Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Justine!

Great question, as far as I understand, Google does NOT actually use “liking” reviews or marking them as “helpful” as any ranking factor. However, I believe it does use them to rank which reviews to show. Similar to how Yelp shows reviews.

In regards to your team, they shouldn’t have any problems if they decide to Ike the reviews. That being said, liking the reviews is just patting your client on the head, but not actually majorly affecting his rankings.

I suggest sharing that with him, he may not find it as important if he knows. On the flip side, if it makes him happy, your team shouldn’t have anything to worry about. I wouldn’t suggest liking every review simply because not every review is ”helpful” some might be truly more helpful than others,

I hope that answers your question!

Here is an article that shares a little bit of info: https://contractorcalls.com/7-things-didnt-know-google-reviews/ see point 6.

If that didn’t answer your question, Mozzer Miriam Ellis might have more insight.

Best,

Alex Ratynski

Hi Justin,

Great question, to help answer that question I will use a quote from Google's support document regarding duplicate content.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en

"Examples of non-malicious duplicate content could include:

• Discussion forums that can generate both regular and stripped-down pages targeted at mobile devices
• Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs
• Printer-only versions of web pages

"

I think your situation would likely fall under the similar category as "acceptable" like the store items example I highlighted. Keep in mind although duplicate content should really be avoided when possible, Google does NOT actually penalize site's for having it.

Although I would try to keep the overall amount of duplicate content to a minimum, it shouldn't be too big of an issue. Utilize the unique descriptions, in this case, you likely won't have to worry too much about the duplicate content.

I hope that helps!

Best,
Alex Ratynski

Great question Daniel!

Without all the information (which errors you were given) this may be a difficult question to answer.

Because Google doesn't openly share which ranking factors have the most impact or "weight"  the answer to this question is up for debate depending on the SEO. That being said, in my personal experience the most impactful differences on both rankings and more importantly user experience is performance & On-Page optimizations.

Here is how you might prioritize your SEO improvements:

1. Fix any crawling errors first (meta no-index, blocked by robots.txt, etc..)
2. Improve the page speed load time
3. Fix On-Page SEO Issues (Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, etc...)
4. Everything else

My reason for putting it in this order is simply because you want to first make sure search engines can even crawl and index your site. If they can't everything else will be mute.

Next you want to improve speed because if the page truly loads 10+ seconds, then most people will become extremely frustrated and leave. Improving this user experience will not only be better for Google but most importantly your users. Which is the whole reason we have a website after all.

Third I chose On-Page SEO because when you improve your on-page, Google will then be able to clearly see what your page is about and be able to rank it more efficiently. I would suggest focusing on those things in that order first and foremost as it will make the biggest improvements for BOTH your users and rankings.

I hope that helps!

Best, 
Alex Ratynski

Hi there!

Alex here,

I know when you first look at your domain and see a spam score like that it can certainly be frustrating or scary, but don't panic.  Just because your "spam score" is at 23% does NOT mean that your site or domain is actually spammy.

The way spam score works (and huge shoutout to the hard working team at Moz for creating it) is by looking at 27 different "signals" or "features" that _most _sites that are spam have, and comparing it to yours. A common misconception is that Spam Score is created by analyzing the links from other spammy sites and who they also link to. There are many factors.

That being said, your domain/site may be getting the score simply because it doesn't "pass" many of the signals like:

• Low number of pages found
• Domain name length
• No Phone Number Present
• Abnormally short or long URL path length

I encourage you to look over all the signals (and keep them in mind as you work with your domain) over at this helpful page:
https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/help/link-explorer/link-building/spam-score

They include a super helpful video as well.

So in summary, feel free to use your domain. Don't get too worried off of the Spam Score alone.

I hope that answered your question and was helpful!

Best, 
Alex Ratynski

Thank you, Dan! We have indeed been very transparent about the repercussions of not being indexed. Appreciate you taking the time to respond.

My client has had a site since 1996 (the first one was a www subdomain, his current site has no www). He came to my company for SEO about a year ago, after having a WordPress site that was accidentally set to not be crawled/indexed by search engines.

We set the site to be indexed and added a blog. Since then, he has had slow increase in keyword rankings (on page 3 or most globally searched terms) but is still nowhere near page 1 for most of his keywords. He thinks my company has done nothing, while I see the keyword improvements as a sign of success - slow, gradual - but going in the right direction.

I don't know if he was ranking well before he had a site that was not set to be indexed - but if he was on page one, would he eventually return there? Or do we have to build everything over again?

Thanks for the input.  We have an employee that only does Google places right now.  They contact our doctors and make sure the PINs are done correctly, as well as uploading pictures and video.

I will be sure that we are getting the most out of directories as we can.  As for the guest commenting on other blogs, we train the doctors to do that.  However, most don't have time.  It is difficult for us to find blogs all over the country for different dentists and put a link on each one.  I will give it a shot though.  Thanks for all the feedback, and if anyone else has a thought I would be happy to hear their ideas.

We own a small web design company that both creates the sites and then does the seo marketing for them once they are created.  The business has grown to have over 100 customers.   However, as we sell more sites we find our SEO team is somewhat short staffed.  So far, the area that suffers the most is the link building aspect of SEO.

The sites we build are for dentists and usually only contain 10 to 20 pages.  Enough to list the services they offer and where they are located.  Here is my question:

We need to get the most effective links possible for over 100 sites with just a couple of employees.  What would be the most effective links to try for.  We cant chase down every stray link for our doctors.  And, we don't have time to do in-depth research for each client each month as we are already pushing ourselves to the limit.  In time, we will have more employees to help share the SEO load.  But for now, where should we be spending our time most effectively?  We can usually only budget one or two hours per client each month for linking.

Thanks for any advice you can offer.

Great question Daniel!

Without all the information (which errors you were given) this may be a difficult question to answer.

Because Google doesn't openly share which ranking factors have the most impact or "weight"  the answer to this question is up for debate depending on the SEO. That being said, in my personal experience the most impactful differences on both rankings and more importantly user experience is performance & On-Page optimizations.

Here is how you might prioritize your SEO improvements:

1. Fix any crawling errors first (meta no-index, blocked by robots.txt, etc..)
2. Improve the page speed load time
3. Fix On-Page SEO Issues (Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, etc...)
4. Everything else

My reason for putting it in this order is simply because you want to first make sure search engines can even crawl and index your site. If they can't everything else will be mute.

Next you want to improve speed because if the page truly loads 10+ seconds, then most people will become extremely frustrated and leave. Improving this user experience will not only be better for Google but most importantly your users. Which is the whole reason we have a website after all.

Third I chose On-Page SEO because when you improve your on-page, Google will then be able to clearly see what your page is about and be able to rank it more efficiently. I would suggest focusing on those things in that order first and foremost as it will make the biggest improvements for BOTH your users and rankings.

I hope that helps!

Best, 
Alex Ratynski

Hey Justine!

Great question, as far as I understand, Google does NOT actually use “liking” reviews or marking them as “helpful” as any ranking factor. However, I believe it does use them to rank which reviews to show. Similar to how Yelp shows reviews.

In regards to your team, they shouldn’t have any problems if they decide to Ike the reviews. That being said, liking the reviews is just patting your client on the head, but not actually majorly affecting his rankings.

I suggest sharing that with him, he may not find it as important if he knows. On the flip side, if it makes him happy, your team shouldn’t have anything to worry about. I wouldn’t suggest liking every review simply because not every review is ”helpful” some might be truly more helpful than others,

I hope that answers your question!

Here is an article that shares a little bit of info: https://contractorcalls.com/7-things-didnt-know-google-reviews/ see point 6.

If that didn’t answer your question, Mozzer Miriam Ellis might have more insight.

Best,

Alex Ratynski

Hi there!

Alex here,

I know when you first look at your domain and see a spam score like that it can certainly be frustrating or scary, but don't panic.  Just because your "spam score" is at 23% does NOT mean that your site or domain is actually spammy.

The way spam score works (and huge shoutout to the hard working team at Moz for creating it) is by looking at 27 different "signals" or "features" that _most _sites that are spam have, and comparing it to yours. A common misconception is that Spam Score is created by analyzing the links from other spammy sites and who they also link to. There are many factors.

That being said, your domain/site may be getting the score simply because it doesn't "pass" many of the signals like:

• Low number of pages found
• Domain name length
• No Phone Number Present
• Abnormally short or long URL path length

I encourage you to look over all the signals (and keep them in mind as you work with your domain) over at this helpful page:
https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/help/link-explorer/link-building/spam-score

They include a super helpful video as well.

So in summary, feel free to use your domain. Don't get too worried off of the Spam Score alone.

I hope that answered your question and was helpful!

Best, 
Alex Ratynski

Thank you, Dan! We have indeed been very transparent about the repercussions of not being indexed. Appreciate you taking the time to respond.

Hi Justin,

Great question, to help answer that question I will use a quote from Google's support document regarding duplicate content.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en

"Examples of non-malicious duplicate content could include:

• Discussion forums that can generate both regular and stripped-down pages targeted at mobile devices
• Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs
• Printer-only versions of web pages

"

I think your situation would likely fall under the similar category as "acceptable" like the store items example I highlighted. Keep in mind although duplicate content should really be avoided when possible, Google does NOT actually penalize site's for having it.

Although I would try to keep the overall amount of duplicate content to a minimum, it shouldn't be too big of an issue. Utilize the unique descriptions, in this case, you likely won't have to worry too much about the duplicate content.

I hope that helps!

Best,
Alex Ratynski