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Glad to help!

Even if you're not linking back and forth, you're still diluting your SEO value over many domains, as opposed to providing one place to demonstrate expertise in your niche. However many domains your spreading your content over, is how many times you'll be duplicating some of your work. Say you have 5 domains, one for each appliance type, then you're reporting and conducting analysis for 5 sites, you're updating 5 XML sitemaps & 5 robots files, 5 different sites to get/monitor reviews for, 5 sites to monitor rank for....you get the point. Additionally, if you get a really good link for _one _of those sites, it only benefits that domain, whereas if you're operating all under one site, that link helps all service lines, not just the one whose domain got that link.

If they can determine that they're connected (which is highly likely since you'd be linking back and forth), all of them.

That's getting a bit into the black-hat realm. I would stay away from any strategy where you have microsites for each service offered. Linking back and forth between microsite domains like you mentioned is going to look very sketchy to search engines. These days, SEO is much more about the quality of your content and how much of an expert you are in your niche, and less about the keywords you can stuff in your site.

Hi,

I'd stick with the domain name you're currently using. There is no SEO value to what domain you have. This used to be true ~10 years ago, which is why you see a lot of domains out there like AirConditioningRepairHouston.com, etc.. You may not have much domain authority right now with the current domain, but if you switch, you'll have zero. Additionally, any links you already have will lose about 10% of their value when you redirect them to a new site.

Hi,

That sounds like a definite candidate for duplicate content issues. A true responsive design only has one set of page elements coded, which then rearrange based on screen size, that's what makes responsive the optimal solution for SEO. Search engines only have to read one code set per page and they know it'll render for most devices. In your case, I believe search engines will view that as a tactic to game the system; one version of the content is essentially cloaked when the other is displayed.

You can probably find a good WP freelancer that can do this for you. I don't know of a simpler way to implement such an attribution solution.

You can leverage that phone number by populating a field on the form based on what phone number displays.

For example, you may have the following dynamic phone configuration:

555-1234: Google Organic

555-3456: Google Paid Search

555-5678: Email Marketing

When someone submits a form, there is a hidden field that looks at what phone number is displayed and then populates the field with the coordinating marketing channel. As far as execution of this logic, I'm afraid I can't help, our Dev team handled all that. But it's pretty simple logic, so I think most developers would be able to write this relatively easily.

Are you, by chance, using any type of dynamic phone tracking on the site? We implemented an attribution model like this by leveraging the displayed phone number.

I just ran this query for bvstate URLs indexed for the H&R Block site. Mozbar shows canonical tags with bvstate in them, and Screaming Frog finds no canonical tags at all. There is a deeper issue that is not simply Google ignoring them.

Do you have different examples? The Home Depot link doesn't work when trying to view the actual page on the site. With the Microsoft link, the canonical is working, as the version with the parameter is not indexed in Google, but the canonical version is indexed, which is what I would expect for a canonical that is being obeyed.

No problem, glad to be of assistance!

HI Donald,

On the site that borrowed the post from the original publisher, add a canonical tag that points to the URL of the original blog post. This is the ideological way to handle this, and how news sites should be crediting the original publisher when syndicating articles.

In some cases, implementing a self-referring 301 redirect may cause an infinite loop in which your homepage would not be accessible at all, so I can understand your dev team's reluctance.

A canonical tag and a 301 redirect pass the same amount of link authority, so in this case, they serve the same purpose and provide the same benefit. I'd stick with the canonical tag and pick a different, more valuable battle to fight.

Hi Rachael,

Spending time pursuing links these days is a pretty futile task. You'll spend hours prospecting and doing outreach, and then most site owners won't respond to you.

The best thing you can do to generate links is create high-quality, unique, trustworthy, and linkable content. Get your content in front of the right people, and it will acquire links naturally. The best type of link to have is one that no one asked for, the content was just good enough for someone to say 'hey, this is useful stuff, I'm going to reference it on my site'. Of course now, the tricky part is getting your content in front of the right people. You can leverage most of the usual channels for content amplification; social, organic, email, etc. etc.

Hope that's helpful!

Hi ,

Did you follow all of Google's Change of Address instructions? If redirects are in place, chances are you missed something else minor that can have a big impact.

Hi Thomas,

That should work. You can confirm this by modifying your robots.txt file in Search Console and testing a handful of URLs to ensure they're blocked the way you want.

Hi Sigurd,

Your implementation of canonicals is almost there. You're currently using the relative URL, when you should be using absolute URLs. As per Google Search Console guidelines, relative URLs here can cause issues.

I wouldn't worry too much about your crawl budget. With a site this large, it's a very small percentage of your total pages, so the overall effect won't be that noticeable.

Hi Angela,

Yes, those redirects should be updated. For each redirect that Google passes through, you lose about 10% of the authority from the referring page. So if you have two-step redirects like that, you'll lose ~20% of the authority. Having redirect chains like that will also negatively affect your load time.