Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Luke

As a general rule of thumb, blogs will offer up a fair bit of duplication through tags, categories and archives so it can be worth not indexing those pages. For the posts themselves, you should have the option to create a unique snippet rather than using the first couple of blog paragraphs if you wanted to do that (best practice) but the duplication of the blog posts should be handled by the canonical tag so there is only one true instance  of the article on the site.

You don't mention which blog package you are using but for WordPress, the yoast SEO plugin will help you easily deal with most common issues.

http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

The plugin does not do this all on installation and requires some simple configuration to fit your circumstances but the following page walks you through the configuration of the plugin so you can make a call on what to index, noindex, etc.

http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/

What if you are not using WordPress? Well, I would still read the above article. It deals with issues common to most blog platforms and covers technical optimisation, template tweaks, site structure, conversions and most importantly for you (section 3 I think) covers duplication created by the blog, pagination etc.

Well worth a read if only to get you thinking in the right direction and if you are using WordPress, then the plugin and that tutorial will put most of your problems, if not all to bed.

Hope it helps!

Marcus

Hey Moosa

Not really. There may be a nasty redirection workaround you could implement but a DNS A record can really only point to a domain / sub domain and not to a sub folder.

To do this the two elements need to be housed on the same server and then you need to redirect all the blog URLs to the new location. You should be able to do this with a fairly simple catch all redirection rule.

What is the blog software & hosting? Wordpress? It's fairly simple to migrate WordPress in most cases and I have some solid migration scripts for updating the DB if that is of use to you?

So, some pain to get this working but certainly worth the effort.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Hey Zach

The penalty issues in 2012 have become a nightmare to deal with in some ways as the messages from Google are unclear and there are just so many potential issues. So, to deal with it properly we have to diagnose what the issues are and then make sure that we show what we have done that was wrong and that we have made efforts to have it removed.

Looking at your case from like 10,000 feet it we can discern the following.

1. you lost traffic on the 24th of April so you were seemingly hit by penguin. We know penguin is going after certain types of links so a quick look at your link profile in open site explorer shows us that the most popular keyword used by a site to link to you is 'poker on line' and not a branded term as would be expected - this is used by 74 sites.

You also have 15,000 links with the URL as the anchor so a branded and safe anchor, but, these 15,000 links come from only 19 sites so you have another penguin favourite in masses of footer links.

These two points represent a large chunk of your links so cleaning these up may see you bounce back if this is purely an algorithmic penalty.

2. July 19th Message - if this is the standard message it would indicate you also have a manual penalty as well now and need to take further action. This is now more difficult as you need to ensure your link profile is squeaky clean as it will be reviewed by a member of the web spam team.

3. This further email lets you know that google are distrusting some links to your site rather than your site as a whole. Quite how this fits into your penguin and manual penalty situation is unclear but I would say that the action points you need to take for points 1 & 2 will cover this anyway.

Action Points

A. Contact the 74 sites and where they are not spammy links ask them to change the anchor on these links to something branded.

B. Contact the 19 sites with the sitewide footer links and have them removed OR no followed. If they are paid, then just get rid of them.

C. Review the entire link profile and contact the sites to have any dodgy links removed. You would do well to keep a spreadsheet and date the requests and if you do three attempts log the dates. If you want  to go further, you can have a legal letter drafted and send it to the site owners and again detail this in your spreadsheet.

Reconsideration Request

Once you have cleaned up everything as best as possible you can then submit a reconsideration request. You will want to link to your spreadsheet and detail everything you have done to remove the dodgy links. Remember you seemingly have a penguin penalty and a manual penalty so you will want to ensure you have done a thorough job that will solve the anchor and footer links problem and resolve any problems that human eyes will spot on a review.

--

Best of luck, your site is in a hole and has picked up every link penalty going so... as the old song says, things can only get better! I would certainly indicate to your client just how bad the situation is and that your job, before you can do any 'SEO' and improve his traffic, is to remove his problems.

All the best
Marcus

Cheers Tom

I have asked a few sensitive questions, but as it goes, the responses were never able to solve the problem, it was almost helping with a crisis of confidence or direction really rather than an out and out solution. In the end, I stopped asking private questions as I just got more from public Q&A.

It's a shame I guess and I do get it but if folks need private consultation they are going to have to get private consultation now I guess.

Have a good one!
Marcus

Hey Simon

It's fairly easy to diagnose a panda issue and start by checking the dates you lost traffic. Lets assume you have a panda issue and that has pulled down lots of the rankings for various pages and sections of the site.

Now, that does not mean, that subsequently, you have not picked up a penguin problem as well and looking at your link profile, it would certainly not be surprising:

• No URLs in the top 5 anchors
• Links from low quality sources (http://zurichhotelsweb.com/links/links13.html)
• Links from topically irrelevant sources
• High percentage of keyword anchors
• low percentage of URL anchors

So, if you can check the date you first lost organic traffic in analytics you can pretty much determine if it is a panda problem.

You can read up on the types of thin content here:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content

Then, you need to identify all the thin content pages and either update them or remove them. If you can't remove them or they have a purpose then you can noindex them and ideally nofollow the links to them from the rest of the site.

Once you have done that, and you need to be thorough, then you should see a bounce back from those issues but I am fairly sure you will have accrued some penguin issues as well so I would also then check the penguin dates for further drops.

I have one client that got hit by Panda on the 19th of April and lost around 25% of organic search volume from Google and then by Penguin on the 24th and lost around another 50% of the remaining volume. We have solved a lot of the penguin problems but are now looking at the panda problems which can be larger in scale to diagnose and resolve.

Fact of the matter is, you have to be fastidious in your approach and remove anything that is duplicated or thin and then go after the Penguin problems.

Good luck and keep us posted!
Marcus

Hey Man

These may work for a while or if you are starting out with a new site but... you are essentially creating weak content and spamming article marketing sites with the intention of boosting your rankings.

It's hardly an approach with any longevity or an ethical front to it, not to say it won't work some for a small business in a non competitive niche.

A way I have used articles in the past is to create a fully singing and dancing article on the actual site itself, something that really solves some of the prospects problems and then create good quality satellite articles to summarise the article or tackle smaller parts of it and link back to the main article. Most article sites allow you to add two links so create one for your keyword (vary it though - add brand name etc) and one back to the main article you are promoting.

Slightly different to this silver bullet approach but my experience of these services is that they create awful content, then spin that into downright drudge, and then spam the article directories which have little to no editorial control to get the links up. Historically, this could work to some extent but it is not the way to do things with an eye on the long term.

Additionally, post the panda update the article sites are getting less traction and value so it's a weak approach that is getting weaker. If your link profile ends up being dominated by this kind of dirge then it may have a negative affect long term.

Googles eyes are on weak content, if I was you,  I would give this a miss and concentrate on building less volume but more quality links.

Hope it helps!
Marcus

Don't change the URL if you can help it, especially as this is an uneccessary change.

You could specify the correct URL in webmaster tools and use a 301 to get around this easy enough but my advice would be to keep the www if possible.

Marcus

Is article spinning necessary? Absolutely not! What are you trying to do? Build a reputation for putting out weak and near duplicate content? Pick up a panda penalty?

Can we see through the question you originally posed and find out what the real question or problem is? Do you need links? Then create great content that people want to link to! If you want to build some general purpose links then write some (original) articles and stick them up at places that will get you quick easy links. Ezinearticles.com, hubpages, squidoo etc will allow links with anchor text for some easy wins but don't make that the backbone of  your strategy.

Ultimately, if you want to promote your website with content, then your best bet is to become socially active in your topical area, make friends and see if you can guest post with some kick ass articles on their sites.

If you want to spin articles, you are swimming upstream as everything Google is about at the moment is eradicating weak and thin content from the web so please, for your own sake,  don't do that.

If those are your ten main service landing pages (from organic search) then they most definitely want to be part of your main navigation. Having these pages linked from every page on the site helps indicate their importance and value within the hierarchy of the site.

This becomes a problem if you have hundreds of landing pages like in a huge, multi category ecommerce store or some such but for ten pages, go for it - make them easy to click to and easy to land on.

Hope that helps.
Marcus

Guest posting is a powerful tactic but it is also extremely hard work. In my mind, it all depends where you are in the life of your business.

If you are writing 'masterpieces' but no one is seeing them, then what is the point? Now, if you put one of these masterpieces a week onto another site, or... better still, if you wrote the masterpiece on your site, then wrote a summary version, still masterful of course, but not as authorative as the main piece and used that as a guest post with a link back to the main article, then you benefit from exposure and refereal traffic.

Also, you can't take social out of this picture - if you have little followers and your great posts are not getting read then you need to get them in front of people and a post on a high traffic site with a referral back to your site and a strong incentive to like / follow / plus you then when you next publish something amazing, you can fire a link out on your social channels.

So, guest posting, SEO silver bullet? No way. Guest posting, a hard but potentially good way to get increased referals and traffic which you can then do more hard work to get soft conversions to social media and the link + win those all so important early links - yep, it will do the job.

Like Egol so rightly said, just putting something out there and waiting for links is a slow game with no guarantees, no matter how good the content is. But, by guest posting, networking with other bloggers, getting people aware of your stuff and hopefully writing about you and sharing your stuff and by benefiting from the traffic and visitors of other more established sites, you can make this work for you.

No easy answers unfortunately, doing this right is hard work but when you get to the tipping weight, when you have enough links that your own masterpieces are starting to rank well AND you have good social standing to get viral sharing and referal traffic from the social networks, well, then you are really starting to see some traffic and not just 100% from organic sources.

Hope this helps buddy. 
Marcus

First thing you want to do here is do some research.

1. Keyword Research - find the keywords you are interested in (obviously)

2. Do these keywords generate local results blended in with the main results?

3. If so - research the current ranking sites.

• How are they categorised
• what citations do they have?
• what do the citations look like?
• How is the actual site optimised for these terms?
• What is their organic ranking for these terms?
• What is their backlink profile look like?

A good way to dig into the competitors is to simply google their name, postcode and then remove their site from the results. This will get you started:

"Competitor" AND "Post Code" -site:http://www.competitor.co.uk

4. Think reviews - get reviews on your Google listing and also on any other relevant sites (looking at the local listings you should see external review sources mentioned if there are any worth considering).

--

Ultimately, you are going to want to do some local SEO - citations, local backlinks etc but you first want to make sure you have all the basics in place and the site and google maps listings are all correctly categorised. Then, get busy on those citations and get creative - anything can be a citation so think

• Press releases
• Q&A Sites
• Videos and Image descriptions
• Social profiles
• forum profiles & sigs
• Guest post bios
• article bios

Obviously, go after the directories where you can get listed. Look for any local directories or sites for citations and for industry specific directories.

Also, make sure you get the basics right. Get the name, address and postcode on every page of the site and make sure it is consistent with the Google listings. If you already have some citations, audit them and make sure everything is consistent there as well.

That should be enough to but in a nutshell dig in, research, find out what the successful people are doing and do more of it.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Hey,

Few things going on here.

If they are PR4 and not in use, there is likely a reason for that and they are probably somewhat tainted. You could likely get this overthrown if you are buying them for genuine purposes by putting in a reconsideration request in.

That said, there was a recent Matt Cutts video where he advised against this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=lGUw9oS5csI

I would at the very least do your homework.

1. Find out what used to be on the domain (wayback machine)

2. Search for backlinks to the domain

3. Look at citations and the history

At the very least, as Matt says in his video, do some research and don't be the sucker that buys a spammy domain!

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Hey,

You are coming at this from a slightly wrong perspective.

• Is your app good?
• Would people reading a review on this site be likely to buy your app?
• Is this site visible in search when people search for app reviews related to your app?

If the reviews are good and the site brings value then getting exposure on the site and a link as part of the bargain would most likely be a good thing.

If the site sucks and is a free for all with 15 word reviews in pigeon English then it may not be such a good thing but it would be unlikely to be harmful.

Forget the metrics for now. Think quality and exposure. If the site is highly visible and high quality and you get some exposure via this site and may get referral traffic as well then a link is likely to be a good thing whether it helps your SEO or not.

Hope that helps
Marcus

Hey Becky

In an ideal world you will want to keep the old pages up or at least redirect them to the equivalent. If they 404 then that's just not ideal. If these pages acquire inbound links (which may be doubtful) you are throwing away equity by not keeping them or redirecting them.

You could try the following:

• Crawl all pages in screaming frog
• Export the list of all pages
• Crawl the list
• Note all internal 404s and 301 them to the relevant page

That is a bit of a hack but if aspects of this are outside of your control that will allow you to keep track of historical changes.

With regards to general optimisation of products you will want to look at ways to prioritise - one person and 20,000 products is a tough gig. However, there may only be 2,000 products that are really important / profitable. This should factor in what is important to the business first so you have some way to prioritise. Then look at the current situation (rank), opportunity (competition) and create an ordered list to give you some plan of attack.

The category pages are a little different and a sensible approach would be to do an audit of sorts as there is likely to be far less of these.

• Get a list of all category pages and targeted keywords
• Find where you are currently (situation analysis)
• Review the competition (opportunities)
• Look for categories where you are almost there OR could improve over what is there currently
• Order by opportunity and focus on those first

If you can create an ordered list that factors in opportunity / difficulty and any other factors you can at least tackle this in a structured way.

Sounds like Chaos though - 20,000 products is a tough gig for one SEO.

Hope that helps.
Marcus

Hey Philipp

Okay, SEO aside here and assuming folks are landing on your site and not on the section of the site that is targeted to their location / language (which is a whole other discussion but not your question as far as I can tell) then you want to redirect these users to the correct language pages.

So, we have two options here:

1. HTTP 301 - Moved Permanently: Now I don't feel this is correct. The resource has not moved, it is just not correct for this user based on their language preference.
2. HTTP 302 - Found: This is used to indicate the resource has temporarily moved to another location so is maybe more suitable as results from page A will not be completely ignored

In fact, if you dig into the HTTP status codes documentation a better option here would seemingly be a 303 which is classified as 'The response to the request can be found under another URI' and for my money that is more suitable. But, problem is, no one seems to use the 303 redirect and everyone seems to use the 302 in it's place.

So, I ask myself, what does Google do? When I visit www.google.com from the UK I am always redirected to the www.google.co.uk site. Is this a 301, 302, 303 or something else entirely? So, I checked quickly in webbug (or you can do it Chrome by looking at the Network tab in Tools > Developer Tools > Network Tab) and it redirects with a 302 status code.

Request: HEAD / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.google.com
Connection: close
Accept: /
User-Agent: WebBug/5.0

Response: HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Location: http://www.google.co.uk/

So, I am not sure there is a definitive answer as from a search engine perspective we would want to folks landing on the right page due to our geo location and language targeting but that does not escape the need to show people the content in the correct language.

If this was me and I was dead set on a redirection I would go with a 302. I can't claim that is an authoritative answer but it is certainly my opinion based on my research here.

I guess the alternative would be to maybe detect the users language settings and load a pop up that then allows them to select and redirect so it is not done at the request / response level but rather a choice the user makes themselves (then maybe cookies or other options could be used to deal with language for those users on subsequent visits). In the UK http://www.babycenter.com/ does this and it pops up asking me which version of the site I would like to visit (choice is always a good thing).

Possibly a good question to ask in the Google Webmaster Help Forum: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/webmasters as you will often get a Googler pop up to answer specific questions or this question may well have been asked before (albeit in a different way). If this is not search focused then really it comes down to what you think works best for your users.

Hope that helps! 
Marcus

Some further reading if it helps:

• http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192
• http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=62399
• http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-discussing-302-redirects/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_302

Hey

As Peter mentioned, in principle, this is no different to any other kind of office address. In practice though, you may find some issues as there may be several other tenants who have had this address previously and subsequently there will be a whole list of different names, phone numbers (2/3 of the Nap), website addresses and other info associated with this address.

Also, the Regus building will likely have lots of other businesses in there at the same actual street address which may create further noise.

The general advice is simple.

• get registered with Google+ Local
• build citations at the important
• optimise the website with local in mind
• generally try to ensure the website is high quality
• Try to be active socially, publish content, build local links, encourage honest reviews etc

But, my approach here would also include a detailed audit of all business listings that exist for that address. Get everything in a spreadsheet and contact the sites one by one to either update or remove the listings. Also, to identify if there are any Google local listings that still exist for the old businesses so these can be updated and removed.

Google is probably your best tool here and a search using the elements you know such as office number (Post Code / Zip Code), address will be the first starting point.

"[Office Number]" "[Street Address]" "[Post Code]"

My business is in an office complex called the Custard Factory in Birmingham and the search above for us would look something like:

"112 Zellig Building" "Gibb Street" "B9 4AA"

This should give us a good starting point. From here we will likely find several other interesting pieces of information we can use to refine these searches:

• Business names
• Phones Number

It's not search based buy you may be able to ask the Regus folks for a list of all previous tenant names of this office and that could give you a good running start here.

Then, it's a process of more traditional searches for those businesses and any information relating to them.

"business name" AND "post code" -www.businesswebsite.co.uk

So, for our business address that would be something like

"Bowler Hat" AND "B9 4AA" -www.bowlerhat.co.uk

This will give you a list of results with the business name, post code and remove any listings for the clients website. You may have to play with this a little as the business may have name variations but this will be a good starting point for further investigation.

Citation based factors (Quality, Consistency & Volume) pay a large part in Local SEO and simply building new citations if there is lots of noise out there and some active local listings may not do what you want it to (Or I could just be really OCD about all this stuff).

I suggest a read through at least the foundational ranking factors here but this should give you plenty of scope to get started: 
http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors

Hope that helps!

Marcus

Hey

This is one of those jobs that has to be done very carefully and as a rule of thumb I would always look to minimise the number of variables. If you are simply changing the URL from one domain to another then it should be fairly straightforward with 301 redirection for the domain itself and an update to the domain in webmaster tools.

With regards to HTTPS and the .php3 pages you have two options

1. make that change now

2. make that change some point after everything else is changed and stabilised

My thinking here would be to get everything as dialled in as possible BEFORE the move to the new domain. Conduct a full technical audit, SEO audit and do whatever you can to optimise the technical aspects of the site. I am talking squeaky clean technical SEO you can see your face in. So, a change to the php3 files, a move to HTTPS - you could do all of that now (along with anything else you find during the technical audit).

Main thinking here is to get everything as perfect as possible pre move - minimise the surface area for potential problems - minimise the number of variables when you make the change - then should anything go wrong you have as clear an idea as possible where the problem lies.

My main advice is to simplify the move as much as possible so anything you can do now rather than later will only make your life easier and the move simpler.

Hope that helps!

Marcus

Hey Chris

The very first step here is to determine what is realistically achievable. Maybe if I give you some leading questions you can work through these and get a better handle on how to play this.

1. Are they a local business? If so - are you only targeting local results currently?

2. Do they only have a single physical location?

3. Are the results primarily for local businesses? Is this true if the keywords are used with and without location modifiers? ("buiding materials birmingham", & just "building materials")

4. What kind of companies are listed in the results? Big brands? Local businesses with a single location? National companies with multiple locations? Online players that play nationally?

I am in Birmingham, UK and have just done a few searches for 'building materials' and 'building materials birmingham'.

When I add a location the results are all for local companies as expected. These seem to be individual building suppliers and for larger chains with multiple locations. Even the larger chains seem to mention that they are the 'local' supplier and really push the fact they have a location that is local to the customer.

If I search for just 'building materials' I do still see local results, organic results for large multi location businesses and a few national online players.

I see a few national players so I would be looking to get a handle on the top three that mirror what your client is trying to achieve here. Get the domain authority and page authority and link profiles of these three players to get some figures behind what you are doing here. I would be looking at OSE, Majestic, aHrefs etc and pooling all that data together and comparing to where your client is currently. This is never as scientific as we would like but it gives you some figures to use in estimating just how much work would be involved here. Really dig into those link profiles to get a feel for what you will need to do here. Look what other advertising these big players do. Consider offline activities as well. TV? Radio? If you are in the US then this may be a much bigger market than the UK so again factor that in - the wider the market the larger the competition.

I would be looking to propose a strategy based on the available metrics to my client. Whether that means using the current site and building on that or setting up a new site or even getting local distribution centres. We can do our research and use the search engine results to help us determine what a realistic strategy may look like.

So you want to know:

• Situation - Where are we currently?
• Competition - What does the competition look like?
• Objectives - Where do want to be?
• Strategy - How are we going to get there?
• Tactics - How specifically are we going to do what we need to get where need to be (link building strategies etc)
• Controls - How will we measure success? What is our timeline here?

Simply put there are a lot of moving parts here and our job as consultants is to help the client understand the often herculean effort involved in being a national player. If you can give them a rough idea of what you think it will take based on some facts and figures you can design a campaign and manage their expectations.

Another consideration is whether you can be a local business and national business? well you can but it may make things confusing from a messaging perspective so you likely need to get that sorted first. I may even be tempted to look at splitting this out but I would always try to be led by the research.

I think it is really super important to know what is required and to explain that whilst this is not a perfect science these metrics give us an idea what needs to be done. From that a campaign can be designed to help the client get where they need to be and to move from a small local business to a national player may be something that needs to be tackled over 1, 3 or even 5 years. Let the data guide you.

Hope that helps - as ever there are no easy answers but don't be afraid to tell your client this. If you can shine a light on the path they can determine if they want to walk it.

Cheers
Marcus

Hey Rosemary

This is against the guidelines for local businesses so could be problematic

Ref: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en-GB

"If your business rents a temporary, "virtual" office at an address that is different from your primary business, do not create a page for that location unless it is staffed during your normal business hours."

If we take a look at the schema page for a local business we can see that this markup is ideally for a physical business

ref: https://schema.org/LocalBusiness

"A particular physical business or branch of an organization. Examples of LocalBusiness include a restaurant, a particular branch of a restaurant chain, a branch of a bank, a medical practice, a club, a bowling alley, etc."

So - to go back to your question I am not sure it is spam as such but it is incorrect in how you are using the mark up. This is not a 'physical business or branch of an organisation' and as such the schema markup is used incorrectly. I would remove the schema markup in this instance.

However - there is no reason why you would not have a location pages for a service area - none at all and you can do these pages well and they can provide real value to a customer in the targeted location. They won't rank in the local pack but they may well rank in the organic results below (or be used for paid traffic)

I wrote about location landing pages in some depth here:
http://searchengineland.com/local-seo-landing-pages-2-0-222583

Hope that helps clear things up for you.

Cheers
Marcus

Hey Steve

It really can be fairly simple to generate positive reviews for the business and I find that all you really have to do is

A) Ask 
B) Make it really, really easy for people to do so

Asking at the point of sale in a bricks and mortar shop is not going to work AND it's important to note that asking people to conduct a review is okay but soliciting a review whilst that user is on your property is not okay and could cause problems down the road (all reviews from same IP address etc). It's also a bit mean to pressure people like that so not a good policy even if we ignore online.

A simple approach we have followed works like this:

• Obtain an email for your customer at point of sale
• Email the customer to ask them if they were happy with the service
• If the customer responds in a positive way then ask them for a review

Now, this tackles two important areas

1. We ensure the user is happy who we are asking to place the review
2. We make it easy for them by linking directly to where we wish the review to be placed and including instructions

You can also steer the ship a bit here (not in a manipulative way) and ask them to mention the location, service etc. This makes the content of the reviews solid for search purposes and useful for other users considering using your service. Win Win.

We go into more detail here with some simple email templates etc: http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/a-review-strategy-for-local-seo/

Hope that helps! Getting good reviews requires that folks are actually good at what they do (which I am sure your client are) and then asking people to place the review whilst making it as easy as possible to do so.

Refs:

• http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/a-review-strategy-for-local-seo/
• http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/08/20/google-on-reviews-asking-for-them-is-ok-soliciting-them-is-bad/