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I would have a single locations page that lists all of your businesses locations by city, state.

I would link the city, state to a landing page for the specific city,state.

Each city, state landing page would have a unique, URL, title, headings, content, etc that would use a format like Keyword | City, State | XYZ Company - because if someone Googles your company name, you should already come up... it is more important to have the keywords, then city or city, then keywords in your title - do some keyword research on this to see which is best for you.

THEN register each of those city,state landing pages using GetListed.org - this will help you build up your local presence in those areas since you have a physical office location.

If you wanted, you could do the footer idea... I think that gets to be kind of spammy, but I guess it all depends on the industry and the number of locations.

Hope that helps.

Mike

I would suggest contacting the customers as a common curtsey. We do customer quotes, but we pull them from success stories, which the customer knows we will be publishing already. While the customer did send you an email with a review or quote, they probably didn't know you would be making their comment public.

I personally would feel better asking the customer, even if you don't plan on using their name or initials, it would still be good. Also, I think if when you contact them you ask if you can use their name, that would be good. I think seeing a name associated with a quote gives it a little more oomph and shows that you aren't just make up quotes.

Just my thoughts.

Mike

Just signed up

Hi Mark,

This sounds like a bug or issue with the SEOmoz software.

Contact help@seomoz.org and ask one of the help associates to look into this for you.

If you do not have many pages, it definitely shouldn't take that long.

The help team responds extremely quickly!

Good luck.

Mike

You shouldn't have to worry about it.

I would reference this article where Matt Cutts explains that if you are professionally translating it for usability... you are good; however, if you use Google translate to spam your content in a bunch of languages... that is bad.

Hope this helps and answers your question.

Mike

If you have not implemented the blog yet, you will not have to use 301 redirects. You only need to 301 if you have existing content, then want to point it to the newer URL.

Here is a real-case scenario:

We had an old URL

domain.com/content.asp?ID=9XXX123M85&AID=KXXX123JSL

We used URL rewriting to change that to domain.com/product - this tells the server to fetch the information from the ugly URL and display it using the new friendly URL. We then had to set up a 301 from the ugly URL to the new URL, ONLY BECAUSE the ugly URL was already in place and receiving inbound links from other sites.

At this same time, we also created a new page

domain.com/content.asp?ID=9XXX123M85&AID=XXXNEWPAGE

We used URL rewriting to change that to domain.com/solutions/feature - again, this tells the server to fetch the content from the ugly URL and display it using the friendly URL. This time, we did not need to set up a 301, because this was a brand new page.

From my research and understanding, there are no negative repercussions in using URL rewriting on new pages; however, if you use URL rewriting, you SHOULD also incorporate a 301 to redirect inbound links that were previously pointing to the old content.

Good luck Rich.

Mike

Hi Troy,

The issue with /index.asp is coming up because of your Home link in your footer. Instead of resolving to home "/" it is being pointed to "/index.asp".

And the reason it is also showing the www-version is because when the crawler is on lucid8.com and it crawls the link to the right of customer/partner login "customers", the crawler is brought to www.lucid8.com/downloadplus/Resource_login.asp Then, from here, if you click on any of the hyperlinks, you are brought to the www-version of the page instead of the non-www you specified as your preferred.

Jesse is correct in saying you need to choose either a www or non-www version; however, you also need to fix the /index.asp issue.

Hope this helps.

Mike

If you are using IIS, then you would want to configure these fixes in your web.config file.

I think you'd want something like this:

<configuration><system.webserver><rewrite><rewritemaps><rewritemap name="Redirect"><add key="/index.asp" value="/"></add></rewritemap></rewritemaps>
            <rules><rule name="CanonicalHostNameRule" enabled="true"><match url="(.*)"><conditions logicalgrouping="MatchAll" trackallcaptures="false"><add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^www.lucid8.com$" negate="true"></add></conditions>
                    <action type="Redirect" url="http://www.lucid8.com/{R:1}"></action></match></rule></rules></rewrite></system.webserver></configuration>

If that does not work, I would recommend breaking it into sections - for example, try doing the redirect code first, then the canonical code second, or vise versa. I always look up examples of web.config configurations on stackoverflow.com.

Hope this helps Troy.

Mike

Whoa! Information overload!!!

1. I don't know of anything that shows you a graphical representation of your site's linking structure; however, I do know of a program that will list out all of the linking pages on your site and the number of in and out links, including anchor text, etc. The number of in links can be an indicator of structurally how your site is organized.

2. 404 errors or not bad as long as they are known. If you no longer have a page and you decide not to redirect from the old page to a new one, that is fine. Google is just giving you a heads up that your site or someone else's is linking to a non existent page. If you do nothing to fix these 404 errors, the page will eventually be removed from Google's index and not be a problem.

3. /document_security.htm looks like it is being linked to from /services_storage_fast_retrieval.htm and  /services_archive_storage.htm

I would recommend downloading and installing Screaming Frog that is the program I was referencing in my response to #1 and that is how I found the issue in #3.

Seer Interactive also wrote a great blog on all of the things this tool can do.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Hi Carla,

Read this article on WordPress security goes into detail on, "... some common forms of vulnerabilities, and the things you can do to help keep your WordPress installation secure."

From my understanding, the gist of it is:

• Keep your installations up-to-date.
• Keep strong passwords and change them regularly.
• Remove unwanted plugins.
• Assign permissions to folders and files.

Hope this helps.

Mike

According to Google -

"We only show sitelinks for results when we think they'll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn't allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks, or we don't think that the sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user's query, we won't show them."

Hope this helps.

Mike

The hash or "#" is usually just referenced by the browser, not the server, so Google does no care about the use of a "#" at the end of your URL. In fact, you can go to pretty much any page and add "#" at the end and you will get the same page, because it is a browser reference.

Some web designers will also just put "#" as the URL as they are coding, because they do not know the final URL.

If you can pinpoint where this is happening, I would suggest fixing it, even if it is not impacting Google indexing or your SEO... just from a "good house keeping" point of view.

You would use the canonical tag if you wanted to keep both versions in place. If you only want to keep one version, you would 301 redirect, which come to think of it... I don't know if you can do, again because the hash is usually just reference by the browser and not the server.

Here is also a quick quote from John Mu (an engineer at Google), stating, "We generally ignore the "fragments" (as in http://domain.com/path#fragment) when crawling, indexing and ranking since this is generally just something that is handled on the client side."

If you provide the domain, I might be able to help you further.

Hope this info helps.

Mike

Without additional information, I can only make a guess on your first comment, "I have set my preferred domain to www..." - are you talking about doing this is Google Webmaster Tools? If so, that is simply telling Google that you would prefer they index your www version versus your non-www version.

Depending on your CMS, you should be able to write some code to automatically redirect all non-www calls to your site to their www counterparts. If you are using IIS, you'd edit your web.config file. If you are using Apache, you'd edit your .htaccess file.

Does that make sense?

Mike

You are correct with your approach.

And as Paddy states, once you launch, remove the disallow and the crawlers will find you.

I would also suggest that once you launch that you submit a sitemap to all of the major search engines to be found even quicker and to help ensure that all of your site pages are crawled.

Mike

That is a "common" issue unfortunately.

Vanessa (Google's Community Manager) responds with this -

"You may be seeing this message on your listing for a couple reasons.

1. Have you just recently verified your listing? Note that it may take up to 2 weeks from the time you've verified that listing to appear on Google Maps, and during that time your Active listing will say “We currently do not support this location” on it. Please just sit tight. 2) Has your listing been verified and live for some time? Search for it on maps.google.com ("business name, city/phone"). Sometimes the links from your Places dashboard aren't synced properly, so you should always search on Maps first to make sure it is indeed removed . Often it's still live and there, you just need to look it up via maps.google.com.3) If you’ve done a search on maps.google.com and still don't see it, go to your Places dashboard (google.com/places) and “poke” the listing by clicking Edit > Submit. Give it a couple days, and then again, go to maps.google.com to see if you see it appear live. 4) If none of that helps, then your listing has been removed from Google Maps. If you believe your listing should not have been removed, get in touch with our support team:Link to contact form: http://support.google.com/places/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1386120&page=ts.csSelect: My listing no longer appears on Google Maps or is incorrectly marked as closed. > Fill out the short form, hit Submit, and await an e-mail from a member of our support team (it may take a few days). - Vanessa_Edited June 14 to reflect troubleshooter updates. - Jade_Update -- We're currently experiencing an issue displaying some pages, affecting service area businesses in particular. My recommendation is that you make absolutely certain that you follow the quality guidelines, and then work through #4 above. You'll get an email back from the support team that asks you to wait if we think your listing is affected."

Hope this helps.

Mike

I guess I would have to know the URL you are referencing to actually verify what exactly you are talking about.

But here is an example of links for a single page on my site:

I have 24 linking root domains with a total of 722 total links to ABCpage on my site.

One of those linking root domains is my domain. I have 331 internal links pointing to ABCpage.

So that leaves almost 400 links left spread across 23 other domains. MANY of these domains have 5+ pages on their websites linking to ABCpage. Other domains of the 23 have a single page linking to ABCpage; however, they may have 3+ links to ABCpage.

You can see links can add up very quickly.

I don't know if this helps or not, but if you are willing to share your website's URL, that would let me or others analyze it if you have any concerns.

Mike

Hi Spencer,

You can check relatively easily whether Google is ignoring it or not.

Type the following into a Google search: site:www.example.com/page?

If you see: www.example.com/page?parameter=1 AND www.example.com/page? in the SERP, then YES, Google is seeing duplicate content.

If you only see one version, that means that Google is probably ignoring the other version. Google does understand that some content management systems naturally produce “duplicate content.” In these cases Google just ignores one of them. If you think about it, this makes sense. If you have two very similar URLs with the same content, it probably isn’t intentional that you’d have duplicate content; however, if you have two VERY different URLs and have duplicate content on those… THEN you’d be a little more concerned.

Hope that helps.

Mike

Depending on the size of your site I would think from a usability standpoint that may be confusing, but you could implement breadcrumbs to remedy the confusion.

From an SEO point of view, I would think that it would be a lot easier for Google to see the differences between two products. For instance, if you have two products DX600 and NX600...

/cameras/point-and-shoot/sony/DX600

/cameras/point-and-shoot/nikon/NX600

would be pretty easy for a crawler and/or user to figure out what the page is about.

If it were just /DX600 and /NX600 that might be a little more complex for users and crawlers - is it a camera, computer, coffee maker, napkin dispenser???

And depending on your site, CMS, and industry, you may have to get creative with your URLs so you do not create duplicates and it may even be difficult to manage if you do not know exactly where to find a page is that you need to edit.

That is just my personal opinion on the subject. I would be interested in viewing the webinar you are talking about - if you have time, please post a link.

Again, I am not saying this is a bad idea by any means, but I think it definitely could make for some interesting issues if not planned out well beforehand.

Mike

Hi Dana,

I don't work for SEOmoz (although I wish I did!).

I know SEOmoz uses Wistia for hosting, but it looks like they do their transcriptions through SpeechPad. I am guessing the reasoning behind it is money - Wistia costs $5 per minute to be returned within 24 hours and SpeechPad is only $2.50 per minute with a 24 hour turn-time.

And depending on when Rand and company film, they could potentially get the cost down to $1 per minute with a one week turn-time.

Only speculation on my part

Mike

You can go back and fix all of your old title tags, making them unique, like Newsletter Archive | Month Year | Sunday School Network, which will get rid of your errors and provide a better user experience. This approach will allow you to target specific keywords on each page for ranking in Google. When you have the same title across multiple pages, the assumption is that the content is either the same or very similar.

I noticed you have a canonical issue, where you can access your site via http://sundayschoolnetwork.com as well as http://www.sundayschoolnetwork.com

The issue with this,  that you have 44 relatively important links from external websites pointing to the non-www version (http://sundayschoolnetwork.com)... which means you are splitting up your potential power between two sites instead of one. There are many ways you can fix this.

As for why you are not ranking as well, it could be the market became more competitive for the keywords you were originally using. It could be that your site content does not reflect the keywords you are targeting. It could be lots of things.

Like I said in my previous post, the nofollow tells crawlers not to follow the internal and external links on those pages; however, they will still get indexed. This means that you will still have duplicate titles appearing in results.  The way to remove them from the results would be to use the noindex directive - which will eventually remove them from the index and you will not have competing title tags.

If you fix your title tags, you do not need to worry about the nofollow or noindex directives.

That is about all I can help with, without knowing any additional information.

The only other thing I can suggest is to read the SEOMoz Beginners Guide to SEO - which will help a TON!

I hope that helps.

Mike