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Many thanks Moosa, that's pretty much what I thought.

thanks

Pete

Hello Mozzers,

We need to redo some of our meta descriptions as our CTR's are not to good. I've noticed one of my competitors using emoji's which I personally think looks pretty good.

They are using the Phone icon and ticks - as calls to action etc

However, I can't see hardly anyone else using them on general serps ...so I am wondering , is it a bad idea ?

thanks

Pete

Hi Miriam,

Many thanks , I will take a look at the local seo audit. Will keep you posted on the limited experiment etc.

Kind Regards

Pete

Hello Miriam,

Many thanks for your comprehensive and detailed answer. By the 2 approaches you mention, it looks like we did actually originally use approach 2. For a long period until approx 2 years ago, this was very successful until google changed the algorithms . We then went through a process of writing new content of at least 350-500 words for every location/category combo which did improves a little but no way back to where it was. We did however manage to keep probably a larger search visibility footprint than we would have normally had got. On the negative side though, I did think , this could come across as spammy as there is only so many ways one can re-spin similar content without it sounding poor. Also apart from the NAP appearing on the location/category pages, the content wasn't really adding anything unique to that specific location although we did try and localise them by adding in directions , landmarks and major roads etc and other local transport info to get to our depots etc.

Although most, locations/category combos ranked in the top 10-15, most of them were hovering between 6-10 , and only a few top 3. It was def. getting harder and harder to improve on these even with local citations etc and using schema markup.

I posted a couple of questions to John Mueller on a hangout and also to the google webmaster forum  and the general feedback  I got , was that these could be classed as doorway pages. Whilst John Mueller suggested that branch pages were okay, and he did say you could probably have a few location/category pages if you offered a service in that area, he was very non committal and encouraged against doing this technique for obvious reasons although, i think if done correctly, it could work perfectly well for some time to come.

We therefore re-structured our site recently to follow your approach 1 and  setup 301's for our location pages to go back to the relevant category pages. I think this improved the overal internal site structure and we therefore had less link dilution.

We are ranking for our services <city>in serps and in some cases we are ranking exactly the same or slightly better than when we had the combo/location page but the page being returned in serps is the branch page in most cases as opposed to the category page.  I do think this going to be best long term although, I think i will experiment a little by possibly adding a few service pages to one or two of my branches and see how that affects things.</city>

I also think that the internal structure in approach 2 diluted everything far to much and weakened many of my landing pages as a whole.

I also looked at that link you sent regarding the local search audit and ordered the book from Amazon. Will keep you posted on the results from my landing page experiment of adding a couple of service pages to a location or two. But I am glad that It looks like I've been on the right track (thereabouts) with regards to both approaches you mention.

Many thanks

Pete

Hi ,

That is something we are looking to do longer term when budgets allow but I guess in the meantime I should no follow them then ?

thanks

Pete

Dear Mozzers,

I have a couple of questions regarding link juice and whether I should have do follow or no follow links ?

We have an affiliate eCommerce website and on our product pages we have a "Order online " button which will go our subdomain on the manufactures site in order for the user to complete the online ordering process

So it's - www.ourcompany.co.uk  - "Order Online Button" - www.manufactuer.ourcompany.co.uk

1. Should this " Order online Button" be a Follow or No Follow link ?

I ask this as currently from looking at Majestic seo , these "order online " buttons on my product pages seems to be Follow links so am I losing potential link juice by sending it externally ? Am I correct in assuming by changing it to be no follows, I would increase the link juice going elsewhere internally?

thanks

Pete

From what I have been told, the ranking gain is less than the loss in link juice you would have by doing 301's from http to https, therefore there is no actual ranking benefit. If there was , I personally think everyone would be doing it.

Like Chris says above, John Mueller said in a recent hangout,that if you had 2 identical sites in everyway and both was josling for position, then the https would take preference but personally I am waiting for ranking benefit to atleast equal the loss from 301s before I consider doing it.

thanks

Pete

Dear Mozzers ,

I am wondering if someone could please help with some advice and assistance on the following for our Tool hire site:

Basically I like to know how we can rank for our categories for our different branch locations ?.

We have a branch finder page and separate branch pages but I do not know if I should have an internal link from all our branch pages to all my different categories or not or is google clever enough to know that I have x locations and x categories and I should rank all the categories in all the locations. I think my site structure is fairly straightforward and on the face of it similar to what others do who have multiple branches .

For example I enclose a link to 2 of our categories - carpet cleaner hire category and a floor sander hire category

carpet cleaner category - http://goo.gl/cMyS4i

floor sander category - http://goo.gl/4ipUyA

Heres a link to our Branch Finder - http://goo.gl/UyTQdK

Heres a link to one of our Branches for example - Bristol Branch - http://goo.gl/9TXHTK

And heres our link to our google plus Bristol page - google plus bristol branch page - https://goo.gl/h0IwAK . We have link from our bristol page going to the bristol google plus page and visa versa.

Currently within our internal linking structure there is No direct link on the branch pages to the categories ?. Is this something we need to do or not necessary ?. - If we do it , then it may mess up or confuse the page as I someone need to get all the category links on the branch pages ?

We have lots of good unique content , lots of citations for our branches and categories etc but we just don't seem to rank at all well for any of our categories in local search.

For example if somene was to search for - Carpet cleaner hire "City Name " or Floor sander hire "City Name" (City name being where our branches are). We dont rank very well for most of our cities. Even without putting the city name in we dont rank to well in local search.

We used to have individual pages for our categories in each of the cities we have branches with unique content on all and these did rank quite well in a few cities but never top 3 in most and we got rid of these last month (start of Oct) as I was told that google may see this as quite spammy or doorway pages if I have a carpet cleaner hire Bristol page or a floor sander hire Bristol page etc ?.. All my location landing pages now just 301 back to the appropriate category.

I am wondering if getting rid of these landing pages was a good idea as by tidying things up , I've seemed to have lost my local rankings for my cities.

Can someone please advise if what I did was right and what else I should look at doing ?> Could it be an internal linking issue I need to sort ?

Any assistance much appreciated.
thanks
Pete

I asked John Mueller in a recent hangout about 301 redirects and he stated that if you had multiple 301's from the same domain going to a single point i.e homepage , then google may discount many of those 301's and treat them 404's. In my context , it was as I had done a migration and being lazy I 301'd all the urls to the home t. He was saying to map them like for like or you could lose out.

So I guess it depends on your 301's etc..

Pete

We use both rel=next and rel=prev along with a canonical tag pointing to the view all pages on our eCommerce site. As Greenstone mentions above, this is what google recommends.

We also use a Cloudflare CDN (Content delivery Network) which takes care of any speed issue . They offer a free package which you can use to trial it and the paid packages are also very good value  ,approx $20-30 per month by memory but it does make the website lightening quick. It's very easy to setup to.

Pete

Hi Tom,

Many thanks , Very helpful links here. I will take a look

thanks

Peter

Many thanks Both,

The SEO company got back to me and implied that as my webpages contain contains several blocks of markup , the first issue is that they need to be condensed into one set of markup for each page.

The also said, it was to basic and not extensive enough and even though Google's testing tool does not indicate any errors does not necessarily mean that the markup is correct or that it meets Google's guidelines.

Do you know if they have a point about the single markup as opposed to several blocks of markup per page as I have never heard that point mentioned before?

thanks

Peter

Dear Mozzers,

We have implemented schema.org on our website and it's showing up as being correct.

However, I've been told by a SEO company that what we have done is incorrect and is therefore giving out wrong signals to google and that it needs fixing but they haven't told me whats wrong with it.

Would someone please be able to have to have a quick scan and highlight anything that is not correct. I have enclosed 4 urls belows of the different sections of my website.

My website homepage - is -- http://goo.gl/2F80w2

We have a number of branches- An example branch url is - http://goo.gl/8FpcaS

example category url - http://goo.gl/gbAaD2

example product url - http://goo.gl/EXI1Sr

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated

Many thanks
Peter

Hello Josh,

Many thanks for your input. This is really for our branch pages  - see please example - http://goo.gl/zpdWfj     - Please feel free critic the page if you feel there are mistakes here being made .

The search volumes here are always quite competitive - tool hire <city name="">so it's not to easy to boost these pages. We've done alot of citations and I am going through trying to make sure they are consistent. The content is unique and we have tried to localize the pages to by including local directions etc etc.</city>

We've done the schema.org so really , I was thinking, what else can I do to help this pages.The idea about using "same as " property came from an article written by whitespark hence my query about what else I can and should i use it .

thanks

Pete

Many thanks for your insight. I will look at implementing this aswell as it's one part of our schema markup we havent' done. I like your idea on using tag manager to.

Many thanks

Pete

Hi All,

We have implemented Schema.og on our website and this also includes the local business schema for all of our branches.However I've read an article (see below ) which says we should also be doing "same as " property and linking this to ALL of our citations such as google plus page , yelp , bing places, city search etc etc  as this will help with citations.

I am wondering if anyone has done this ? - And if so , has this helped with local rankings etc - I don't really want to invest the extra costs to get this done if I can't find anywhere that says its made a difference -

The article from whitespark - says - "when you create new citations for your business (or for your client’s), it’s a waiting game hoping that Google and the other search engines will find your new citations quickly and make the connection between those listings, the business, and the website.

The “sameAs” property can help make that process much quicker _and _easier.  Schema.org explains that the “sameAs” property is used along with the “URL of a reference Web page that unambiguously indicates the item's [or business’] identity.”  By using the “sameAs” property in your NAP schema markup, you can tell search engines that the business you’ve marked up is the same one found at a certain citation URL

Of course, Google+ isn’t the only important citation source.  There’s also Bing Places, Facebook, Yelp, Citysearch and a few others. The nice thing about many schema.org properties is that you can use them multiple times in your markup."

I am wondering what peoples thoughts were and whether they has implemented this and if so , did it help ?

thanks

Pete

| [sameAs](http://schema.org/sameAs) | URL  | URL of a reference Web page that unambiguously indicates the item's identity. E.g. the URL of the item's Wikipedia page, Freebase page, or official website. |

You could always consider no index follow these until a point you'e in a position to improve product pages

People sometimes use this technique if they feel a Panda update is coming... otherwise it could just look like a lot of low quality on the site.

Pete

Hi Matt,

Many thanks for the very comprehensive answer. I didn;t realize any of this at all so thanks

Pete

Hi Russ,

I don't quite understand why I would need to add hreflang tags.

I don't have .com versions of any of my pages,  I only have a .com dominant homepage when I do search for my branch name in serps.

Or am I missing something here ? Can you please explain a bit more ?

thanks

Pete

Many thanks Ben, I will look at those things you mentioned.

Much Appreciated

Pete