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From a purely SEO perspective, I don't think there will be any negative impact from using the acronym URL for your email addresses and the longer URL for your domain — the only concern I might have would be that people might try to link to the acronym domain after seeing your email, and those links would be passing through the redirect, but that would probably be an edge case.

I do think that 25 characters is a very lonnnngg domain name. If it's your brand, you're likely to rank #1 for it without having the exact new brand as the domain name, so you'll be capturing that high search volume anyway. You also have to think about this as a long-term play: there's a lot of search interest for the two brand names together now, because of the merger, but that's not the best reason to select a new brand name or a new domain name, both of which are things you'd want to persist for as long as possible, well after the merger is old news.

I know it might be too late for this, but I'd echo GrouchyKids' recommendation that you rethink how you want to brand the merger of these two brands. High search volume for one term isn't a great reason. If you do decide that you still want that to be your new brand name, you might still want to explore shorter versions of the new brand for your domain name. A 25-character URL is going to lose out on some direct traffic, as it will be difficult for repeat customers to remember and type in exactly (something your company must already be aware of, since they're looking for solutions not to have to type out the whole thing themselves every time they send an email!). Good luck with the rebrand in either case!

effectdigital is correct. If you're blocking pages via robots.txt and still seeing them in the index, it's likely that Google is encountering links to these pages, and is indexing them that way, without updating its crawl (since your robots.txt says not to). Your best bet is to:

• Add a meta robots noindex tag to each of the pages you want removed from the index;
• Remove the disallow directive from robots.txt;
• Wait for Google to re-crawl the pages (using "fetch as googlebot" in GSC may speed this process along
• Once the pages are no longer in Google's index, re-add the disallow directive to your robots.txt file.

How are your links to these images coded? Sometimes Google has trouble understanding that something is an image. For example, OBJECT tags can be rendered by Google's renderer, but won't be treated as images/show up in image search. The same is true for images in an img srcset set, unles that srcset also has a value for "src= ". Are these images showing up in image search? What format are the images (jpg, png, svg, etc)?

If the site is brand new, it could just be that Google is testing out different URLs for the SERP (pretty common with new sites) and will naturally filter out the less-useful ones over time. I can understand not wanting to just wait around on that, though.

It's going to be difficult for a single-page website to do much in the way of organic traffic. You're correct that optimizing 80 sites for the same keywords and phrases isn't going to be very effective; these sites will likely be seen as duplicates of each other, especially if they share the same design and much of the same content. Even if Google doesn't de-index some of their pages for being duplicates, you will still be creating 80 websites that are all competing with each other for the same phrases, which will make it harder for any of them to rank.

What makes these 80 companies different from each other? Why would someone choose one one over the other? If they're local businesses, I'd lean heavily into local SEO for this - using MozLocal to make sure each company's local citations are claimed, filled out, correct, and consistent; and making sure that each company's name, address, and phone number are prominent on the site itself.

Hi John,

As long as you've implemented rel=prev and rel=next markup on your paginated content, having duplicate title tags on these pages shouldn't be a problem at all. If you're really concerned about it, you could update the title tags on subsequent pages to say e.g. "Page 2" at the end, but if you've already marked it up as paginated content it should be fine. Hope that helps!

Hi Lindsay,

You'll want to apply a canonical tag to the PPC pages, pointing to the equivalent SEO page as the canonical version. You may also want to apply a self-referencing canonical tag to your SEO pages - this would be a canonical tag on the page that lists that same page as the canonical version, essentially saying "this page right here is the canonical page."

Tcope25 above is correct that, if you wanted to, you could noindex your PPC landing pages - and Gaston is correct that you would want to implement either a canonical tag or a noindex tag, but not both (there should be no impact on your PPC landing pages either way, it's very common for PPC landing pages to be noindexed). If you apply the canonical tag correctly, however, you shouldn't need to noindex the PPC landing pages. I hope that helps!

Hi Erik,

It's great you're thinking about this ahead of time! Using the Campaign URL Builder to establish UTM links is the best way to do this. You'll want to make sure that your Medium is set to email (not e-mail, or that will be counted as a different Medium). I recommend keeping a running tracking document of the Source, Campaign, Term, etc. you use for each campaign, so it's easy to keep track of which thing was named what. You may also want to sit down and figure out some naming conventions for how you'll determine these, so that multiple people can use the URL Builder the same way. I hope that helps!

Having one Organization tag and then marking up each location with LocalBusiness is how I would do it. It's hard to say what might be going on without knowing a bit more about your implementation. Is all this markup on one page (e.g. an "Our Locations" page), or is each tag firing on a separate location page? You mentioned that some of the markup is showing up in GSC and some isn't - do the entities/markup that are showing up in GSC have anything in common? Are you using static JSON-LD markup in Google Tag Manager, or using variables to generate it dynamically?

Hi David,

I've only seen this type of local sitelink for sites that are sending users to brick-and-mortar locations, so I think in part it would depend on what kind of reviews you're hosting. How different are the local/regional landing pages from each other? Do they feature local products or businesses?

I'd recommend continuing to try to build higher-quality links, rather than pursuing lower-quality directory listings. It's likely that a lot of these lower-quality citations aren't doing anything for your competitors, and the risk of a link penalty from such a strategy is pretty high. Are you reasonably sure that the citation links are the reason they're ranking higher (to the extent that anyone can be sure about why a page is ranking)? Like I said, I'd bet a lot of those citations aren't having much effect on your competitors' sites, as directory listings tend to be devalued by Google pretty quickly. Are there other areas you could try to outdo them - content quality, featured snippets, user experience - to make up some of that ground?

I know it's frustrating to rank lower than people who are being spammy, and high-quality link earning takes time, but that's what I'd advocate doing.

I always say, don't build a brand new baby website for your existing brand unless you're absolutely sure it's necessary - you're going to have to work hard to get it even just to the same level as your existing website, let alone beyond it.  Plus, why cut your link profile in half?  I'd definitely say build a page or section on the new location.  Some things you can do to help SEs figure out you're in 2 locations:

• Make sure both locations are in Google Places or other local services.  I highly recommend Universal Business Listing for this - one submission to UBL will put your business info everywhere it should be to send strong local signals.  Well worth the low price.
• Mark up the addresses of each location on your site with hcard microformat - this says to search engines "here is an address."  here's a wiki with everything you could possibly need on hcard microformat: http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard
• Upload a KML sitemap with your locations to Google Webmaster Tools.  Here's a good guide on how to do that: http://www.martijnbeijk.com/tutorial/using-kml-for-local-seo/
• Use your city name in the title tags of pages that are about that specific location.

Best part about those last 3 suggestions - you can do them all for free.

Good luck!

I would agree that you use the word "Barcelo" more times than is necessary in a title tag. A good rule of thumb for keyword stuffing: read it out loud. If it sounds crazy, you're probably using the keyword too much. Eric's suggestion for a title tag is a good one, and you could really do anything along that line. It looks like the phrase you're targeting most with that page is "Barcelo Hotel Reviews" so I'd begin the title tag with that phrase. Other words like Resorts will still get some association with the word Barcelo, so there's no need to repeat it.

Your title tag is also currently targeting way too many phrases. It's best to target only one or two key phrases on any given page - it's difficult for a page to rank for more than that. Are there other pages on your site that you could use to target some of these phrases?

It sounds like your boss has some ego built in to those title tags, so maybe start out by saying that 2010 was a long time ago (4 years is like a million years in Internet time) and SEO best practices have updated since then. The best practice now would be to use your keyword at the beginning of the title tag, MAYBE use a secondary keyword if you can work it in in natural-sounding language, and keep it to under about 70 characters.

As for the meta description, ABSOLUTELY add one of those - like Eric points out, your SERP result is a little advertisement for your page and the description tag is another way to target your keywords and convince users to click. Having a description tag also means you have more control over what displays when people share your page in social media. As for the meta keywords tag, I'd dispense with those altogether - they're completely worthless at best and may be a weak spam signal at worst.

I'd recommend not using the canonical tag here for the following reasons:

• It's not what the tag is designed for.  By using canonical tag you're saying to search engines, "this page is the same as this other page so just ignore it."  Not true in this case.
• It seems like the pages you're noindexing are good candidates for it: they aren't pages that would be a good experience for users to land on from a search.

IFor product pages that are no longer available, I'd use a 301 redirect to point users to the home page or a similar product - that's a way better experience for users who click on links to those pages (remember, it's about the users as much as search engines), and you preserve link juice.  I'd also just double-check and see if your "view cart" and similar pages are accruing many links; my guess is they aren't.  I'd keep those noindexed via robots.txt just because it would be very odd for a user to click on a search result and land there.  A good user experience is more important than the (my guess is very small) amount of link juice you might lose by not having them indexed.

I find WordPress' blogging functionality a lot easier to use and a lot more customizable. Not only that, if your blog is currently a significant driver of organic rankings/traffic for your site, I would recommend against moving your blog if you have the option to keep it where it is, especially if moving it would mean an overhaul in URLs/URL structure.

Hi Marina,

The last I heard on this (earlier this year), https wasn't supported in the Preferred Domain feature - only www or non-www. So make sure that your sitemap is submitted with https URLs, your internal links all point to https URLs, and your http version 301 redirects to your https version, and that would be sufficient.

There's not a whole lot to be done about other sites getting hacked, unfortunately - even if you did find the program/network that is creating the bad links, you might not be able to tell which competitor of yours is doing it, and even if you did it would be difficult to prove or get them to stop. Your client's site may even not be the real target - link spam networks will often target a variety of random sites in addition to their real targets to cover their tracks. The good news is that Google is pretty astute at ignoring these types of links. It's highly unlikely (though not impossible, unfortunately) that your client will see a link penalty from this malware.

Here's what I would do in this situation:

• Contact as many of the hacked sites as you can/want to, and let them know they've been hacked (that's just a courteous thing to do, as it's likely the site owners have no idea, but it's up to you how much time you want to spend on this).
• Be proactive about disavowing as many of the spammy inbound links as you can find (you're probably already doing this, I'm just saying). You could probably do this at a domain level since it sounds like the linking sites aren't related to your client's site in any way.
• Take a little extra time in the next few months to build some high-quality links to your client's site to make their link profile a little extra shiny.

Taking steps to guard against any damage/fix any damage that may have been done will be a better use of your time and effort than trying to figure out who's doing it and why, IMO.

Hi Eric,

A few things to reassure you off the bat:

1. For what it's worth, there is a huge, HUGE amount of crawler spam happening in the web today. Every site I work on is being hit hard with false referrals and direct visits. I know Google Analytics is working on a solution to better filter these visits out. So I wouldn't be too concerned that it is something a competitor is doing to your site, specifically - it's more likely that it's been caught up in the general wave of spam crawlers.
2. It's important to note that when we talk about Google looking at bounce rate and dwell time as part of ranking your site, those numbers are specifically from clicks through from search - that's data that Google can get without using your private web analytics data as a ranking factor, which they've said repeatedly that they don't and won't do. So a bunch of direct visits with high bounce rates will NOT affect your rankings.

So, it's not dangerous, just annoying. On to how to get that data out of your reports:

• Make sure you're not filtering out spam referrers at a View level - this can cause those visits to incorrectly appear as direct traffic.
• You could set up an Advanced Segment in Google Analytics to filter out direct visits with visit times of, say, under 5 seconds. Some real traffic may get caught in that, but it will get the noise levels down.
• The best way to filter out spam bot traffic, in my opinion, is to set up hostname filtering. Here's a post on Megalytic on how to do that: https://megalytic.com/blog/how-to-filter-out-fake-referrals-and-other-google-analytics-spam. Make sure you've also got an "Unfiltered Data" View so you'll still have historic raw data if you need it.

Hope that helps! Good luck.

Google will frequently rank two pages from the same site in the same SERP if they feel that both pages serve the user intent of the query. Often this will happen, as is the case with these two pages, when they are two pages that are on the same topic, but answer slightly different questions - either of which could be what the user is really asking, if that makes sense. In your example, the two pages that Google is serving up are answering closely related, but slightly different questions: "What is VVS diamond clarity" and "what is the difference between VS and VVS diamond clarity."

It might be advisable for this site to combine the two pages, if (for example) the wrong page was ranking for the query or one page was getting all the traffic and the other wasn't getting any. Another solution would to make them more different from each other, rather than tackling two long-tail variations on the same overall topic.

I would not recommend creating two pages on long-tail variations of the same topic on purpose to try to lock down two spots in a SERP; your time would likely be better spent researching what specific long-tail topics people are searching on, and creating content to serve those users' needs. Umar does have a good point that a SERP with two results from the same domain often present an opportunity to take one of those spots.

If you're suffering from Panda, another thing to look at is how much content you have overall.  If you've got a small amount of text and it has high recurrence of keywords, that's a bad sign for Panda.  A tip I like to use when it comes to keyword stuffing is to read your text out loud.  If it sounds unnatural, you're probably using the keyword too often.  I would focus on creating some new quality content and on making your language sound natural.

If you feel like you're saying Wordpress too much but it's negatively impacting your site, you could use "WP" or other variations to add some variety.

Hi,

I would not recommend taking this approach, for a few reasons:

1. As you say, individual city-keyword combinations have a low amount of traffic - even if you were to get all 30 of these sites ranking for that combo, you probably wouldn't see a bump in traffic to make it worth the work.
2. Building 30 different sites on 30 different domains means building 30 times as many links in order to get the same domain authority, which will take a lot of time and effort.
3. It will be very easy for Google to tell that all of these sites belong to you (all on the same server, all linking to each other, etc).  In the best case scenario, Google will simply devalue all of these links from one site to the other.  A far more likely scenario is that Google will actively penalize you for attempting to build this kind of link network.

This is exactly the kind of strategy that both Panda and Penguin are intended to combat, and I don't think that the potential payoff is worth the risk and effort this strategy will take.  Instead, I recommend spending that time and energy on making your client's site as strong as possible.  Use schema.org to send strong local signals that you're in the San Diego area.  If you're having trouble ranking for head terms such as "web design," look for lower-volume, more specific keywords to target.  Create great content showing your design prowess and cultivate an audience to share it with.

To answer your questions - micro sites for lead generation CAN work, but I don't think local-focused is the way to go for a product like web design for which Google doesn't provide local search results. I DO NOT suggest that you build 30 microsites, interlink them and then point them to your home page, as this is likely to incur a penalty.

I hope that helps! Good luck.