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Just to add to Ryan's already stellar answer, the temporary page should actually (probably; not privy to all details of your situation) have a canonical tag referencing one of the other more permanent pages with similar content.

If the link is not the destination URL the user lands on (in some cases), then yes, it's not the optimal situation for the maximum amount of authority being passed. But that's also dependent upon how the user is being redirected...

Ha, no worries. Somehow it happens all the time! Good luck in solving your SERP title issue!

If both the www. and non-www. URLs were being indexed - creating duplicates for nearly every page on your website - then the significant drop in number of pages indexed makes sense.

I think that - adding the new URL while keeping the old ones in XML sitemap for a bit - is your best idea. You can manually add your new URL to index using GWT tools, as well, but I think it's best practice to wait for your site to be crawled again before removing old links from XML sitemap.

Barry?

Unfortunately that's probably a question better answered by somebody else. I'm not well versed in Twitter when you start talking about different languages/countries, etc. I'd say that's okay, but you may save time by just trying out your content/social strategy in one language first.

There's a lot going on there (customs, cultural differences) these audiences could be vastly different as far as what makes them tick and what makes them likely to engage. Like I said, you're probably better off having someone else chime in on that.

Sorry! Good luck, though.

A natural backlink profile has diversity - get ready for it - naturally. While in a perfect world, you want a strong variation in the number of domains linking to your pages, however if the same site chooses to link to your page(s) on their own, without your or any other outside influence, I don't see an issue with this.

There's a lot here, but I'd like to address the overall strategy here. Just know and keep in mind the new Twitter/Google agreement is nice, but it's an incredibly small slice of the SEO pie, if you will.

Building a twitter following by delivering legitimate content to a relevant audience is great - and yes, could be featured prominently in SERPs - but don't hop on twitter for that. It won't work. I'd develop a larger social media, content marketing, and branding strategy first to solve the problem of getting the brand/company name out there and building followers.

The impact you're looking for will come naturally then. But it's a long term strategy that takes discipline and time. There's no quick win here. Just my two cents.

In my experiences, any time there's a dash in the SERP title, it means Google re-wrote it to some extent. Whether they've shortened it, changed it to something completely unique, it always re-writes with a dash and not a colon, or some other separator.

What Google is essentially saying is, "we think this title better describes your page." The first obvious places to look are length and keyword placement/usage: if the title is too long, shorten it. If the main keywords in your title aren't prominently displayed on the page (H1, H2s, body copy, other internal pages using that anchor text, etc.) then I'd try and make those types of changes.

Don't go overboard with keyword stuffing or anything like that, of course. It's usually not too hard to get these changed back, just do a little digging, keyword research, and make some of the changes I've recommended. I bet you'll see the title change to what you've suggested after optimizing and another crawl or two.

You can't - and more importantly don't need to - submit a reconsideration request if you haven't received a manual action message in Webmaster Tools.

Sounds like you're on the right track if you've used the Disavow Tool. Hopefully you personally reached out to all the webmasters linking to you before using the tool? If not, using the Disavow may not be as effective. Make sure you've purged ALL the links that may draw suspicion. Personally, I'd rather disavow a link that's "good" if I have any questions about it instead of leaving a link that's "bad" in the backlink profile.

In order to begin to recover from the algorithmic penalty, I'd recommend you begin creating a white-hat link building campaign based around unique and valuable pieces of content. Good content that's relevant and important to your target customer with attract links naturally (over time).

If the link is not the destination URL the user lands on (in some cases), then yes, it's not the optimal situation for the maximum amount of authority being passed. But that's also dependent upon how the user is being redirected...

It's not a surprise that both Bing and Yahoo rankings are dropping together, as performance on these engines seem to be more or less the same in my experiences.

If Google ranking and traffic are up however, you may not have anything to worry about. Instead of just focusing on rank, prioritize by search volume and target keywords for your business. If your priority or "money" keywords are still reaching your website - and you're still getting good traffic quantity via Google search - I'd give Bing/Yahoo time to come around.

They test their organic results too, so maybe it's just a short-term test. Another good bit of advice moving forward: never overreact to a rank report or two. Sometimes it's something you've implemented or your competitor, but sometimes it's just normal SERP flux or random results. These inconsistencies will sort themselves out.

Sorry for not having insight on the specific market, but figured I'd chime in.

In my experiences, any time there's a dash in the SERP title, it means Google re-wrote it to some extent. Whether they've shortened it, changed it to something completely unique, it always re-writes with a dash and not a colon, or some other separator.

What Google is essentially saying is, "we think this title better describes your page." The first obvious places to look are length and keyword placement/usage: if the title is too long, shorten it. If the main keywords in your title aren't prominently displayed on the page (H1, H2s, body copy, other internal pages using that anchor text, etc.) then I'd try and make those types of changes.

Don't go overboard with keyword stuffing or anything like that, of course. It's usually not too hard to get these changed back, just do a little digging, keyword research, and make some of the changes I've recommended. I bet you'll see the title change to what you've suggested after optimizing and another crawl or two.

Ruben,

I'd agree with your assessment that those URL formats are too long and unnecessary. This URL structure looks a lot like keyword stuffing and EMD (exact-match domain) as well as PMD (partial-match domain) were valued by the people who made the website. In their defense, depending on how old the website is, those extra keywords may have actually helped the pages rank better for relevant queries years ago.

I wouldn't worry too much about redirecting those URLs or changing them today, however. I suppose you could but today search engines are far more sophisticated. I don't think it'd be a great investment of your time.

Without having any additional context, my best guess would be one (or likely more) of your competitors have targeted these keywords with standard local SEO tactics: hyper-localized, local address/business schema markup, address and other local neighborhood information, relevant on-site content, etc.

Maybe they've focused more on semantic aspects of on-page SEO factors (co-citation, location of targeted keywords in relationship to one another, other semantic relationships) than you have? While it sounds like you've done a good job including your website (a backlink) in high-quality local directories (more than your competitor[s] have at least), but what about links overall?

While local-relevant links are nice, high-quality links in general will still carry a website a long way as far as ranking and consistent organic traffic. It appears Pigeon - the most recent local update - is steering closer to generic web ranking signals, not just the local stuff.

Hope that helps! Would be happy to try and provide more information if you're able or willing to answer some of these questions.

Moving a subdomain permanently can be a huge project! This question is probably better answered through a blog post that includes a walkthrough of what to check - and double check - before finalizing anything. Below are some of the blog posts I've found that best detail this process. If you come across any questions, feel free to reach out! I'd be happy to help. But I'm sure the blog posts will do the trick (including one here at Moz!)

• How to Completely Ruin (or Save) Your Website with Redirects

• A Quick Guide to Redirects for SEO

• How to Help Avoid SEO Pitfalls with 301 Redirects

Good luck!

Are you still seeing a 7-pack? From what I've seen, the latest Pigeon update has removed almost all local 7-packs for a more compact, 3-pack or the new "local stack" (or whatever we're calling it). When I Google "toronto dentist," I'm getting a more compact 3-pack, granted I am in the States.

To answer your original question, I'd probably say no just because it's probably not the best way to focus your local SEO efforts. In most cases the local packs are at the top of SERPs (underneath ads, of course) but very rarely are they half-way down the SERP. I have some clients targeting keywords with SERPs that trigger the local pack between organic listings 1 and 2, but that's becoming rare.

Your goal should be to rank in the local pack (or higher in it, if you're already there). What I can say is the way to possibly jumping the local pack and the way to move up in the pack are likely the same tactics: basic local SEO. There are a ton of blog posts out there from awesome experts like Andrew Shotland and Mike Blumenthal, but some important initial questions to ask yourself and audit your website with:

• Basic SEO principles: duplicate content (all forms), good title tags, img tags, etc.
• Local SEO principles: business city/state in title tags, NAP on (basically) every page, local phone number used (not 1-800), etc.
• Technical principles: all the basics, 404s, bad 301s/302s, XML sitemap, using schema for local business (or more specific schema [there's now a dentist one, I believe], etc.)

If you're a multiple location business there's a whole lot more to the Local SEO principles, but I'd recommend checking out some of the experts' and their blogs for those. Some of those recommendations and answers can be too long for a Moz Q&A.

There's a lot here, but I'd like to address the overall strategy here. Just know and keep in mind the new Twitter/Google agreement is nice, but it's an incredibly small slice of the SEO pie, if you will.

Building a twitter following by delivering legitimate content to a relevant audience is great - and yes, could be featured prominently in SERPs - but don't hop on twitter for that. It won't work. I'd develop a larger social media, content marketing, and branding strategy first to solve the problem of getting the brand/company name out there and building followers.

The impact you're looking for will come naturally then. But it's a long term strategy that takes discipline and time. There's no quick win here. Just my two cents.

It depends on what you mean by "remove."

If the content of all those old blogs truly is poor, I'd strongly consider going through 1 by 1 and seeing how you can re-write, expand upon, and improve the overall blog post. Can you tackle the subject from another angle? Are there images, videos, or even visual assets you can add to the post to make it more intriguing and sharable?

Then, you can seek out some credible places to strategically place your blog content for additional exposure and maybe even a link. Be careful here, however. I'm not talking about forum and comment spam, but there may be some active communities that are open to unique and valuable content. Do your research first.

When going through each post 1 by 1, you'll undoubtedly find blog posts that are simply "too far gone" or not relevant enough to keep. Essentially, it wouldn't even be worth your time to re-write them. In this case, find another page on your website that's MOST SIMILAR to the blog post. This may be in topic, but also could be an author's page, another blog post that is valuable, a contact page, etc. Then perform 301 redirects of the crap blog posts to those pages.

Not only are you salvaging any little value those blog posts may have had, but you're also preventing crawl and index issues by telling the search engine bots where that content is now (assuming it was indexed in the first place).

This is an incredibly long content process and should take you months. Especially if there's a lot of content that's good enough to be re-written, expanded upon, and added to. However making that content relevant and useful is the best thing you can do. It's a long process, but if your best content writers need a project, this would be it.

To recap: **1) **Go through each blog post 1 by 1, determine what's good enough to edit, what's "too far gone." 2) Re-write, edit, add to (content and images/videos) and re-promote them socially and to appropriate audiences and communities. 3) For the posts that were "too far gone," 301 redirect them to the most relevant posts and pages that are remaining "live."

Again, I can say firsthand that this is a LONG process. I've done it for a client in the past. However, the return was well worth the work. And by doing it this way and not just deleting posts, you're preventing yourself a lot of crawl/index headaches with the search engines.