No, I am not really sure that schema can even be used to mark up a link. Or are you talking about using schema on those linking pages? A well marked up review, address etc on an external site is not going to be a bad thing but if this is just an attempt to game the system then... it will likely offer little benefit.

My pleasure!

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,

There is a general consensus that 300 words or 500 characters is enough but I tend to think that is borderline useless advice here. How long should a blog post be? My answer would be long enough to fulfil the promise of the title and short enough to not be boring and overstay it's welcome.

Some great blog posts may be 100 words, some fantastic posts may be 10,000 words. It really depends on what you are talking about and how long it needs to  be to accurately do what it says on the tin.

There is a tendency in search to try and do SEO by numbers. We want 300 words. Well, 300 words does not denote quality. Quality denotes quality. If your main criteria when writing blogs or hiring writers is to hit 300 words then you have already failed. If your main criteria is to provide high quality answers that don't already exist or to do things way better than they are already being done then you are on the right track.

That's a somewhat philosophical answer but a better one than any general advice you may get re word or character count. If you want a more specific answer tailored to your situation then look at the blog posts that do well in the niche you are targeting. How long are they? Could some of them benefit from more detail? Could some of them be trimmed a bit to provide a more succinct answer?

The only caveat to this advice would be to avoid going too long and if you have something that is thousands of words long consider making it part of a series and having several posts that make a greater whole. Think of them as chapters of a book or report and that these parts can then more accurately fulfil the promise made by the whole. A great strategy can be to write up a series like this and then to create an overview or summary that links out to the more detailed sub posts and you then target the high level and more detailed keywords within your topic.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Hey Christopher

Just to clarify:

• You have two businesses (A & B) both in Edmonton and running at two separate addresses.
• You are moving business A into the address of business B

You do not state what the actual problem is here but I am going to assume it has something to do with a loss of traffic / visibility in local search due to a changed address and merging of the two businesses (please correct me if this is wrong). I see strong local results (7 pack #1) for floral delivery edmonton canada / flower delivery edmonton canada but much less strong results for the other business.

I like to think in real world terms and if these are two distinct businesses, related, but distinct then really Google should not have a problem with this if they are in the same address so I see no reason why you would be 'punished' for this. Lots of physical addresses house more than one office / business so as long as you are not looking to cheat, then you should be fine.

So, we have to think about the practicalities of doing this:

1. Change address on website
2. change address on all citations to match new address

If we want to maintain (and possibly improve) our local SEO then we have to be fastidious in our approach at identifying and updating all external listings of the address (be that structured or unstructured citations).

I would approach this as follows.

**1. Identify all external citations & document in a spreadsheet. **

To do this we need to google for all listings for your business. Structured citations are easy so something like:

"business name" "post code" -www.url.co.uk

You are basically looking for business name, postcode and removing any listings from your own site.

For the unstructured citations you may need to use a little more Google-Fu and play with this a little and look for mentions of your brand name + location - your website. Play with it, be thorough, find all mentions of your site

"business name" "phone number" -www.url.co.uk
"business name" "location" -www.url.co.uk
etc

Then, document all of this in a spreadsheet and start to work through these listings updating the address.

2. Update address on your website, social profiles and any citations under your control

3. Go to work updating all the other structured and unstructured citations

You may need to verify the new address and jump through some hoops so you may see a drop in visibility for a short period but if you are thorough here you will likely come out the other side stronger with better and more consistent citations.

Top tip - co occurrence of keywords and external reviews are hot topics in local SEO so look at this as a chance to update and improve any citations you find and talk about your business, services and make note of any you can look for that can have reviews added.

Ultimately, you should not be punished if you are not doing anything nefarious here so do what you need to do and look at it as an opportunity to improve your listings as you go.

I have not added two existing businesses to one address like this but we have moved lots of businesses from one address to another and usually made solid improvements in the process.

Hope that helps
Marcus

Hey Axial

As far as I am aware there is no option to target regions like Europe and to do this in webmaster tools you will need to create a folder for each country you are looking to target within Europe.

Obviously, there are lots of different languages across Europe so in an ideal world, you will want a version geotargeted to each country in the correct language. If you want to be really fancy you will want a version with english and the relevant countries language.

So, for spain as an example, targeting Spanish and English the hreflang would be set as "ES-es" and "ES-en" (Spain-Spanish and Spain-English). Directories could be matched /es-es & /es-en.

Not an answer as such but as far as I am aware, Europe is not targetable in a single folder via webmaster tools so you are going to have to work with what's available.

Hope that helps

Marcus