of ours have improved, some have lost out, but the results generally seem to have shifted against usual guidelines for listing optimisation (reviews, local phone numbers, consistency with website etc.).

Any thoughts?

Thanks

Hi Chris, I guess it stands to reason! Thanks for the feedback.

Hi, just wondering what peoples' thoughts are on linking from a Google Places listing; where multiple locations are present (and multiple Places listings), do people generally link back to the home page or to the individual location pages? I would be interested to hear anybody's thoughts.

Thank you

In light of the recent penalty put on the Interflora site, does anybody know who their SEO company is or was (or if they were doing it in house)?

Also, do you think SEO companies that are responsible for things like this should be named and shamed?

It may be that the keyword tools you are using aren't accurate enough to be relied upon - I see this happen a lot with location based terms.

If you're using the Google AdWords keyword tool, have you ensured that 'exact' is selected for the match type and not the defualt 'broad' (that's caught me out in the past when I've forgotten to change it).

Aside from that, you could run a small-scale PPC campaign, allow it to run for a few weeks and then look the search terms report to see what variants of your terms people are searching for, then target them oragnically. PPC and SEO can work really well together too - there is always something to be learnt from either side.

Hi Irving - thanks for your thoughts.

No URL paths are used in the links, just page names.The aim is simply to get the new pages indexed, but this isn't happening with the current way that they are linked to and from what I've read I think it will be better to just ask their developers to change the links to standard HTML.

Great - thanks,

I was looking for articles on the subject but didn't have much look finding difinative answers - so these are really helpful.

The site doesn't actually include URL's in the links, just page/category names, which I'm guessing the search engine can't follow?

Thanks again!

Hi,

We have a client who has internal links pointing to some relatively new pages that we asked them to implement. The problem is that instead of using standard HTML links, their developers have used javascript - e.g. javascript:GoTo...

The new pages have links from the homepage (among others) and have been live for about 3-4 weeks now - yet are still to be indexed by Google, Bing & Yahoo. Is it possibe that Javascript links are making them difficult to be found?

Thanks in advance for any tips.

Wow - thanks Robert!

It looks like I'm getting there with some sort of strategy to talk them through now. Will set eveything up properly in WMT (targeting by country not language, as you say), then if that doesn't have the desired effect, will look at using the hreflang element. Lots of work to be doing but hopefully it will get them the results they're after.

Great advice - thanks. I never thought of setting up a WMT account for each sub domain.

I've also just read up on the hreflang element (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html`).` Have you ever used this before? If so, did it have any effect?

Thanks again for your help!

Hi,

We have a prospective client who currently have a sub domain setup for each language, they all have the same content as the main domain. The problem is that the main domain is written in English (but not UK English), and they want the UK sub domain to outrank it (it's the other way round at the moment). Effectively, there are duplicate content issues here and as a result it looks like Google have chosen to keep the main domain (as it has more authority) and lower the UK sub results in its rankings.

Is there a feature in webmaster tools where you can target subdomains to a location (I know you can do this with a main domain). Additionally, any other tips for the above would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Thanks for your useful input Mat. I thought it may be the case that canonical tags was the way to go but It's good to hear the thoughts of somebody whos 'been there, done that'. It would be nice to capitalise on the traffic that filter pages could bring but it just isn't worth the risk. Canonical tags now implemented!

Thanks again!

Hi,

We have a client who has a fairly large e-commerce site that went live quite recently. The site is near enough fully indexed by Google, but one thing I've noticed is that filtered search results pages are being indexed, all with duplicate page titles. Obviously this is an issue that needs to be looked at ASAP.

My questions is this - would we be better tweaking site settings so that page titles are constructed from the filters (brand/price/size) and therefore unique (and useful for searchers who are after a specific brand or size of a given item). Or should we rel=canonical the filtered pages so that they are eventually dropped from the index (the safer of the two options)?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Thanks Martin! You've raised a couple of things I hadn't thought of. I'll have a look into those. In the meantime, if anything else comes to mind, I'm all ears.

Cheers

Hello,

I'm having an issue with a client's Google Places listing. It's showing on page 8 for one of the main keyword terms but their main site is on page 1. Having looked into competitors' places listings ranking above, I've ruled out the following;

• lack of citations
• inconsistent citations
• incomplete profile
• incorrect category listing
• details not matching places landing page
• incorrect location
• and any form of keyword stuffing

Other places listings ranking above have fewer citations, incomplete profiles, details inconsistent with their main site, one is no longer trading as a business and one has no website! In the past, our client had had two listings simultaneously but we addressed this waaaay back. Is it possible we could still be getting punished? I'm at a bit of a loss otherwise.

Any thoughts would be hugely appreciated.

Thankyou!

Hi Ben,

Thanks for taking the time to reply,

The site was on or around the first page for at least 18 months (longer I think) prior to March. Additionally, there were a few other sites moved around a lot around the same time (although we can figure out why these have lost rankings, which makes it more frustrating). I think you may be correct when you say that it's a change in the way that Google renders the SERP's for that keyword.

Thanks again,

Jason

Hi Adam, thanks for you thoughts.

Unfortunately the dates of the drops don't match either penguin or or panda (or any of their updates. I say unfortunately as if that was the case at least we'd know what the issue is.

We've also had no message in webmaster tools from Google. Duplicate content is another thing we considered - I think a few sites have copied content from the homepage so we might have a re-write of that and see if that helps.

Thanks again,

Jason

Hi,

We have a client who dropped in the rankings (initially from bottom of the first page to page to page 3, and now page 5) for a single keyword (their most important one - targeted on their homepage) back in the middle of March. So far, we've found that the issue isn't the following:

• Keyword stuffing on the page
• External anchor text pointing to the page
• Internal anchor text pointing to the page

In addition to the above, the drop didn't coincide with panda or penguin. Any other ideas as to what could cause such a drop for a single keyword (other related rankings haven't moved).

We're starting to think that this may just have been another small change in the algorithm but it seems like too big of a drop in a short space of time for that to be the case.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated!

Thanks.