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There has been several debates on the topic of the geo location of hosting provider and the impact on SEO and rankings. As a best practice, it is recommended to host in the same country you are targeting but are there any studies available that confirms the web hosting providers location influences rankings?

Key word in the url is important but it is not the only factor that will decide the rank for your target keyword. You can use golf-club or club but here are few other things that should be inline in order to rank for golf-club.

1. Authority of your domain.

2. Quality and quantity of the incoming links to your main domain and the target page

3. Relevance of the on page content on the golf club page. ( LDA score)

4. Title tag

6. Anchor text of the backlinks to the target page.

and several others.

Since you already have the word golf in your domain adding the keyword again in the url will not make a signficant difference as long as you target the page content for golf clubs. The key is it have original content and organic backlinks.

Sometimes the internal redirection issues will not show up on OSE. OSE data is not real time so it will take couple of weeks to get the most updated one (as per the last I heard from Rand in one of the webinar).

I generally use Xenu link Sleuth to identify all the redirection and page not found issues. Another tool that we use which is more advacned is Gsitecrawler.

Font size impacts user experience and may impact SEO in certain cases. Providing users multiple font size options to choose from i.e small, medium, large helps user experience. Search spiders do look for usage of bold, italics and H1 tags on a web page. Better user experience generally lead to better SEO.

Ryan answered this question pretty well and I would like to add few points to it

1. As long as your site architecture is organic and designed for the user you should not be too concerned about page -keyword targeting.

2. Avoid have too many links on the page. Typically, there should not be more than 150 links on a page.

3. Make sure to have equal balance of content and images on the site.

4. Backlinks with good distribution of anchor text.

Best practice is to add new content and create new title and meta for these pages instead of changing title for the same page constantly.

Changing title too many times in short span can confuse the search spider as title is the first piece of content crawled by spiders. By changing the title too many times you may cause the search spider to think that there is something unnatural about the website.

Your most recent Google cache is showing the target as Toronto,Ontario confirming your concerns.

The challenge you are facing is similar to sites like Yellowpages.com, superpages.com and any other location targeted sites may face. The way these sites have worked around is by adding relevant static content to the website.

By adding relevant content to your home page your will be able to minimize the location targeting effect. Plus, search spiders already know that you are not limited to the location of IP because they have indexed multiple pages from your website.

I also noticed that your home page outbound link to content ratio is upside down. You have too many links on the homepage and extremely limited content. Additionally, the text blurb on the top is not user friendly and stuffed with too many keywords. You can easily replace this text with user friendly static content such as your website USP.

Hello Neil,

Since advertising banners hoardings are paid ads as a general rule even if Google is able to somehow read the urls we can right away disqualify the SEO benefits. Plus, there is no flow of link juice from these image ad links.

Google book is definitely interesting one. Google books are a scanned image of the actual book so the links are not an actual link that could pass the link juice. Google also provides an ebook version of some books and the links on the ebooks are highlighted like a regular link but these are not clickable. It could be possible that Google will soon enable these links and link page rank juice will flow from these links the to the destination site. The only issue I see here is since these are hosted on Google is could very well be a nofollow so it could be given similar weight like a brand or social mention if Google decides to use the links for SEO ranking.

Rodney,

Google spiders not only reads the anchor text on the link but also take into consideration ton of other factors including the text around the link, website url, domain name,  domain authority, page authority, title tag and several on page elements to decide the worthiness of a link.

"Keyword 1 Keyword 2" anchor text definitely has more weight than "Keyword 1 Keyword 2 another word" or any other variation but that alone is not enough to rank for the keyword.

I have seen direct improvement in keyword rank due to exact anchor text vs anchor text with extra words but too many backlinks with exact anchor text will be considered a forced attempt to gain ranking and Google could disqualify the link juice completely.

Google is already beefing up their algorithm to disqualify paid and farm links. One of the most common themes in all paid links is the exact anchor text so it will be easier for Google to identify a set of exact anchor text links on a website with dofollow.

Always try to use anchor text variations in the link building campaign. There are far better chances of rank improvement with an organic link building strategy compared to a forced anchor text tactic.

Hope this helps.

Thanks

Sameer

As long as you launch the site on a domain with proper local TLD (.de in your case) and add locally targeted content you should be ok. If possible try to host the website in the same country you are targeting.

Google has become much smarter in terms of detecting the geo local elements and it should serve the appropriate site on the SERP.

As far the mixing languages goes, it would not be a wise thing to do because it could impact usability. Is there a specific reason on why you are translating only a few pages in German? I could relate to an example where one of my customers mixed English with a local language on the local TLD website. The bounce rate went to the roof and users did not like it. They complained about this on the support chats and web forms. The issue was fixed and the bounce rate went down.

Local ranking factors has a lot in common to regular search ranking factors including quality and quantity of links, content LDA score, and several other metrics.

However, there are lot of other metrics that Google generally looks at to rank a site locally.

• local place page with correct information ( address, correct category, phone # , map icon)

• Profiles on local directories ( superpages, citysearch.com, angielists ..)

• Local citations (links from local directories and sites like chamber of commerce, BBB, local small business groups)

• reviews (Google and other local websites like Yelp, citysearch, judysbook)

Here is a link to a website that provides extensive research work on local ranking factors.

Here is another links to awesome SMX Seattle 2011 breakaway session on local ranking factors.

Traditional online directories are losing its value in the eyes of search engines and a good example is DMOZ. Even though DMOZ was one of the most popular directory before 2009 (it still has some value) it is not the best link source.

Local search prominence has allowed local directories to become stronger than a regular web link directory.

The question a user should ask before investing in directory link building is

• are users going to appreciate the availability of this directory? Is this going to provide benefits to the end user?

• Is this a vertical directory within high authority website or is this just a collection of links?

• Is the directory locally targeted (think yellowpages.com , cityguide.com) (applies to local ranking)

If the answer to these questions is no then clearly this is not a good source for getting links.