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Add additional locations through the Google My Business dashboard under the same Google account. It simplifies management of the listings and helps Google understand the relationship between locations.

These do appear to be contradictory guidelines until you understand what Google is trying to avoid here. Historically, SEOs have tried to rank businesses for geo-specific searches in areas other than where a business is located.

Let's say you run a gardening shop in Atlanta and you have an ecommerce side of the business online. Yes, you want to get walk-in traffic from the metro Atlanta area, but you also want to sell products online to customers all over the country. Ten years ago, you might set up 50 or so pages on your site with the exact same content with the city, state switched out. That way you could target keywords like the following:

• gardening supplies in Nashville, TN
• gardening supplies in Houston, TX
• gardening supplies in Seattle, WA
• gardening supplies in San Francisco, CA
• and so on...

That worked well 10 years ago, but the Panda update put a stop to that kind of nonsense.  Google understands that someone searching for "gardening supplies in Nashville, TN" is looking for a brick and mortar location in Nashville and not an ecommerce store.

If you have locations in each of those cities, you have a legitimate reason to target the above search queries. On the other hand, you don't want to incur the wrath of Google with duplicate content on your landing pages. That's why the best solution is to create unique content that will appeal to users in that location. Yes, this requires time and possibly money to implement, but it's worth it when customers are streaming through the door at each location.

Check out Bright Local's recent InsideLocal Webinar: Powerful Content Creation Ideas for Local Businesses. They discussed several companies that are doing a great job with local landing page content.

That's the way it should work. When you set up a cross domain canonical from a URL on domain 1 to a URL on domain 2, you are telling the search engine that you want the content on site 2 to be indexed rather than the same content on site 1. The page content on domain 1 is probably not in the index for search results anymore, but the canonical tag ties the content on the two domains together.

In your example, does the search results link to the content on domain 2? That's what I would expect.

Ugh. I can't really speak to your precise issue without the URL, but it's possible they are sacrificing increased sales and UX to aesthetics.  If they won't budge, you'll have to work harder to improve local search performance in other areas like off-site business citations and reviews.

You are correct in your suspicion. If you canonicalize all of your color pages to the single page, that single page will probably be the only one to show up in search.

The internal duplication isn't really your biggest problem. The bigger problem is external duplicate content. You have the same or very similar product descriptions as other websites.  You can't compete with established websites selling the same products with the same product descriptions unless you have an aggressive and well-rounded digital marketing plan. Start by adding unique content to the product pages, which will help with both the internal and external duplicate content.

I also want to address your concern that the website will be penalized for duplicate content. There is no duplicate content "penalty."  Rather, when evaluating pages with duplicate content for a given search query, Google will choose the top page(s) to display in SERPs and filter out the rest.

Only a tiny fraction of the pages on your site are actually appearing in Google search results. A search of "site:vinylabs.com" only shows 5 pages in the results. You may have technical issues affecting indexability in addition to duplicate content.

There is no one specific radius for local results. It depends on the type of business and the query itself. For example, someone searching for a gas station probably needs the nearest one, but that's not necessarily true for someone searching for an attorney.  The result radius can also be affected by modifiers like "near me" or "in my area." The intent is slightly different than if you search for a query + city, state or even if you search for the query without a geo-modifier.  The device makes a difference as well. If you are on the go using your mobile phone, Google may assume you want the nearest location that's open now.

The best thing to do is search the specific queries in question with different modifiers and devices and see what kind of results you get.

As with many SEO questions, the answer here is "It depends." What type of content is duplicated on the city pages? How much unique content is there in addition to the duplicated content?

Having the same content on unique city pages is not necessarily a problem. Google will serve up the page that is most relevant to the search query and will filter out the rest. However, if all of the content is the same across all of these pages, the overall site would be considered lower quality.  The key is to balance any duplicated content with additional unique content that provides value for the site visitor.

Any chance you can share the URL? That would make it much easier for someone to help in this forum. Without the URL, I can offer a few diagnostic questions.

• Have the number of pages on the site remained the same and pages are being removed from the index? Or have you added more content, but the percentage in the index has decreased?
• Have you checked your robots.txt file or page-level meta robots tag to see if you are blocking or noindexing anything?
• Have you submitted an XML sitemap?  If so, check the XML sitemap to make sure what's being submitted should be indexed. It's possible to submit a sitemap that includes noindexed pages, especially with some automated tools.
• Is it a large site? If so, check for issues that may affect crawl budget.
• Have you changed any canonical tags?
• Have you used the Fetch as Google tool to diagnose a specific URL?

I've never heard of Google using class names as a ranking factor, and I can't see any reason why they would. It would be easy to manipulate, and class names don't affect the user experience at all.

My takeaway from the webmaster guidelines you referenced is that user experience is an important ranking factor (something we knew already), and Google needs to access the page's Javascript and CSS in order to evaluate the user's experience of that page. Google wants to render your page in the same way the user experiences it for indexing purposes. That's why they threaten to penalize your site if you disallow crawling of Javascript or CSS.

Mike Blumenthal posted a breakdown of a Mediative study in September that you might find useful.

LOCAL HEAT MAPS – LOTS OF ATTENTION, NOT SO MUCH CLICKING

Are the backlinks pointing to actual pages on your website? I have seen cases where there was malware on a site that created new pages the site owner couldn't see. Then hundreds of backlinks were created that point to the malware pages. You may want to scan your site for malware.

With all of those parameters, it's doubtful that your site is being crawled efficiently.  In other words, the Googlebot gives up before it has a chance to crawl all of your pages. You should be able to configure URL parameters in Google Webmaster Tools to let Google know how to handle each parameter. This presentation breaks it down.

You can find the 35 temporary redirects that Moz reports using the Screaming Frog tool. You'll see the redirects for individual links under the "Response Codes" tab. Look for the "Redirect URI" column.

The fastest way to find all of the redirects is to go to "Reports" > "Redirect Chains." This will show all the redirects on the site. I think you have to purchase a license for this feature.

If you are trying to find redirects that have been set up for incoming links from external sites, you'll have to access the .htaccess file. I also do a site:domain.com search in Google just to see if there are old links still in the index. Then keep an eye on 404 errors in Google Webmaster Tools after the site launches.

You can list all 5 addresses on your contact page, but you should consider creating local landing pages if you serve customers at each location. See the following for some best practices.

http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2013/04/30/16-ways-to-create-unique-local-content-for-cities-where-you-want-to-rank/

As for your second question, if you want to drive traffic through local search, you definitely want to clean up local business citations.

When you say "there seems to be more and more spam links that are popping up on my site," do you mean the links are actually on your site? Like blog comments?

You can scan your site at https://sitecheck.sucuri.net/.  There are others as well, but it's a good idea to have a web developer actually look at the files on your server as well. Scanners don't always see everything. If your site is a WordPress site, you can install and scan for malware using the Wordfence plugin. (Note: Some hosts, like WP Engine, don't allow the Wordfence plugin.)

If you don't want to share your domain name publicly, you can send it to me in a private message and I'll take a look.

Your friend has to give Google a reason to send searchers to his website instead of the many well-known authority sites that have the same verses.  Is he providing a lot of unique commentary, or are the pages mostly bible verses that can be found on thousands of other sites? If it's the former, then he should be okay. If it's the latter, he may want to focus on adding more unique content.

It's perfectly normal to link two sites together like this. It can be useful to site visitors, and it's also very common. The problem comes when you have dozens of websites cross-linking together in some sort of link network.

More information

• Google's Matt Cutts Says It Is Okay To Link Your Sites Together But in Moderation

Domain authority is not a metric that can tell you whether or not you've been penalized. Moz recently updated their index, which caused a significant change in DA for a lot of sites. See https://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority for more information on what domain authority can tell you.

Moz Local isn't the type of spammy directory submission service that will get you in trouble with Google. The kind you need to watch out for are those that submit to hundreds of low-quality directories that really only exist for SEO link building. You don't see that kind of submission service as much now, but they were everywhere in the pre-Penguin days.

Search volume is only one factor that you should consider when analyzing keywords. At a minimum, we look at the following during keyword research.

• Search volume
• Keyword difficulty (Using Moz's Keyword Difficulty tool)
• Relevance (How relevant is the query to the client's business, website, products, or services? This is a subjective number that we score as a percentage.)
• Searcher intent - There are lots of different ways to classify user intent. See this, this, and this for more info.
• Google's perception of user intent - Analyze the SERPs to see what types of results appear for that query.

The last two are key for your issue. Take a look at the SERPs. Every result for "odor eliminator" is for a product rather than a service, and the top ranking sites are powerful brand sites like amazon.com, walmart.com, and homedepot.com. On the other hand, if someone searches "odor removal service," they are clearly not looking for a product. If my assumptions are correct, that query is 100% relevant to what your client is offering.

My advice is to focus on the more relevant, less competitive keyword in this particular case. .

The purpose of Open Site Explorer is to show backlinks. It is not intended to show how those links are redirected on your site. If your 301 redirects are set up properly, anyone who clicks on them will be redirected to the proper page on your site. However, you would have to ask the websites linking to you to change the URLs if you want those URLs to be updated (and reflected in OSE).