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Bump. Just curious if anyone has any new ideas on this? We still have not found a solution.

Hmm. Yeah, I will add the CAPTCHA to see if it helps. I'll also see if I can add them to no-call lists.   But it's very frustrating for the client because he is getting A LOT of sales people calling him daily now b/c of this issue. He just so happens to remind me almost daily about it.

It hasn't just been happening for a couple weeks. It's been happening for about 6-7 weeks now.

They haven't really lost a bunch of traffic. They didn't have a lot to begin with. They have no penalties according to GWT and other tools.

Sorry about that. I think I got the image added properly. You can see that all the traffic comes from different cities in California.

I just logged into their biz.yelp.com page and they had a big increase in traffic to their Yelp profile in January-current.

I have disables bots in the view settings. Definitely looks like they are selling their information to sales people somehow. Any way to get rid of this without deleting their Yelp page?

Hey all,

I have a client who I have been having the WORST time getting traffic and ranked for relevant keywords. I've tried so many things and have yet to see much progress after about 9 months.

Site is mgmcdallas.com. I realized something REALLYY weird with this site a couple weeks ago.

The business has a Dallas, TX address and really only services the Dallas/Fort Worth metro area.

They recently started getting some of referral traffic from yelp.com/biz_redir. Weirdly, they've also been getting more sales calls and more salespeople filling out their contact form.

Take January for example, they had 164 sessions and 119 of those were from this yelp referral. They DON'T advertise with Yelp, or get traffic from Yelp anywhere in Texas. You can see from below screenshot that they are all coming from California.

I've had our <acronym title="Search Engine Optimization">SEO</acronym> and developer look into and we can't figure out what's happening.  Any thoughts?

iubnZdu

Hey Jess,

First of all, I want to say AWESOME website. It looks really great and really has inspired me to update ours to something similar. lol

A lot of websites have been hit in the recent weeks due to the Penguin 2.1 update, especially if they have hired someone in the past to just "build links" for them. Have you noticed this drop in rankings in the last couple months; or, has it just always been like this?

Ahrefs.com is good place to start when checking your links. Just from looking at some of these myself, I notice you have links from a bunch of different sites like germany.paristech.com, phillippines.paristech.com, france.paristech.com, and some other sites in foreign languages. These are examples of links that are most likely hurting you more than helping you.

I would recommend starting by doing a link assessment, removal of bad links, and submit to the Google disavow tool. Once you do that, I would begin focusing on the SEO piece more and begin to build quality links through great content and social media.

Shameless Plug: We have some packages to assist with the link cleanup and SEO. Feel free to shoot me a message if you have any other questions. ben@todayslocalmedia.com

Hey All!

I recently started my business about 1.5 years ago and am loving it, doing well, and learning new things every day! I am very curious what others in the industry use for proposals, invoicing, accepting payments and sending receipts. What we are doing now seems like a lot of trouble and we are using different platforms for almost all of it.

Since starting, my goal has been to use as little paper as possible, so I do almost everything over the computer.

1. We send out proposals using Quoteroller and that has been very useful because clients can click to the proposal from their email and they can also accept proposals through that link.
2. We invoice clients from Quickbooks Online (QBO) and can have those sent directly to clients' email inbox.
3. We have to manually create a payment link through one of Bluefin's payment platforms. We can send this link through email or add it to the proposal email sent from Quoteroller.
4. After they accept proposals (hopefully!), and make payment, we have to go back into QBO and "receive payment" and this does not send out a receipt to the client. Maybe someone knows a way to fix it to where it does send an automatic receipt when we "receive payment?"
5. If client requests a receipt, we must go into QBO and generate a "sales receipt."

So, now that you know our process, are we making ourself work too much? Is there a more simple approach?

Sounds to me like you are on the right track. As of right now, there is nothing telling us not to keep doing what we are doing. You could also add the Google+ Business Page to your list. It will give a social aspect to your listings and will allows users to interact with each location.

For more info on Google Maps 2.0:

http://www.google.com/maps/about/explore/

I have a very small client/personal friend of mine who is in a very niche market. They rank pretty well for all their keywords mainly because it is so niche and the competitor websites are no good. I was wanting to begin adding a few blog posts and tips here and there about industry, but was wanting to first know why have a 0.0 mozRank.

Their campaign has been set up on Moz for over 6 months and there are 0 errors and warnings for their site... I thought they would eventually warrant something. I have read the posts explaining mozRank and have came to the conclusion that it is a 0.0 still because no one is linking to their site.. am I right? Other than that, are there other ways to raise this score?

Site is http://bit.ly/18nPE3W

Hi Keri,

I have actually checked out that post numerous times in the past. Seems to be a great "manual" for anyone just starting out.

Thanks for the information!

Thanks for the great input Peter.

The site does have, let me rephrase... did have 12-15 tags total and I realized after everyone's input that I needed to just get rid of them. It seemed that it was a tactic that once worked great, but as things move forward, probably not in the best interest to aid in the rankings later on.

I am going to take the most natural approach and try to keep the on-page clean and free of "tricks" and focus on off-page now and see how well that works.

Thanks again for your advice.

This article from Google may help you also to create a high quality titles.  This is the best practice, according to Google.  I usually like to see what they have to say, given that the majority of your client's #1 concern is Google.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=3562

Thanks Matthew for the response.  That is exactly what I was looking for.  Seems that all on-page optimization now needs to be 100% natural looking and focus the rest of it with off-page, etc.

Hi Moz community,

New to the Moz community and hopefully first post/comment of many to come. I am somewhat new to the industry and have a question that I would like to ask and get your opinions on.  It is most likely something that is a very simple answer, but here goes:

I have a website that is for a local moving company (so small amounts of traffic and very few pages) that was built on Wordpress... I was told when I first started that I should create tags for some of the cities serviced in the area.  I did so and tagged the first blog post to each tag.  Turned out to be about 12-15 tags, which in turn created 12-15 additional pages.  These tags are listed in the footer area of each page. There are less than 20 pages in the website excluding the tags.

Now, I know that each of these pages are showing as duplicate content. To me, this just does not seem like best practices to me.  For someone quite new to the industry, what would you suggest I do in order to best deal with this situation.

Should I even keep the tags?

Should I keep and not index?

Should I add/remove from site map?

Thanks in advance for any help and I look forward to being a long time member of SEOMoz.