Local SEO and Wordpress tags

JolitaEicas

Hi guys,

I have a wordpress website which has ranked number 1 in Google for the past year for <my service + my town>.

I then setup some wordpress tags to target other towns nearby and was ranking very well (often number 1) for <my service + other town>.

This was successful for me until the end of May 2013 when Google's latest panda update seems to have slapped me with a wet fish! I now have dropped about 4 places for my primary <service + town> and hardly rank at all for my tags.

I want to delete my tags altogether but should I create a new page for each tag and 301 redirect them to there (I have about 18 tags) or what is best practice here?

wwrjd

jolita - although dis wont answer ur question, i think im correct in saying if ur site is still ranking and u didnt receive a warning in google webmaster tools den u havent been penalised by google panda/penguin. maybe ur tags are causing duplicate content and need to be no-indexed.

JolitaEicas

wwrjd wrote: »

jolita - although dis wont answer ur question, i think im correct in saying if ur site is still ranking and u didnt receive a warning in google webmaster tools den u havent been penalised by google panda/penguin. maybe ur tags are causing duplicate content and need to be no-indexed.

thank you for you reply but it is more info on how to correctly handle 301 redirects after i delete my tags that i need as i suspect my tags might appear spammy!

Aine Philip

JolitaEicas wrote: »

thank you for you reply but it is more info on how to correctly handle 301 redirects after i delete my tags that i need as i suspect my tags might appear spammy!

Hi

I am not sure will it help you in or not, But you can install a 301 redirect plugin in wordpress, where you can easily manage the redirects. simple as:

Old url : New Url

for drop in ranking may be due to the links on website: ( it may be possible that most of your internal and external links are linking to home page).

Do use either of the following types of anchor

Hybrid branded anchors ("Brand name + keyword variations")
Universal anchors ("here's the link", "link", etc.)
Naked URLs ("http://www.site.com")


This may help you to get over the Google update.

PaulPinnacle

wwrjd wrote: »

... i think im correct in saying if ur site is still ranking and u didnt receive a warning in google webmaster tools den u havent been penalised by google panda/penguin.

Not really.

It means that they haven't been hit by a manual webspam penalty, but it doesn't mean that they haven't been hit by the algorithmic changes brought in with Panda (Penguin isn't relevant to this case, but equally can have both algorithmic and manual impacts on sites).

Panda is specifically aimed at targeting low quality and 'thin' sites. Without adding any valuable or meaningful content, your site went from having a single page on <service + town> to trying to support 18 or 19 pages including the tag coding. It's not adding any extra value for your users, it's simply keyword stuffing (the fact that it's built into a tag just makes it more convoluted not any less spammy).

There is further impacts that this will have algorithmically in terms of hurting the placement of link equity on your site (rather than having the value of links pointing at a single authoritative page you now have that equity being distributed between a large number of far less authoritative/spammy pages), wasted crawl bandwidth (rather than crawling valuable unique pages of your site, googlebot is hitting multiple duplicate pages and dropping their view of the quality of your site) and hurting indexation (as the Search Engines filter out the duplicates, meaning you're in the supplementary which are independent from but related to some of the Panda issues.

JolitaEicas wrote: »

thank you for you reply but it is more info on how to correctly handle 301 redirects after i delete my tags that i need as i suspect my tags might appear spammy!

You suspect correctly. Well... they don't appear spammy, they are spammy.

Where are you looking to redirect the tags?

It's a strange situation. Normally I'd be in full agreement with 301'ing at every chance, but in this case those pages never should have existed and this is one of the few situations where I'd probably suggest returning a 410 instead (basically telling googlebot you're returning a permanent 404 for the page from now on).

JolitaEicas

firstly, thank u so much for taking d time to reply, it was very informative and helpful.

i was planning on redirecting tags to newly created pages. for example redirect the tag <serviceA townA> to a newly created page titled <serviceA townA> and on this page will be details of work i have done for clients based in this town. each of the new <service town> pages will have unique content and i will stop using tags altogether.

do you think this is the right approach?

kgarvey

JolitaEicas wrote: »

firstly, thank u so much for taking d time to reply, it was very informative and helpful.

i was planning on redirecting tags to newly created pages. for example redirect the tag <serviceA townA> to a newly created page titled <serviceA townA> and on this page will be details of work i have done for clients based in this town. each of the new <service town> pages will have unique content and i will stop using tags altogether.

do you think this is the right approach?

You could do this but might need to spin the wording a little to make sure it is different from your main page. as you may get a big slap if you have several pages with the same content just differe keywords in for Service Town

PaulPinnacle

JolitaEicas wrote: »

do you think this is the right approach?

In theory, yes. This is exactly what the 'search engines' want to see. From a 'technical' point of view, assuming you have enough unique content for each and all of the proposed pages, this is exactly how it should be done.

Now comes the kick in the teeth over this type of a move... even though the approach you're now looking to take is technically correct, is it actually the right thing to do? That, I'm afraid, is a very different question. (There also is a slight technical issue to address in how you link to those pages and where they sit in the overall site architecture, but you'd probably be able to do that intuitively without even thinking about it fairly well. You also should be aware that by adding a largish, assuming your site only has a small number of pages in total, number of pages the overall view of your domain might drop arithmetically [you move from a small number of pages with a decent number of links each to a large number of pages with only links pointing to a small number of those pages - long story short, look to promote the new pages via social media, email lists and other channels once they go live and get some traction on incoming links])

Is it actually good for your users? Do they benefit from you setting up a unique page for each of these locations? If you weren't going to get a (potential) boost in organic SERPs would you still consider implementing those pages? Is the content on those pages the way you wish for your business and your 'brand' to be seen (is the quality high, is the tone correct, is the image created a positive one for your business)?

If you can answer 'Yes' to all of the above, go create the pages. If you answer 'No' to all or most, don't create them. If it's a mix or if you're not sure, give it more thought (i.e. you might decide that rather than creating specific keyword focused landing pages for each location to instead simply create a blog post for each job you do, assuming the client signs off on it, and include the required locational and other relevant keywords built into the post in a natural way) and ask any questions here that might help you come to an answer.

vincychan

First of all, you cannot just create pages for same services targeting different cities. Always try to target not more than 3 keywords for one page.

When you plan an SEO strategy, make sure you dont select keywords which are not prospective. You can target three keywords, which means you can target 3 cities with different prefix key phrases, so that you have got options to target different cities and different services.

JolitaEicas

PaulPinnacle wrote: »

In theory, yes. This is exactly what the 'search engines' want to see. From a 'technical' point of view, assuming you have enough unique content for each and all of the proposed pages, this is exactly how it should be done.

Now comes the kick in the teeth over this type of a move... even though the approach you're now looking to take is technically correct, is it actually the right thing to do? That, I'm afraid, is a very different question. (There also is a slight technical issue to address in how you link to those pages and where they sit in the overall site architecture, but you'd probably be able to do that intuitively without even thinking about it fairly well. You also should be aware that by adding a largish, assuming your site only has a small number of pages in total, number of pages the overall view of your domain might drop arithmetically [you move from a small number of pages with a decent number of links each to a large number of pages with only links pointing to a small number of those pages - long story short, look to promote the new pages via social media, email lists and other channels once they go live and get some traction on incoming links])

Is it actually good for your users? Do they benefit from you setting up a unique page for each of these locations? If you weren't going to get a (potential) boost in organic SERPs would you still consider implementing those pages? Is the content on those pages the way you wish for your business and your 'brand' to be seen (is the quality high, is the tone correct, is the image created a positive one for your business)?

If you can answer 'Yes' to all of the above, go create the pages. If you answer 'No' to all or most, don't create them. If it's a mix or if you're not sure, give it more thought (i.e. you might decide that rather than creating specific keyword focused landing pages for each location to instead simply create a blog post for each job you do, assuming the client signs off on it, and include the required locational and other relevant keywords built into the post in a natural way) and ask any questions here that might help you come to an answer.

Once again, thanks for your reply, very informative and helpful again. I am ready to redirect my spammy tags and relaunch (so to speak) my site this weekend. I will post results over time!

One more question regarding footer links on client sites. I have links from maybe 30 websites where it says Photography by <my name> and <my name> links back to my homepage. Should I leave these there or delete them altogether? Apart from Flickr, Twitter and Facebook, these are about my only external links.

PaulPinnacle

JolitaEicas wrote: »

One more question regarding footer links on client sites. I have links from maybe 30 websites where it says Photography by <my name> and <my name> links back to my homepage. Should I leave these there or delete them altogether?

I'm guessing these are site wide footer links?

In theory, these have been devalued greatly and you should be looking to have them removed if you were to follow the search engines guidance to a T. In reality, if you haven't been penalised for them (either a manual webspam penalty in your Webmaster Tools or an algorithmic penalty where you noticed a big drop in rankings) then chances are that removing them will hurt you in the short term (though it is probably for the best in the long term, before you do/might get hit for it).

Where possible, have links to your site contained within the editorial content (a single editorial link could carry as much weight as a site wide footer link due to the way the links are categorised) rather than in a footer/boiler plate section of the site. This is more troublesome for those using your images, obviously, so you could agree to a specific page linking back to you and giving a testimonial on your work in place of the footer links.

JolitaEicas

PaulPinnacle wrote: »

I'm guessing these are site wide footer links?

Where possible, have links to your site contained within the editorial content (a single editorial link could carry as much weight as a site wide footer link due to the way the links are categorised) rather than in a footer/boiler plate section of the site. This is more troublesome for those using your images, obviously, so you could agree to a specific page linking back to you and giving a testimonial on your work in place of the footer links.

Yes sitewide footer links.

Would it help if I just have a credit link to my site on homepage and delete from all other pages?

PaulPinnacle

JolitaEicas wrote: »

Would it help if I just have a credit link to my site on homepage and delete from all other pages?

Depending on the specifics, that would be the best place.

On the vast majority of sites the homepage will carry the most authority/link equity/whatever term you wish to use, so all other things being equal a link from that page is the most beneficial. The specifics do come into play though. A footer link from the home page would be viewed very differently than an editorial link from a deeper page. Nobody can say which will/would carry more weight, there are simply too many factors that come into play for a generic answer to ever be given never mind the fact that none of us know Googles algorithms and can only give a 'best guess' based on correlation of testing with results, but if you can get the link moved from a devalued location (sidebars or footers) to a different one it certainly would help with the weightings assigned to it.

(If it's something you're interested in getting into the nitty gritty of, and don't just want to take me at my word [I know I'm right, but never trust anyone in this field without validation and proof], you could do a lot worse than reading up on the "Reasonable Surfer" model [Patent application here - That one was randomly picked as one of the many that are/would be relevant to this conversation] that Google build their PageRank system around in the early days. Things have moved on and developed a lot since those early days, but the fundamental ideas behind it are still relevant today)