Google Places Pages and social icons

[Ron10]

I have a business that works in many cities across Texas.  Our home base is in Austin and i have a Google Places page set up for Austin.  I have a page dedicated to each major city in Texas talking about clients we've worked with in each city, etc..  I am placing social icons on each page and Google Places is one of the Icons and i was concerned that if Google sees a link to our Austin places page on our Houston page that the Houston page might be considered less relevant for a Houston search being as Google takes note of addresses on pages to consider relevance.  Will my page suffer in the serps if i link to our Austin local page on our other city pages in the google places icon?

Second question:  What are the best social icons to put on my web pages for the best traffic?

Take care,
Ron

[Ron10]

I've been told that Google will rank a page higher for a local query if the address on the page has the city in it that was typed into the search bar.  If the address on the bottom of the page is  an Austin address, then a search phrase with Houston in it should cause the Austin addressed page to rank lower.  The Google Local page that i was going point the social icon to on our Houston page is our home office in Austin.  I wasn't sure if Google would see that their Local Page was an Austin address and cause my Houston page to rank lower for Houston searches.  That's kind of hard to explain, do you follow me?

[anthony-305442]

why would linking out to a social page, confuse the bots?

If I have a page about dogs, and I link out to my cat page, this shouldn't alter the semantic associations much.

[Ron10]

Yes, exactly, this would be an example:

<a href="http://www.facebook.com/SEOmoz" class="facebook">Facebooka>

[anthony-305442]

when you say "social icon" arent you using a jpg in an A tag?

[Ron10]

It would be hard to imagine enciting any robot confusion so long as the branch office link was in an A tag...

When you say "tag" you mean the social icon button taking you to my Austin local page right?

[anthony-305442]

When I worked on our regional pages, I was sure to specify regional "city name" keywords high on the page's Y axis.

I never really thought about a detriment derived from linking to branch offices in other cities. It would be hard to imagine enciting any robot confusion so long as the branch office link was in an A tag...