Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey MPO, maybe an example could help?

But, there are lots of options here and there is nothing stopping a developer showing certain divs to certain devices although if you were going to take that approach I would favour doing this in scripting and not rendering the content at all.

Ultimately, googlebot should see the full page and get ranking should be based on that. It is not till you have searched, found a result and clicked on it that there will be any kind of filtering for the specific device.

Most mobile themes for wordpress just show the main content OR have a separate set of widgetised areas for the mobile theme to show a simplified menu or content blocks.

Really, you are just trying to let the user have the best experience on the device they have chosen to use and whilst many smartphones can  do the full experience my data connection is not always so great that I would opt for that over the core article or content I was chosing to look at.

Also, you can always give people the option to view the full site if they so choose.

But to go back to the question, does it harm your SEO, well no, not unless you are doing something dodgy and cloaking content for google bot specifically, you will be fine!

Hey, they should be one and the same.

I am working with a commercial photographer and it is an area that is wide open in local where he operates. But, we are mostly optimising his pages for the broad term + area + brand. Obviously, we carry this through his page name, page title, meta description, breadcrumbs and actual content so we have something like.

So, home page is something like:

URL:
www.url.co.uk

Title:
Matthew Smith - Commercial, Architectural & Fashion Photographer | Birmingham

Service pages are like this:

URL:
www.url.co.uk/commercial-photographer/

Breadcrumb:
Home > Commercial Photographer

Title:
Commercial Photographer in Birmingham | MatthewSmith.co.uk

URL:
www.url.co.uk/architectural-photographer/

Breadcrumb:
Home > Architectural Photographer

Title:
Architectural Photographer in Birmingham | MatthewSmith.co.uk

---

So, any citations will also at least mention the location, feature his consistent address and his main keywords (without any localisation).

So, I am not sure, if we do this the right way, there needs to be any kind of distinction and I am certainly not going to cram search keywords together like 'commercial photographer birmingham' and miss out general stop words like 'in' to somehow 'optimise' it better. Likewise, I am unlikely to want to build links with 'commercial photographer birmingham' as an anchor as it is probably completely unneeded and unnatural + possibly dangerous.

For most small businesses in the UK local SEO is so easy and so open that just build something that does things the right way

• The right keywords (commercial photographer instead of the bigger volume commercial photography)
• Well optimised landing pages and a solid information architecture
• Good content that matches the intent of the user searching
• Well optimised social platforms
• Lots of well put together citations (quality matters - think of each one as an advert for the biz)
• Unstructured citations on important sites (twitter bio etc)
• Maybe some local links
• Consistent NAP
• A review strategy that builds reviews in a sensible, steady manner (preferably steering the reviewers to include the location and service keyword in the nicest possible way)

This should not be difficult and certainly don't approach it in a spammy or manipulative way & try to build quality into your workflow and increasing visibility locally (in the UK at least) should be easy.

Some further reading that may help:

• http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/name-address-phone-number/
• http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/quality-not-quantity-citations-for-seo/

Hope that helps!
Marcus

remote

Hey Jazy

As Daniel points out, this really depends on what you want from a site. If you are looking to put out regular content and share your knowledge and experience via a blog and have a few service type pages then WordPress is ideal.

If you want a solid SEO platform then WordPress + the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin is pretty damn good (with some savvy configuration).

**Pro's of WordPress **

• Free
• Good for SEO
• Loads of free and premium plugins and themes
• Turnkey solution that can be up in no time
• lots of great backup and security plugins (wordfence and vaultpress for starters)

Cons of wordpress

• It is what it is so if that is not what you want then... you need a bespoke site

Pros of Bespoke

• You can have exactly what you want

Con's of bespoke

• Price
• maintenance
• adding new functionality can be costly

Ultimately, we always look to see if there is a reason not to use WordPress for a project and in most cases it is a perfect solution. This is especially true if you are looking to do a lot of blogging or set up a personal brand as it is just such a strong, scalable and flexible tool that has a low barrier to entry in terms of technical knowledge.

Happy to answer any specific questions if you have any!

Maybe check out WP101 as well, they have a bunch of WordPress videos so you can get a better idea of how everything works and what you will be getting.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Arghh, looks worse than I thought. OpenSiteExplorer won't expand the linking sites for me at the moment but if it is this rotten, then a clean up is just not always practical let alone possible.

This is the client needs to be transparent and if they can't be, then you need to dig through the link profile to guide your hand.

If they are doing .edu and .gov link building then this is a true case of manipulation and as Robert says above, fixing it will likely be pretty difficult.

Just try to be as honest and descriptive as possible. Consider you were not doing it for a search engine but that you were doing it for a blind site user who would want as much info as possible.

Product A - Side View

Product A - view from top

Product A in Red

Product A in Blue

etc

Tough and alt text is often a mess, or repeated in these cases so just describe each image as best and as naturally as possible and you will be okay.

Marcus

Hey, Thomas's response really nails most of the obvious causes here but as a simple n=1 oppinion this happened to one of my clients last week. Homepage disappeared for around 48 hours. No problems I could detect, but it was not indexed. Weird, but just as I was scratching  my chin it popped back up.

Check the obvious things, make sure there are no problems and then leave it for 48 hours and see if it pops back up.

Not hugely scientific but after such a big update we often see little aberrations and this could be one of those if everything else is as it should be.

Hope that helps
Marcus

Hey Daniel

I am not sure there is ever a single right or wrong answer in these situations as there are just so many moving parts.

I tend to lean towards a single site as, well, it's a single site so just one site to maintain and focus on. But, we have to consider the differences in the business areas and if one area is airplanes and the other is icecream then... maybe the differences are just too pronounced.

I think a  helpful way to decide is to consider the likely users and audience for the site(s).

• Who is the site for? What do our typical users look like?
• Do people understand that A is the parent company of X, Y & Z
• Is it going to work for users best as one site or three or does it not really matter
• Who is going to maintain the site and add content?
• Are there any business reasons to have separate sites?

From a pure SEO perspective, three sites would likely give you more scope with each site being truly focused on it's core area, but that comes with the burden of much more work.

With a single site everything is simplified and as long as we ensure we have a very sensible structure and a good clean hierarchy then we should be able to make it easy for a user to navigate and understand where they are within the site and for Google to understand the three different and distinct areas.

I am thinking bread crumbs, URLs, consistent page titles etc.

URL: www.example.com/airplanes/ 
Breadcrumb: Home > Airplanes 
Page Title: Airplanes - Example.com

URL: www.example.com/icecream/
Breadcrumb: Home > Icecream
Page Title: Ice Cream - Example.com

URL: www.example.com/underpants/
Breadcrumb: Home > Underpants
Page Title: Underpants - Example.com

It's all too easy to overcomplicate things and certainly three or even four sites is way more complicated than one. Just remember your users, consider how they may arrive at the site and make sure the structure, breadcrumbs, page names, page titles and everything else all create a consistent experience.

Likewise, ensure that the homepage makes it very easy for people to get to where they need to be (think signposts).

Who knows as well, there may be opportunity to cross sell in having the three businesses on one site and certainly additional marketing like email marketing, analytics, PPC etc all creates extra work to manage effectively on several sites compared to a single site.

If this was me I would be gunning for a single site but with a serious consideration of the pros, cons and any problems or opportunities that may make one or three a better choice.

So, not an answer as such, but maybe something to get you thinking along the right lines.

Hope it helps!
Marcus

Hey, I have never seen it stated that links that are shown under a link query are inherently good or bad. Use your gut here, if the link looks bad, it likely is bad and even if it has not been tied up into your penguin problems now, who is to say it won't be picked up on the next update?

If the link is clearly manipulative or has potential to be toxic then getting rid of it is the best long term solution irrespective of whether it is shown in a link: query or not.

Hope that helps!

Marcus

Hey Ryan,

If you nofollow a link the pagerank is still split evenly amongst the links on the page and the page rank that would have flowed through this one link is lost.

Google's position is pretty clear on this and is has been clarified by Matt Cutts and in the Google Webmaster Guidelines which provide some examples of the correct usage of the nofollow tag.

Back in the day, you could control the flow of page rank throughout your site like this but that ship sailed a long, long time ago (and crashed against the rocks).

The nofollow tag should be used for a few legitimate reasons.

1. Untrusted links like those from blog comments
2. To prevent a crawler following a link where it can not gain access like a forum profile or login page
3. And to prevent the selling of page rank via paid links

There are likely some other legitimate uses but this covers off the basics.

If you are looking to use this to in a way sculpt the page rank and create more powerful links on pages within your site, don't bother, it won't work and is not the recommended way to interlink documents within your own site. If you want specific pages to not be indexed then use the noindex, follow tag on them or block them in robots.txt.

A few references:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569

http://searchengineland.com/friends-dont-let-friends-use-nofollow-77922

Hope it helps!
Marcus

Hey

I think replied to your other post but I can chip in here a little as well.

Firstly I would try to understand where these drops are happening. You mention that you are still ranking well for some of the main keywords so what is losing traction?

Review the periods after each drop and then compare to the previous period in analytics. Work through the various reports and you can determine what pages / sections of the site are losing traffic. You can then get an idea of what is likely the problem and formulate a plan to resolve it.

The first step here is always to gather as much information as possible on where exactly you are losing traffic and then perform a review to understand what the problem is and even if this was solid, well converting traffic in the first place.

Hope that helps
Marcus

Hey Bob

Hard to say. It may dilute the search term. It may expand scope and help you rank for a wider range of terms which are potentially further down the path to purchase. If experience in this business has taught me anything it is best to go with your gut and do things that you believe the benefit the user without hurting the SEO (and potentially helping it). And then, most importantly of all measure the results.

• Determine all your KPIs here - conversions, engagement, ranking, organic traffic etc
• Create a small experiment on a handful of products with fairly solid statistical results
• Measure the results and use that to inform your approach

It's so hard to generalise as well - what works for one product may hurt another so just test, test, test and use the results to keep iterating and improving the approach.

Hope that helps
Marcus

Hey Dan

Ultimately, I don't think this would be a problem on an otherwise non spammy site. There is generally a big difference between a site that is using a set of spammy or manipulative techniques and one that makes a simple mistake like this so I doubt you have much to worry about if everything else is as it should be.

That said, I guess the simple question here is:

If you are using a background image and white text, why not use a background colour as well?

This would address the obvious usability issues relating to the image not displaying and clarify that there is no bad intention here to trick anything. Better for users, better for search engines, better for your SEO penalty related anxiety issues.

Hope that helps.

Marcus

Hey

I really would not sweat this one. The Title can have page breaks and whilst it would be nicer from a code formatting perspective if it did not it really should not hurt. If it is tripping up the Google Analytics Top Content report though then that in itself is a good argument to make what is the simplest of simple fixes to the back end of the CMS>

Hope this helps!
Marcus

Hey

Highly doubt this is anything other than a coincidence.

Hope that helps.

Marcus

Hey Mark

As a general rule of thumb it's easier to promote one site than several. So, if your business has multiple service areas this can make good sense.

It's good for users - if someone lands on the homepage then it clearly signposts someone to the right section

It's good for search engines - everything for that customer type is then organised in that section of the site.

It's not the only way to do it but where you are segmenting by customer type and there is not much crossover then it means that the right people see the right content.

I would probably have a bit more content on the homepage, a structured navigation and still have this clear navigation in place but that's just me. Ultimately, if it makes sense for your audience you can typically make it work for search engines.

Hope that helps

Marcus

Are you a US company or a UK company?

It won't really make any difference where the domain is purchased, and very little where it is hosted really but it makes sense to host for a UK audience in the UK (less distance for requests to travel) but you could overcome this with geo targeting in webmaster tools.

You can register a US domain (.com etc) with a UK company though - no need to do it via a US registrar.

This is one of those tiny, weeney issues - if you are targeting UK folks, do it all in the UK and be done with it. Certainly don't agonise over it for any time!

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Hey Varun

For a single location business serving a relative catchment area this is a total no brainer. Some sites do okay without this but there no reasons I can think of to not do this and certainly in our experience with over 100 local projects this always helps and never hurts.

This is not the be all and end all though and I would want optimised service pages and the like if the business has several sub services so the pages themselves were optimised beyond simply having the address (usual suspects, page titles, meta desc, H1, content etc).

Few pointers and clarifications from our experience:

• You want the full NAP and not just the address
• Ideally your NAP will be formatted exactly as on your Google+ places / local page
• You can use a generator to add some schema mark up to your address for even more sizzle: http://www.microdatagenerator.com/local-business-schema/

Ultimately, and it should always come back to this, if I am a local customer looking for a local business I want to know when I land on that page that they are A) local and B) serve my local area. Having an address on every page helps with this as does having optimised page elements and copy - that is user optimised with search engine visibility in mind.

This is an easy win - lots of positives, no negatives.

Hope that helps

Marcus

Hey Richard

I don't think there is a general consensus and these things have to be reviewed on a case by case basis. You have pretty much covered it above but you need to balance relevance, competition and volume and make the best call.

No easy answers in this game eh!

Marcus

Hey Bob

There is a much easier way to do this and simply have your PDFs that you don't want indexed in a folder that you block access to in robots.txt. This way you can just drop PDFs into articles and link to them knowing full well these pages will not be indexed.

Assuming you had a PDF called article.pdf in a folder called pdfs/ then the following would prevent indexation.

User-agent: * Disallow: /pdfs/

Or to just block the file itself:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /pdfs/yourfile.pdf Additionally, There is no reason not to add the canonical link as well and if you find people are linking directly to the PDF then having this would ensure that the equity associated with those links was correctly attributed to the parent page (always a good thing).

Header add Link '<http: www.url.co.uk="" pdfs="" article.html="">; </http:> rel="canonical"'

Generally, there are better ways to block indexation than with robots.txt but in the case of PDFs, we really don't want these files indexed as they make for such poor landing pages (no navigation) and we certainly want to remove any competition or duplication between the page and the PDF so in this case, it makes for a quick, painless and suitable solution.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Hey

If you use sub directories for the language pages then links to any page on the site should help improve overall domain authority. Links to the domain / individual sections / pages are still the top tier ranking factors so it should help.

It is important to consider both geography and language for many multi language sites if they target multiple locations as well - good overview here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en

If this is just multi language in one location then it is a touch easier (even if that location is everywhere) and the WPML plugin will handle the href lang tags for you indicating alternative language versions of pages. This helps the search engine return the right language page to search engine users: https://wpml.org/documentation/support/adding-hreflang-wordpress/

Hope that helps.

Cheers
Marcus