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Egol as always gives a common sense answer. I would not worry about a ratio, unless it is really bad. Search engines have a limit on how much of a page they will crawl, as there is no limit on how large a page may be, but unless you have a huge amount of code before content I would not be concerned. From Bing The page contains a large block of embedded script code. Search engines will ignore script code, but large quantities of script will force the actual text content of the page further down in the HTML. Since search engines may analyze only the first 100 KB of a page, it is possible that the script block may prevent search engines from indexing any page content.

Hi Sarah, Provided that these are physical locations that are staffed during normal business hours and not shared by another business, then, yes, it's typically a best practice to link from each Google+ Local page to its respective landing page on the website. I realize this isn't your question, but as it came up in this thread, I thought I'd address it first. Do you see a benefit for your customers in doing this? If so, go ahead. If not, what would be your goal in doing this? It can't hurt, but may not give you a visible boost in any way. Recommend you study the great new Moz Local Learning Center. Tons of good info there: http://moz.com/learn/local Hope this helps!

Sarah, I see you placed this question almost a week ago and received no help with it. First, I should say that probably the complexity of it without a url or example.com diagram makes it quite difficult even for those who are very experienced in Local optimization. Next, I saw a red flag from the beginning and I want to be very sure I understand what you have: You have bricks and mortar stores in various locations and you have an ecommerce site that represents all of those stores (my first thought is, like a Costco or other discount warehouse merchant). You have claimed all the locations in Google (you mentioned hummingbird) and have a local/G+ page for each and now, you are slipping in the rankings of the Local (7-pack) or for terms with keyword and geo keyword? (which or both). Now, you want to implement a branch locator on the site and "from looking at other websites with branch locators, they tend to a separate button/page with which you can search for a branch etc. However, they don't have location specific pages." This practice makes you wonder what a best practice would be (correct?) If the find a location link is in a sidebar or header (not the footer as that would be poor UI/UX) it will show from any page. To me, the second question is telling in that you are looking at someone searching for a location who is already on the site. While they will do that, you also must consider those who are searching and see your page in the SERPs. What do you want them to do? Do you want them to come to the site before they find a location? Or, are you fine with them shopping bricks and mortar first and foremost? I would set up each location with a "location" page that is reached from a separate branch locator page that is linked to from the other pages you want searchers/shoppers to be able to find locations from. So, if you sell furniture, I would have a link in the outdoor furniture section, the tables section, the bedroom section, etc.  and all would link to a single locator page where one could input a zip or city, state. (It could even have a list of locations if there are not too many for that.) If the page is on your site and the onpage SEO is around Find A Store Near You for example, there is a good chance that Google will site link that page. (Now, your searchers can choose find a store or shop online.) With the individual city or store pages, I would optimize them so they work for you Local G+ and you will still have the opportunity to rank for non Local SERPS with other pages. The 7 pack is local and the other organic listings allow you more possibility to rank. Remember, typically, a page that is in the 7 pack, etc. will not show in the other organic listings. One assumption I am making is the stores do NOT have their own websites. Hopefully, I have given you enough or provided good questions so that with answers we can assist you further. All the best, Robert

For a personal project, I implemented a CDN to my site (MaxCDN). The CDN now delivers every image via a subdomain and the CDN has sped my site's load speed. My goal from the start was speed, and in fact I got obsessed with load speed as I wanted to score over 90 in Google's PageSpeed and GTMetrix. There was another element at play and it was the most crucial one - the customer. I'm impatient when it comes to web browsing and I know I'm not alone. We know what we want when we click links, and we expect it to load fast. I am my own customer so speed was important. I name my image files with SEO in mind, using dashes, key phrases relavant to the image and alt tags, but I also know images aren't the sole driver for link backs and leads. Your site is an ecommerce site, if you have up to 21 images per page, speed is the importance here. Your customers are more likely to link/share to your product page not images The goal for you is an ecommerce conversion. Users who share your images might fall into 2 groups, users who share images for the aesthetic value and users who share the image for a purchase. Those sharing for purchase will more likely share the page URL and that's the audience you want. This ties into how users will find your images, search engines will offer the ability to see the image (aesthetic audience) and visit the page (potential purchaser). Getting the right alt tag, image file name will help rank your image higher in the search result for images Hosting your images in a subdomain should be fine as your site is an ecommerce one, it isn't deviantArt where they want every link to the core domain You already are using the correct file names and alt tags. Images are just one element of an optimisation strategy. To conclude, I would put yourself in your customer's shoes and ask, what do I want when I visit your ecommerce site. Will a slow site frustrate/make you leave? Will speed change your experience with the site and thus make you browse more? How are you showing such large images? Is the user experience fluid?

Hi Peter, Many thanks for your thoughts and taking the time to answer. Yes I have been trying to add richer content on my most popular local pages although it can be quite difficult when you have 90 odd locations , so I've done the top 25-40 depending on the category and I will remove some of the lesser popular locations for now to decrease duplicate/thin content ratio. I agree , that the citations would be the way forward. I have started doing these as well for at least 20 locations although some don't have a link back to my local page but I believe that google is really looking for the NAP as a way of local verification as opposed to a link. Good point regarding the .com and co.uk. These mainly go to my home page but I am looking ay my competitors,their ratio is better than mine so I will try to improve this also. Thanks for the Miriam Ellis Article - I will study this in details. First impressions , it does look very good and has some great pointers. One again Many thanks Sarah

Hi Sarah, Good questions! Regarding choosing categories - no, do not use geo terms in the categories. This will likely lead to penalization. Some tips: it's best if you can choose at least 2 of Google's pre-set categories as your first 2 categories if you can't find pre-set choices for all 5, but if you have to use your own custom-written categories for the last 3, that's fine. Be sure they follow the 'is-not-does' rule. So for you, your business IS a carpet cleaning company, so a category like that is fine, but your company DOES carpet cleaning and that is not an allowed category. Similar examples: plumber is okay, but plumbing is not. Dog walker is okay, but dog walking is not. Hair salon is okay, but hair cuts is not. So, be sure to follow this rule. Regarding what to put in the business description field, again, strongly advise against using any type of geo terms in this field (no cities, zip codes, phone numbers, regional terms, county terms, etc.). While there has never been a public rule against this, it has long been observed that the use of geo terms in the category field can dock your listing. So, avoid that. The best use of the business description field, in my opinion, is to offer up your key selling points in this area. For example, if you've won a Best-Of award. Or if you offer a free initial consultation. Or a money back guarantee. Or have 35 years of experience. In other words, share your unique value proposition here. I also try to avoid using any of the keywords in the description field that I've already used as a category. Again, this isn't a publicly acknowledged rule, but it has been observed in the past as possibly being problematic. The only thing you need for Google to understand the locale of a given Google+ Local page is its address and phone number field. Fill these out accurately and depend on that rather than using geo terms any place else on the listing - not in the business title, categories, description or anywhere else. Hope this helps!

I have approx. 1500 products which can be hired from 80 locations so what I have done it first split the products up into approximately 20 categories and then 8 to 10 subcategories per category and then have 80 location pages for each Category and sub category. Each location page also have a Google Business Local listing as well. So , yes there is some degree of duplication as I have 20 categories x 80 cities and then least 8 Sub Categories per category x 80 cities I have written unique content for the more popular cities on the category and sub category landing pages etc but as you can see, it would take me years to write complete unique content everywhere… My site is currently 50K plus pages. I can’t see any other way of doing it ?

Your checkout and/or converting process is something that should always be optimised for mobile. I've seen on so many sites have a huge spike in drop-off rate, cart abandonment etc from mobile devices, just because the process has not been optimised for the devices. Make the form easy to fill out - increase text box sizes, scroll bars and other things if you need to.  If your industry requires quite a bit of detail in the form, this may not be enough.  For those cases, I've seen solutions that include providing a pop-up box allowing you to email the form to yourself, allowing you to fill it out a later date or when you're back on the PC.  This is a fairly easy thing to implement, simply make it trigger when it detects a user agent from a mobile device (iPhone, iPad, Android etc).

Here is the link http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test

http://www.metamend.com/google-dance.html

A 301 will transfer those unwanted inbound links to the new url.  You'll essentially have the same problem. A google employee said recently that if you want to disavow inbound links, you should make the target page 404.  So create a new url for the "damaged" pages, but don't 301 them.  Let the "damaged" pages go to a hard 404 (no softies).

Youy should be looking for high pages per day as a indication that google sees your site as good content or changing content, you should be looking for low time spent to show your site has quick download times. Kilios per day is relevant to pages downloaded, if your time spent is high you might look at this more closly

Hi Sarah If you can’t create unique content yourself have you thought about ways in which you could have unique content created quickly and easily so it doesn’t take years? How about encouraging customers to review the service that they have got and their experience in the location they hired from? You could do this by opening up a discount on your next hire or probably more practically a free entry into a prize draw for something that will tempt them to create a review? This is a tricky one if you want to keep ranking for all your locations but I think it is possible and something that is worth giving time to in order to experience results you have previously...

Hi Russ, Our traffic had gone down a little bit earlier in June but .... We first got an message on 22nd June - in GWT - Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site. Then on 26th June , 80% of our rankings for our keywords fell off a cliff. We don't know if it was the refresh from the panda update or if it was the google bot problem. We have never had this message beforebut noticed we had some dodgy urls being produced from our site. We don't know how long this has been going on for but wasnt sure if either the googlebot changed it's way of working or we just so happenned for the Panda refresh to happen a couple of days after the message. I would have thought that our rankings would have suffered on 11th June if it was the Panda that done it. In the meantime, we have put 301 redirects on the dodgy urls thanks Sarah.

Hi Sarah, If you mean putting a rel canonical tag on a page that you are going to (or are) 301 redirecting to another page...then it doesn't matter at that point as the 301 redirect happens at the server level and will redirect the bot to the new page before the old page (and rel canonical tag is read). Hope this helps! Cheers!

Ahhh,  I see what you mean now. Yes, good idea . Will get that implement to. Yes, everything is duplicated.It's all the same apart from the url which seems to be bringing in to different locations instead of one. Odd url Generated(notice it has 2 locations in it) http://www.bestathire.co.uk/rent/Vacuum_cleaners/Walsall/250/Alfreton Correct location specific urls - http://www.bestathire.co.uk/rent/Vacuum_cleaners/Walsall/250 http://www.bestathire.co.uk/rent/Vacuum_cleaners/Alfreton/250 thanks Sarah.

It's worth noting that title tags are often misused. Either because webmasters are trying to spam their keywords or because they're not aware of it's proper use. Obviously sets the subject of the page. Should only be used for sub sections of the page. For example: User Reviews is good usage, because its a sub section of the page. Featured Product , Online Users aren't really sub sections of a page, so I'd avoid using title tags for things like that.

Would this kid be willing to log back on to the forums and remove his links? I guess contacting the moderators might work as well

Many thanks , you have been most helpful. Yes, I see your point. I think we will have a look at implementing this on a couple of categories where we can monitor traffic and rankings . Then if it looks good, then will roll it out to the rest of the site. Thank you. Sarah

With pagination if you have correctly implemented rel="next" and rel="prev" , you should be fine . But one issue I have seen with my clients is that , eCommerce sites usually have multiple ways to sort pages higest price lowest price a-z z-a etc all these are duplicate content if you have not  used rel="Canonical" .  Hope this helps you out