Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You should be good to go. According to Rand the footers, menus, and sidebar content is ignored. What is seen as unique is only the body section of the page. Here is the link:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-unique-does-content-need-to-be-to-perform-well-in-search-engines-whiteboard-friday

Hope this answers your question.

I think if the stock image fits your brand then it's ok to use it. To the best of my knowledge the cover of Snow Leopard is actually a stock image, so even the best prefer to trust a professional to photograph a live snow leopard.

But back to your question I would certainly apply the names and alt tags to the business, so I wouldn't just use the most generic of naming conventions. Maybe a photo of happy customers would read "my_brand_testimonials" especially if it is on the testimonials page of your site. I would also make sure the stock is not commonly associated with your industry and that it's not too popular. If it is consider not making an image site map.

Another practice I would use would be if possible to alter the images for your use. Of course this is assuming you have the rights to make those modifications. But simple modifications can go a long way at explaining things. I myself have used skitch to draw attention to certain points.

Things I wouldn't do are to use a stock boardroom and claim it's the office. In this case theres really no stock solution and it looks deceiving.

I've never experienced this in a negative way but I find it hard to believe Google would penalize someone for using stock navigation buttons. I suppose if someone was crafting a directory using a popular directory software and provided little to no SEO value, but was the only player in a razor thin niche, then maybe being completely stock would hurt the site. But one could argue it never stood a chance regardless.

At the present we have a set of service landing pages under a city page not intended as a landing page. I am going to read that article to get some more insight and appreciate your time posting it.

I would say some of my frustration is building a general service page, then extending it to multiple sub-services. Often times I feel as though the general service page more than covers the sub-services. The only reason to create the sub-service page would be to target another keyword.

I have no issue writing a service page for one city but get exhausted thinking about how it could be done for smaller cities nearby. I certainly feel guilty building animations and great language for one city, and directing a tiny city to a city page with only a little information. Particularly when the visiting user will likely expect me to just duplicate the service offering for their city. I suppose the solution is to become more creative about rewriting the same services.

We've all been here before if you do local. What type of content should go on a local service page when dealing with multiple service locations?

You could:

• Describe Services
• List Local News Articles
• List staff in that location (although I would prefer in the staff page for that city)
• Testimonials from that location or service

But what happens when you are describing something that needs no explanation. Or a medical procedure that requires no localization and altering the wording can actually cause legal problems if misstated.

Matt Cuts recommends a few sentences to a paragraph to describe a service, but my experience hasn't found this to hold up locally.

Any ideas or suggestions about how this could be remedied?

The New Yorker has a famous cartoon with two dogs on a computer that said 'no one knows your a dog on the internet', unfortunately Google would rather everyone knew. What I mean by that is a carefully concocted strategy may not be rewarded with large SEO value initially, as Google prefers the slow and steady approach. That's not to say that you may be contributing unique content that your industry is badly in need of. But ranking Amazon in Google's eyes would be a time consuming effort in the public domain, not one that launches completed and ready, unless of course you are a big brand. But if the content is meant to be interpreted as a complete set then I don't see any harm in launching all at once, a website launch, or campaign would be a good example.

This is my opinion too. There was a time when this was acceptable and essentially their black hat methods have been grandfathered into the system. However if you tried to it in the present you would be held back. I have a competitor that was hit on long tail terms but still ranks for the most competitive phrases. Needless to say he upped his PPC in order to make up for frivolous phrases but his traffic is still besting me because he has the most obvious search phrases at number one.

I'm going to try this as the current option is sitting. Thanks for the response!

One of my domains was hacked right before I took over managing it. The hacker created around 100 links for simply grotesque things. After I took over I erased the entire site, rebuilt from scratch, new server (inmotion), rewrote every page, robots.txt every offending page, and even 301 just in case 404s were hurting me. I am now almost a month in and I have seen zero movement on anything rankings based.

This is not a bad domain it was registered in 2008 and has a few decent citations because of the Doc's medical license. They registered for BBB in November and have a 30 year old listing citation from them based on business establishment.

I must be going crazy but it's not ranking for anything except the homepage.

I didn't know Google could hold a grudge for so long. The only ranking I can sometimes achieve is through Google Places which still has to compete with tough domains.

I've already put in a reconsideration request and received a response stating the following:  We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.

Just check it for yourself I know it's a work in progress but I'm not even considered relevant on page 50! And the crap links are still indexed!! A search for a keyword I'm aiming for with my client's name followed after gives me no results.

I am currently using wordpress, yoast xml, and single keyword focusses. My market is tough but no way I can not rank for the keyword and my name.

I think if the stock image fits your brand then it's ok to use it. To the best of my knowledge the cover of Snow Leopard is actually a stock image, so even the best prefer to trust a professional to photograph a live snow leopard.

But back to your question I would certainly apply the names and alt tags to the business, so I wouldn't just use the most generic of naming conventions. Maybe a photo of happy customers would read "my_brand_testimonials" especially if it is on the testimonials page of your site. I would also make sure the stock is not commonly associated with your industry and that it's not too popular. If it is consider not making an image site map.

Another practice I would use would be if possible to alter the images for your use. Of course this is assuming you have the rights to make those modifications. But simple modifications can go a long way at explaining things. I myself have used skitch to draw attention to certain points.

Things I wouldn't do are to use a stock boardroom and claim it's the office. In this case theres really no stock solution and it looks deceiving.

I've never experienced this in a negative way but I find it hard to believe Google would penalize someone for using stock navigation buttons. I suppose if someone was crafting a directory using a popular directory software and provided little to no SEO value, but was the only player in a razor thin niche, then maybe being completely stock would hurt the site. But one could argue it never stood a chance regardless.

You should be good to go. According to Rand the footers, menus, and sidebar content is ignored. What is seen as unique is only the body section of the page. Here is the link:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-unique-does-content-need-to-be-to-perform-well-in-search-engines-whiteboard-friday

Hope this answers your question.