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What has helped me a great deal in creating social media strategies for clients is when I get questions like 'We want 2000 twitter followers' or 'We want 1000 fans', I ask them very basic questions like, 'What are you hoping will result from having 1000 fans?' Questions like that get them thinking strategically. I always throw it out there that if their looking to get to a certain number of fans, there's sites out there like fiverr that allow you to buy thousands of fans or twitter followers that are mostly bots - and that they don't need me to do that.

Having that conversation will get the client focusing on the proper long term strategy.

In my experience you really have to get the client out of caveman mode ("ME WANT MORE FANS!") and once you do that you can position social media services with the proper expectations.

Obviously you know that the costs for fans will be all over the place depending on your CPC. In my experience for traffic I send to the clients FB Page (most of this data is pre-timeline though) the rate of clicks to 'fan conversion' is in the 15% neighborhood. So once you identify your CPC, you can use that number to give a ball park idea of what a cost per fan acquisition is going to look like.

If they balk, you can share articles like this:

Understanding the Value of a Facebook Fan

Which will help you show your clients how facebook and twitter can be a platform to drive conversions rather than simply a way of collecting fans and followers.

Yep, I agree with both of these posts. I looked at the site on your profile and if that's the site you are thinking about hiring a writer for, I really don't see the need to pay that much for something like that unless you KNEW for a fact that it was going to be UBER compelling. In my experience, compelling content for local businesses is usually written by someone who is a) an expert in that industry and b) has an extremely unique voice. So unless this individual checks both of these boxes, I wouldn't pay anywhere near that personally.

Agree with John. That link is pure, unadulterated 24k SEO gold. It's dofollow, it comes from a 92 DA web site ... it will pay SEO dividends for years to come. Also it's much better than a typical press release because all credible press release platforms have changed their links to "nofollow" at the urging of Google in the last year or two. Kudos to you for putting in the effort to get that.

I do a lot of local SEO and some national/traditional ecommerce SEO and In my experience, you are absolutely limiting your "national" reach by having geo-tags in your titles. While no one can say with 1000% absolute certainty that Google is devaluing your 'National' search engine results due to your local geo tags, you're at the very least reducing your KW density for your page titles, which undoubtedly will affect your rankings nationally.

What I have found to be a solid strategy for eCommerce sites seeking local and 'national' customers, is to build landing pages that are city based subdomains that are optimized for a particular city. Then have links within those geo landing pages to the main ecommerce site.

example:

Tulsa.Widgets.com

Page Title: Tulsa Widgets | BarnDoors.com

Notice I'll usually keep the root domain in the geo subdomain for branding purposes and to avoid consumer confusion when they are looking at the SERPs. The good part for these local subdomains, is you can typically achieve quick rankings in these mid-size and sometimes larger markets. Most importantly though, this frees up your root domain to try to rank for your highest trafficked keyword at a higher kw density.

This strategy has worked well for my clients who are doing the brick and mortar + eCommerce thing but feel free to shoot holes in it - I'm always looking for better ways to handle the whole local & national seo issue.

Lastly, I would also add the caveat that if you're already ranking 'nationally' with your geo infused titles, (for example, if "Tulsa OK Widget | WIdgets.com" is ranking for the keyword "Widget") I wouldn't change a thing until there are signs that you're slipping.

Long answer: see above.

Short answer: not worth it.

As far as your page title; It depends what specific keyword you're trying to rank for. What is your kw goal for this page?

You could ask 5 people this question and get 5 different answers. My strategy for most of the brands that I manage is exactly what yours is with one exception: we are now linking to our Google+ pages but not prominently.

The only exception is clients who are trying to rank locally (google maps) because now that reviews on Google Places must be done with a Google+ account, and reviews are critical to ranking locally in the maps, it's necessary and logical to send users to our Google+ Places with the hope they leave a review.

In fact, there's considerably more value in a Google+ review for my Local SEO clients than say a Facebook Like or a Retweet.

If that link comes from a Wall St. Journal Property that doesn't allow just anyone to create pages with followed links (i.e. blogspot), I would anticipate that link yielding terrific long term results for your site's page and domain authority. Most small businesses have a very hard time getting those types of links so you should be very proud.

At the same time though, when it comes to linkbuilding always remember to play the long game. Every once in awhile that unicorn link that makes an instant impact comes along but generally speaking that's a result of click through traffic as a result of people clicking on that link when the page goes live ... it sounds like that's NOT the case here if I understand your post correctly so I would just keep doing what you're doing that got you that link in the first place

Also, I'm sure you've already done this but it's always a good idea to share links about your business from other sites on your social media for the bragging rights and of course, it won't hurt the value of that link to have good social signals going to it.

I would direct submit to all the biggies and then submit through LocalEZE (now Nuestar (sp?)) for the lesser directories. Chris ^ is exactly right, there's diminishing returns on spending the 5-10 min to claim your listings on every directory and if you look at the David Mihm infographic that Chris shared you'll see that LocalEZE feeds most of the lesser known directories. That's what I've been doing for my clients for years and it works well.

Perhaps I'm the squeaky wheel here, and I understand that's not the culture on these forums (which I'm ALL for 99.9999% of the time) ... but to me, if the DA's are going to go back up, why drop them?  For us, DA is something we educate our clients on, we preach it's credibility/accuracy, and we ask our clients to hold us accountable to it. But now, I'm going to have to essentially undermine its credibility to explain to my clients that this is a large scale drop and it should go back up again soon.

I'm done being the squeaky wheel now. I am a big believer in DA and Moz in general ... these forums have the sharpest people in the industry. I just felt compelled to express some frustration.

When you say, you've been affected, what exactly do you mean? When did you see the impact and what % was the drop in traffic?

Have you logged into Google Places for each business and checked the analytics/impressions/clicks for each? Is the dropoff happening their too?

One thing I noticed that I believe is hurting you is that these two pages appear to be for the same business:

http://www.fairfieldinnhotelaurora.com

http://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/denas-fairfield-inn-and-suites-denver-aurora-southlands/

This is a big problem because although your web site is legitimate, can you blame google for perhaps seeing it as an imposter when Marriott.com (in all it's authoitative glory) has the same business? If this is happening on every one of your domains (all of which appear to be franchises of bigger corporations) then my money is Marriott.com page is what's causing your domain to be flagged. I would re-submit your site to Google and explain the situation...hopefully once a human eye sees the scenario, they will fix the issue.

In Google's defense though, it's easy to see why they would flag your domains...imagine if you bought a domain name like chicagounitedairlines.com and Google didn't flag it?

You can setup a thank you page in google analytics by doing the following:

1. Log into your Google Analytics account and go to the website profile for your site.
2. Click on the “edit” button to the right of your site link.
3. You should now see an area if you scroll down a little called only “goals”. Click on the first link on the right to “add goal”.
4. Once there, name your goal. I named mine “subscribers”. Under Goal Type, select “URL Destination”.
5. After that, you should be given more options to input your “thank you” page information. Under “match type” select “exact match” and input your goal url as “/thank-you/” if your whole url was http://www.mysite.com/thank-you/
6. If you want to track sales, you can additionally input the value of your average sale too (win!).

I have quite a bit of experience with this situation and I can tell you I have never had any issues getting a client to rank because of it. As long as your NAP is consistent across all the directories, you'll be fine. Obviously, the most ideal situation is a normal real address but that's not always possible for some businesses.

The only exception is I've noticed UPS Stores addresses seem to have a little more of an uphill battle than a business suite shared address but even with them, they eventually start ranking.

Yes, unfortunately, there's nothing else you can do for SERPS for specific keywords that are being flooded with 'news' like this. I would just wait it out for a couple of weeks and see if those results go away. If not, perhaps modify my on page optimization to target some related keywords that are not affected.

I have a different opinion based on my extensive experience working with subdomains. The big advantage to working with subdomains, is that they all benefit from the Domain Authority of the root url.

If you owned tacobell.com (with a DA of 80) and decided to create a web site on a subdomain for each location like tambabay.tacobell.com, that subdomain would benefit immediately from the root.

In my experience is the same is true for penalties, regardless of how the subdomains are linked, if in the example above, tacobell.com begins the spammiest seo campaign of all time, tampabay.tacobell.com absolutely will incur some, if not all of the wrath.

Just go to Bing maps and find the address you're looking for and then click on the share button and then embed. This will give you the code you need for your site. You can modify the code to add your own map pointer or business name as well.

HMC1e.jpg

Setup a 301 re-direct in your .htaccess file that designates the 'official' home page url. This will eliminate the crawl errors.

http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/2007/03/how-to-properly-implement-a-301-redirect/

Sorry, yes, adding a directory is exactly like adding a domain or a subdomain to Webmaster tools. Just add the full url, confirm ownership and you're all set

I think that is exactly the right strategy - cherry pick when to use follow links

I've setup 301s for a client of mine who was doing the exact same thing and no their interior (city level) pages are ranking just fine even after Penguin. Now who's to say Google changes something in the next update and we lose traffic...but I think that risk is equal to the cityservice.com domains getting hit as well if you don't to the 301.

Either way you look at it, your client is using some outside the box tactics and that of course will put them at the mercy of Google to an extent. Have you thought about using subdomains like city.brandname.com? That's been working good for a few of my clients as well.

It depends on the purpose and quality of the content. If this is just regular content that you normally post to your site, I would post it.

On the other hand, if the content was a piece that I really thought would be a difference maker and really impactful compared to my "regular" (I know, I know - all content is impactful) content. I would hold off and post the content when I launch the new site to give my audience a legit reason to check out the new eye candy.

To echo what John said, the short answer is no.

The longer answer is those guys have their PPC down to an exact science. If they can bring their CPC down a few cents in a month, it likely saves them THOUSANDS of dollars. This means they have smart people who manage their account, looking for every competitive advantage possible.

I would focus on keywords that target advantages that your business (likely better, more customized service) offers so that you aren't on such an uneven playing field.

I believe your current configuration is hurting your long term SEO.

My preferences would rank as follows:

1. company name + country specific TLD (company.de, company.uk, company.com
2. subdomain on .com uk.company.com, de.company.com
3. directory on .com company.com/uk/, company.com/de/

That's my .02

Mark is spot on - If you have the time, creative and/or resources to write thousands of pages of unique that's your best bet.

If you don't however, have you tried making sure that your title, h1s, metas, etc., are all unique? If not, I would try that and re-submit your site through your webmaster tools...that's worked with many of my clients and allowed the each child subdomain to rank regionally. It's not the ideal solution, but it's a step in the right direction that won't hurt.

Yeah I agree, I don't see any ethics issues here at all. If this were my directory, I would look at it like this: there are two main potential benefits to this directory 1) relevant traffic 2) a relevant link. There's nothing wrong if you wanted to charge clients for premium placement once you get enough businesses in there.

I've noticed with my ISP (time warner cable), when I type a URL that doesn't exist, it will route me to it's own SERP that has a list of businesses that are quasi relevant to the URL i typed in. Could this be happening for you?

The only potential benefits i can think of here are:

1. Perhaps they don't own their businesses name on facebook so they created a user friendly URL that forwards to their non-user friendly facebook URL (example facebook.com/businessname-29348271790-11345

2. There's the outside chance someone could link to the URL....the SEO impact would be very limited though depending on how they are forwarding the URL to facebook.

3. Branding - A lot of companies want to brand their domain name in an ad yet they still want to engage users on facebook...this would be one way of making sure people were taking note of the domain.

I would imagine that you would see drop n traffic if you began to receive traffic immediately a upon creating the 301. I would leave it in place unless theres a really compelling reason (that I can't think of) to remove it.

One thing I noticed is that your using the rel="author" tag twice on the blogs you provided, one to link to your internal profile and one for your Google+ profile. I would try removing the tag from the internal link and leave it for the Google+ link and see if that makes a difference.

I'm with you, I like having the separate content. I'm sure if you do that you will link all of content so that someone looking for a particular piece of content can quickly navigate by title or something like that. I think doing that way you can target broad keywords for each of the eight topics and if they're in depth, I would imagine the long tail opportunities will be there as well.

To me this solution satisfies the human/user experience part as well as the search engines, your eight landing pages will get some love because of how narrow in scope they.

I have a lot of clients just like this guy who have high PR for a site that has had little to no traditional SEO work done. Usually they have a domain that's old and back links dusty old chamber of commerce sites. I would sell him on the 301 re-direct. You have to show him how without the re-direct, he's essentially competing with himself. Most small business owners I've dealt with will cede control if you explain this properly.

Now if I read between the lines, it sounds like this guy may have lost confidence in your abilities, which if that's the case, your best bet may just be looking for a graceful exit. If he doesn't trust you as an expert in what you do, you're going to be fighting a losing battle from here on out with him. Worse yet, you won't be getting paid for it. If this is indeed the case and you have honored your agreement with him, I would chalk this up as a learning experience and monitor the site from afar - hopefully it will rank eventually and you can then send him an email to make nice.

What about the on page SEO for the blank page? Anything there? I agree with the other guys, sounds like this blank page has some signals going to it ... possibly a really powerful link (even by accident) that could be pushing it's PA up.

1. Yes, make sure description is different for each page
2. So are there two pages in two different categories or one page being crawled twice? If it's two seperate pages in different categories I would change the title tag to something like 'Product X Category 1' and then 'Product X Category 2'. I would do the same thing with the description as well. If it's one page being crawled (possibly indexed twice) I would pick a category based on potential traffic and get rid of the 2nd category.
3. Who's they? I'm not understanding this canonical question
4. It should not make a difference whether you're using a full url or short url format.

Maybe I'm missing something, but why would you not move all the content to a new site and just be done with homestead.com? Surely your client is missing the opportunity to brand their own url right?

Have you done a scan of your website to confirm that you don't have any malware or malicious code? That would be the first thing I would do. I have had this issue a few times with hacked sites. The first thing we do is scan the site, clean it, test it and even relocate it to a new host if the server we're on is compromised.

The question I would ask is how important is it for you to get your sites 'up that ladder' and what is your time worth? If the answer is very and more than $10/hr, then I would say keep SEOMoz. It sounds like you've spend quite a bit of time on on-site seo...where I would now focus some time on is using the competitive analysis within SEOmoz to fully understand why your competitors for each of your sites are further 'up the ladder' as you put it. Then work backwords from there....I've find that tool in particular to be a valuable time saver. Also the reports are very useful in tracking and sharing your progress. Just my .02.

1. Yes, worry. 301 those old page to your new page or new web site.
2. I don't know if this is a question but I'm assuming you're talking about the links from the first question and whether they are meaningful. I say yes. Nofollow links are a critical component to a solid link profile.

3. I would not worry about this. Again, a natural link profile will have anchor text that is not ideal.

Cool site.

I agree, with Egols comment, I think Google is treating these pages as being low quality because there isn't much content on the pages. If you're familiar with worpdress, Google often does the same thing with all the hundreds of pages that WP makes for blog categories, tags, etc.

I would test this theory by picking a few of the random pages and adding some content that is well optimized and see how it performs.

Obviously these are not duplicate pages but I think your pages are drawing the duplicate content flags because

1. You have the same h1 for each one (man vs. world) and
2. Your content other than your actual picture is all very similar (i.e. disclaimer)
3. You have no alt image tags so the crawler has no idea what sort of image it's looking at
4. Your URLS are very similar (I'd switch to a more SEO friendly URL structure if your CMS allows)

I would fix #1-3 for sure since those are pretty easy fixes and then see if that causes the notices to cease. If not, I would fix #4 as well. Long term, you are going to want to fix #4 regardless so you might as well bite the bullet.

I thought you claimed the old competitor page and tried to input your client's info for their Google+ page.

If that's not the case and you've already set up a Google+ page, there's nothing that needs to be done in my opinion.

I'm not sure that I would have had them change their number prior to reading this story, so as much as I would like to say yes and sound smart, I would have probably played it the same way. Especially when you think of the benefits of old customers of the competitor calling your client looking for the same services.

So David was kind enough to look at the site and found some potential issues. In short, the home page had 57 heading tags which is excessive, there are some heading tags missing from some interior pages and there's a few pages that should be no indexed that aren't

I'm going to fix all of these, give it some time and see if this fixes the issues. I'll keep this thread updated.

Thanks David for your time!

I think Mark has the right idea, I would build out a landing page on your main site for the keyword, then 301 the emd back to it. Bottom line, emd results are short lived.

CTR in my experience, has the greatest impact on your QS in adwords.

If I needed to improve my QS on a competitors branded name, I would do the following:

1. Create a new campaign titled "competitor x"
2. Create ad groups for each of the competitors products
3. Create ads that are transparent that you ARE NOT the competitor but offer a similar, if not better, value.
4. Employ dynamic keyword placement in some of your ads (test with and without)
5. Build landing pages that contract your business with your competitor (again transparency will avoid problems from people feeling duped that they clicked on your ad when they were looking for your competitor.

I think this question depends on how many products you have, how many products you eventually want to grow to and what your keyword goals are. For example, if you have 5 specific products and don't want to expand to say more than 15 in the next 5 years, in my opinion, you don't need to use all the categories. Categories are for organizing data and/or targeting category kws. If there's not much data to organize and your long tail URLs efficiently target your kws ... then I would stick with that.

Yes exactly, in that case I would expand my radius to include the nearest metropolitan area. I would maybe not try to encompass the entire city of a city like say Denver, but a portion of it.

In my experience, if you get overly ambitious with your service area, you end up with very poor results.

I would ask yourself this question, how big is the radius around your office, where if you were to rank #1, would give you enough business to earn a living and grow your business, but not too much business where you're overwhelmed? That's where I would I would "cast my net" so to speak. Get rankings in a smaller radius and then you can expand a little from there if you're not getting leads or exposure from there.