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Do you have any tricks to getting reviews to stick on yelp? Whenever we ask out customers to review us on there their reviews end up getting "detected" as fakes. I have tried it out myself, and the only way i've gotten them to stick is making several reviews of various different local businesses with average ratings and then dropping one in for the client with a better rating. Perhaps this is a little on the blackhat/greyhat side of things.  But if our customers are legitimatly trying to review us and it doesn't stick, i don't feel all that bad taking this route, the only real problem is time consumed. What about google? has anyone had any luck gaining more reviews for their client on google?

Sorry for the lame title, i couldn't think of a better one. I want to know if google treats this: http://www.domain.com/products/some-product-name the same as it would treat: http://www.domain.com/?products=some-product-name if not, could you tell me the differences?

I just recently learned that changing your page title earns you a google penalty.  Unfortunately i learned this after playing around with my page titles a bit to get the most optimal page titles.  Does anybody know how long this google penalty lasts? is it forever? or just temporary?

We have been working on local SEO quite a lot for our small business, trying to understand why we are consistantly outranked by our competators.  I understand there are many factors at play here. I realize that DA & PA, Places page optimization, and on page optimization also play a role, but for the purpose of this question i would like to focus on just one factor: citations. From your experiance with local SEO do you find that a citation that is located closer to the top of the page holds more weight than a citation buried further down a page? Here is an example:
http://www.yellowpages.ca/search/si/1/Storage-Self+Service/Toronto+ON/ in this case the people paying for the priority positions on that page are right at the top of the page, rather than buried 5 pages into the results.  in fact they are right at the top of each page of the results, so over and over again they are above the free listings. I have heard that google considers the value of a link based on its position on the page.  So would it be safe to assume that google also considers the value of a citation based on its position on the page? Thank you for your time,
Storwell

There are a lot of local directories that i have seen google pull citations from.  Quite often i see people putting listings in these directories prefixed by several "A"s, so that they will appear on the first page of the list. Just how deep does google crawl through the pages of these lists? will google actually crawl through all the pages? Some of these directories offer paid listings that appear at the top of the directory.  We have been considering purchasing some of these paid positions, so that google would be more likely to pickup our citations. In one case i have noticed a directory: shopincities.com do something that spiked my interest.  Basically, if you start clicking through the different pages of a category, the site will block you after 3 or 4 pages in.  It serves you an error saying that you are not human.  In my mind this is to prevent google from fully crawling their whole list, so that the people who pay for the top positions are picked up, and the people who don't pay, even though their profiles are listed there, never get crawled by google. So would you pay for position on these directories? here are some examples: http://www.shopincities.com
http://www.411.ca
http://www.goldbook.com
http://www.n49.ca
http://torontodirect.com
http://www.yellowpages.com Or would you just throw a whole bunch of A's infront of your business name so you appear on the first page of listings? Or do you belive it doesn't matter how deep you are in the listings, and with enough time google will find it regardless and credit it as a citation?

I have a competator that has literally hundreds of sites like this: http://www.wire-shelf.com/tag/cleaning/ that don't have a huge amount of page authority, but he is getting citations out of all of them.  The site is obviously useless, and just a place for some SEO company to keep adding more links to their various clients, and creating google citations for them at the same time. Once you have filled out your information on every single local database and obtained all the legit citations you can, your competitors are still beating you by having more citations, from various sites like the one above. Is there any way to stay whitehat and actually succeed? or should i just follow suit, and make 100 crappy websites full of crap and put links in them.  seems silly, but it seems like the only way to compete these days.

I'm aware that local search is mostly based on citations, and how well your Google places page is optimized, and the landing pages are optimized.  But I was wondering if anyone could tell me if backlinks have any relevance in the local search results?  And if they do, how much would you say the impact the local search results? could you estimate a % of total value? Also if they do, does it help to have backlinks that point at your places page urls? or should the backlinks just point at your places page landing pages?

We currently have a domain that has a small amount of inbound links: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/www.1800wecoach.com/a!links We decided to switch over to a different domain name, which currently has 0 inbound links. What we were wondering is which would be better: link to the new domain from the old domain in a prominent location on all pages. or forward the old domain to the new domain? does forwarding a domain pass linkjuice?

how heavily do the list of keywords in google's webmaster tools reflect your ranking for those keywords?  For example see this screenshot: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/39497/Screen shot 2011-06-04 at 7.22.31 PM.png we are a self storage company, and our first two keywords in google's webmaster tools are storage and self.  the problem is nobody searches for self storage (from my keyword research). most people search for "storage +cityname" like "storage toronto" for example. so i guess my question would be this: would it be effective to change all the instances of "Self" on our website to "Toronto" or other city names to try to push the city names higher in google's webmaster tools keywords rank?

Or does google treat this behavior the same way as a reciprocal link and discount any credibility of the citation?

Title says it all.

Or will those sources be discounted by google then similar to how google discounts link exchanges? I have noticed some pages, like mapquest, don't really have a directory, so google might not be aware of their content unless it is linked too??? In this type of a case, would it help to link to mapquest's search results? then the citation will get picked up by google? Example: http://www.mapquest.com/?hk=6-i30tP49i

I have been trying to gain some position in our local O-pack results and have used whitespark to hunt for citations and aquire as many as possible, but even after 4-5 months google has still not detected many of the citations we have added.  What are you favourite citation sources? which ones really help? i.e. what are some quality canadian citation sources?

Does anyone know how google selects the news articles it displays in google trends? EX: http://www.google.com/trends?q=glitch+hop%2C+dubstep&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 See how dubstep has a couple posts that show up when searched in google trends? these are different than regular SERPS as far as i can tell.  Does anyone know how google selects them?

They have a couple listings of us with screwy info but i can't actually use their website, all the buttons that say "join" or "write a review" "uplaod an image" etc, are just an href="#" and don't actually do anything??? I figured maybe they have some broken javascript so i tried using different browsers (firefox & chrome in mac, and IE in windows.) Here's our listings in there: http://www.camerchants.com/Business/Storage+-+Self+Service/Storwell.Self.Storage/MTAyODAzNQ# http://www.camerchants.com/Business/Movers/Storwell.Self.Storage/MTEwMjMyOQ
http://www.camerchants.com/Business/Movers/Storwell.Self.Storage/MTEwMjMyOA
http://www.camerchants.com/Business/Recreational+Vehicles+Storage/Storwell.Self.Storage/MTAyODU4OQ# Are you able to click anything on this website and it actually functions as advertised? am i just using the wrong browser, or is this some kind of tool competitors use to blackhat our local listings into oblivion?

I have probably set them for each of my storage locations over 20 times now.  They stick for a week, only to find them have all been deleted once again. Also, why are my competitors able to choose custom categories, where as I am not?

If someone formats a link like so: http://www.somedomain.com/keyword1-keyword2/keyword3.php Would you still get a similar anchor text benefit to this link as if it was formated like so: somedomain keyword1 keyword2 keyword3 what i mean is, does google extract out keywords from links that use the url as the anchortext?

I always try to strive for getting good anchortext in links that people link to my sites with, but sometimes they are not very web savvy, or just plain not willing to format the link the way i want it and we end up with links that use the URL as the anchortext. My question is, if i format a url such that it has keywords in it, and when someone makes a link like this: http://www.storwell.com/self-storage-toronto-bursary-application-form.php does google consider the words: storwell, self, storage, toronto, bursary, application & form as the anchor text?

I was just wondering if someone could point out to me any known differences between these three search engines.  I feel like i have been spending a lot of time optimizing for google, but don't have much of an idea of how to optimize for yahoo or bing.  Do you have any up-to date article links or tips/advice?

It seems like a lot of our competators are getting lots of link juice from fake/spammy looking articles on squido.  Is it worth the effort to make these articles and add links to them, or is google smarter than that? Example here: http://www.squidoo.com/selfstoragesmyrnatn links to: www.migsonstorage.com who seems to be doing pretty good according to OSE with a PA of 63 and a DA of 56

I am having a hard time understanding why we are ranking so poorly for the keyword search "self storage toronto" on google.ca We have claimed our places page, and we have 38 citations and 9 reviews.  Yet for some reason we are burried 7 pages into the places pages results way below other places pages that have far lower page authority, domain authority, and less citations and reviews on their places page. I just can't understand what we are doing wrong / overlooking. Any ideas? Here's the places page i am referring too: http://maps.google.ca/maps/place?hl=en&ie=UTF8&q=storwell&fb=1&gl=ca&hq=storwell&cid=3009236871758088464&z=14 We do happen to land very high in the organic results for the same keyword, infact we are on the first page but why is google not giving us any love in places?