Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Where I work we currently have two profiles for the same address and we have not been penalised. Have you made sure the account content is totally different and also verified the listings?

Very cool.. be nice if it could be extended to the top 100

Note just seen the Edit - great to see it is now showing pretty much everyone that is active.

I beleive editing the .HTAccess file will possibly resolve this issue.
You need to push users via a redirect like the below if on an apache server. Hope this helps.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

For me Option 1 with 301 redirect from the old structure makes sense. After all the pages re-indexed I would imagine they should keep their rankings ok. Like you said having custom urls does have additional benefits.

I agree with Alick300 rather than having two domain names which will simply dilute your brand identity, why not simply go for local based results and implement specific landing pages for certain location you wish to market too.

maybe something like www.rainydaysumbrella.com/newyork or www.rainydaysumbrella.com/chicago etc

Since the EMD update, keyword rich domain names have had significantly less value. Concentrate on creating a rich brand experience with great content and customers at the heart and you won't go far wrong.

If, however you feel you cannot live without owning both domains there is no harm in owning them both some people simply do this as a safety net so others cannot utilise them. Before you buy one or maybe both domains, make sure you do a historical check of the domains to make sure there is no hidden negative history that you may have to tackle.

Goodluck selling your umbrellas

As per the other guys in the discussion I too have seen this taking place, as a national brand the 4 pack and not so much the local pack has caused a drop in our organic traffic across brands.

We also noted a large than normal increase in Ad Spend when some of our ads switched to the main ad block area from within the sidebar, this is however, now back under control.

Unfortunately the Organic nature of the online searches is being pushed further away from the search user whom is now in many cases just getting ads.

I was aware that the mobile icon was being tested and was resently confirmed to be rolling out. As such and as per Leonie, you may have not seen it in your browser as only the odd test saw it. Going forward this will likely be visible to all.

A bit more can be seen in these posts.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-anti-mobile-friendly-icons-19282.html
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-smartphone-icon-19233.html
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-smartphone-icon-15532.html

also a bit on mobile friendly ranking factors here

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-mobile-ranking-algorithm-19463.html

Cheers Andy and Jonathan,
I didn't check to see if they are paid links as yet - but will go have another look for sure.

Andy, I totally agree, despite being as clean as we can be, we do know that many of our competitors can be a little shady when it comes to SEO and we also understand that we cannot really challenge the super huge aggregators for authority, however consider ourselves to one of the best of the rest.

We do try and create great linkable assets, but mainly for peripheral elements associated with us e.g. charity news, product reviews etc I am trying to get more genuine insurance articles on our blog etc - infographics, case studies etc... but finding people that think our content is valuable to both them and their readers is the hardest bit. I think people have certainly become a little numb to direct contact and so the content really has to shine and stand out from the crowd.
Cheers for your help so far.

I was in the middle of very much the same kind of response when an email pinged up with a new answer.

What CleverPhD has stated in his great answer is very much the process I have tried to follow over the last couple of years and I also try and stick to one source for positions, as when compared most other tools they are relatively close to one another.

Secondly as stated again by CleverPhd, people have so much personalisation going on especially with Chrome and Google that I tend to only use the positions as close ballpark figures and hope they maintain the same area.

I personally use a number of tools, MOZ bing one, Google Search Console, SemRush, and SeoPowersuite.... as for managing my social my personal favourite is Buffer..... where i manage, FB, Twitter, G+, Pinterest, Instagram and LinkedIn.

I read an article the other day about hidden content etc. I would recommend not doing so as Google will not necessarily count it. I would recommend having the links visible and accesible for both Google and the user.

Here is the article I read.

You might be able to see some peaks and troughs in the graphs over at SEMRush. They may not be 100% accurate, but will hopefully demonstrate the timing for when things changed. This will then help you to correlate with which algo updates you were most likely affected.

However based on the info you originally gave and the practices that were originaly undertaken, it would not suprise me if you have been hit with pretty much everything.

Good luck with the recovery. Time and effort will in time see a reward.

As per the confusion I too was thinking it would be individual pages for each business in a location. As for the markups I suppose it depends on the different businesses being used.

If however they are all on one page then as per Andy I am not sure you can feature all the schema at the same time without causing some issues.

Have you signed up to mozscape first of all? You can try it for free. If so, hopefully this might help.

https://moz.com/products/mozscape/access

Have you also

1. Inform Google that there has been a change of address.
2. Re Crawled your site and resubmit in Webmaster Tools.
3. Update your xml Sitemaps to include all new pages.
4. Based on an externally generated list (Moz OSE) check all external links to be repointed. Starting with the most important pages first.

Hope this also helps, unfortunately a move is not a quick process, the new site needs time to be indexed and them climb up the rankings.

I know this may not be the case, but have you checked your site analytics to see if it is being hit by a number of these Russian bot / crawler style entities that have been doing the rounds of late, if so this could be another of the reasons you are seeing additional bounced number growing.

I found I had a few and over the last few weeks I have made an effort to remove a lot of this negative referral traffic and crawlers.

I hope this is not too simple an answer, but schema.org is my go to place. Depending on the page or content you can simply select the type and then normally at the bottom of each type of content there is an example of its applciation in html mircodata or via json. I hope this help.

I would imagine that the best solution would be to point the sub cat canonically to the parent this making the parent category page the dominant authority page.

Absolutely agree with Patrick, if it does not feel right and you feel uncomfortable/spammy in doing it then don't.

Always opt for a strategy that is open, clear and provides your end users with a genuine experience.

If you believe they are genuinely hindering your site then yes I would suggest disavowing the links where possible. Starting with those that are particularly spammy. Rather than doing a huge batch do a few at a time and measure the impact where possible.

Secondly, also mention within the #hashed comments in your disavow file, that you have tried to get in touch with the problems site administrators but have had no response. Google would like to see that you have tried to get in touch first to resolve the issue before jumping in to disavow.

Hope that's of some use.

Cheers

Tim