For clarification, the main reason I suggested the local phone number is it will actually look more creditable (in my opinion) when a user is searching business directories.

For instance, if I visit YP.com (which is one of the GetListed directories) and search for "consulting" near "Stockton, CA" I get many results:

1. ABC Company (800)XXX-XXXX

2. DEF Company (209)XXX-XXXX

3. GHI Company (209)XXX-XXXX

...

If I searched for consulting near an area I specified, I personally would rather find a company that has a local area code. This would make more sense to me, because I specified an area... so clearly I want to work locally. If I specify an area and the results return an 800 number, I personally become a little suspicious as to whether the company is actually local or if they just employees in the area that can help me.

I think that when you are adding your information to business directories, I would lead with the local number, then 800 number, because people that are using these directories are looking for solutions for a specific area.

On your website, I would suggest leading with the 800 to establish you have a national presence, then your local phone number.

Good luck.

Mike

Hi Chad,

You are correct. You should list the local phone number on the website and the GetListed.org directories. While 800 numbers are convenient, they do not give any indication as to the location of the business.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Cool. No worries

StackOverFlow has always been awesome in helping me with my IIS rules and such.

If you Google: site:stackoverflow.com apache redirect

You will see MANY examples of how to set up 301 redirects, including redirecting from non-www to www pages, etc.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Hi Jesus,

This is an interesting article about how fixing duplicate content increased a websites indexation, in turn increasing their website traffic by 150%.

I would definitely attack the Crawl Errors found ASAP. Duplicate page content, 4XX errors, and missing or duplicate title tags can definitely mess with rankings.

Once you have your errors under control, I would work on the warnings whenever you have time or are bored.

Long story short... the errors can definitely have a big impact on how you are ranking, while the warnings are just a "heads-up".

Hope this helps.

Good luck.

Mike

Google Analytics or Google Webmaster Tools? You will need to do that in Webmaster Tools.

That is a bummer they are having issues with your 301 redirects. If you know whether you are using Apache, IIS, etc. for your backend, you could post the code you are using in a new question and hopefully someone in the SEOMoz community can help; otherwise, there are Apache and IIS forums where you can post and get some great results and/or examples to base your redirects off of too.

Good luck Sarah! I hope you get your site in shape and back on page 1!!!

Mike

... I had so much written in here, then just clicked back on accident... <sigh>Let me start over...</sigh>

Unique content will help gain followers. The more followers you have, the more FB shares and likes you "should" have. This is where FB pages can impact how your website ranks in Google's SERPs.

The biggest thing with FB pages is that they need to be monitored to interact with followers, responding to their questions and concerns, and updating your content. If you do not do these things, you will not get the followers, shares, and likes you are wanting.

Depending on your company, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Google+ might be a better form of social media; however, like FB, they still need to be monitored and followers will demand interaction.

As for increasing your DA... it is wicked tough to do in a short period of time. According to SEOMoz:

"How do I influence this metric?

Unlike other SEO metrics, Domain Authority is difficult to directly influence. This is because it is made up of an aggregate of metrics (mozRank, mozTrust, link profile, etc...) that each have an impact on this score. This was done intentionally because this metric is meant to approximate how competitive a given site is in Google.com. Since, Google.com takes into account a lot of factors, a metric that tries to calculate it must incorporate a lot of factors as well.

This means the best way to influence this metric is to improve your overall SEO. Particularly you should focus on your link profile (which influences mozRank and mozTrust) by getting more links from other well linked to pages."

The short of it is that if your SEO provider is creating multiple FB accounts and they are having issues with maintaining multiple accounts, you are definitely better of with just using one. If they put the amount of time and resources into managing one account over multiple, in theory, you should be able to accumulate more followers, likes, etc., because you will be creating unique content for one source instead of creating thin content, you will be providing great interactions with followers, instead of responding a few days later, etc.

Does that help?

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

Hi Sarah,

If the titles are different and the page content is different, I do not understand why you should be getting any errors.

What tool are you using that is giving you the "similar content" message?

Your site visitors will still be able to search your site with nofollow in place, because nofollow is simply a directive telling search engines to not follow the internal and external links on your page.

The noindex directive tells Google to not index the content on the selected pages.

If you can provide me with the name of the tool you are receiving the "similar content" message from and/or provide me with your website address I could take a look into things further.

... long story short, if your titles are unique and your content is unique, you should not have to worry about duplicate content.

Hope this helps,

Mike

Hi Sarah,

It would be best for your to create your own topic so that others can give their help to your specific question.

Once you post your question, I will be happy to respond there.

Thanks,

Mike

I guess that is something you should ask your self... does it make sense?

If it doesn't, don't do it; however, if each location has different specials or coupons or something unique to offer at different locations... it makes sense to me.

And if it is any consolation, Target has MANY Facebook pages, including a main Target page with Target Style, Target Baby, Target Canada, Target Black Friday, Target Wedding, etc.

And all of their different pages of different numbers of followers, likes, etc. giving each individual Facebook page its own page authority.

Make sense?

Mike

Hi Robert,

GetListed.org is probably the best. It not only tells you which directories to get listed in, it also verifies when your business has been listed.

The directories on GetListed.org are great, then any other industry specific or local business directories you can get into will make complete sense to Google when crawling. It starts to become a sketchy area when you start adding your website to random or generic directories... some are OK, you just don't want to over do it in the generic ones.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Hi Scott,

I would not worry about that being considered duplicate content. Is it duplicate? Yes - however you are listing your mission in business directories, so some duplicate content is assumed.

When Google indexes, it can easily determine where the duplicate content originated and gives complete credit to that source... in this case, your homepage.

You can even Google: "seomoz is the world's most popular provider of seo software" and see that this same paragraph is listed on LinkedIn, CrunchBase, VendorStack, StartupGenome, etc.

These business directories are all reputable, so I would not worry about it. If you do see random webpages or your own webpages duplicating your content, then you should be more concerned about fixing that.

Hope this helps.

Mike

LAME! You may just want to let the 301 redirect you have in place take its course or remove the URL from Google's index since it was added by mistake anyway.

Mike

If that does not work, give this a whirl:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.[a-zA-Z0-9]{3,4}

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/$

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html

Maybe give this a whirl:

If URL does not contain a period or end with a slash

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.|/$)

append .html to requested URL

RewriteRule (.*) /$1.html [L]

Hi John,

I would actually suggest trying to put St. Charles, MO in your title tag like the competitor that is ranking above you.

That will help with ranking higher for the keywords "St Charles Lawn Care" AND is way easier than creating additional pages AND your homepage already has very good rankings.

If you haven't already, make sure you are listed in all of the local business directories at GetListed.org to further increase your local presence.

Good luck.

Mike

"I accidentally manually submitted the url to google and manually in submitted it to index and that when this issue began...."

It sounds like you accidently added this URL to the index. You can follow the procedure outlined below to request Google remove the specific URL from the index:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=59819

I checked your site's structure using Screaming Frog and it does not appear that you are linking to any non-.html versions. If I perform a scan using one of your non-.html pages, it appears that it only links to itself.

Since you have the 301 redirect in place, you can choose to wait it out and Google should correct things eventually; otherwise, requesting Google remove the URL is a faster... PERMANENT process.

Good luck.

Mike

It can actually take GWT weeks or months to actually remove these warnings from their reports.

As long as you have personally verified that they are fixed on your live site, you do not need to worry.

I just verified that your /estimate-request.html is using the description you stated above; however, Google is still using the meta description you had in place on Jan 30,2013.

Once Google re-indexes your page, it will appear correctly in the SERPs, but like I said, it may take months for this fix to be reflected in Google Webmaster Tools.

Does that help?

Mike

Hi John,

SEOMoz has the following plans:

PRO

• 300 keywords
• 5 campaigns

PRO Plus

• 1,000 keywords
• 10 campaigns

PRO Elite

• 3,500 keywords
• 30 campaigns

PRO Agency

• 10,000 keywords
• 120 campaigns

PRO Enterprise

• 30,000 keywords
• 200 campaigns

http://www.seomoz.org/plans

http://www.seomoz.org/plans/enterprise

Mike

Hi John,

Yes:

http://www.seomoz.org/plans

1,000 words using the PRO Plus plan and 3,500 words using the PRO Elite plan.

Mike