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Hi Anthony, Normally, my answer would be the same as the one given by Bryan. The simplest path in most multi-location business scenarios is to have 1 page per city and 1 page per service, rather than trying to cover every possible geo/keyword combo. However, most people ask about this before they have invested so much time and money in the development of the site and its content. Because you've already made the investment, this is what I would suggest you evaluate with the decision makers at the practice: Is the content simply mediocre or is it actually duplicate content? If the former, can you envision a way to take these pages to a new level of usefulness? For example, what if, on these pages you currently have, you showcased all of the free or inexpensive auxiliary local resources for mental health? I'm thinking of group therapy, mental health department, serene places to walk for meditation, free yoga or tai chi resources, elder advocacy groups, healthy and fun things for children, lectures, seminars, outdoor concerts, community gardens, pet shelters and anything else you could think of that could make a meaningful difference in patients' mind and body health. Because you would be doing this based on the symptoms of certain conditions and the resources of a given city, each page would, by its very nature, be unique and helpful. You would have, in fact, greatly enhanced the hyperlocal value of each page. But, if the content is duplicative, that's another matter as it could really be hurting the business and not doing much for the practice's clients. You might, in this case, decide to dismantle a structure that probably shouldn't have been built in the first place and go with the 1 page per city/ 1 page per service model, perhaps even implementing some of the hyperlocal suggestions I've brainstormed to improve the city pages, the health condition pages or both. You could cull the duplicate pages for their best work, build fewer, much better pages instead using some of the old work and greatly adding to it and end up with a very strong but slimmer site. I think either path is viable, depending on the resources available to you. Hope this helps!

Good point. I didn't even consider that Twitter links are no-follow. That almost makes it a moot point right there. Thanks Monica!

Hi Everyone, I got this question answered by google and thought I'd share. Hello Anthony, Thank you for the clarification, You have creative control of the information displayed. The bulk spreadsheet allows you to enter in a blanket description. However on a personal note I prefer custom when I read a page, (and it does no harm to customize) to me it makes it feel more "friendly". Customizing a description should have no effect on ranking, any changes can take a day or 2 to be seen. In that time the page may act strange, but it should be back to normal within the week. Ultimately the choice to personalize or use a standard description is up to you. Here it will have no effect on verification or ranking. To be concise, I suppose the answers are as follows: 1) Should I copy and paste each location's current unique description into the spreadsheet, or just write one very good description and copy it for all 20 locations?This is 100% your personal preference.   2) Does Google like/dislike "duplicate content" as it applies to business descriptions?  Google does not care.3) Is changing a location's description likely to temporarily harm the "ranking" of my business location in search results?No. It has no effect.  Hope this helps!

Even if you get everything right when undertaking a re-design, you can't get away from the fact that some things have changed and your search performance is likely to impacted. It can take weeks or months for the site to regain the lost traffic. From the analytics screenshot, it looks like you've done a pretty good job. As Jeff mentioned, you do need to take into account seasonal traffic fluctuation as well as any other external activity. One site I manage has experienced a significant change in traffic since the end of British Summer Time. Can you compare you traffic with the same period last year. Can you see any similar fluctuation when you look at Google Trends for some of your keywords? Have your rankings changed? What keywords and what was the landing page for each keyword. How has the landing page changed in the re-design. The problem with aggregate/average analytics metrics is that they don't provide you with much of an insight into what's happening. Can you segment your non-paid search traffic, and your direct traffic and see if both segments are affected in a similar way. If your non-search traffic is also affected then it might suggest an external factor. Take a look at your landing pages for your search traffic and compare them to the previous higher traffic period. Are all pages similarly affected or are there significant differences on particular pages. If there are you can compare the content of these pages to the previous incarnation of the site and see if you can explain why there might have been a drop. Of course, I'm assuming that the main goal of the re-design wasn't to "get more visitors", but to get more leads or sales. You say that the bounce rate is much lower and the time on site is better. What about conversions? Again, segment your non-paid search traffic and compare the number of conversions and the conversion rate before and after the update. It's perfectly possible to have less traffic and improve your conversions if the traffic is more relevant and with the right commercial intent. Hope this help.

I sometimes put noindex on category pages too, because I have the manual excerpts also present on the blog index pages (the pages that list all blog posts in chronological order). But is really a decision I make based on the type of website. There are websites where category pages present much interest then the chronological post listing. On these I don't use noindex, but I also do something to prevent duplicate content - I add some static text to the category pages so that they don't contain only the post excerpts.