perfect, just what I needed.  I just hope these "old school" ping efforts still work.  The client won't let us access their Google Search Console and yet we need their website crawled asap.

Thanks!

Thank you very much.  Do you know where I can find more information about HTTP ping?  The google articles don't really provide step by step information on how to do this.

We have a client that will not grant us access to their Google Search Console (don't ask us why).

Is there anyway possible to submit a XML sitemap to Google without using GSC?

Thanks

Thanks everyone.  I sure don't intend to use this tactic because it looks awful on a website and I would hate to have Google decide it was spammy .

Rosemary

In addition, with symantic search Google knows that these two phrases are the same:

CyberSecurity PR Firms
Cyber Security PR Firms

They also do the same with Cybersecurity agency or firm.

Imagine telling a client to have all these individual landing pages!

I was on the phone with a proposed web relaunch firm for one of my clients listening to them talk about their deep SEO knowledge. I cannot believe that this wouldn’t be considered black-hat or at least very Spammy in which case a client could be in trouble.

On this vendor’s site I notice that they stack the footer site map with about 50 links that are basically keywords they are trying to rank for. But here’s the kicker shown by way of example from one of the themes in the footer:

9 footer links:
Top PR Firms
Best PR Firms
Leading PR Firms
CyberSecurity PR Firms
Cyber Security PR Firms
Technology PR Firms
PR Firm
Government PR Firms
Public Sector PR Firms

Each link goes to a unique URL that is basically a knock-off of the homepage with a few words or at the most one sentences swapped out to include this footer link keyword phrase, sometimes there is a different title attribute but generally they are a close match to each other.

The canonical for each page links back to itself.

I simply can’t believe Google doesn’t consider this Spammy.

Interested in your view.
Rosemary

So I have client that delivers goods to residential addresses and commercial businesses.  They have 60+ distribution centers but want to target surrounding counties, cities and territories.

Our development team was considering using virtual location pages (thousands) for these service areas.  I have lobbied against this out of concern that Google would label these "doorway" pages.  These pages would not have full addresses.

I want to develop a strategy to gain coverage in these surrounding delivery areas.   I was told that applying https://schema.org/serviceArea might help.  However will this truly bring in the necessary visibility?   Would having only a few key select virtual locations suffice (along with Service Area schema)?

Any advice on applying https://schema.org/serviceArea attributes would be much appreciated.
Thanks

Excellent response Marcus.  Thanks for your feedback.

I have a client that has multiple virtual locations to show website visitors where they provide delivery services.   These are individual pages that include unique phone numbers, zip codes, city & state.  However there is no address (this is just a service area).

We wanted to apply schematic markup to these landing pages.  Our development team successfully applied schema to the phone, state, city, etc.  However for just the address property they said VIRTUAL LOCATION.  This checked out fine on the Google structured data testing tool.

Our question is this; can just having VIRTUAL LOCATION for the address property be construed as spamming?  This landing page is providing pertinent information for the end user.  However since there is no brick and mortar address I'm trying to determine if having VIRTUAL LOCATION as the value could be frowned upon by Google.

Any insight would be very helpful.

Thanks

I know this seems like an old school question.  As a long time SEO I would never use ALL CAPS in a title tag (unless a brand name is capitalized).  However I recently came across a Moz video about creating better calls to action in the meta description tags.  Some of the examples had CTAs that were using all caps (i.e. CALL NOW!  or LOWEST QUOTES!)

I realize there is a debate about the user experience implications.  However I'm more concerned about search engines penalizing websites that are using ALL CAPS CTAs in their meta description tags.

Any feedback/advice would be appreciated.

Thanks

Thirteen months ago we removed a large number of non-corporate URLs from our web server.  We created 301 redirects and in some cases, we simply removed the content as there was no place to redirect to.

Unfortunately, all these pages still appear in Google's SERPs (not Bings) for both the 301'd pages and the pages we removed without redirecting.  When you click on the pages in the SERPs that have been redirected - you do get redirected - so we have ruled out any problems with the 301s.

We have already resubmitted our XML sitemap and when we run a crawl using Screaming Frog we do not see any of these old pages being linked to at our domain.

We have a few different approaches we're considering to get Google to remove these pages from the SERPs and would welcome your input.

• Remove the 301 redirect entirely so that visits to those pages return a 404 (much easier) or a 410 (would require some setup/configuration via Wordpress).  This of course means that anyone visiting those URLs won't be forwarded along, but Google may not drop those redirects from the SERPs otherwise.
• Request that Google temporarily block those pages (done via GWMT), which lasts for 90 days.
• Update robots.txt to block access to the redirecting directories.

Thank you.

Rosemary

One year ago I removed a whole lot of junk that was on my web server but it is still appearing in the SERPs.

Recently one of my clients was hesitant to move their new store locator pages to a subdomain.  They have some SEO knowledge and cited the whiteboard Friday article at https://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday.

While it is very possible that Rand Fiskin has a valid point I felt hesitant to let this be the final verdict.  John Mueller from Google Webmaster Central claims that Google is indifferent towards subdomains vs subfolders.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h1t5fs5VcI#t=50

Also this SEO disagreed with Rand Fiskin’s post about using sub folders instead of sub domains.  He claims that Rand Fiskin ran only 3 experiments over 2 years, while he has tested multiple subdomain vs subfolder experiments over 10 years and observed no difference.

http://www.seo-theory.com/2015/02/06/subdomains-vs-subfolders-what-are-the-facts-on-rankings/

Here is another post from the Website Magazine.  They too believe that there is no SEO benefits of a subdomain vs subfolder infrastructure.  Proper SEO and infrastructure is what is most important.

http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2015/03/10/seo-inquiry-subdomains-subdirectories.aspx

Again Rand might be right, but I rather provide a recommendation to my client based on an authoritative source such as a Google engineer like John Mueller.

Does anybody else have any thoughts and/or insight about this?

If I recall we used to be able to change our title attributes tag dynamically based on the search query but not sure if it's possible now or if it makes sense to do so.

Thoughts?

Rosemary

Recently I have been promoting custom long form content development for major brand clients.  For UX reasons we collapse the content so only 2-3 sentences of the first paragraph are visible.  However there is a "read more" link that expands the entire content piece.
I have believed that the searchbots would have no problem crawling, indexing and applying a positive SEO signal for this content.  However I'm starting to wonder.  Is there any evidence that the Google search algorithm could possible discount or even ignore collapsed content?

You're right - I'm worrying about something that isn't yet a problem.

Thank you

I have a client that has multiple virtual locations to show website visitors where they provide delivery services.   These are individual pages that include unique phone numbers, zip codes, city & state.  However there is no address (this is just a service area).

We wanted to apply schematic markup to these landing pages.  Our development team successfully applied schema to the phone, state, city, etc.  However for just the address property they said VIRTUAL LOCATION.  This checked out fine on the Google structured data testing tool.

Our question is this; can just having VIRTUAL LOCATION for the address property be construed as spamming?  This landing page is providing pertinent information for the end user.  However since there is no brick and mortar address I'm trying to determine if having VIRTUAL LOCATION as the value could be frowned upon by Google.

Any insight would be very helpful.

Thanks

perfect, just what I needed.  I just hope these "old school" ping efforts still work.  The client won't let us access their Google Search Console and yet we need their website crawled asap.

Thanks!