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Hi Michael! There are 3 common approaches to your scenario which can be described as follows: OPTION 1 This represents a very basic, good structure to be used when all service cities are deemed of equal importance: Build a unique landing page for each city served, optimized for each city + general info about your work in that city Build a unique landing page for each service, optimized for each service but not optimized for geo terms. OPTION 2 Given Google's extreme bias toward physical location, this option can be used to maximize your optimization for your city of location, while still giving secondary focus to additional service cities where you lack a physical location: Build a unique landing page for each city served, optimized for each city + general info about your work in that city Build a unique landing page for each service, optimized for each service and also optimized for your city of location, strengthening the association between your services and your core city. OPTION 3 This option should only be considered by companies with significant funding and exceptional creative resources that will ensure that all pages are unique and useful rather than duplicative, thin and harmful: Build a unique page for every possible keyword/geo combination. So: Cloud Computing Sherman Oaks Cloud Computing Van Nuys Computer Repair Sherman Oaks Computer Repair Van Nuys etc. *Again, this last approach should only be undertaken if you are positive the content you'll be developing has a definite purpose for users and that you won't end up weakening your website with a big menu of weak pages. Options 1 & 2 tend to be the best bet for smaller companies with reasonable resources. Option 3 can work, but only where creative possibilities and big budget are available. Hope this helps lay this out in a way that makes sense!

Hey There! That infographic looks like it has some good stuff in it! It does look like it's a few years old, so beware of any outdated terminology. You might also like to check out some of these resources on the Moz Blog: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages https://moz.com/blog/local-seo-checklist https://moz.com/blog/why-good-unique-content-needs-to-die-whiteboard-friday Hope they help!

It does look like you have link issues and your site has been hit by Google Penguin. I would review all the links--pull them from OSE, GSC, Ahrefs, and Majestic.com, combine them, and consider running them through Link Research Tools' Link Detox report. That will give you a good idea of which links you need to disavow right away. We don't know when the next Penguin is coming out (when it will be updated), so cleaning up those links is a must right away.

There is no authentic tool to check google penalty. you can visit this site to get the best product reviews available in the market http://buyersthing.com/

Whenever you use domain "masking", you're setting yourself up for search engine ranking problems. You're essentially making the same content available on both domain names. That leads to duplicate content, and the search engines (mainly Google) will pick which domain they prefer and show that on in the search results (usually the one that they crawl first). The only proper way to deal with this is to set up 301 Permanent Redirects from one domain to the other.

Michael, from what i can tell, your website is built using WordPress. We typically recommend installing the Yoast SEO plugin and using that--which will help with your robots.txt file. If you need more information, take a look here: https://yoast.com/wordpress-robots-txt-example/ Generally, most of your site won't need to be disallowed in the robots.txt file, unless you're using tags and categories on your site. Yoast typically helps disallow the proper directories that you need to disallow. One thing that you need to be aware of is the fact that you don't want to disallow your .CSS or .JS files on your site, many of the themes nowadays will put those files in your wp-admin folder--which by default typically gets disallowed.

Quite a few plugins do the same thing you are talking about. Yoast SEO is a big name when it comes to everything SEO related but there are others as well. My idea is to read the comments and reviews about the plugin before you actually install it on your website. If the reviews and star ratings are bad, probably its not worth it. Just a thought!

Additional responses to this question can be found here: https://moz.com/community/q/best-sitemap-for-large-website

Is there a good way to avoid it on for a blog that's part of a larger site, (the whole site isn't a blog - and couldn't be powered by a blog CMS like WP - but we have a blog, currently on a subdomain)?

Hi there When I access your sitemap at http://www.guitarcontrol.com/sitemap.xml, you'll see it hasn't been updated since 2010. These old URLs point to an old site as well. I would definitely update this! You'll need to create a new sitemap XML, upload it to your site, and then resubmit it to Google and Bing. You can learn more on how to create one here. Let me know if you need anymore help!