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I think Mueller's main point may be that if you treat your subdomains separately from your main site, Google will treat them differently as well. For example, if you have three subdomains - www, blog and cloud - but all of them have different navigation, css and limited interlinking and little keyword theme commonality, Google will treat them as separate sites and you will suffer the dreaded subdomain issue.

BUT if you integrate the three domains well - same nav, same look & feel and lots of good contextual anchor text interlinking, Google will treat it as the same site and the subdomain issue will become moot.

Has anyone done any testing with those variables?

It's hard to give specific input without knowing the client. A link building strategy, like all SEO, is something that needs to be tailored to the client. On the whole, however, with articles it's really is about quality and legitimacy.

If you write quality articles that have meaningful and useful content, then you have a better chance of getting them published on sites that will provide high link value. If you're just gaming the system and writing solely for the sake of links, then you're going to be limited to low-quality sites, which won't do a whole lot for the client.

That's quite a lengthy plan. I have no idea what the budget is, but if it isn't large I think it would be best to narrow this down to one or two methods and build from there.

Despite all the negative attention directories have been getting lately, there is still value in them. Your idea of only targeting high quality ones is good, but also make sure they are relevant (either in their total focus or at least have a very relevant category). Having to pay is a given and should be part of your budget. This can be a good, (relatively) quick-result first step if done properly.

Comments on any site, including .edu & .gov, aren't the best first line of attack. Their SEO value is very limited and it takes many to amount to anything. I'm not convinced they every really do amount to anything from a strictly SEO point of view.

Press releases also get a lot of guff, but if there's something legit to announce, then that should definitely be explored. It's all about how much real value the PR brings to readers.

If you look at the code for the page /bikes/how-to/check-a-rear-hub/, you'll see that there are two links that appear to be part of a pagination element

Chain Wear ». But no part of that actually shows on the page itself (user-facing).

As far as the link-to-content ratio,  site is a little light on text, but heavy on links. Just completing the site by putting text in each of the "contents", "tools" and "parts" sections will help with that. I'm sure that's your plan, but since it's not done currently and you're having issues, it's worth pointing out.

Google doesn't like things like hidden text/links or too little text with too many links so these issues could be throwing up a red flag in Google's eyes.

I don't see anything in the anchor text that stands out as immediately problematic. Are these internal or external links?

It's hard to give more advice without more information, but one thing I see on your site is that you have some links in the code that aren't on the page. You should figure out how much of that is happening and why. Depending on the answer you find, it may be something to address.

Plus the link to content ratio is off a bit. You may want to add more content and group your inner links to lower the count.

We've had a lot of success using Raven Tools, as well as some other tools for SERP Rankings for our clients; however, most only go down to the country level. We're researching into some good hyper local trackers (down to the city/zip level). Does anyone have any suggestions?

When one hovers over the social media metrics in Open Site Explorer the popups say that the numbers represent the total number of times the URL has been posted, liked, tweeted or +1'd.

Those numbers are [appear to be] more dynamic than the data in OSE's other reports and seem to get a fresh analysis each time the URL is entered.

So I'm wondering what period of time is it counting in it's "total number of times" determination? If I'd like to track the data to get an idea of, say, total number of Facebook Shares for a one month period, how often should I check the numbers?

I've been trying to get a CSV for linking domains for two days now and still have nothing.  It got to the "Finalizing" status within a few hours and stayed that way for about 24 hours, and now it's back to the beginning of a "pending" status.

I second what Keri said. It has happened to me many times. You just have to be patient.

It really depends on the content of your blog.  I have seen a few blogs from various companies that we have worked with that have blogs that have a lot of content that is not related the rest of their site. Because the content is not related we have seen how the blog is bringing in the wrong kind of traffic when it starts to rank for keywords that are unrelated to the main site. Also, all of this unrelated content could hurt the site by causing the search engines to miscategorize the main purpose of the site.

A added bonus of having an external blog is that you can create quality external links to your site from your blog.

All that being said, generally I suggest that companies have their site under their own domain like www.mysite.com/blog

There are lot's of variables that affect the displaying of ranking on the SERPs, some of them include location, account settings and many other things. Google also runs tests on their search results constantly so you might see some variation from that as well.

What does all this mean? Don't worry about the details so much but look at the overall trend to see if in general your rankings are going up or down. If you are tracking rankings manually i would use the same browser using the same settings each time to check the rankings, this you will use as your baseline. Then you will be able to monitor for any changes in rankings based on these set variables. If you then check other browsers you should see the same general trend even though the results may not be exact.

My guess is it it due to the content.  I did a quick search for the first sentence on the home page content: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=%22Starting+a+business+is+usually+thought+of+as+something+that+takes+lots+of+money+and+carries+lots+of+risks.%22

It looks like there are MANY sites using the same content.  It appears that Google really dislikes content that is duplicated nowadays.  The same thing happened to one of my sites. There were some spammers that grabbed our content and our rankings fell.  Create some new original content and your rankings should come back.

Hi Roger,

We created a blog post on cross domain tracking with Google Analytics that describes how to do this.  Please check it out: http://www.blastam.com/blog/index.php/2011/02/google-analytics-cross-domain-tracking/

You should really optimize your blog posts before they are published live on the blog.  We have seen an optimized blog post start to show up in search results in less than 24 hours after posting it. If you optimize your post later it wont get crawled and updated as quickly but it will still get your updates. It seem that search engines see blogs as very time sensitive (kind of like news articles) and will crawl new posts faster.

I agree with David about the level of SEO you are performing on the posts.  You don't want to hurt the readability or persuasiveness of the blog posts. If you optimize it right it shouldn't seem forced or spammy. I would suggest to only target one or two keywords per blog post.  You should also get the original blog writer to help out by giving them a keyword or two before they write the post. Just give the writer some basic SEO instructions abouit usings a keyword in headers and various phrases and let them incorporate the keywords into their message. Then afterwards you shouldn't have to do as much, just some simple clean up to optimize the post. This is what we do and it has work out great.

It depends on what your purpose is.

If you want them totally block from being index then putting the page in the robots.tx fil or using a robots meta tag would work fine.

If you just want to de-emphasize the page to the search engines you can use nofollows or javascript links on footer/header links.

One thing that we have done is to combine some of these pages (terms and privacy) into one page to cut down on the number of total links on each page.

You could also not include the privacy page link on every page (depending on your site) but just link it from certain pages that collect sensitive data (near the form).

I hope this helps. The main thing to remember is that each site is different so you will have to adjust your tactics depending on precisely what you are trying to accomplish.

I just noticed that some of your pages are indexed under www.dentistinlittlerock.com and some with out the www's at dentistinlittlerock.com. This could be why you are not seeing them all indexed in your webmaster tools.  Webmaster tools see these as two different sites.

You should set up a 301 redirect to have them all go to one domain(either www.dentistinlittlerock.com or dentistinlittlerock.com).  This should fix it.

It's usually best to use your target keyword at the beginning of the description.  Users will not always read the full description when scanning the SERP. Search engines seem to give the to give more weight to the keywords at the beginning of the description as well. So the closer to the front the better.

Okay, that being said, you have to make sure you are not trying to jam all of your keywords at the beginning otherwise it will turn off the user. Choose the most important one as your primary keyword to use at the beginning and use other related keywords throughout the description where they make sense.

When one hovers over the social media metrics in Open Site Explorer the popups say that the numbers represent the total number of times the URL has been posted, liked, tweeted or +1'd.

Those numbers are [appear to be] more dynamic than the data in OSE's other reports and seem to get a fresh analysis each time the URL is entered.

So I'm wondering what period of time is it counting in it's "total number of times" determination? If I'd like to track the data to get an idea of, say, total number of Facebook Shares for a one month period, how often should I check the numbers?

I don't see anything in the anchor text that stands out as immediately problematic. Are these internal or external links?

It's hard to give more advice without more information, but one thing I see on your site is that you have some links in the code that aren't on the page. You should figure out how much of that is happening and why. Depending on the answer you find, it may be something to address.

Plus the link to content ratio is off a bit. You may want to add more content and group your inner links to lower the count.

"How does google decide if a listing from one city shows up in another?"

-- It depends on the amount of competition that search term has and how well everyones Google Places pages are optimized for that term.  If there is a lot of competition for that term then it will stick with that city, if there are not a lot of quality matches it will expand it's results.

"Any ideas on improving the distance your listings show up for?"

-- Optimize you Google Places page for the keywords you want to show up for. Your Places page is going to be centered around your physical address first, then it is going to look at the content you added for title, description, and any other info you add.  If your business covers a wider area like a neighboring town then make sure you include the name of that town in your description or title if it is appropriate. Your success will depend on how competitive the market in that area is and how optimized your page and others pages are for those location you are looking in.