Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Well if half my citations aren't recognized then there's a good chance that is hurting the ranking correct?

I was saying when I google the company name "Photojennette" because I'm trying to correct NAP for this company to Photojennette Photography instead of just Photojennette, I see a ton of listings on Google SERP with " Photo Jennette McCurdy "

What your saying is that you think Google ignores a citation in regards to local ranking so long as NAP is not present.  So if it isn't a full citation with Name, Address, Phone, then they likely don't take it into account.

So my clients business name is "Photojennette Photography" and while researching citations to correct I have found a completely random issue.  There's an actress named Jennette McCardy that apparently has a ton of photos on the internet and with that are page titles like "Brand New Photo : Jennette McCardy" and "Look at this Photo Jennette McCardy"

My question is, would Google be sending my listing down because of this?  It's completely random and has nothing to do with the business.  Thanks in advance.

In my research I have found multiple citations that were both lowercase and uppercase.  Does this inconsistency effect ranking?

Because I'm still not seeing a #1-3 ranking for some of my main target keywords and the people who are have higher DA and PA by 5-10 points and I teach SEO and I want to be able to explain everything involved.

Thanks for the heads up. Didn't realize that would make much of a difference but I corrected the problem.  Also, without me doing anything, the Canonical Error is fixed...

I've put off asking this question for a long time because I know what the short answer is, but I've been working the SEO on http://www.photojennette.com for almost a year now pretty constantly and all of the measurements are positives except for authority.  Traffic has more than doubled, links sending visits has doubled, external followed links is 500% up, keywords sending is way up, pages within the site have way more links and are more diverse in their own SEO, but no matter what I can't get PA and DA to budge. In fact at one point DA dropped a point or two. (although OSE and Moz Analytics shown that competitors lost a point or two at the same time so I didn't think much of it.)  I feel like I had a good grasp on what helps DA but I'm starting to question that.  Anyone have any ideas?

I came to post the exact same thing.  Feb 6 2014 was my last update on all 9 of the sites I manage.  Any word on whats going on?

The link is a front page of a website though.

http://stellyweddings.com

I understand what Canonical is for, but this isn't a duplicated page, its the front page.  Im not sure why I would get the above error in On-Page grading.  Basically saying the page is grading  a B instead of an A because of the above error.

I have a wordpress site that On-Page Grader is saying I don't have Canonical done correctly.  Here is the comment.

Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical

If the canonical tag is pointing to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. Make sure you're targeting the right page (if this isn't it, you can reset the target above) and then change the canonical tag to reference that URL.

Recommendation: We check to make sure that IF you use canonical URL tags, it points to the right page. If the canonical tag points to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. If you've not made this page the rel=canonical target, change the reference to this URL. NOTE: For pages not employing canonical URL tags, this factor does not apply.

I have quite a few sites and have never had an issue with this.  Can anyone help?  I tried installing a plugin but that seems to have made it worse.  This is the front page of the site btw.

Do you know off hand how many total pages you have on your website?  Also do you have those sitemap statistics?

Edit:  Also I see you already have adwords going.  One of the biggest issues I see are meta descriptions.  They are far from original but I understand that can be hard with so many products.  Another issue could be the rating markup you have, but someone else could chime in on that as I'm not fully knowledgeable of that world.  Lastly, make sure you have a very active Google+ account.  I see very few +'s on your profile and I would imagine just posting images of your furniture on there will garner many many links from Google back to your site.

So one reason you may not have any crawl errors is that your pages may not be submitted to Webmaster Tools (WT) in the form of a Sitemap.  Can you click on Sitemaps inside Webmaster Tools and see if any are submitted?  If so how many pages are submitted and how many are indexed?  Moz Analytics is letting us know there are errors on the site, WT is not so the conclusion might be that all the pages are not submitted.  If thats the case, you want to get a sitemap.xml created ASAP and submitted to WT.

I've always been under the assumption that a follow link is better than a nofollow as long as its a good link.  Google doesn't penalize you for having paid links, they just don't offer as much authority.  Someone else can chime in but I would prefer the Follow over Nofollow.

Yes, you need to ask them to add correct alt image text for your image links.  "Rove Concepts" would likely be best if they are all directed at your front page.  Also, consider an Adwords Campaign for specific terms and make sure to send those adwords clicks to the page for that term.  One way to create DA is to have people entering your site from pages other than your front page.  For example:

Create an Adwords ad for "eames leather chair" and then point it to this page "http://www.roveconcepts.com/store/living-room/chairs/eames-lounge-chair" rather than the front page.  Learning to effectively use Adwords is a completely different topic but this will help bring traffic back to your site.  I would venture to say whatever you are paying for those IMG adds, if applied to Adwords, would generate more business for you.

For now, let me know about the Sitemap questions above.

In your Moz Anaylitics under Search > Crawl Diagnostics - are there errors there?

Also, on many of your paid links, you are using img's without alt text.  Anchor text is becoming more and more important in today's SEO.  If you have 50,000 links with no correct anchor text that alone can be hurting you.

Miriam,

Thank you so much for your detailed response yet again.  I will address each of your comments below after having done as much research on each of them as I can.

• Have all previous citations been discovered and cleaned up?  I have used whitespark.ca as well as Google to find as many citations as I possibly could over the last couple of months.  I do know of a citation on chamberofcommerce.org where I have contact them, and they have yet to reply and one on wsyk.com as part of the businesses legal information for doing business in two different states.  I have contacted them as well and they refuse to remove it.   I'm not sure what else I could do.  The listings don't have the name correct

http://www.wysk.com/index/colorado/denver/w3n3jrp/photojennette-ltd/profile

http://www.chamberofcommerce.com/denver-co/31237013-photo-jennette/

I tried claiming the business on chamber of commerce but it says its already claimed and the owner of the company has no recollection of it.

• Are citations being built appropriately for each location?  Yes, again using Whitespark.ca to look at where the top ranking websites have citations, I have been effectively building citations for each of the locations.

• Is the Google+ Local page for each of the 2 locations violation free?  As far as I can tell, both of the Google+ Local pages are verified, and linking to their perspective pages on the site (http://www.photojennette.com/austin & http://www.photojennette.com/denver)

• Could there be duplicate Google+ Local listings or merged listings?  I wouldn't know how to find this.  I haven't seen any duplicate listings.  There is a second business with a google plus local page at that address but it is using a different phone number.  I spoke with a Google rep and he assured me that the second listing, so long as it had a different phone number wouldn't effect the other listing as far as violations.  My client said the second business could be removed if needed but I haven't removed it yet.  Could be an issue?

• Does the website appropriately reflect the 2 locations, or could there be anything on it that is confusing the bots as to the accuracy of distinct NAP for each location?  Those pages are http://www.photojennette.com/austin and http://www.photojennette.com/denver and they both include content, images, Schema citation and Google Map with the location.

• Is robots.txt setup correctly on the site, ensuring that it is fully crawlable?  The site looks to be fully indexed as far as I can see.  Robots.txt is telling google not to index some pages that the client doesn't want on Google.

• Has the site been submitted to Google Webmaster Tools? Yes.

• Has their been a previous issue with spammy linkbuilding that could be harming the site?  As far as I know, my client is the only owner of the domain and there has not been any of those types of activities.

• Is there a duplicate content issue on the website?  Moz is telling me I am free and clear of any duplicate content issues.  I have personally built each page.  There are resemblances between some of the pages, but each have their own text, alt images, meta content, etc.  I am using wordpress SEO by yoast just as a note, and also hes Local plugin.

Again, I can't thank you enough for your help.  I hope I have acurately answered each of your questions.

By my definition, dead end links are any links that don't help.  These would include links to pages that no longer exist on your site, that perhaps need a 301 redirect, links from websites that have nothing to do with your keyword topics, or links from websites that have really bad DA on pages with bad PA.

Webmaster Tools within Google is probably a great place to start.  You can see where Google is finding errors by looking under Crawl > Crawl Errors.  There you will find pages that might have been deleted without a redirect and are therefore showing a 400 Error.  Also you can see who is linking to your website under Search Traffic > Links To Your Site.  That's probably a really strong place to start.

OSE only gives you a sample of the pages that are pointing links to your site, but you could find those domains there as well.  Majestic SEO offers a free account with some Referring Domain information as well.

As far as fixing the issues, well if ts a link on a website you don't want to be linked from, you can start by emailing them and asking for it removed.  If its a link to a page that has been deleted or renamed, just 301 redirect that page to a live, working page so that when its clicked through, the user ends up on a working page.

Google's number one goal is user experience.  If their users click on a link from Google that ends up on a page that doesn't exist, it works against you.  If Google sees a link on a referring domain that is pointing to a page that doesn't exist, its a similar situation.  If Google sees two pages with the same content, that's another notch against your site.  That's where Canonical links come into play.

It's a long process so just hang in there and make sure the powers at be know how important it is because its going to take a large amount of man hours to fix this issue.  Can you check Webmaster Tools and tell me how many errors it finds under Crawl Errors and how many links are under Total Links and under "Who links the most" check domains that have a ton of links to your site that might not be helpful to your site.

Does anyone else have thoughts on this?

One problem I see is that you have 250 referring domains from only 151 referring IP's (as seen on Majestic SEO)  That right there tells me you have about 100 or so domains that are likely owned by the same people all referring to you.  In general that usually leads to blackhat SEO.

Also, if you use OpenSiteExplorer, you will see that your Page Authority and Domain Authority are both fairly low for the competitive, global market you are targeting.  This likely comes from dead end links that dont have anything to do with furniture, your local area, or your products specifically.

Duplicate meta data and page titles will cause major issues.  OSE says you have 283 new links in the last 32 days.  That seems like quite a few for a furniture company.  Do you have a new SEO working for you?

Do you have a strong social media following?  Are the followers real, viral followers or were they purchased? (I only ask because you seem unsure of your previous SEO team.)  Do you sell globally or would Local help you gain some of that traffic back?

Unfortunately, undoing bad SEO is much harder than just starting from scratch.  First things first, learn about Canonical links, 301 redirects, and get rid of any duplicate page titles and meta descriptions.  Remember, each page should be about a specific keyword set.

Good luck!

Elchanan, thanks for your response.  I have two physical, verified locations, and I have pages for each with decent PA, linked to two different Google Plus Local profiles.  I'd love to learn more about mapmaker.

I checked out the listings on mapmaker and they look good.  Both visible but I did notice that one of the addresses doesn't have abbreviations.  So its, East Kentucky Avenue and in many of my citations I have it like it is normally which is E. Kentucky Ave.  Could this be an issue?  I submitted it as E. Kentucky Ave. and I am assuming Google decided to use the long form?

Webmaster Tools isn't telling you that it thinks your website is about Dollars, its telling you that it sees that mentioned often on your site.  You really don't need to fix anything, but perhaps adding more content about your target keyword will help push that down a bit.  Are you saying something costs "88 Dollars" all over your website or actually using a $?

If its the latter, that would be very interesting.  If its the former, remove dollar and use $ instead.  Cheers!

So it's been a few months since my most favorite thread "Local Really?" (http://moz.com/community/q/local-really) and I have worked tirelessly deleting duplicate citations, fixing incorrect NAP, and adding new citations for the two different locations my client works from.  I have added a second Google Plus Local page and verified it as well and linked it back to the page for that location on my site.  I have added Schema.org markup on each of the pages relating to the locations with the full address and correct NAP.  I research with whitespark.ca to find new possibilities and compare with listings ranking highly.

I feel like I have worked non-stop at this but unfortunately I have still seen 0 results from my examining everything.  The Google listing is still on page 14 / 20 and seems to be stuck there.  Is this fairly normal?  I'm just at a lost as I have honestly tried to adhere to all the comments and advice given by everyone here (again while seeing the competition doing none of those things.)  I think I'm just looking for that little "things look right just give it time and continue" or even "no!  you're doing it wrong still"

Thanks in advance!