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** While this type of content would undoubtedly drive traffic, many users would not convert into customers as there is no service nearby. ** I agree.  My sites have lots of this type of content and I work very hard to get this traffic.   If you use Google's DFP you can target your house ads to display a geographically relevant creative for certain locations (for example... sports massage in Bentham, or Birkenhead, or Accrington) and show adsense for any other location.    This enables you to promote your own services where you have them and adsense to all other visitors.  You can also sell this geographically targeted ad serving to specific clients. I like the idea of a side menu but do you think this would be enough to allow the pages to rank? If you have a kickass article that gets a lot of links it will start to pull traffic for these geographic terms.  If competition is not strong or your pages develops significant link strength, then you could rank for these terms.   I get lots of geographic term traffic from these types of pages.  Lots.   If you have one of these pages with 30 great links it is going to compete.

Hi Will, A C-block is part of the IP address of a website (xxx.xxx.CCC.xxx), for example, with my blog, the IP address is 173.248.188.141 - the c-block is 188. Usually, websites that are all hosted on the same server have the same c-block. This is a way that Google can detect link-farms, where loads of sites are set up on the same server and used to link to your website. This is why it is good to have diversity in the amount of linking c-blocks. Inevitably, you will have some identical c-block links but that's ok (and is completely natural). In terms of the links to your website, you have links from 130 root domains that are made up of 70 unique c-blocks. This ratio is perfectly fine, so don't worry. Hope this helps.

How big are these mega menus? If you have thousands of links then you better cut 'em back. If you have a couple hundred on a powerful site that has great rankings and spider flow then I would not worry about it. I have seen those warnings for my site.  According to them my site has way to many links but I am happy with it and the site does great.

If you can check through all the backlinks and can be sure that they're good quality links, I'd bop in a 301 redirect. I look for two things when considering 301s: Traffic and live links.  Your client has both. If she is serious about promoting the new site as the definitive website for her brand, then I'd put in the redirect.  For continuity's sake, you may want to make the new page similar to the old one, or carry the same brand messaging, but I think a 301 is much more preferential than a landing page.  It would pass on link strength and also not interrupt the user's journey.

Hi Yes i see your point about the benefit to the client , but much like guest posting or an artist adding his name to a pice of work, referrals is part of our business. We are looking to add our credentials to a clients site, so when someone visits the clients site likes the looks of it, we want them to think, "i might just contact this company" we are trying to develop the least spammist way of doing this.

Hi, I am having the same difficulty trying to find a good strategy for long tail SEO for our ecommerce clients, considering that it is difficult to have long content on our product pages as it is not recommended, as well as the fact that it is quite difficult to compete with the likes of amazon, walmart, and even your own distributors! As such, I am thinking that to target long tail keywords, it would best be wise to create a blog consisting of different content and media that targets your specific keywords AND within an article for example, link back to your product page within the long tail anchor text your targeting to the product page everytime. In addition, you could also take advantage of testimonials and reviews for targeting long tail keywords on your product page. Hope that helps. Thanks

I still think that your anchor linking profile is too heavily weighted to the one term as it's over 60% the one keyword phrase. I don't profess to be an "expert" so it would be good for others to pitch in but a natural looking profile would be 80% brand name (company name) or that's the case if you check a site that hasn't had seo done to it. My experience of an over optimised anchor penalty is that you get relegated to the bottom of the pack in terms of searches. ie. you appear after all other relevant searches. Often this can be around 10 pages.

Hello Ross, Here is a very good guide on 301 Redirects which you need to setup in order to keep your rankings, I think it will explain everything you need to know... http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection Hope this helps!

yea this is what i was thinking to, but how big a slap are we getting, as its knocked us 100-200 places off I saw rads video the other day ago and made some extra changes, lighten the load on over optimisation. I have just removed one of the catering terms from the title, but this looks a bit excessive for over optimisation.

Sounds like you're doing it right! You want your URLs to end in a trailing slash, and for the URLs that don't, you want a training slash added. If that's what's showing up in your reports and in your spot checks, you're doing great! You may want to write a code that does this automatically -- e.g. that adds a trailing slash to any URL that doesn't have one, if that url doesn't inclue a filetype (to exclude bad things like /image.png becoming /image.png/) Note: If you're on Wordpress, you might try a plugin like http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/smart-404/ to catch any bad urls that might rear their heads later -- it or something like it (if you're not on WordPress) would also likely take care of the redirection issue you're having altogether.

As far as I know, OSE is simply a tool that crawls your site and as many as it can, so if the link is there, it will report it. OSE doesn't tell you what juice is coming to you, if any at all. So I would say it will probably report it as a followed internal link, if that's what the code says, (can't seem to get on OSE to explore further) but in terms of where the link juice goes, I'd say, as you said, it's "a link with no link juice"

thanks for the advice on this one, i always thought the sandbox was still around, i tend not to take on clients with very new domains or even recommend a domain change for this very reason, thanks for putting me right on this one, i will need to google!! Yea content and onsite has been completed, I didn't want to do much link building other than business citations.

Is the detailed report showing check marks that "corporate catering" is in the meta description and other areas that it's not in? For what it's worth, corporate catering does appear in the URL, Title, and H1. It also is displayed in the nav bar.