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Let's get in an internet argument!!! (That was a serious(ly fun) internet smile right there, bro.)

Social media can result in exposure that can result in lovely links outside of social media.

It's less of a stretch to say that organic links, outside of social media, as a result of social media exposure increase rankings.

The people at KISS Metric weren't incorrect at all. Their measurements aren't doubted. I don't doubt them.

But there are some, pretty critical, things that remain unsaid there.

Jinx, owe me a Coke.

The Edit

If a friend and I said the same thing at the same time, the first person to call 'jinx' was owed one soft drink. We posted roughly the same thing at about the same time. It's mildly amusing.

It looks like King Sumo.

Hi Ashish,

Our beloved Matt Cutts has, fairly recently, stated that social signals aren't part of the algorithm. Social signals aren't used for or against a site, regardless of their veracity. As unlikely as it sounds, Google just doesn't have the capability to accurately gauge social signals in a timely and accurate manner - or so we are told.

It sounds like you made a solid tactical decision in regard to how one should gain exposure. Congratulations, you made something good. How you iterate upon your recent success is up to you, but it sounds like you'll do just fine.

This is really only based on ~five minutes of messing around with SEM Rush, but it looks like some of your competitors have taken a little bit of a hit - to a greater or lesser degree. However, there is at least one actual competitor that appears to have increased their share quite a bit in that time.

If I had to hazard a guess, I would say Grossman Justice should be on your radar, if it isn't already. Yep. Sometimes it's just plain old competition.

Though I would probably revisit some of those guest posts on your site, done in 2012. They're pretty exact match anchor friendly. That might not be a terribly good thing. It wouldn't hurt to possibly nofollow those links.

Another thing that's a little strange and could be fixed easily is the 'Office Details' text on the contact page. It almost blends in with the background button. I don't think this is hurting much, it just looks bad. A little CSS tweak and you're looking good, at least on that point.

Though I would wonder who built thousands of links with the anchor text 'lawyer'. A lot of that happened hot prior to August 2014.

Without rambling on much more, I'm trying to say there are a lot of factors. Some of the little problems on your site, once fixed, can add up to bigger wins. Plus your competition has caught up to you. I don't think it's the plugin change, at least not at the moment.

Are we talking ACME Haberdashery and ACME Cobblers, or is this more of an ACME Plumbing and ACME Drain Cleaning situation? I gather that we're talking about local businesses, which comes with it's own bit of fun. I'm just trying to gauge if the difference in service offerings merit the effort.

Hi David,

This isn't really the forum for hiring consultants. As stated, you can go with the recommended list from Moz. I would much rather discuss some of the issues in the forum, out in the open. It's more fun that way.

Just from looking at a couple of the 19 or so domain names registered throughout the years, the situation looks like a bit of a hot mess. Best of luck.

I would do it one better and crawl from a local web server, just to be sure. But in all reality, a password protected directory is probably more accessible, in this instance.

There are some pretty good suggestions here, though I think we have your extreme case (50 pages) covered as well. Advanced Web Ranking can record results about as deep as you would like to go. Though you will have to 'tune' AWR and likely employ some proxies to get those results without being blocked.

Settings>Performance>General Performance Settings (in the second drop down)

I haven't used this utility in a couple of years, but it can go about as deep and wide as you need - on the spot - if you use proxy IP addresses. I used it to report on 200K+ total keywords (I'm glad those days are done-ish.), with one report comprising about 30K KW. That report took a bit of tweaking to avoid being blocked.

I'll go through these in order.

#1-#4 Not unless you're advertising a different domain name via collateral or other channels.

In regard to #3 specifically, that should be an easy SQL find and replace (e.g. Find smithjonespllc.com and replace with smithjonesdoepllc.com) if you have to change the name. Then get ready for a ton of NAP cleanup.

#5 This may be an interesting opportunity to measure your offline efforts. Perhaps a clone of the site could be blocked via robots.txt and meta robots. Though you're better off spending most of your efforts online anyway. It's just a thought.

#6 I've worked with a number of firms and partners come and go. So it's a question of permanence/vanity in many instances. Though it's entirely possible to make a page for the partner and run a local campaign for each partner. You'll more than likely get more mileage that way, and have less NAP cleanup issues.

My aunt is the President of her firm, though all of the properties only have the founding partner's names. The firm is over 100 years old and they're doing fine.

There are many times where I would take something similar to Scott's tact. I agree as well, he mentioned some good general practices. But this site has been in the wild for a bit and you just acquired it.

This means there's a good bit of homework to do before overhauling the entire permalink structure, for what I suspect is a considerable number of pages/posts. Knowing nothing else, the safest opinion I can render is to keep the structure as is for existing pages/posts (current traffic/link/revenue considerations) - and consider a custom post type and custom permalink workaround ('Sperimenting! Woooo!) for fun and profit(?). Your developer, or the WP development community, may have a better solution.

Though I generally tend to disagree with doing things simply because the competition is doing the same. If nothing else, the mentality tends to bleed over into everything. Just think of all the wasted time/opportunities. Some differentiation can be a good thing.

But if the custom permalink URLs tend to out-perform the slightly-lesser-than-pretty URLs over time, you can do a cost/benefit of total URL permalink change. (Rewrites... rewrites as far as the eye can see... buzzlightyear.jpg) But yeah, you'll probably have to confront the previous posts/pages permalinks at some time. I'm just saying confront the issue with some primary data, with the aid of secondary data.

I'll start with: Leave the existing URLs alone!!!

With the current permalink structure, you're possibly getting a slight page load speed boost. Apparently it's easier for WP to query and return a URL with numbers. I don't really understand how the speed boost happens, since everything has a numeric ID# anyway until the URLs become Pretty, so yeah.... there's that.

If we had our druthers, you and I, everything would be page-name post-name. It looks cleaner, it's easier to read and remember. Though in sports, information is time sensitive. The date in the URL would help a slightly savvier user know if you're talking about a game won in this season, rather than last season from the SERP.

This may be a little bit of a workaround, and I'm not a WP developer (I can muddle along and play until I get in trouble.) but you can make a custom post type with a custom permalink. That way, the old URLs stay the same and anything new can be done the way you seem fit. I'm not sure about your level of comfort with the guts of WP, but here's something you can repurpose or show to a dev: Custom Post Type - Custom Permalink Tut

Best of luck.

And now you can get to what you were trying to do in the first place. If I had a dollar...

That's odd that neither method works. There are still a few more methods you can try. You can find them here. If you could update how that works for you, that would be appreciated.

Whenever I see things like this, I always wonder how often people get fired for system problems beyond their control. At any rate, once you re-verify your account, the historic data should still be there. So no worries on that part.

I'm not terribly well-versed in IIS environments, but it sounds like your developer is speaking the truth/correct. Considering it's happening on the mobile version, and not the desktop, there's another hint in favor of a bad rewrite. So as mentioned above, set up a temporary redirect until the rewrite rule is fixed.

Also, it appears that the mobile and desktop URL serve significantly different content. That's generally something I would avoid. Mobile users want the same stuff as desktop users. So that's something else to think about.

You may be better off just doing a pattern match if your CMS generates a lot of junk URLs. You could save yourself a lot of time and heartache with the following:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?

That will block everything with with a ? in the string. So yeah, use with caution - as always.

If you're quite certain you want to block access to the image sizes subdirectory you may use:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /sizes*/

More on all of that fun from Google and SEO Book.

Robots.txt is almost as unforgiving as .htaccess, especially once you start pattern matching. Make sure to test everything thoroughly before you push to a live environment. For serious. You have been warned.

Google WMT and Bing WMT also provide parameter handling tools. Once you tell Bing and/or Google that you want their bots to ignore urls with certain parameter(s) you select. So if you wanted to handle it that way, it looks like ignoring the app= parameter should do the trick for most of your expressed concerns.

Good luck! explosions in the distance XD

You don't have to make a new listing for each location, though I recommend making one for each location. Even if they're in the same city, you can differentiate the listings with a descriptor. See here for more on that. It's pretty straight forward.

I'm not terribly familiar with search trends in Australia, but I'm fairly sure you would want the province in the title tag. Province (abbreviation) in the title tag would definitely be better for a local business. So your title tag may look something like Blue Widgets Gold Coast Queensland | Business Name.

The above would likely be the home page title for a business that sells blue widgets in Gold Coast. Now say the business also does Blue Widget Repair as a service. Your service page would look something like **Blue Widget Repair Gold Coast Queensland | Business Name. **

Now if you have another location, in another city - you would want a page with a title of Blue Widgets City Province | Business Name. Going a little further, you could use this page as the link on your business listings. Trust me, it's good stuff.

Why not just adopt WordPress? ; ) I generally don't work with the .Net platform in the wild, unless I'm prospecting. You may or may not believe some of the crazy things that platform does out of the box. So make sure to get a full crawl of the site and sort out any issues prior to dev work. I recommend Screaming Frog in most instances. But if you have a gigantic site and/or you may not be able to identify problems readily, you may find Deep Crawl worth the price.

At any rate, just make sure you have a pre and post launch crawl for comparison. That alone can save you hours of time, should something go a awry. If nothing else the crawls will help a consultant, should you need one in the future.

Since you're making major site changes, it's also a good idea to get some site speed benchmarks. (Get benchmarks under various traffic loads, if possible.) It's possible that you can end up with a slower site, even though it's responsive. There are a number of ways that can happen, but at least you'll know if you have a speed problem.

I recommend GTmetrix and Pingdom for the above tasks. Here are some really simple fixes from Feed The Bot that should help with speed, once you're on an Apache server.

Just remember, redesigns are a great time to catch any loose ends you 'didn't have time for' or were 'minor problems'. Those minor problems stack up to considerable wins, once they're righted. You're on the right path with a responsive redesign. Remember to preserve the source order of the site between versions (desktop, mobile, tablet) as much as possible. That will help with the speed as well.

Seconding EGOL's statement, for the most part.

Years ago, The Matt Cutts stated W3C valid code wasn't a ranking factor. There's been a bit of debate over the years, but there still isn't much evidence to support W3C validation itself as a ranking factor. So it's something you probably can put on the back burner for more pressing concerns.

Honestly, sometimes errors are flagged simply because a comment or two are a little wonky. But that won't really inhibit how competitive a site is. If the site has 'quite a few' errors and warnings, that could potentially decrease site speed. Site speed is a ranking factor.

I suppose my best answer is; "No, it's not a ranking factor itself. Though there's some potential for poor coding to harm something that is a ranking factor."

My apologies, it's been a while on this thread. Just tested what, and it doesn't what? What site? What would be awesome?