Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You nailed it sir!

• Other than just Google+ local there are tons of yellow pages and data aggregation website that allow business to list their business and move from their accordingly... some of the other websites other them Google+local, Yahoo local and Bing local are yell.com, yelp.com, yp.com, truelocal.com and many more...

• Some websites will only allow you to go live once they will verify your business through phone in that case the call will be received on your customer’s business address and upon verification it will give you a code that you can enter to verify your listing. I usually define the process to my client before going on with the process so he knew what is going to happen.

• For most of the website you can use one account but obviously with yahoo and bing you will be needing their own email accounts.

• Here is the top 50 list of local citation for US and UK (http://searchengineland.com/top-50-citation-sources-for-uk-us-local-businesses-104938) if you have a business in Australia then this is the dedicated list of business in AU (http://www.setalks.com/ultimate-list-of-local-citations-for-australian-businesses/)

• You have to talk to business owner and explain the situation and why it is needed for their business before you actually step ahead and start submitting your businesses to local citations.

• Few need a different accounts as mentioned above but mostly it works with a single account

• Brightlocal, Getlisted there can be few more!

  I hope I cover all the answers let me know if there is any new information you want!

I use xml-sitemaps.com for sitemap generation as its simple and easy to use!

If you are adding sitemap link in your robots.txt file its fine but not adding is not really a big problem!

Getting links from industry partners makes complete sense to me and they can’t be the link that should hurt your rankings unless those partners are themselves going through some kind of penalty! Google ideally should only mark the website who violate Google guidelines.

Just check two things, if you have included Meta description in your Yoast plugin for home page. If it will be missing, Google usually take any line from the content.

The idea is to recheck if the Meta description is available and wait for the next crawl and Google will update your given Meta description.

Hope this helps!

If you have change the domain, the only thing you can do is to 301 redirects the old domain to the new one and start promoting it and getting quality links on it. There will be a drop in traffic and rankings but it will be for a short span of time and it will come back again.

Don’t revert to old again because it will not do much help as far as the rakings and traffic is concern, my idea is to create campaigns that actually work for you.

Hope this helps!!

I agree with Matt, there is no penalty I know that has to do anything with penalty but if you run screaming frog crawler it will ask you to limit the size of the image to 100KB but again going above is not really a penalty.

Yes if the images will be heavy the time on site will increase and if the page take more than usual to load this is where you might lose your rankings as site load time is a ranking signal now.

Hope this helps!

my best advice for you is to go through Moz's Beginners guide to SEO and ask questions in QnA if you didn't understand anything and you will get the basics of everything and then you can move ahead step by step.

Hope this helps!

Ok here is how I will respond to this question.

There are tons of signal that Google uses in order to rank a website against a query. CTR can be one of them but I see two problems here:

1. Bounce rate. The bounce rate of the traffic will be high and this might give Google a hint that the website is getting a fake or unrealistic traffic.
2. Amount of traffic from one source. The website that you are going to use will send the direct traffic or referral traffic from multiple (yet) limited sources and I am sure none of them will be reputable in the eye of Google which again make the case suspicious.

We might see an increase in rankings in the beginning but it might fall down again in weeks of time so I guess for long term, this idea is a waste, plus this can hurt you as well.

Now, I will move to the EGOL’s idea of how you should be working instead. I think the better idea is to work on legit ideas that give a real boost to your website rankings will help in the longer run and make you a brand which otherwise is not possible.

Hope this helps!

If I would be at your place I would see the link profile of the staff domain and see if there are any valuable links on that domain? In-case of yes I would prefer to redirect instead of turning down the domain.

On the other hand if the staff domain’s link profile is spamy and risky then I would prefer to go with the other option and that is to turn down the domain at the first place.

Hope this helps!

In order to made the right choice between these two let me ask you another question. Which is better for the users from their visiting point of view. I think at any step user should not face any problem in their website journey.

If the redirect will not be page by page, users might end up facing some 404s on the website as the provided URLs will be indexed and ranking in Google search results. Technically page by page URL will allow the particular URL’s link juice to be transferred to the new domain and although it might take a bit of a time but rankings on the new domain will adjust accordingly.

Hope this helps.

If this not really a manual penalty then disavow will take a long time and seeing the rankings nad traffic back will take months. The reason I will suggest not to 301 to the sub category of the main site is because if it was really under the red light, it will hurt the main site as well instead of helping it.

What you ideally should do is to make sure you disavow all the bad links, now create some high quality links to different part so the website and see if this help you with rankings and traffic. One you see the rankings and traffic is recovered, then if you want 301 is a safe bet.

Hope this helps!

If you ask me you are doing everything right and you have to keep doing it. I remember when I was doing the same for one of my client, the rankings did improve but didn’t really hit the first page for many of the real money making keywords.

I think when your website went through Google penalty it took more than usual to gain the trust of Google. If I would be at your place, I would have looked in to the past data and see how every penguin and panda update affect my traffic and rankings.

If the ranking and traffic went positive (significantly) then you should continue what you are doing and wait for the penguin and panda update to release. This way they will look in to your efforts again and give you back the rankings that you deserve.

Also, my advice is to get a link from highest authority websites (if possible) that Google really trust, this should also help big time.

Adding my two cents!

I think it’s pretty much depends upon situation to situation. In my case if you are donating something, in partners with some organization or another other type that falls in this area, you can have a do-follow link that point back to your website.

I prefer to use brand names as an alt image but if you are using other words that make sense, I personally don’t think there should be a problem.

Note: Overdoing anything will hurt!

I wrote a detailed post on SEMRush that talks about step by step research in order to come up with the list of keywords that are money making or help you get quality traffic and leads from search engine.

http://www.semrush.com/blog/publications/judge-value-keywords-business/

Go through the post and you will have a better idea. SEMRUsh does have limited countries but I think Google Keyword planner can help better in this regards.

Hope this helps!

Alan, If you are looking for some tool that can check your bad links than, link detox seems to be the best option around but as you said that your link profile isn’t long to doing it manually isn’t really a bad option either.

While back I wrote a post about how to find bad links in your link profile. In that post I discuss the anatomy of a bad links so just keep that in mind while sorting bad links from the good one and you are good to go for creating a disavow file.

Remember DA does not count the quality of domains so expecting a jump in DA because you are increasing the number of quality domains is not ideal.

Hope this helps!

Three quick things you should do and I am sure the indexing ratio will go high!

1. Index your website to Google Webmaster tool. If you are already there submit your xml sitemap to GWT and make sure it’s approved from there.
2. Make sure the internal linking is done correctly. Don’t overdo it but atleast to some extent so that bots can move to other relevant pages on the website.
3. The URLs are not indexing consider pushing them via social (twitter tweets would be ideal)

Bonus: If you can get quality links back to those pages that are not indexed would be mindblowing as this way the indexing will guaranteed.

Also check your robots.txt file to make sure no URL is blocked from Google index.

Hope this helps!

Alan, if I would be at your place, I would have moved to a program like link detox instead of the manual labor and here are some reasons why!

1. You are emailing to the real people so no matter what trick you use, there are chances that you may fail, especially if they have decided not to remove the links.
2. The removal ratio can dramatically increase if you offer a small amount to remove a link but again disavow is a better and easy option that will help you save your time and money.
3. Manual Labor to do a work that might or might not work is a bad investment in my opinion, on the other hand manual labor will be much more expensive as compare to a tool like Link Detox.

Link Detox will find bad links, email them and give you the list of bad links that contain your website link. You can get that data and create a disavow file and submit it to Google.

All in all, I understand your point but in my opinion it is not a very good investment.

Hope this helps!

Completely agree to Thomas! Including keyword Meta tag in the page will never really help you with SEO or any kind of rankings but on the other hand it will exactly tell your competitors what you are focusing on each page of the website.

This might help them align their strategies against you and kick you out from the better SERP positions in search engine from the targeted key phrases.

Hope this helps!

I think I have to agree about most of the things that Patrick discussed already but make sure that visitors are considering at one that can easily be done by having a similar design, cross promotion, easy access from blog to website and from website to blog and more.

Also, it is advisable to do a small awareness campaign that give a clear idea to user that these two different domains are owned by one.