Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for your reply.

It's not a link scheme. There's actually a legitimate reason for the this information to appear in the privacy policy of companies who use my client's products.  I just don't know if it might help their rankings.

Let's say that Site A is a large brand with high authority ( Moz shows it at 90 DA). Site A is about “Blue Shoes”.

Site B is about “fishing”.

If Site A links from their privacy policy page to Site B … would that inbound link carry enough weight in a way that could impact rankings for Site B given that the content is totally unrelated and it's a link from a privacy policy?

I’m asking if the work to get clients/partners do this help.

I have a hypothetical question for you all!

Site A is a large brand with high authority ( Moz shows it at 90 DA). Site A is about “Blue Shoes”.

Site B is about “fishing”.

If site A links from their privacy policy to Site B … would that inbound link carry enough weight in a way that could impact rankings?

I’m asking if the work to get clients/partners do this help.

I have a client who is a major player in the continuing education vertical.  They have recently noticed that the Google Knowledge Graph is displaying erroneous information whenever somebody searches for their brand name (no matter the location/IP address).  The brand Knowledge Graph is pulling information from a permanently closed location.  Our client has multiple locations.  Why Google decided to pull data from this particular (closed) location is beyond us.

Our client has reclaimed the permanently closed location Google+ page and they are going to permanently delete it.  However we are wondering if there is anyway to expedite the process of updating the Knowledge Graph.  Is there anyway to submit feedback to Google about the KG?  Is there anyway to request a Knowledge Graph correction?  The erroneous "permanently closed" data is very embarrassing for our client.

You're right - I'm worrying about something that isn't yet a problem.

Thank you

Ok, Rand - one last questions.

I do think one year is a long time to have old results and if I was going to do a test to get Google to stop showing them in their SERPs what would you do?   --- Let's say a client asked you to have these URLs disappear

The 79 pages that appear in the /eichler/ directory are from a personal site so I don't care what happens with those pages in the SERPs.

My ideas are:

• Remove the 301 redirect entirely so that visits to those pages return a 404 (much easier) or a 410 (would require some setup/configuration via Wordpress).  This of course means that anyone visiting those URLs won't be forwarded along, but Google may not drop those redirects from the SERPs otherwise.

• Request that Google temporarily block those pages (done via GWMT), which lasts for 90 days.

• Update robots.txt to block access to the redirecting directories.

• Remove the 301 redirect entirely so that visits to those pages return a 404 (much easier) or a 410 (would require some setup/configuration via Wordpress).  This of course means that anyone visiting those URLs won't be forwarded along, but Google may not drop those redirects from the SERPs otherwise.

• Request that Google temporarily block those pages (done via GWMT), which lasts for 90 days.

• Update robots.txt to block access to the redirecting directories.

Thank you  Rand.    It has been 14 months since these pages were moved and I'd never seen Google retain pages anywhere near this long.

You're right of course, there has been no impact to traffic for our site as these pages weren't about our search business.

Thanks for taking a look at our issue.

Rosemary

Wow - do I ever feel privileged to have you respond!  Thank you Rand.

You can see a batch of redirected URLs here <  site:totheweb.com eichler   >

I appreciate any suggestions.

Rosemary

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Atotheweb.com+eichler&oq=site%3Atotheweb.com+eichler&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.4598j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8

Thirteen months ago we removed a large number of non-corporate URLs from our web server.  We created 301 redirects and in some cases, we simply removed the content as there was no place to redirect to.

Unfortunately, all these pages still appear in Google's SERPs (not Bings) for both the 301'd pages and the pages we removed without redirecting.  When you click on the pages in the SERPs that have been redirected - you do get redirected - so we have ruled out any problems with the 301s.

We have already resubmitted our XML sitemap and when we run a crawl using Screaming Frog we do not see any of these old pages being linked to at our domain.

We have a few different approaches we're considering to get Google to remove these pages from the SERPs and would welcome your input.

• Remove the 301 redirect entirely so that visits to those pages return a 404 (much easier) or a 410 (would require some setup/configuration via Wordpress).  This of course means that anyone visiting those URLs won't be forwarded along, but Google may not drop those redirects from the SERPs otherwise.
• Request that Google temporarily block those pages (done via GWMT), which lasts for 90 days.
• Update robots.txt to block access to the redirecting directories.

Thank you.

Rosemary

One year ago I removed a whole lot of junk that was on my web server but it is still appearing in the SERPs.

I have a client that needs to get a WP template completely revamped.   They work in residential contracting and this website will be for lead generation.   The current WP template has several problems with load speeds, structured data, SSL issues, mobile template problems (most critical issue) and other issues.  Their budget is $5K to $12K. 
Does anybody know of any US based (MUST be accessible by phone number) WP Developer who has a strong knowledge of SEO & Conversion optimization?

Thanks

Recently one of my clients was hesitant to move their new store locator pages to a subdomain.  They have some SEO knowledge and cited the whiteboard Friday article at https://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday.

While it is very possible that Rand Fiskin has a valid point I felt hesitant to let this be the final verdict.  John Mueller from Google Webmaster Central claims that Google is indifferent towards subdomains vs subfolders.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h1t5fs5VcI#t=50

Also this SEO disagreed with Rand Fiskin’s post about using sub folders instead of sub domains.  He claims that Rand Fiskin ran only 3 experiments over 2 years, while he has tested multiple subdomain vs subfolder experiments over 10 years and observed no difference.

http://www.seo-theory.com/2015/02/06/subdomains-vs-subfolders-what-are-the-facts-on-rankings/

Here is another post from the Website Magazine.  They too believe that there is no SEO benefits of a subdomain vs subfolder infrastructure.  Proper SEO and infrastructure is what is most important.

http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2015/03/10/seo-inquiry-subdomains-subdirectories.aspx

Again Rand might be right, but I rather provide a recommendation to my client based on an authoritative source such as a Google engineer like John Mueller.

Does anybody else have any thoughts and/or insight about this?

Thanks for your input!

A client of our wants to manage business listings for three locations in China.   We wanted to submit to Baidu but from what I've learned this is highly regulated (you live in China, pay a fee and call them to confirm).

This is the only article I could find about submitting to Baidu:

http://www.nanjingmarketinggroup.com/blog/baidu/how-can-baidu-maps-help-my-business

Are there any conduit or 3rd party services available that can handle this?

Thanks

This has been a common question from several of my clients.  I'm shocked that Google hasn't done anything to segment this local traffic since it's coming from one of their own products.  Google insights on the GMB panel isn't enough to cut it when our client has thousands of local listings.

It was recommended a few years to apply UTM parameters to local URLs to get more accurate referral/source tracking in Google Analytics.  Here is an old Moz post about this process https://moz.com/blog/tracking-traffic-from-google-places-in-google-analytics

However does GA automatically separate this traffic out nowadays?  Is there a method to identify the traffic coming from Maps/Places without UTM parameters?  Is UTM tagging still necessary if we want to see these traffic reports?

I was curious if it is possible to markup a newsletter signup link for a client.  If yes, what schema property should I use?  https://schema.org/Action?

We are using JSON-LD to apply schema.  My colleague had question about applying @id tags in the schema parent lists:

While implementing schema, we've included @id as a parameter to both the "list" child of "ListItem" of a "BreadcrumbList" - on the same schema, we've added an @id parameter to mainContentOfPage and both @id parameters are set to the pages URL. Having this @id in both places is giving schema checker results that have the child elements of "mainContentOfPage" appearing under the "list" item.

Questions: is this good or bad? Where should @id be used? What should @id be set to?

Thanks for the insight!

I have just started using Link Detox to determine if our clients have links/domains pointing to their sites that could be harming them in organic search. In a few cases 7%-9% of links have been flagged as a high priority to be disavowed.

I would be interested in your opinion on the following:

1. If your site does not have a Google penalty is there an advantage to disavowing pages that have been flagged as high risk? When I go to those pages they look spammy and have no real value other than an inbound link.

2. If a client acquires another website/company and that website is now 301 redirected to the client's site, would "high risk" inbound links from the acquired company cause a problem for my client?

3. A client has taken down content from their site that was completely unrelated to their current business. Is there a benefit in disavowing those links to the old content that are deemed by Link Detox as being high risk?

Thank you,

Rosemary

I have a client that has images appearing on their on their Google+ profile that they don't want.  They are not user uploaded images....but images being uploaded via Google maps and other sources.  There is no readily available "delete" option for these particular photos.

Google provided this article about dealing with these photos https://support.google.com/business/answer/6130451?hl=en&ref_topic=6130059\.  It turns out we have to "flag" this photos to get them removed.  We can just take them off the Google+ profile.

Does anybody know a work around for this?  We don't want to wait weeks or months for Google to manually remove these photos.

Hi Peter:  Yes, we have already used that link because it was provided in Bing's message to us and that's where I pulled the two bulleted "issues" I referenced in the original email.

The question is, do we need to go to this trouble for Edge and what might it do to legacy versions of IE?  We checked other clients and all of them have alerts - or what Bing is calling "Suggestions".

I don't see everyone following MS's suggestions and if we don't what serious impact could there be?

Our client received an email from Bing WMTs  saying

"We have identified 4 known issues with your website in Microsoft Edge – the new default browser for Windows 10 and Bing –  Of the four problems mentioned, only two seem to be relevant (maybe)

• We’ve found that this webpage may include HTML markup that treats Microsoft Edge differently from other modern browsers. The new EdgeHTML rendering engine for Microsoft Edge is document-mode agnostic and designed for fast, modern rendering. We recommend that you implement one code base for all modern browsers and include Microsoft Edge as part of your modern browser test matrix.
• **We've found that this webpage may have missing vendor-specific prefixes **or may have implemented vendor-specific prefixes when they are not required in common CSS properties. This may cause compatibility problems with how this webpage renders across different browsers.

Last month the client received 20K visitors from all IE browsers and this is significant enough to be concerned about.

**Are other folks making changes to their code to adapt to MS Edge?  **