Hey Philipp

Okay, SEO aside here and assuming folks are landing on your site and not on the section of the site that is targeted to their location / language (which is a whole other discussion but not your question as far as I can tell) then you want to redirect these users to the correct language pages.

So, we have two options here:

1. HTTP 301 - Moved Permanently: Now I don't feel this is correct. The resource has not moved, it is just not correct for this user based on their language preference.
2. HTTP 302 - Found: This is used to indicate the resource has temporarily moved to another location so is maybe more suitable as results from page A will not be completely ignored

In fact, if you dig into the HTTP status codes documentation a better option here would seemingly be a 303 which is classified as 'The response to the request can be found under another URI' and for my money that is more suitable. But, problem is, no one seems to use the 303 redirect and everyone seems to use the 302 in it's place.

So, I ask myself, what does Google do? When I visit www.google.com from the UK I am always redirected to the www.google.co.uk site. Is this a 301, 302, 303 or something else entirely? So, I checked quickly in webbug (or you can do it Chrome by looking at the Network tab in Tools > Developer Tools > Network Tab) and it redirects with a 302 status code.

Request: HEAD / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.google.com
Connection: close
Accept: /
User-Agent: WebBug/5.0

Response: HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Location: http://www.google.co.uk/

So, I am not sure there is a definitive answer as from a search engine perspective we would want to folks landing on the right page due to our geo location and language targeting but that does not escape the need to show people the content in the correct language.

If this was me and I was dead set on a redirection I would go with a 302. I can't claim that is an authoritative answer but it is certainly my opinion based on my research here.

I guess the alternative would be to maybe detect the users language settings and load a pop up that then allows them to select and redirect so it is not done at the request / response level but rather a choice the user makes themselves (then maybe cookies or other options could be used to deal with language for those users on subsequent visits). In the UK http://www.babycenter.com/ does this and it pops up asking me which version of the site I would like to visit (choice is always a good thing).

Possibly a good question to ask in the Google Webmaster Help Forum: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/webmasters as you will often get a Googler pop up to answer specific questions or this question may well have been asked before (albeit in a different way). If this is not search focused then really it comes down to what you think works best for your users.

Hope that helps! 
Marcus

Some further reading if it helps:

• http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192
• http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=62399
• http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-discussing-302-redirects/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_302

Hey

As Peter mentioned, in principle, this is no different to any other kind of office address. In practice though, you may find some issues as there may be several other tenants who have had this address previously and subsequently there will be a whole list of different names, phone numbers (2/3 of the Nap), website addresses and other info associated with this address.

Also, the Regus building will likely have lots of other businesses in there at the same actual street address which may create further noise.

The general advice is simple.

• get registered with Google+ Local
• build citations at the important
• optimise the website with local in mind
• generally try to ensure the website is high quality
• Try to be active socially, publish content, build local links, encourage honest reviews etc

But, my approach here would also include a detailed audit of all business listings that exist for that address. Get everything in a spreadsheet and contact the sites one by one to either update or remove the listings. Also, to identify if there are any Google local listings that still exist for the old businesses so these can be updated and removed.

Google is probably your best tool here and a search using the elements you know such as office number (Post Code / Zip Code), address will be the first starting point.

"[Office Number]" "[Street Address]" "[Post Code]"

My business is in an office complex called the Custard Factory in Birmingham and the search above for us would look something like:

"112 Zellig Building" "Gibb Street" "B9 4AA"

This should give us a good starting point. From here we will likely find several other interesting pieces of information we can use to refine these searches:

• Business names
• Phones Number

It's not search based buy you may be able to ask the Regus folks for a list of all previous tenant names of this office and that could give you a good running start here.

Then, it's a process of more traditional searches for those businesses and any information relating to them.

"business name" AND "post code" -www.businesswebsite.co.uk

So, for our business address that would be something like

"Bowler Hat" AND "B9 4AA" -www.bowlerhat.co.uk

This will give you a list of results with the business name, post code and remove any listings for the clients website. You may have to play with this a little as the business may have name variations but this will be a good starting point for further investigation.

Citation based factors (Quality, Consistency & Volume) pay a large part in Local SEO and simply building new citations if there is lots of noise out there and some active local listings may not do what you want it to (Or I could just be really OCD about all this stuff).

I suggest a read through at least the foundational ranking factors here but this should give you plenty of scope to get started: 
http://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/local-search-ranking-factors

Hope that helps!

Marcus

I agree, get a great domain name that is short & user friendly and concentrate on building the brand. You can still SEO the site and as Elias mentioned, any benefit of exact match domains is being slowly chipped away so concentrate on your users.

I wish I had known what I know now when I registered my company and domain name!

Hey Dan

Ultimately, I don't think this would be a problem on an otherwise non spammy site. There is generally a big difference between a site that is using a set of spammy or manipulative techniques and one that makes a simple mistake like this so I doubt you have much to worry about if everything else is as it should be.

That said, I guess the simple question here is:

If you are using a background image and white text, why not use a background colour as well?

This would address the obvious usability issues relating to the image not displaying and clarify that there is no bad intention here to trick anything. Better for users, better for search engines, better for your SEO penalty related anxiety issues.

Hope that helps.

Marcus

Hey Rosemary

This is against the guidelines for local businesses so could be problematic

Ref: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en-GB

"If your business rents a temporary, "virtual" office at an address that is different from your primary business, do not create a page for that location unless it is staffed during your normal business hours."

If we take a look at the schema page for a local business we can see that this markup is ideally for a physical business

ref: https://schema.org/LocalBusiness

"A particular physical business or branch of an organization. Examples of LocalBusiness include a restaurant, a particular branch of a restaurant chain, a branch of a bank, a medical practice, a club, a bowling alley, etc."

So - to go back to your question I am not sure it is spam as such but it is incorrect in how you are using the mark up. This is not a 'physical business or branch of an organisation' and as such the schema markup is used incorrectly. I would remove the schema markup in this instance.

However - there is no reason why you would not have a location pages for a service area - none at all and you can do these pages well and they can provide real value to a customer in the targeted location. They won't rank in the local pack but they may well rank in the organic results below (or be used for paid traffic)

I wrote about location landing pages in some depth here:
http://searchengineland.com/local-seo-landing-pages-2-0-222583

Hope that helps clear things up for you.

Cheers
Marcus

Hey Varun

For a single location business serving a relative catchment area this is a total no brainer. Some sites do okay without this but there no reasons I can think of to not do this and certainly in our experience with over 100 local projects this always helps and never hurts.

This is not the be all and end all though and I would want optimised service pages and the like if the business has several sub services so the pages themselves were optimised beyond simply having the address (usual suspects, page titles, meta desc, H1, content etc).

Few pointers and clarifications from our experience:

• You want the full NAP and not just the address
• Ideally your NAP will be formatted exactly as on your Google+ places / local page
• You can use a generator to add some schema mark up to your address for even more sizzle: http://www.microdatagenerator.com/local-business-schema/

Ultimately, and it should always come back to this, if I am a local customer looking for a local business I want to know when I land on that page that they are A) local and B) serve my local area. Having an address on every page helps with this as does having optimised page elements and copy - that is user optimised with search engine visibility in mind.

This is an easy win - lots of positives, no negatives.

Hope that helps

Marcus

Hey Bob

There is a much easier way to do this and simply have your PDFs that you don't want indexed in a folder that you block access to in robots.txt. This way you can just drop PDFs into articles and link to them knowing full well these pages will not be indexed.

Assuming you had a PDF called article.pdf in a folder called pdfs/ then the following would prevent indexation.

User-agent: * Disallow: /pdfs/

Or to just block the file itself:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /pdfs/yourfile.pdf Additionally, There is no reason not to add the canonical link as well and if you find people are linking directly to the PDF then having this would ensure that the equity associated with those links was correctly attributed to the parent page (always a good thing).

Header add Link '<http: www.url.co.uk="" pdfs="" article.html="">; </http:> rel="canonical"'

Generally, there are better ways to block indexation than with robots.txt but in the case of PDFs, we really don't want these files indexed as they make for such poor landing pages (no navigation) and we certainly want to remove any competition or duplication between the page and the PDF so in this case, it makes for a quick, painless and suitable solution.

Hope that helps!
Marcus