Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Chad,

Chris makes a good point re the leaders in ranking and what are they doing. I would also look for chinks in armor. But, first I would stop what you are doing and back up: Do you have a sales funnel? Do you have a serious KWA? Do you have a sitemap predicated on KWA and UI/UX (Factoring in user habits? Likely user habits if the company is new?). To me url structure comes to a degree as a result of these items.

Once you have those, typically on a site of any size (we have particular expertise in the tourist industries on our dev team) you will have certain issues that you will need to make decisions on based on the clients needs, ui/ux, best seo that really are business decisions and you will likely get right - if you take it in order IMO. But that said, the structure I follow is based on some basic SEO rules - four clicks max, four clicks max, keep it simple for the bot (they all can't be Roger), then: What are the important business KWs I must rank for (destination first or event first or mode first, etc.) I would follow that down the line. Personally, I have never searched on Tour company (ies) nor have I searched on "destinations" or "Sights" so I would not have that in my architecture unless the KWA showed I should. So, instead of destinations for example what are they looking for specifically and can I get that in a menu/ sub-directory etc. Then follow your brain.

Sorry that I cannot give you a do it like this: A/B/C but from the fact you are looking I think you will get this and make it happen. My opinion is that after domain what is the first thing they are looking for that is a category then what specifically within that and then other data for a decision. To me you tell the search engine that you are at my domain...this is the most important keyword here, this is next, and this is the final destination that is rock solid.

Hope this helps,

Robert

Mandi,

I think you are meaning redirected as opposed to proxied. (Canonical in this case - from GWMT)

Two ways:

• Add a rel="canonical" link to the  section of the non-canonical version of each HTML page.

  To specify a canonical link to the page http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish, create a element as follows:

  Copy this link into the  section of all non-canonical versions of the page, such as http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&sort=price.

  If you publish content on both http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish and https://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish, you can specify the canonical version of the page. Create the  element:

  Add this link to the  section of https://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish.

• **Indicate the canonical version of a URL by responding with the Link rel="canonical" HTTP header.**Adding rel="canonical" to the head section of a page is useful for HTML content, but it can't be used for PDFs and other file types indexed by Google Web Search. In these cases you can indicate a canonical URL by responding with the Link rel="canonical" HTTP header, like this (note that to use this option, you'll need to be able to configure your server):

Hope this helps,

Robert

EGOL,

As to forbes and you doing the SEO: I have sent them a letter telling them they would!

Sam, 
So that I am clear, you are currently in City A which has good ranking/traffic for city A plus keyword.

You are concerned that when you move to city B you will lose ranking and traffic in City A.

If this is the case then the answer is yes, no, and maybe. I am not being flippant and I will offer you a way to handle it. Assuming there are good business reasons for the move and it is hard not to do it, then you need a strategy for retaining as much of what you have as possible. So, first and foremost you need to know what url (s) receive your CityA + keyword traffic (as you may need to do redirects after the move and you change the site to take into account the move).

Next, when you move to city b, you want to make sure you take care to handle your Google Places / Google plus correctly. Do not try to keep the old listing as it is a fools errand. Let me say the reason I tell you is that we work with clients who have made every Local / G+ / microsite vs. sub directory mistake known to man. The effort to fix what you will break by trying to have two locations with one not real or to keep the old and not use the new is well beyond benefit if you succeed. If you break this piece and the listings get merged in some way, you can spend a ton of $ and up to a year trying to correct it if you work with a Local pro.

If you look at your current rankings around CityA + KW, you will likely see that if you are in a 7 pack, that url will be different from any url ranking organically. Your concern re traffic, conversions, etc. will be to maintain organic as you will lose the ranking in 7 pack over time (anywhere from a week or two to several months depending on a lot of factors). So, where will that traffic go to? When you create the page(s) for city B + keyword, make sure you your url structure for City A either stays the same or is 301 redirected to new urls for the new CityA + KW url.

Next, if you are not currently using these next few things, they will assist you with maintaining your other rankings for CityA (If you are, keep it up):

Do you have Exif data in the images where you have City A images on the pages? Add it if not.

Do you have a Google maps API in the page with the location? (If the location is not there, put the map with the city only).

Are you using structured markup for place on all the pages for city A? If not, add it.

Pay attention to on-page SEO for city A (and B) + KW. So, url with cityA + KW. Title tag with same and following this convention (IMO): KW | City A | Brand, make sure your H1 has some version of KW and city A and that you have it appropriately in the content, alt text, etc. 
The reason for all of this is that any place where you were weak before gives you room to improve with the hope the improvement offsets some of the negatives brought about by being in a different city.

I really hope this helps you with the move. I can tell you we have clients who were using all types of devices trying to rank in cities where they were not located. When it was done cleanly, with the City + KW as an individual page/sub-directory and then a contact page with Google Map API as the "local" presence, we have shocked clients that they could be ranked and not be in the city. Understand, we are holistic in our SEO approach in that we believe in getting as close as possible to the holy grail of 100% SEO'd. (All, please no - Google doesn't want perfect SEO, etc. - I've heard it and read it; I also know what has worked in my efforts.)

Best,

Robert

Brett,

Your question is "How do they affect SEO?" Simply put, they can sometimes increase the speed with which a site loads, but there are caveats. Seeing all your questions around site speed, I would suggest trying this link to Yahoo (comes from YSlow)

So, if the site is too slow, beyond user experience issues (which to me are the bigger issues usually around a slow site) you can cost yourself in PPC and, IMO if UX issues are significant, SEO ranking.

Hope this helps,

Hello Luke,

I would approach it like this. FIrst, ask the question: What is the best way to maximize the locations I want given I am between two distinct geographic areas? If you want to insure you are hitting both, what is at your disposal?

For Google + you will have the choice of one or the other and I go with which is most important first. Then, mention the other. In search, someone searching for city A is going to pull geographically (given all other things are equal) from city center point out. If you are center of city A that is great, if you are halfway out, you will be in the search, etc. But, then make sure you have other indicators like your title tags. If each city is important I would have two pages (one on each city with differing content). That is better than a single page of content and title tags as you have them.

If, your only other option is to use the title tags with both, keep them at 70 characters and have a go at it. You won't hurt anything, but it is not the highest value approach.

Hope this helps you out,

Robert

Blink-SEO

Jonathan is correct to try a Fetch as Google in WMT for the urls you need re indexed. (Note, that is not really the purpose of a Fetch as Google, but sometimes it works.)
I would also resubmit the sitemap now that you have blocked the offending url with robots.txt. It is likely the resubmission will help you the quickest IMO.

Best,

Robert

Matt,

This info from google doesn't have anything to do with duplicate content.

The first one is about title tags and even that says they (Google) may try to improve the title. Nothing about the meta.

The second is from a Google forum in 2008 and says to first check dmoz to see if the meta is appearing there.  If you just say, hey use noodp, noydir, you are making an assumption that is problematic.

The third where you have John Mueller, it is again about Titles and not using keyword stuffing.

Here is the issue Matt: When you state something like that (and I have made the same mistake) and leave a lot out, someone who doesn't do this day to day, assumes something that is simply not true. Frankly, I know of no instance where duplicate content has caused a SERP snippet to change.

Yes, you can use noodp, noydir, but you need to explain why and not say its because of duplicate content. The snippet he gives says "Provides a range of web design and print design services."  If you put that search on Google.com.au, there is no duplicate content issue.

Yes, that does appear on dmoz, not on Yahoo Directory. But, it also appears on several directory type sites. Will using noodp keep it from happening? Only if that is the source.

So, I have thumbed you up for the courtesy of a reply to me (evens out the thumb down). Thanks for the reply and, feel free to let me know if I stray or if you believe something here is incorrect. I am open to being wrong and having it pointed out.

All the best,

Robert

Hello Robert,

I will give you a method here that may assist you on the reindex side:

In GWMT go to Health> Fetch as Googlebot

In the url space following the initial domain, put an offending page and then click Fetch

It usually takes less than 5 seconds and you will see "success" with a green check mark followed by a button for Submit to Index. (Given the situation, I highly urge you to click it!

Note: If the entire site is affected, you will want to use URL and Linked pages on submission (you only get ten of these per month) and if not, just that url. (You get 500 Fetches a month).

This should help get you indexed more rapidly. PLEASE do not tell anyone as it is a secret!!

Good Luck,

Robert

Will2112

You have a good question and I agree with Anthony. You can kill the feed and be fine - if that is the only consideration. If the feed is bringing you something in return, say more people reading and interacting with your blog, that is another consideration. 
With the image you have here, it appears almost all of the scrapers are the same person, group, company, etc. They appear to be out of Turkey and are taking part of your contact, then placing the Pinterest link hidden where there should be an image. What actually happens is the person clicks thinking they are going to see an image, and their item gets pinned. (Funny, but if the person does not have pinterest, it won't happen and, most are going to "Books Worth Reading.") Also, most of the images have your CDN url. No help for them.

I hope that at least gives you some info to work with. Good luck. I hate that these types can get away with content theft, but I doubt their sites would actually outrank you for an actual keyword term search around the subject.

Best

Robert

Bobrock4

First, you need to 301 url to url as a best practice. Second, you need to understand that the more difficult issue is you changed domain name and that may cause Google, etc. to take a little longer to credit the 301 (due to bad practices in the past). That said, there is a great resource on moz that considers whether you are on a LAMP stack or microsoft, etc.

The link is in Learn SEO  and is better than just giving you a rewrite rule as it will allow you to comprehend what is happening and why.

I hope you find this helpful.

Robert

Luke,

The first thing I see is this sentence: These internal pages have low PR, yet are performing well in terms of SERPs.

So in answering you, I will treat it as I would a client. Do these pages bring you business, improve your ROI, etc.? If the answer is yes, I am going to approach the problem very cautiously. Let's assume they are important.

For those pages that are offending you say there are a couple (I will guess that means not more than 5). If your site is fairly large 50 plus pages for example, I do not see these pages impacting the site negatively in our current environment. But, you could simply send a few messages out to those linking and request that they remove the links.
Keep a record that you did and send more than one request. At the same time, go out and get a few good links to the same pages to make the weight change a bit toward better links.

If you change the urls of the pages there is no need to change 404. Simply leave it as a search for what you were looking for. Those directories won't be searching. You are correct in not doing redirect involving old urls in this case.

Hope this helps and provides a bit of perspective.

best

ravashjalil

With a news/sports site in particular you are going to have continuous stories you are writing. When you start doing one 301 to another to another to another to another to another to another... sooner or later it is going to appear to be THE SPAM CITY GAZETTE. You do not want a site like that. With a news or sports story unless huge and it is our byline, etc. you are not going to have enough juice on any given page to really benefit you. You ultimately will be attempting to move juice from internal pages to other internal pages. 
You are better served to do it the old fashion way, just keep writing great content, etc. Archive the older stuff and let the visitor do their bit. If you get  a page with a lot of links coming to it, you might want to leave it alone as people seem to want to read that...not get sent somewhere else.

Best,

Robert

Andrew,

I can understand that you are concerned re the bounce rate, but you are likely over-concerned where you do not need to be. The reason is no site is losing ranking to bounce rate. Yes, there is a very low amount of debate on this, but I do not see it in the day to day and I look over a lot of sites. First, with your WMT settings as you have them, Google knows where your market is.

So, to help you feel better, do this: Take a look at your non UK traffic. Is the high bounce rate coming from there? If so and if the algorithm takes it into account (it does not), then the algorithm also takes into account the bounce is from other than your proclaimed market. (The increase in BR).

Worry about  your traffic in the UK - is it up or down? Is your time on site increasing or decreasing? How many page views are you getting over time? Have you gotten your content to a place where it is not the same descriptions and images as others selling the same furniture? Then, or before, how are you converting? Are your sales good? Increasing? Decreasing?

Last question is this. Assume for whatever reason, that a crazy Yank goes to your site and sees a lovely divan he wishes to purchase and is willing to pay $1,000 to ship it to Texas... Would you let him?

Best to you,

Robert

Ryan

Thanks for your input on this. The client is a seller of very big ticket item and the developer/seo she had was very clever at creating his own link farm/pyramid/etc. 
The good news for her was that she had a lot of industry cites that linked to her site and she has always done a great job at her own PR which brought in more quality links.

I was not trying to draw a corollary to specific links and PA/DA but show a broad picture around all the links (of which at least half were poor/bad) and how as those go away things change - which is I think a portion of what you are saying.

What I am showing with the images is that the links start going away and as the result DA/PA drops...but, we begin to see a concomitant rise in mozTrust which I believe can be taken as a signal - how exact I could not guess - that things will improve. It would appear that based on your comments I was a bit less than clear - thanks for the assist.

The reason we did not go into aggressive link removal with the client was due in large part to her relationship with past dev. She was very concerned about how they perceived their treatment. We had to be a bit cautious and we understood (and told her) the possible consequences.

Thanks for your clarity; I do believe there is more to come from Google around this issue.

All the best,

Robert

Steve

Please read what EGOL wrote first. If you want to stop "auto-correction" (which is a user choice) you must allow the domain to appear in the SERPs. Otherwise, how does the user know that it should not be corrected. But, secondarily, I think you need to also tell your client to chill. (Yes, we have attorneys for clients and they are large clients with nationwide campaigns). Understand, attorneys know everything, ask them. They are assuming people are staying with the corrected version as opposed to overriding. Google does NOT take them to a different domain. Google gives them a choice (showing results for xyz.com - show results for yyz.com instead?).

There is no way to stop the auto correct; just as there is no way to stop an attorney from being totally brilliant, ask them.

Best

ndirseo

Since you "made a lot of optimization changes" I am going to assume you used fetch as Google a lot as well. If so, you will only have the option to Send URL and all linked pages 10 times per month. You can fetch as Google 500 times.

I think the issue here is simply one of bandwidth and overuse.  Think of it this way.Fetch as Google was designed to let you see the pages as Google sees them for the purpose of errors, those who had been spammed, etc. As more and more people began using it, they had to limit due to overuse.

If you have checked a page with Fetch as Google and it comes back ok, and you do that for the whole site, you should not have to use url and all linked pages that often as the pages are linked.

Hope this helps. I Have pointed to where you see the limits in GWMT with image.

Here is the link re webmaster tools.  Note its next to last paragraph.

Hope that helps,

Robert

D7fxWzN.png?1

Got an email this morning on a domain that is not privacy protected. (One of mine that I own significant extensions for).

I am attaching the email and the link. The thing did not throw me off because I know where all is and it had nothing identifiable, but to those with a domain and they want to keep it, this has to have some real chance of taking some peoples money.

The domain you land on is SecureTrans32456.com/order/.........

Just keeping the world alert...

best

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Unlike EGOL, I am not opinionated (muffled guffaws from those who know me), but I do wonder sometimes about things like LSI keywords. I have not used any of the software you mention so I am not a good resource for that. But, if the assumption is that LSI keywords when added to an article or page will in some way improve traffic, conversions, etc. I would ask this: Are you so fine tuned and optimized that this is the last thing you can do to improve your situation? (In other words, a 1 or 2% project)? If the answer is yes, I would ask, "Why would anyone in their right mind stink up great writing?" (Oh, sorry, I stole someone's question.) But, if the answer is no, it is not the final fine tune to the site/page, then I would say write something really good and then make sure you are using structured data to make it easier on the search engines and improve your meta description so the searcher finds what they are looking for. Finally, make sure you have several ways to convert the traffic.  
Really, EGOL is more right than he explains; if you write something really interesting and well written, people will read it and give you the traffic you need. That in and of itself will negate the need for attempting to conjure low hanging keyword fruit through software. My point is that we tend to spend too much time on low value projects like LSI KW's and not enough on the more relevant SEO projects. 
Best

Tim,

I am going to give you an answer that you missed:

"Ok so here is the question. A few months ago i decided to join pingler.com and pay for the service as i was using the free service, but after four months now i have not noticed any changes... "

So, what were you expecting to happen? Since you instituted this practice, how much content has changed or been added? If the answer is little or none, well why are you pinging?

In SEO, as in fitness, bodybuilding, etc. there are always 'magic' ways to improve. In about the mid 80's the craze in fitness was creatine. If you take creatine you can jump over a building in three weeks... etc. I do not know if the desire to find shortcuts is a more rooted value in the US or if it is global (yes, I have travelled, but just not sure). However, it is very apparent in all SEO and people seem to grab each item, ride it a short distance, jump off and grab another. So here is my suggestion: 
Read all on your site, check for dupes web-wide (copyscape.com), clean those up, insure your on-page SEO is in line with SEOmoz recommendations, create content and compare it to your competitor's - whose is better? If you said yours, send a copy of yours and your competitor's to three people who tell you the absolute truth; if all three say yours is better, put it up!

You can take every gimmick, black hat, gray hat, green hat (sorry can't disclose these as they are inner sanctum SEO level and above only) and creatine and I will manage: Content, answering the query, UI/UX, basic good SEO, etc. IMO there is no way you will catch me in three to six months. Yes, I mean it.

That is the best advice I can give you regarding Pingler.com

Best to you and Great Luck going forward,

Robert