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Jeff

I am a bit surprised by the no results with the www. An example is our site, drumbeatmarketing.net, when you put it in that way on a site: you return the correct version, the www. I am not sure re the 301 you are using, but one way to help yourself is to go into GWMT and make sure you have a preferred domain.

Login to WMT, go to the gear in the top right of the page (settings), go to site settings and you will see the page with geographic target, then preferred domain. Select the preferred domain (appears you are wanting the www). This should assist you in ensuring it is correct. Then, if you can have someone check the 301, that would be good. If you have a question re the 301, add it to the responses here and we will assist.

EDIT - I checked in screaming frog and your 301 is the www to the non www. This is what you wanted? If you do the preferred domain that should assist as well. When was the 301 put in?
Lastly, it makes zero difference which you use www or non www. Once you have it in correctly whatever the searcher puts in, it will resolve to the correct version.

Best

Robert

David,

Since no one answered this, I wanted to answer you as I am assuming no one could find it.

(Next time add a time frame as many won't watch the whole vid. The part showing a report button is at about 1:42.)

The vid shows a report button next to the campaign settings in the Moz Analytics Beta. My guess is there is intent to have a button but there is not one yet in Beta.

Hopefully Keri, or one of the other staffers will see and let us know.

Best

JC,

When you say ...started out 404-ing them...seemed like Google was penalizing my crawl rate..... etc. I have not seen where Google even algorithmically had any real issues with 404's. I your site has 500K pages and 100K are 404'd I do not think it would be a problem for Google per se. (You might have a searcher problem if these were pages that were bookmarked, lots of links, etc.) My caution would be that if you have a lot of pages on the site with links that still go to the 404 pages you could run into UX issues. 
For me, I would go with the 404's. I think they will get removed over time.

Best

Think most are having issues. One thing to note is that when you switch from the tool bar to explore links, etc and click on OSE, the search field populates using 2%F in place of any /

If you take that out and put / in, all is well. The ability to use the tool bar for links is spotty at best.

I did report a while back and have assumed the updates along with the server issue was pushing the limits. I am sure it will get taken care of.

From Screaming Frog you have redirected correctly the www version to the non www version. (Which is what you stated above you wanted).

By selecting the non www version in GWMT, you are just reinforcing that it is done in a way that works for you.

There is no damage to the www not showing. Go to the nav bar and type in drumbeatmarketing.net and enter; you will see it resolve to www.drumbeatmarketing.net. 
So, any non www page is not going to show unless we have something wrong. All is good. Yours is just the opposite as that is what you wanted. No matter what anyone says, it is irrelevant which you choose to use (with the obvious exception where the site has not had a preferred domain and now has two values for PA and you are trying to merge them).

Good question, glad to help,

Robert

Yair

I think that the canonical is the better option. I am unsure as to your use of the term "crawl budget," in that there is no fixed number of times a page or a site will be crawled versus a second similar site for example. I have a huge reference site that is crawled every couple of days and I have small sites of ten pages that are crawled weekly or less. It is dependent on the traffic and behaviors of that traffic (which would include number of inbound links, etc.) and on things like you re-submitting sitemap, etc. 
The canonical tag was created to provide the clarification to the search engine as to what you considered to be the relevant page. Go ahead and use it.

Best

Robert

Ghulam

You can run up to 5 campaigns using up to 300 total keywords between them. Any one campaign will crawl up to 10,000 pages. Go to 'My Account' then Billing and Subscriptions and it lays all out simply.

Best

Mark,

The Testfreaks piece is the first red flag you gave. "Aggregated Review Data" from an outside source. Google has stated they are going after markup spam. But, you say this is inserted with Java and you say "they have working on many other sites successfully." Do you have access to the analytics of the other sites or are they telling you this and you go to the site and there is a site with the same Java for aggregate reviews? There is quite a difference.

My first move, given the limited data supplied (your GA is a very small slice of time and there is no comparison to last year for example), the first move I would make is to remove the aggregate reviews. Also, for products, if you are using any markup for reviews, you need to do so on a page by page basis with only one product per page.

Now, I will give you the short version of my speech regarding e commerce sites using the other guys assistance to sell. You are selling speakers and HiFi equipment that Testfreaks is also an affiliate for. (Even the popup review on your site has multiple links to others selling the same product.)  So, why not use Schema and create your own reviews and ratings on the site? Would you really rather allow someone to pull your customers so that you can show a rating that Google probably does not like or won't like in the near term?

Now, correlation does not equal causation, but you give us little to go on. My first change would be a wave goodbye to TestFreak. BTW when you click on their site on the link for learn more about their reviews for other sites, it will not load. The url is a different domain: http://www.testfreaksdata.com/

I hope this helps.

Robert

I don't disagree at all and I think AJ Kohn is a rock star. In SEO, I have learned over time that there are rarely absolutes like always do this or never do that. I based my answer on how you posited the question.

If you read AJ's post you will note that the rel=canonical issue comes up with others commenting and not in the body of his post. Yes, if the page is superfluous like a cart page or a contact page, use the robots.txt to block the crawl. But, if you have a page with rank, links, etc. that help your canonical page, how are you helping yourself by forgoing rel=canon?

I think his bigger point was that you want to be aware and to understand that the # of times you are crawled is at least partially governed by PR which is governed by all those other things we discussed. If you understand that and keep the crawl focused on better pages you help yourself.

Does that clarify a bit?
Best

Max,

Because the links you put are to your private data, SEOmoz won't let anyone follow. Can you put in a screenshot and then just give a link tot the actual url that is a problem? Thanks.

Wilco,

Your page http://www.badkamerxxl.nl/merken/D links to /f/merk-damixa. Using the Moz tool, if you are on the referring page, I used the link finding tool (pen with orange for internal links) and it is an internal link. If you click it you land on the appropriate url.

Hope that helps you out, but if you want a clear picture of link structure, you could always use Screaming Frog. (The link to that page shows in screaming frog and shows over two hundred links away from the page linking to it.)

Robert

PS With one internal link from a page with a huge amount of links on it, you will not necessarily have a PA greater than one. Each link on the linking page divides the value of the page.

With this info, I would go with Robots.txt because, as you say, it outweighs any potential loss given the use of the pages and the absence of links.

Thanks

Patrick, SEOmoz only crawls once a month as they need time to process the data from the crawl. It is likely you will show up corrected within the next few weeks. If you did it just after a crawl and had to wait a month it would then be a couple of weeks before results show. So, likely within 6-7 weeks from when you removed redirect. 
Hope this helps

I used the Moz tool also and at first I showed one internal link and posted that and then, when I came back it wasn't showing. It may have been picking up the G translate??. It does show in ScreamingFrog and, I used your site search went to the page with the link to the product page and it obviously worked. In SF it showed the urls as 200 so no problem there. 
I am not sure why it would not show on the Moz tools. I know some links won't show in OSE, but I have never had an occurrence like this. 
You do have an internal link, if you are to increase your PA you need to get more links to the page. I caution you about the overuse of internal links. I realize there are two schools on quantity: some say, where it used to be 100 as a limit now many more are acceptable. Personally, I would not want pages with hundreds of internal links.

If you go to GWMT, and click on Search Traffic, you will see internal links. Click that and you will be able to look at individual URLs. That might assist you even more.

LMK if that works or you need further assistance.

Netviper

I would first offer a simple suggestion whenever someone says, Google doesn't or Google does... Ask them where they read it or saw it. (Obviously, hearing it is not very beneficial.) That said, I politely disagree with whomever said that.

We have clients that are service area businesses and they have a need to be present when someone looks for example for a plumber. So, Houston Plumber and neighborhood A, B, C, D.... What you must do, is be careful regarding local and how you set it up. Do not go out and get UPS addresses, virtual addresses, etc. for these communities. You should have one location for each real address that is a business address that your client has. If they only have one in the city, that is it. Make sure that Name, Address, and Phone is always the same. IF you are going to want to use a different phone number for a given community (typically for tracking purposes), make sure you do it as an image on the web page, no HTML and no alt text with number, etc. Forever (or until things change) you will have the same NAP for the entire city unless it is a tracking number that is not crawled.

For every page you create for a community I suggest the following. Go shoot some photos or have them shot, etc. using a camera or phone with GPS and use one or two of those on your page. Talk about that area and the business and as best possible, try not to make every page the same. Find ways to add a paragraph or two that are real differentiators for that locale.

Doing this, you should have some success with meeting the needs of your client.

Best

Robert

Excellent response THB. We do both for all sites.

Wilco,

If they crawled that page, the PA should be correct. Based on what I see external of Moz, it is.

Robert

Thanks to Umar for asking for the domain.

I looked using a site: operator and found 13 pages and 21 pdf's that were indexed. I am not familiar with the company who handled the cleanup so I would check to make sure they have not added any robots.txt, etc. in an attempt to keep it all safe. That would be my first look. To me this is the most logical if you have submitted a new sitemap.

Let us know how it comes out,

Robert

Creativeguy,

The Places rankings and the organic are not the same. See Dr. Pete on Counting to 10 the Google Way

I have a lawfirm that is F in Google 7 pack for a specialty they have. So CertainLawfirm.com is in places for business bankruptcy. Further down on the same search in organic, they are ranked 5th. The url for that organic ranking is CertainLawfirm.com/business-bankruptcy/

So they are organically 5th for that keyword and they also show up for that term in Places.

Gets crazier every day and Dr. Pete does a great job explaining it.

Best

Sorry, had to go away a bit. 
The Omskirk is being returned due to proximity. You are near there, you get to see Omskirk. If you went into Google Search settings and made the location London, you would see London showing more.

So, someone in Liverpool, won't be seeing a bunch of Omskirk.

Your question was: How do you handle localised results being returned for a query? You don't. In the eyes of search engines (Google in this case), search results are impacted by the searcher who makes the queries. If you and I are in the same room and we both search on Home delivered coal, we will likely get a somewhat different result (you search on that type term more and click on specific results that modify what you see.) If we both are on non personalized search and in the same room, 99% we will get the same SERP.

So, we probably got off track a bit with the way we all answered. If not, then Miriam's direction is as solid as can be. She knows local back and front. You can either grow slowly or you advertise for a faster result.

The only way YOU will impact Local terms is to use them. Now, DO NOT GO OUT AND CREATE A BUNCH OF LOCAL LISTINGS. Not yelling, really emphasizing. You could have a page for London coal and other larger cities, etc. but take care with duplicate content.

To learn where the traffic is coming from, I would do this. Go into GA, Audience, Visitors Flow and isolate the traffic to city. In my screenshot you will see what I am speaking of. This will show you what city the traffic is coming from. (You need to first click on the UK and View only this segment). Now you see where your city traffic is coming from. That can show you where you can improve or change to meet your business desires.

Let us know if this helps,

Robert

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