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

Thanks EGOL.  Still looking for additional evidence about this.

Yep I completely agree with your response.  Unfortunately I'm in a position where I manage major enterprise accounts with multiple stakeholders (including some people are not educated in SEO).  Every major change we propose needs to be documented, cited and reviewed.  When making an argument for content expansion I would need to use thorough research example (Moz study, documentation on search engine land, etc).

Anyway thank for taking the time to share your feedback and advice on this thread.  Although this is not the answer I wanted to hear (i.e. Google doesn't respect collapsed content)...however it's very likely accurate.  This is a serious SEO issue that needs to be addressed.

We are applying 500 to 800+ word custom content blocks for our client landing pages (local landing pages) that shows a preview of the first paragraph and a "read more" expansion link.  We know that most website visitors only care about the location info of these particular landing pages.  We also know that our client UX teams would certainly not approve an entire visible content block on these pages.
Are there any case studies about this issue?  I'm trying to find a bona fide research project to help back up our argument.

How collapsed was your content?  Did you hide the entire block?  Only show a few sentences?  I'm trying to find a research article about this.  This is a MAJOR issue to consider for our SEO campaigns.

Yes that is a very legitimate concern of mine.  We have invested significant resources into custom long form content for our clients and we are very concerned this all for nothing...or possibly worse (discounting content).

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?

Yes, thank you.  However I'm looking for a simple layman's analogy.  Most of the blog post readers are not going to be able to comprehend the technical aspects.

I'm currently writing a blog post about schema.  However I want to set the record straight that schema is not exactly the same as structured data, although both are often used interchangeably.  I understand this schema.org is a vocabulary of global identifiers for properties and things.   Structured data is what Google officially stated as "a standard way to annotate your content so machines can understand it..."

Does anybody know of a good analogy to compare the two?

Thanks!

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

Lately we have been applying structured data to the main content body of our client's websites.  Our lead developer had a good question about HTML however.

In JSON-LD, what is the proper way to embed content from a data field that has html markup (i.e. p, ul, li, br, tags) into mainContentOfPage. Should the HTML be stripped our or escaped somehow?

I know that apply schema to the main body content is helpful for the Googlebot.  However should we keep the HTML?  Any recommendations or best practices would be appreciated.

Thanks!

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

Thank you

Ok, Rand - one last questions.

I do think one year is a long time to have old results and if I was going to do a test to get Google to stop showing them in their SERPs what would you do?   --- Let's say a client asked you to have these URLs disappear

The 79 pages that appear in the /eichler/ directory are from a personal site so I don't care what happens with those pages in the SERPs.

My ideas are:

• 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.

• 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  Rand.    It has been 14 months since these pages were moved and I'd never seen Google retain pages anywhere near this long.

You're right of course, there has been no impact to traffic for our site as these pages weren't about our search business.

Thanks for taking a look at our issue.

Rosemary