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It wont negatively affect your website, but people are visual learners and skim content online, and providing a visual cue as to the precise nature of the link they are following from your website might build more trust to you ultimately in your visitors' eyes.

Absolutely agree - content marketing, on top of authority accreditation links and other layers of diverse links built on trust.

Thanks a ton Miriam! Totally makes sense...

Best.
Todd

Hi guys, I have a question that might have been asked previously but warrants asking again.

What is the best workaround for Google Local verification for a business that is located at a physical address that does not receive mail. I have a friend who lives in an area that does not receive mail.

This particular person tried using a local PO box to verify, but as it turns out that is a poor option a) because it is not allowed within the guidelines of Google Local, and b) because the listing was not accepted as a unique address and is listed without an address in Local because of this.

Is there anyone with recent experience in terms of getting around this and verifying perfectly legitimate businesses in no-mail areas?

I would have thought Google would have provided a workaround for those types of businesses.

Any thoughts / experience would be appreciated!

Short answer - it can.

The best thing to do is audit the new website in a dev environment to be sure that the new website code is correct, error free, pages do not have duplicate or canonical issues, and all on-page factor have been copied over correctly.

Difficult to obtain in practice without a significant creative campaign, and overall those links are as valuable as the inbound links to those sites and pages. Being .edu or .gov inherently does not give these websites more value from a link standpoint. The fact that they are .gov and .edu draws links to them - and that is the reason why most .edu and .gov links on quality, trusted contextual pages count for alot.

I would not suggest you start with low level links because this sends signals to Google at the onset that your brand and website is lower quality.

I would instead focus on ways to develop high quality links from trusted sources.

The number one issue we find with template changes is inadvertent duplicate content changes.

Do a full initial duplicate content check across the website including canonicalization of urls - especially at the homepage.

Stay closely aligned to data from the Google Webmaster Tools and use queries in Google in quotes to pull up all pages in Google cached for those terms to help investigate whether duplicate content is an issue.

Hi Joshua,

Overall the competition doesn't look terribly high for that keyword. I always opt to keep it clean insofar as inbound link quality. There is very little reason you couldn't move SelectWise out of position two for this keyword.

Try the comparison product approach in inbound links. It helps the links look more editorial as opposed to trying to rank a competitor / alternate website for a potential brand or trademarked term company.

What keywords is she trying to rank for? This will help us answer the question

Using the Google webmaster tools site change of address helps. Find it in the GWT Site configuration > change of address area.

Used with 301 redirection, the change usually takes place in about 2-3 weeks, depending on the authority of the domain.

It's a possibility. There have been ongoing discussions on internal linking on most of the major SEO forums for quite some time.

My personal feeling is that most websites can effectively reduce the number of internal links by auditing their link flow, determining their "ideal" real estate and ensuring that they are not necessarily duplicating unnecessary links, which would steal some of the juice that might otherwise go to some of the bigger pages.

Only <5% of people ever see the footer in the average website, so my opinion has always been that the footer should contain supporting links to areas to help the user in "context". Contact, About, Sitemap and Investors, for examples, are classic links one might find there.

Big real estate - or important pages in the website - should be linked to from your main nav or areas above the fold with lots of user exposure.

Keep in mind when changing and removing links - it is a process. Do not go in and remove all or a significant part of your links in one week.

Make one or two good changes, then wait for a period of a week or so, then make others small changes over time

Hope this helps.

Todd
www.seovisions.com

Hi Steven.

Depending on the type of business and geography it caters to, I generally advise clients to start at local and branch out. This helps establish your business as a bonafide, real business with a physical location. I believe it helps build significant trust. Be sure to align your phone numbers, physical business address and other details (synchronization) between profile accounts.

In terms of links always build the most authority links you can first. For obvious and unobvious reasons. Authority links build trust faster and allow more cushion in terms of both profile build rate and the types of links you can build moving forward.

Also, more trusted links in my experience actually help improve the weight or other links in parallel in the campaign when built correctly.

Hope this helps,
Todd

Drops such as the one you have experienced can be difficult to assess. I would advise the following procedures to rule out other issues first. As Egol correctly stated it is important to not jump to fixes right away, for two reasons. First of all, the situation could be temporary and could revert. Second of all, changes you make will obscure the potential issues, making it more difficult to find problem spots.

1. Check robots.txt to ensure there are no issues with file additions that could be blocking major pages
2. Check link canonical tag, if you use it, to ensure there are no issues there with incorrect urls
3. Check inbound links both using inbound link tools and Webmaster tools for any suspicious bursts of links or links that look dodgy you might not account for
4. Run a sitewide meta check on all titles and meta descriptions and ensure everything is correct. There are software companies that offer fairly inexpensive options that will spider the entire website relatively quickly. Do this late at night post-swell
4. Use Xenu to check all broken links and fix. Even if there are only a few.
5. Run the google bot indexing tool in GWT and check for any instances of funny code or potential problems
6. Analyze your analytics to determine which keyword clusters lots the most positioning. This can often give you clues as to what might have happened.

Hope this helps.
Todd
www.seovisions.com

Many of the" local" style generic and niche directories use this approach. Many travel sites lean heavily on this model as well. Sites pull in a number of related clusters of content including

-Points of interest
-Related stores in area
-Weather
-Reviews
-Comments
-Information aggregated from the Internet and published in a 'meaningful' way (subjective of course to the user)

Hope this helps.

Todd