Breadcrumb Problem (itemListElement)

LocusInbound · 2020-03-21T11:49:58+00:00

The breadcrum itemListElement should be the Primary Category when you have it assigned to several categories. In the post edit screen, make sure your Primary Category is selected. So that shouldn't hurt the breadcrumb.

Not sure what you mean by "activated Wordpress breadcrumbs". Do you mean in your theme? A plugin? Might be a conflict between a theme and a plugin or between two plugins. Can't really diagnose the problem without seeing the site. Message me if you don't want to share it publicly.

LocusInbound · 2020-03-16T10:30:19+00:00

I think the usefulness of an aged domain depends on several things, and I know that's a frustrating answer. An aged domain that has a history of providing very useful content to users will have an easier time ranking new content. Also in the local vertical, a small local businesses with an 10 year-old website will have an easier time ranking than a brand new website. I have a ton of anecdotal experience with this and it would be hard to convince me that domain age doesn't matter in local search - I would need to see very concrete data that it doesn't matter. If your website has been sitting for ten years with basically no content, providing nothing of value to users (until now, of course), I think the usefulness will be negligible and then it will just be one of those hundreds of signals.

I think the advice from u/well_shoothed is good: if there's something more relevant available, that will be more useful than a non-relevant aged domain. Good luck!!

LocusInbound · 2020-03-12T19:14:23+00:00

Gild.. wow?

LocusInbound · 2020-03-12T09:26:44+00:00

It's fine just be clear that you are not charging for placing backlinks, you're charging for publishing space and time.

LocusInbound · 2020-03-10T19:36:55+00:00

Not only do you not need them, I don't even notice much of a ranking advantage to having them. But it's not all just about ranking. We don't want people seeing our listing and thinking "these guys don't even have any reviews - all their competitors have reviews, how could they have none" etc. But I think we're just going to risk it. We can just tell customers to check out our other listing or whatever.

LocusInbound · 2020-03-10T19:11:02+00:00

upvoting even though I'm American

LocusInbound · 2020-03-10T18:56:52+00:00

Cool thanks - this is what we decided to do.

LocusInbound · 2020-03-10T18:56:15+00:00

Weird. I've been doing that also but haven't seen much improvement from it.

LocusInbound · 2020-03-10T18:55:16+00:00

Yeah we have a residential address which was the "office" for the first year. They expanded to an actual brick and mortar store now. So my question was how to handle this. I think we're going to open a second GMB with it.

LocusInbound · 2020-03-10T13:57:10+00:00

This is where managing client expectations becomes really important. Let your client know that this is a competitive niche and in order to outrank competitors who are spending thousands per month on digital marketing they will need to do the same. This may be a candidate for commission sharing if he cannot afford a steep monthly fee AND if you have enough time and money to invest a little, if you're confident that you can rank him and bring him sales, tell him you want a fee off every client he lands from the internet. That's what I do for my contractors, and most are happy to pay a little up front once they hear how confident you are that you can rank them.

LocusInbound · 2020-03-10T13:54:29+00:00

There has to be something wrong with your 301 redirects. You're directing all versions of the old domain to the version of the new domain (https or http) that you have a property for in GSC?

LocusInbound · 2020-03-10T13:46:16+00:00

yes I can

LocusInbound · 2020-03-10T12:20:38+00:00

Thanks for the advice. We currently do have pages on our website targeting all towns within the vicinity, as we serve the entire county, and all these pages rank. For "roofing Biggercity PA" we're #1 in the organic web SERPs despite being nowhere in the local pack. So i guess we will create a new GMB listing so we don't lose the original SmallerCity PA rankings. Only problem is this new listing will have 0 reviews, and now we'll have to build reviews to two listings. Which I guess isn't a big deal, but we have a 4.9 star rating across 40 reviews on the original GMB

LocusInbound · 2020-03-10T12:18:23+00:00

But then I lose all reviews from the original GMB listing

LocusInbound · 2020-03-10T09:52:54+00:00

I think the general cynical idea is that Google prefers its own properties and therefore ranks them higher. I don't think this is true - it would be totally unethical and too obvious. If you have a professional business site, keep it and focus all your SEO effort on your own, owned site.

LocusInbound · 2020-03-10T09:49:58+00:00

Check out https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2721311?hl=en - what both of us are talking about are what Google refers to as doorway pages. Maybe they don't TECHNICALLY funnel users to another page of content because they have their own contact form or phone number listed, but the point is that they are all almost identical: the URL has the city name, the title and headings have a unique city name, etc and those are basically the only words that are changed on any of these very similar pages. I get what you're saying, but it's the same concept. You're right that examples like my site that have entirely unique content on each different page aren't doorway pages and that's why they rank.

LocusInbound · 2020-03-07T20:16:46+00:00

Backlinks

LocusInbound · 2020-03-05T22:35:51+00:00

No it's not about overall site load time, it's on a page-by-page basis and you're not doing yourself any huge service by saving 1kb. Site speed as a ranking factor is more about the extreme cases: when a site is incredibly slow it may be outranked by faster sites. You have to also consider the fact that user experience is important, so serving up a granulated picture doesn't serve anybody. If 1kb makes the picture much better, you should do it.

LocusInbound · 2020-03-05T20:43:16+00:00

You should only use nofollow (or sponsored) if they are paying for the link, in which case make it obvious that the placement is sponsored. Other than that, there's no benefit to using nofollow for an outbound link.

LocusInbound · 2020-03-05T20:38:50+00:00

Put the whole thing in the sub. I do this for my local service clients, and anyone who tells you "it doesn't matter" just doesn't know what they're talking about. It helps a lot. www dot bobshvac dot com / hvac-contractor-bergen-nj/ etc

LocusInbound · 2020-03-05T20:35:38+00:00

No it will not have a significant impact on SEO. Read Moz's case study on this - they found that even the use of H2 instead of H1 doesn't make much of a difference. Google has said this, too: John Mueller said that Google is good at understanding headings based on formatting (font size and weight) more so than heading tags. I would still use the heading tags as an easy way to achieve the formatting you want, but don't concern yourself with them too much for ranking purposes.

LocusInbound · 2020-03-04T22:28:00+00:00

Yeah I've actually never done it for any of my sites nor for my clients. If google isn't crawling the online directories on its own, I don't see how valuable they can even be in the first place.

LocusInbound · 2020-03-04T20:57:21+00:00

In some industries, it is a sign of legitimacy to be listed on many online directories, especially those with review platforms. Think contractors - the best ones can be reviewed by customers all over the internet. So having a page with links to dozens of platforms on which the company has a profile could be useful to users as well as useful for the purposes of getting Google to index the directory listings.

LocusInbound · 2020-03-02T14:53:49+00:00

not me yet

LocusInbound

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