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I've never heard of that being the case, especially considering how many people / companies handle bulk listings.  It could easily affect your spot check of their results unless you have a localized machine dialed in though. Local Rankings are much more likely to be affected by the things listed here: http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors. Cheers!

Which ones are in your sitemap, uppercase or lowercase?  Have you double checked any and all internal links on your site to make sure everything is lowercase? Are there other sites out there pointing to uppercase? Are you 100% certain of a complete purge?

If you are, then they should eventually stop crawling the uppercase.  Still, having them crawl the upper case and receive a 301 redirect doesn't involve much bandwidth.

I would double check the sitemap file to see if it's still accurate or if the site has changed and the URLs in the sitemap no longer correspond to the structure of the site.  My guess is that the root domain is the only one of the 111 that is correctly listed.  Cheers!

Your domain strength is pretty high, so on your home page and top pages, those navigational links are going to be fine, but you could nofollow the bulk of them on the individual blog pages.

You already have the tweet and facebook like buttons that are getting use, but you might be able to add some easy to copy & paste code, similar to a badge, to try and boost inbound links (http://www.seomoz.org/dp/badges). Also, since you have so much content you could try getting a Polyvore-like feature added to your site that helps people make a collage from the different wedding details they like. (http://www.polyvore.com/).

I didn't dig too deeply so these are just off-the-cuff examples, but hopefully enough to spark some ideas for you.

Possibly, but the search of "plumber" is going to be a much more varied result than "city name plumber".  Google knows that people typing just plumber could be looking for plumber training, plumber how to's on youtube, plumber photos, definitions of plumber for their first grade school report, and so on.

I think the nav menu works well from a UX perspective so complete removal might be a little drastic.  You could look into using the term 'cruise' a bit less within the menu as you get, "Africa Cruise, Alaska Cruise, Baltic Cruise... and so on," but I'd also check these changes against Google performance instead of just the Moz tool alone.  If they aren't performing whatsoever and duplicate content looks to be an issue it could warrant a change.

It certainly could. You'd also want dev to use 301 redirection when applying a change like that. The sitemap isn't a hard fast rule for what you want indexed in the search engines, rather an aid to help them crawl your site. If it's in error they'll still be able to crawl and index more than what's listed on the sitemap. Ideally though, your sitemap is an accurate reflection of the pages of your site.

All the risks associated with changing the domain structure of a site just to get your keyword in as CNAME just aren't worth it for established sites.  Unless you're doing some distinct branding via the domain structure, I'd just be happy with having the keyword phrase after the 'co.uk/'

Google's guideline is here: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177 with the most applicable portion  being in the address section:

• Make sure that your page is created at your actual, real-world location.

• Use the precise address for the business rather than broad city names or cross-streets. P.O. Boxes are not considered accurate physical locations.

• If you need to specify a mailbox or suite number within your physical location, please list your physical address in Address Line 1, and put your mailbox or suite number in Address Line 2.

• If your business rents a temporary, "virtual" office at a different address from your primary business, do not create a page for that location unless it is staffed during your normal business hours.

So his locations need to be staffed, open to the public, office based locations. If he's serving clients in 4 different cities, but only has one office in one city it's not the same thing as the requirements above. That would be, "Service-area businesses--business that serve customers at their locations--should have one page for the central office or location and designate a service area from that point. If you wish to display your complete business address while setting your service area(s), your business location should be staffed and able to receive customers during its stated hours. Google will determine how best to display your business address based on your business information as well as information from other sources. Learn more about service-area businesses."

The document as a whole is worth the read. Cheers!

Hello. Depending on your CMS, shopping cart, or web site design software you can often find sites that are well-designed and ranking well, as one example: https://wordpress.org/showcase/tag/ecommerce/ (for Wordpress). you'll be able to find similar pages for Magento, Shopify, and others.  Cheers!

Yup. Update the site map with your current and accurate URLs and you should be on your way.

Hi David,

Semantically related keywords are part of it, as is search intent, inbound links, semantic network relations, and general Google mojo.  The logic behind it is that having the exact words on a page isn't as importnat is being a highly relevant match for the searcher's topic and intent.  With the data available to Google they're pretty readily able to infer those connections.

Rand covers this in-depth during a recent Whiteboard Friday http://moz.com/blog/topic-modeling-semantic-connectivity-whiteboard-friday

I'd put this in the worthwhile column. Google is trending towards standardization of things somewhat like this: mobile, pagespeed, facts -- so having outside data that universally agrees about a company's site, location, etc would further their standing in my opinion.

Another factor is that reviews and social presence might be not connecting up as well as possible if the associations above aren't being made.

Alt tagging is good for the visually impaired, so it's partly a best practice for that reason. I'd treat readability issues the same: avoid keyword stuffing, make the alt tag something informational. If it brings about some SEO benefit because of that, great. Two birds.

Possibly due to 302 vs 301 redirects. Those pages still load. Mozscape didn't update those pages from their previous crawls yet. Fixing the sitemap will help, further internal and external links pointing to the lowercase URL versus the uppercase will help too.

There's actually even more scenarios to it than just that, but thankfully there's a great Moz post on this from April 2014: http://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights that covers your questions, and more.

To your specifics, yes a user can set a specific language and Google will try to serve results weighted to their language settings, regardless of location (the German user in the UK per your example). They can also serve German results to anyone in Germany by default (location based).

Again, the blog post breaks it all down very well. Go take a look and you should be able to parse what you need for your exact situation.  Cheers!

Hi Kanya. Just to clarify, you're saying that this new site is going to represent a new store? And that the new store has a different phone, location, name and domain name? To some degree it sounds like it would fall under the franchise model when doing local listings... Yet it also sounds like they sites and stores are trying to be different enough that a customer wouldn't know that they are owned by the same person if they visited either a physical location or the site.  Ultimately it sounds like more cost and work for the owner, but if they're willing to differentiate that much between stores, it sounds that's part of their overall model. Still, a few more details would help. Cheers!

Kate Morris wrote a nice post on how to break up sitemaps for large sites a few years ago, but it still holds true today: http://moz.com/blog/multiple-xml-sitemaps-increased-indexation-and-traffic, so following the advice there should help on your first question.

Your 301 redirect to English should probably be a 302 and based on browser language settings.  Is it possible for anyone to get to a file or folder at www.example.com/whatever...?

Third, see the blog mentioned above. She gets into the details of how to create an Index format for your soon to be many sitemaps.  Cheers!

It's likely they used 301 then if that's what they said. You can check using an HTTP header tool. Uppercase in the Google results is odd as well. You'll want to double check this stuff and get the sitemap changed to help prompt the use of lowercase instead.

Hi Guy. The Corporation schema is probably best suited to markup for publicly traded companies: http://www.schema.org/Corporation as it has the following uses...

tickerSymbol: The exchange traded instrument associated with a Corporation object. The tickerSymbol is expressed as an exchange and an instrument name separated by a space character. For the exchange component of the tickerSymbol attribute, we reccommend using the controlled vocaulary of Market Identifier Codes (MIC) specified in ISO15022.

duns: The Dun & Bradstreet DUNS number for identifying an organization or business person.

legalName: The official name of the organization, e.g. the registered company name.

And a few others.

It may be a question of using some Extension markup to better indicate the nuances of stock quotes. For example, maxPrice and minPrice could conceivably be used for High and Low price quote values, while price/open could reflect Opening price quote, and price/close the close.  With those you'd have the structure of an OHLC bar.