They have no shame when it comes to link spam LOL. You should know this by now. This person seems no different then the people that email blast cialis discounts.

I was doing a search for a similar topic for a site we manage that has gained 50k links in the past 4 months, and I came across this article. I was a bit shocked at the answers I saw, and some of the ones that were voted as good. It's an old article, but I felt compelled to answer since this is still a relevant topic.

The link structure you showed is completely normal, and I would highly doubt you would see any negative impact from a strategy such as this. New sites and updated sites over time always receive new links. It's not about "how many" but more about "from where". I will address them one by one:

100 directory submissions
Great, as long as you have tested the directories that you are being submitted to. If they have high spam scores and low domain authority, could be a risk. You should ask what directories you were submitted to and research them to see if they have a blacklist history or are penalized. If not, I see no issue here at all. When we launch a site, we submit it to up to 450+ trusted directories, depending on the SEO plan level selected. All directories have been tested via Moz tools and other providers, to ensure the link health.

80 bookmarks
Not sure when you mean by this, but as long as the places you are being added are trustworthy and somewhat related to what you provide, I wouldn't worry. Even non-related links can be beneficial, coming from the right source. Granted, everyone wants the perfect anchor text link such as "awesome product in CITY", but a "visit website" followed anchor link will not do you any harm coming from the right source.

16 search engine submissions
If this is a page or URL submission through Bing or Google webmaster tools, it's a total non-issue. People submit hundreds of URLs per day, or even thousands for larger sites.

15 Article submissions
"Submitted to where?" would be a better question than how many is good or bad. If these are legitimate articles through a legitimate source such as PrWeb or the like, you should have no issues. Just depends on where they are placing your articles, the article quality, and the linking domain.

46 forum links
Could be good, could be bad, depends on how you were linked to, and the trust factor of the linking site. See above. You may also want to see if the linked is followed because if not, it holds little value unless it was posted on a relevant forum as helpful advice, that has good visibility.

10 local classified searches
Not sure what this is indicating, but again, it depends on how the linking was done, and where the links are coming from.

As to the people stating that having a lot of new, varied links is a great way to get banned/penalized, just NO. That is not true. You want link diversity and many places linking to you, and in the business world, you can't always keep posting great blogs/posts/pages/articles hoping and waiting for the links to come to you.

I have also never seen a link campaign that got someone penalized unless it was just blatant disregard for link quality or lack of knowledge.

Hope this helps...years later lol. Or at best, it will help someone that comes across this article in the future.

Not to bring this topic back up, but is this still valued?

I understand the perception point of view, in that a lot of people still trust the BBB as a company that highlights good businesses to work with.

BUT, as the links are now no followed, and the price for the accredited profile is very high, is it worth it? I can see it being so for a contractor, but for an agency?

In looking up some stuff to answer that question, I found these requirements: 1. Ratings must be sourced directly from users.
2. Don't rely on human editors to create, curate or compile ratings information for local businesses. These types of reviews are critic reviews.
3. Sites must collect ratings information directly from users and not from other sites.Here are the guidelines: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/review#review-snippetsDoes this help?

Backlinks. Anchor text. Find people that will link to you using the words you want to rank for.

"Their site has no purposeful SEO in it, there is barely any text on the homepage at all and none of the text are the keywords it is ranking for."

The above statement is concerning. If they have a good budget, as their SEO and design advisor I would say what needs to be said. Text can be added in a stylized way to help improve the SEO of any site without taking away from a good design. Google likes words, not CSS and images. Without a reference, it's hard to judge what can be improved, and how you should go about suggesting it to your client. You also mentioned rankings, but what do those rankings look like? Are we talking page one, or top 3?

This one has my vote. You have to allow them access in order to see that you don't want the pages indexed. If you block them from seeing this rule...well they won't be able to see it.

It makes no difference, as long as they are viewed as separate accounts. If you have sites running out of directories of other sites then this can cause problems if the domain settings are not correct. Basically, make sure each account has its own Cpanel account, and you should be good to go. If they share the same IP address it makes no difference.

If you are super worried about this, then I would assign a separate IP address for each account if you have WHM access.

If both your Yext and Moz listings match, it won't matter, as the citation information will be correct no matter who they prioritize.

1. He is the main lawyer at his new practice, but he also has one other.

2. We do not have access to the old listing. We contacted Google and they were able to tell us that the listing is owned by his old partner's email address (yikes!). They didn't exactly split on good terms, so I am hoping that Google will be able to release the listing so we can claim it.

Once we are able to claim, should we just delete it entirely? Would this action remove it from Google maps completely, or just mark it as closed?

This is a bit confusing to explain so bear with me please.

We have a client that used to have an old law practice with a partner. The site and backlinks were very large and it had a lot of domain authority. It also had a very large citation profile and history.

The two lawyers have since split, but there remains multiple Google Places listings out there for the old partnership. We have fixed the one showing the old business practice name, but not the one that he setup for his personal name. One of the biggest hassles is that the old location he setup has his attorney name in the actual listing.

The issue is that we cannot close the old listing (we tried this), as it comes up permanently closed when you Google his name. If you search for his new Law Firm, the correct business listing that we have set up will show. The new listing also includes his name and has over 50 five star reviews. We hoped that the large amount of legitimate reviews would get rid of or at least suppress the old listing, but it is not happening.

So I am a bit confused as to what to do. If we close the old listing Google shows the red "permanently closed" listing when you Google his name. We cannot update the old listing information to show his new address as then it will compete with the new listing that we setup that shows all the positive reviews. The old listing was not created by us, and the new one was. The new one shows when you search for his Law Firm name in Google, but not for his personal name i.e "NAME HERE ATTORNEY" or "HIS NAME and LOCATION"

Interested to hear your thoughts. The only way I can think to fix this is to contact Google directly and see if there is a way to permanently delete the listing from Google maps, but I am not aware that this is possible.

Just wanted to chime in and add my experience with both providers.

To be clear, Yext is more expensive. It also is a direct feed into more listings. If you are trying to get listings published quickly and need to show results (or reports) to a client, Yext would be a better way to go. As a subscriber, you can also give your clients discounts from the Yext pricing page, which can help add to your overall total commitment from the client. As far as data being removed, the additional data that is added via Yext's api is no longer valid or displayed once you stop paying (they call it no longer a "trusted" listing). I have never had one revert back to a pre listing status. Yext uses one of the many large databases: Factual. Chances are that by submitting to factual the other data aggregators will pick up your listing with time, even if you have not submitted to them.

Moz local is a great resource for companies that have the time to wait. The data aggregators they submit to take time to publish the listing. Acxiom, Nuestar and the others can sometimes make it confusing or even very expensive to list on their data networks. Acxiom is one of the stronger databases, having been known to be a direct feed to Google.

My advice:

If you can afford to wait the 2-3 months to have the listing start to appear, then use Moz. The time period you have to wait is not necessarily the fault of Moz, as even if you submit directly to Acxiom yourself it will take 2-3 months to go live. Ultimately, your listing will appear on the other citation sites, it will just take longer to do so.

If you are looking for an additional source of income and are a great salesman, use Yext. Yext has a much better interface of showing how many listings are incorrect, (even if many of the ones that are listed are from their own proprietary citation sites. ). This makes it an easier sale to your clients, and also easier for you as an agency to get an idea of how bad your clients current citation status really is. Yext will get your listings posted very quickly, and give you a place to link to off of your main domain, giving your clients additional sources of validation very quickly. Some of the sites they submit to are a bit dinky, but hey, a link and validation source is just that. Pricing is higher, but I think its fair considering the speed and extras you get for the money.

AND... the elephant in the room is of course.. do it all yourself! This will offer the most control over all your listings and control over who and what to submit where. You will lose out on some of the other benefits of MOZ (cheaper cost vs your time and long wait) and YEXT (faster speed, lots of directories but higher cost). It's worth noting that some of the YEXT directories that they are partnered with you cannot actually submit to, as they are either created by YEXT or locked so that you have to use their service to submit your listing there.

We never place a link without the site owners permission.

It's a grey area to be sure. Lots of the things that Google states can contradict one another, such as in your case: They want you to have authoritative backlinks from reliable sources, but they dont want you to pay for it. (Might get in their way of getting your Adwords dollars, lol)

In this case, look closely at what you are getting. Sites like YP, Chamber of Commerce all offer paid profile creations, with the paid profile links being of a higher visibility within their website. If you are getting a full profile page, with lots of ways for you to support your business or company then it could be beneficial. If you are getting a small, otherwise unfindable profile page with a anchor text optimized link directly to your site, I would stay away.

Think of the benefits of having the link. Is your link going to be placed somewhere it can be found, and when found, does the page that will be linking offer the user anything. How does the profile page help build upon your brand?

"If I were to pay for a profile with them, would I request for a "nofollow" link back to my site? "
Again, it depends on how they set up the profile, and how they set up their profiles for all the other businesses on that site. If Google sees the site as just a way to milk money out of people for paid backlinks, they will get hit and eventually so will you. I would do some investigating into the other businesses that have profiles on there, and see how they do in search results. Either way, one link will most likely not do a ton of damage to your reputation, but is that a risk you would be willing to take? Just boils down to what you feel comfortable with.

I am for adding the company name at the end. If a person is searching for a brand or company, you should have more than a few places where that name or brand is mentioned.

I understand that branding involves much more than this, but due to how the site is set up, I don't see anything wrong with it. You are not extending your title past the character count, not putting your name at the beginning of the title, etc. The page titles are already very short, so I see no harm in it.

With is being so easy to rip off anothers brand name with a domain or URL, I personally agree with using using a company name in the page title, unless your company name is extremely long, and jeopardizes the character count displayed.

Then, there is always this:
http://searchengineland.com/quantifying-brand-bias-search-results-rand-fishkin-moz-189824

I'm sure some will disagree with me, but that's what makes the internet such a great place. Being able to agree to disagree

You can submit them separately. One for video, one for images, one for URL's. This may be a more effective approach at getting things indexed, as it separates them into their own category. If you are already having a high load time, wouldn't hurt to try.

To answer your original question:

"Sitemaps should be no larger than 10MB (10,485,760 bytes) and can contain a maximum of 50,000 URLs. These limits help to ensure that your web server does not get bogged down serving very large files."

But wait, there's more!

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/021559.html

"Google has changed the number of Sitemaps you can reference in a Sitemap index file. The number use to be 1,000 sitemaps can be referenced in a Sitemap index file, now the number is 50,000 Sitemaps. This is a huge increase in capacity.

Still, each Sitemap file can contain up to 50,000 URLs, so technically 50,000 multiplied by 50,000 is 2,500,000,000 or 2.5 billion URLs can be submitted to Google via Sitemaps."

I agree with EGOL. I see what you are trying to do, but I would try and capture that traffic and content for your own site, then to give it away to Wikipedia.

We had a discussion in the office today, about if it can help or hurt you to link back to your site from one that you optimize, host, or manage.

A few ideas that were mentioned:

HURT:
1. The website is not directly related to your niche, therefore Google will treat it as a link exchange or spammy link.
2. Links back to you are often not surrounded by related text about your services, and looks out of place to users and Search Engines.

HELP:
1. On good (higher PR, reputable domain) domains, a link back can add authority, even if the site is not directly related to your services.
2. Allows high ranking sites to show users who the provider is, potentially creating a new client, and a followed incoming link on anchor text you can choose.

So, what do you think? Test results would be appreciated, as we are trying to get real data. Benefits and cons if you have an opinion.

Anyone can edit a Wiki page = bad for your business. If you can't control it, or constantly have to edit what people type it's not worth the time investment.

Wiki outranking your main site =  bad for your business. Here's why: Wiki often has a ton of references and links on a page about a business. The chances that a user will click one of those and navigate away from your page is very high. Worse case would be that a user clicks a similar business, that is a competitor of yours. Think of it like having the "related videos" displayed at the end of a youtube video. They click, they leave, you are not thought of again. One thing to remember when advertising on the internet; It is your job to convince people to use your services. People that do not know your business don't owe you anything, and have no brand loyalty to your company.

Yes, I added it into OSE. That's actually where I found so many of them. You should see what is linking to this site, as it's truly scary. I would never want our domain to be a part of that. BUT, somehow it is working for them. Almost every link is something questionable, and not related at all. It's funny how Google will penalize hotvsnot and the like, but not this type of activity.

"So, if these guys don't even have their own queries nailed down then they either are not very good at this or the cost isn't worth it even for them."

Sounds legit. This seems to be a bait and switch service directed at those unfamilar with seo to get them intrigued. Gotta love those pesky seo emails selling dreams every day! We get quite a few of them here. Most go straight to the trash folder. Wonder what they tell the client when it doesnt work and they don't show up in auto suggest? lol