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I must be overcomplicating this. I have a website with a blog structure that includes year subfolders, so:  website.com/2019/blog-title, website.com/2018/blog-title, website.com/2017/blog-title, etc. I want to create a segment that I can apply in Site Content > All Pages to get quick stats for all blogs, regardless of year. (Pageviews, time on site, etc.) Unfortunately, Content Drilldown doesn't work well here as it is grouping by each year. I have tried setting up a segment using regex, but am getting a mixture of all pages, not just blog pages.  I have set up the segment the following way:

Advanced > Conditions > Page, Matches Regex, /2019/(.*?)/

Advanced > Conditions > Page, Matches Regex, /2018/(.*?)/

Advanced > Conditions > Page, Matches Regex, /2017/(.*?)/

Am I going about this all wrong? Is my regex wrong? Any advice is appreciated!

Side note: glaringly obvious that now is the time to clean up my URLs. But I'd still love to see the data in its current URL state.

Thank you!

From a UX perspective, having an interstitial like that can turn off many visitors, especially if it's coming off a search result. They're expecting to get to an article about whatever they just searched, and instead they see a thought of the day plus an ad. While it generates revenue for the domain, it can have a longer term effect of diminishing return or regular visitors.

There was a great article here a couple years ago, identifying customer satisfaction as a primary SEO factor. http://moz.com/blog/seo-satisfaction

We've had the same issue. Many phone calls and hours later Google had to manually do it...it seems to be a glitch that they don't care to fix.

I think industry partner links are fair game. These are also probably your heavy hitters meaning removing them will probably be the most hurtful.

Its not a bad idea, but it might not be the best idea. By doing so you're limiting your product description to a short one, and if that's the only thing describing the product it might not be enough to attract the attention from the search engines. As for the technical answer, the meta description and short description won't count against each other.

If you want a page or url not crawled then you should use the robots.txt file and robots meta tags. Then, in WMT, make sure those same pages are actually not being crawled

Hope that answers your question

Check this guy out, he's one of the leading experts

http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/

http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/definitive-local-search-citations/

Proximity will get your business more targeted in a local sense, and that's still a hard case to make because the site you're getting the link from has to be set up in a way where they've geo tagrgeted as well. Don't forget to get the business listed on the well known places https://mza.bundledseo.com/local/search.

Hope that helps

Take a peek at this

http://moz.com/blog/the-international-seo-checklist

It probably has to do with their language and geo tags. I'm not too familiar with international SEO but that would be my take on it.

Yes, high quality links will be what easily makes and breaks any SEO attempt. You're onto something when you say local chamber links, getting links from places like that is usually doable and should be something that you explore.

It has to do with cookies, and serving dynamic content. Returning visitors get identified as returning and then a certain message is displayed. Hubspot has a produc that deals with this, there are a few others which don't come to mind right away.

If you're very technical you can use PHP to ID a returning visitor and then spit out targeted messaging.

Local results usually get trumped by sites like Yelp, Lawyers.com and even Facebook. There are so many factors at play that it's hard to say what exactly would be affecting it. It does seem like you've done your work with on site SEO. If your competitors have better back link profiles that's still the number one factor in Google's rankings.

Hope that helps

The only real reason I would avoid setting it up in a clients account is to protect myself from antsy clients that like to tweak stuff without knowing what they're doing.

When we set accounts up for clients we use their acounts and manage everything from our MCC, but there might be something we're missing in the sense of reasons to not use an MCC.

External followed are all external do follow links

Total external is all external links

Total links is all external and internal links

Yes, in the great world of marketing we all know that a negative experience gets amplified far more often and to a greater extent than positive ones. I guess we'll take this one as a win and see how the rankings hold. Thanks for your responses!

We took on a small construction client and have been building up their site slowly for the past 6 months, doing no manual link building. We did however do a comprehensive clean up of their local SEO listing stuff, and best practices on site markup as well as adding content.

This month we noticed a huge jump in SERPs, page one to be exact and all within the top 5 for 30 high value KW/phrases. They dominate their market which is awesome, however we're trying to see if its something others are experienceing as well. Is Google playng catch up in the local markets? Or did we just do a kick ass job and now we can pat ourselves on the back?

Here's a really recent video of Matt Cutts explaining what's considered paid links.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zupIbMyMfBI

Google is always running tests in their SERPs. This is one of their tests and being to quick to follow might not be the appropriate step. I for one will wait for the dust to settle before tweaking anything.

Because the title lengths have changed there must be more happening within their search algo as well so just changing a title might not be helpfully.

Depends. In their case it makes sense because they have too many links to have a typical drop down. Here's more content to read from Distilled which explains the dos and donts

https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/site-navigation-for-seo/

This might seem like a super simplified answer but just google the terms you're concerned about and that should answer your question as to how google is treating certain KWs. Use an incognito window to do so or read up more technical ways http://moz.com/blog/face-off-4-ways-to-de-personalize-google. De personalizing will allow you to see a better picture of how the terms get treated.

This is not an extensive list but here are a couple.

http://moz.com/blog/perfecting-onpage-optimization-for-ecommerce-websites

http://searchengineland.com/best-practices-in-e-commerce-seo-176921

Depending on the client the convention can change. Here are two traditionally used ways to deal with titles

Keywords and phrases - Brand ( seems to be better because the keywords are first)

Brand - Keywords and phrases

or

Keywords - Location - Brand (adding more than one location would probably not work well)

Make the home page you primary location and deeper pages covering other locations. The example you provided does look a bit spammy due to the keyword being present multiple times and different locations being there.

Obviously there isn't a perfect way to do this. So do what makes sense and is considered best practices and then record the results and tweak it as necessary.

Because it is a local branded result you can try to contact the Google local business team, https://support.google.com/places/answer/173102?hl=en&ref_topic=1656742# and ask them to fix it. We had a problem where an employee face, instead of our company logo was showing up, which we're still working on getting removed.

Adding the words to the URL doesn't have as much weight as doing the bigger stuff which is the titles, metas, img alts etc. The convention I'm used to is using human friendly URL paths so, www.yoursite.com/carpet-cleaning-st-louis, that way it looks clean and matches your KW/phrases you're tracking. I think the more important item to consider is you creating "value" on your pages so that they aren't considered "thin", which is what Google's panda update was/is targeting.

Hope that helps.

You can use OSE (opensiteexplorer) or Majestic SEO to see any recent sites that have linked to your site.

The money spent on rent can be applied to build a killer site that has content catered to the areas he really focuses on. So create pages for specific cities and have some job details specific to that city. The business details aren't in the question so its hard to say but I'm guessing if there isn't a need to open a new office your client is just trying to get local  'seven pack" rankings which require a physical place and a local number.

Hope that helps.

Yes. If you think your new strategy is the way to go why wouldn't you go through and fix older stuff. By applying your new strategy you should be able to see if it is a better one by comparing historic data. Make sure you're careful with changing URLs which can lead to losing links and structure issues.

I say play with it. If your hunch is true then you'll pay more and get the same results. If your hunch is not then you'll pay the same or slightly more and get better results. PPC campaigns are all about testing, analyzing and improving. Maybe this is one of the ways for that to happen.

Some domains are generic, .com .net .org and others are geo targeted.  So by geo targeting by TLD is only half the battle. Google states "we'll rely on several signals, including IP address, location information on the page, links to the page, and any relevant information from Google Places". Having an exact replica doesn't make sense but tweaking it to suit the country does.

So in the example provided above I think that they have all those "signals" Google is talking about there so it's two different sites targeting different SERPs. You'll notice that their home page titles are different just for starters, I'm sure they don't have exactly the same sites placed on two different domains.

Read more about this here:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en

You can try to focus two KWs on that page, so the two you provided. It might take some trial and error to make it work but I know that it's doable.

You can use schema (http://schema.org/), html tags to try and get some rich snippets. There really is no guarantee as to what will actually work as Google treats each industry with a different set of rules. What you're referring to is definitely mostly an Adwords thing, except for stuff like your address that can be pulled for your google local page and listed under a SERP for your business name.

Hope that helps

Yes use open graph tags, which is meta data just like a title tag or meta tag for a site

Read more here.

http://davidwalsh.name/facebook-meta-tags

So we have a WA construction client that we're working on doing some local SEO stuff. This month all the keywords that we're tracking but one is on the first page. It's easy to say "yay, we're so damn good at what we do", but it seems like there must have been a shift in the way google is ranking local results. Anyone else experiencing this??

Your thoughts are correct. Using a third party number won't help with NAP and citation building. Because Google and every other data aggregator knows that the number being used isn't the actual business number you're basically creating confusion. Plus verifications with a third party phone number are impossible.

Having a local number helps all the aggregators geo locate the business in a sense, which helps with local seo.

Read more here: http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/?s=third+party+phone

Our personal experience with overlays/popups have been that they create massive bounce rates and people run because these methods have been associated in the minds of consumers as spam.

Think about the customer, will a pop up enhance their experience with the site? If not why do it? Also from a organic perspective having "handcrafted" in your text might be a benefit?!

You can run your landing pages URLs in adwords tools>keyword planner>Search for new keyword and ad group ideas>Your landing page. This approach will show you what google's crawler thinks are the terms on the page. This won't give you a quality score per se but it will let you know how google adwords sees the page.

Even if there were a quality score tool it would only be as good as the creator and Google doesn't have a tool like that.

Your data won't just disappear, your main site will just stop showing new data if it becomes an inactive site. Here's the google documentation on how to make subdomain tracking work well.

https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/gaTrackingSite#multipleDomains

Each back link checker has it's own crawlers and therefore they will show different results. Majestic Seo shows 0 links for the site, another example of everyone having their own link index database.

Google webmaster tools usually only shows a sample of actual links.

Meta descriptions are NOT a must, however they have been correlated with higher CTR. Here's a way to check if you should add meta descriptions.

Do the search site:(insert your site).com or site:www.(insert your site).com, if the metas that are being shown make your happy then Google is delivering a good description.

Many times what Google comes up with is crap. Also meta descriptions are great for you marketing message.

The real question is how "local" your business is. If it is truly a local business getting your NAP (name address and phone number) consistent is a must. Also getting your listings cleaned up allows you to have a consistent marketing message across all channels.

Read more about what should be done at the bare minimum here:

http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/

Yahoo went secure recently which means the referrer data will be skewed.

Read more:

http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-search-goes-secure-182343

The "local seven pack" has kind of killed of what you're about to do. Basically Google has localized the business categories and would rather give the searcher results that a relevant than just the same company over and over. If you have 40 pages of thin content Google won't rank those pages unless they're better than the ones that rank already, and since this is a new site that may take a while for it to happen. Plus having a address based in Seattle (or whatever the location may be) will hinder your ability to rank for other cities.

In the mean time you can do fun stuff like this. Here are ways to combat the seven pack http://searchengineland.com/how-to-get-around-google-locals-7-pack-without-breaking-a-sweat-52154.

Hope this helps.

From my knowledge of links the following stuff has nothing to do with the the URL what so ever. It's a CSS class.

Awesome Moz article with lots of details on keyword research.

http://moz.com/blog/keywords-to-concepts

I think word stream offers those volumes.

We've had sites drop out off the top 50 as google reevaluated such small changes as you listed in your post. I'd say give it some time and after a month start worrying. In the mean time look at webmaster tools and see if the search impressions have changed/dropped.

Moz has tons of info on local SEO, https://getlisted.org/ is a good place to start. Also this whole rebrand may take 6 months before all the listings are up to date and all the data with the aggregators is cleaned up.

I'd say Google Places would be your best bet to start with, because of the immediate results and then start cleaning up everything else.

As for schema we use it in or website and it hasn't correlated closely to rankings. Google webmaster tools shows the schema snippets but doesn't say that they use it.

Domain name changes will rock your clients results like crazy, make sure to read up what the best way to handle a new domain as to avoid losing any juice.

Find your true competitors, then use SEM rush and see if that helps. Also everything is relative, so if moz says its medium competition and there's no one searching for it the reality is that it's probably not that hard to rank for it.

I've had the same issue in using the "new" analytics. I just go back into pro and create a campaign that way.