Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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 As far as data being removed, the additional data that is added via Yext's api is no longer valid or displayed once you stop paying (they call it no longer a "trusted" listing).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.

It can help, but if you are expecting a single MOZ link to skyrocket you ahead of all your competitors, that will not happen. Google looks at the complete link profile for a site, and not one singular instance. Will it help? Sure! Will it make a night and day difference? NO.

The best way to use your MOZ profile is to make yourself an active member of the community, and show that you know what you are talking about. MOZ is a leading authority of not only industry experts, but also of people looking for help and advice. Link from your website to your profile page. Link to your social accounts from your profile page. If it is something you would like to promote, then have a space on your site that states you are a member of the MOZ community. We get link referrals from MOZ all the time, and we have also gotten leads from members on here looking for help.

In short, for it to be the most effective, don't think of just the link. Think of how you can use the community to broaden your reach and exposure.

Depends on what you are trying to do. If you have very little content, but a lot of links then they may frown upon it, frowning meaning take action against your site.

If you just have a large menu with a lot of links, and frequently link to other pages then I doubt it will be counted against you.

I understand trying to abide by Google guidelines, but it's much easier to simply look at your paqge and say "Does this make sense?" Am I trying to add links to manipulate search engine rankings, or am I trying to help users find helpful/relevant/related information? Once you look at it from that standpoint, it becomes easier to see where you have problem areas.

Since you are doing a genre based site, think of how you can organize your URL and menu structure, to make your articles easier to find, and link to. (I would imagine you want people to share your content, right?)

As long as your pulldown menus are linking to individual articles, even if the link count is high I dount think you will run into any issues.

Best advice: Do it right the first time. What does that mean:

1. Having the sitemap.xml file accurate and ready to be submitted. 
2. Not focusing just on Google. Submit your site and links links to all webmasters.
3. Making sure your site is complete, meaning all meta, titles, and urls are all unique and filled out with relevant information. Some of your titles are not specific, such as:
http://www.sbat.com/livescores/ - Page title is Live scores...think of how users will search for your page. A More appropriate title would be "LIve Sports Scores | Live Soccer Scores from Around the World" or something similar.

4. Getting rid of duplicate URL's. If you are using a CMS, then you want to make sure you follow this rule: One url to one page of content. View more on this topic here: http://www.webdesignandcompany.com/5-htaccess-rules-to-avoid-duplicate-content
5. Making sure your images and alt text is properly filled out. For example: Dont label images image123.jpg, name them what you want to rank for, such as stl-cardinals-jersey.jpg or something like that. You never know how users will search for content or answers, so optimize as broad as possible.
6. Submit all pages in webmaster tools using "Fetch as google". This allows you to submit individual and sitewide crawls of your site. Helps in getting pages indexed/reindexed faster
7. Plan ahead. Launch of a website then hoping it will rank well is a fast way to not rank. Think of ways to gain additional validation and backlinks. Press releases can be a great way to do this when you are just starting out.

That should get you started. Hope this helps!

We never place a link without the site owners permission.

Are your individual product pages optimized? Getting a user to visit your site doesn't mean they have to come in through the main category page. You could have your Widget category page optimized around the widget (or types, styles colors) or a more general page that is optimized around the widget product and what it is for.

By optimizing the widget product pages, you may have an additional page on which to rank. What I mean is, is you are on the widget page only for green widgets, then optimize only around that phrase. If you have multiple color options or filters from within  that page, state that "this widget is available in black, green, blue" etc. Also make sure to have relevant related items shown so that if a user does happen upon that page, they know you sell more than one type. Optimizing the product pages can also be done quickly, as this can be completed when you are entering in the item details. If you add a lot of products all the time, create a template that you can use to quickly add details to any product, and then edit the details that only pertain to that specific item.

In your sitemaps, you can choose what filters get included in your index. If you are worried about duplicates, don't include them, or block the generated URL's in robots.txt

Something wise my father once told me "Something is only worth how much someone is willing to pay for it."

It depends. First, how much of your time is going to be invested in creating, optimizing, and ranking this site? Since it sounds like this is something you are going to do with multiple domains, it could get pretty time-consuming.

Also, if you know how to get websites to page one, why are you not marketing that to potential clients and consumers? Trying to get a keyword driven domain to rank high and sell it off for a quick buck doesn't really seem like a good investment, either time wise, or for the success of your company. I would use sites that you have ranked high as an example of what you can do for clients, and sign them up for a monthly fee, rather than trying to sell them a "get rich quick" domain.

Why do I think this way? Here's the theoretical math:

Option 1:
Optimize keyword-driven site to rank in Google: approx 30 hours @ $50 hour labor cost (not sure what you charge for time, so using $50 as an example) = $1500

Time cold-calling and email blasting potential buyers to purchase said domain: approx 8 hours = $400

Most likely cost for selling said site: approx $2000 max ($800-1500 most likely)

Gained vs Invested = $2000-1900=$100. Also this negates the fact that you can make additional money from this client again, unless you start the process over again.

Option 2:
Demonstrate SEO prowess to potential client using existing sites as proof of results
Sign up client for basic SEO services at $500 per month.
Invest 20-30 hours making client's site soar in results.
Client is happy. Refers friends and other business owners your way.
You make more money, and gain a positive reputation for being a quality seo provider.

Although I'd rather not upload our actual document that we send to clients, I will tell you what we include. First, we do not charge based upon setting up the campaign, we charge based upon spend. Generally, higher spending accounts wil require more maintenance and time, especially if they have a large keyword range. This helps tie into our existing business model of charging over time, rather than large bulk sums.

Also, we include links to our developer profiles, that have links to their Adwords certifications, etc so potential clients can see that they are qualified.

If you want the most accurate traffic report possible, then I would set up a custom goal in analytics using your landing page URL. Depending upon what you are trying to do, you could set up a page that is targeted directly to your YouTube refferals, and focus on promoting conversions. Or another option is to just clone the home page to a different URL and set it to NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW and have them land on that when they click the link.

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1116091?hl=en

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.

Is the content that will be added readable? Looking in SEO browser, it doesnt seem that it is. Check out the report here:

http://seo-browser.com/index.php?address=http%3A%2F%2Fdeepdesign.co.za%2Fprint-printer-printing%2F&button0.x=68&button0.y=15&button0=Simple

If the content cannot be read by a search engine, any content you add will no have any effect on your rankings.

The boxes that slide out (if your plan is to retain that design), should link to sub pages of focused, relevant content.

I think you should also take a very close look at the way the pages/URL's are set up. 
print-printer-printing/
with a page title of "PRINT, PRINTER, PRINTING! | DEEPDESIGN"

Very spammy, and even if Google allows it to rank I doubt a user would be compelled to click that result out of one that states something like "Graphic Design and Printing Services -YOURCOMPANY"

I would look at all aspects of the site, even if their budget is low. Doing SEO work just for the sake of getting paid will not get the company the results they are looking for. I would check the template to see what is readable text, then focus your efforts on cleaning up the on page and off page SEO.

After looking hard at rankings after every algo update, we always see strange results while Google is still "rolling it out". I wouldn't take much to heart while they get the algo in place. It would be better to let things stablilze, then go back and see what rankings changed. I think the week of the update is the worst time to analyze what is going on.

From Matt Cutts blog:
https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/468891756982185985

"Google is rolling out our Panda 4.0 update starting today." Rolling out, starting today are the things that stand out to me from that statement, meaning "its not done yet" lol

I will say that we have seen our rankings improve, with multiple links now showing on the front page for our main keywords. Whereas authorship was not displaying, it now is, combined with our schema reviews.

The alt attribute helps Google and other search engines understand what the image is about. Here is a nice article from Google about image publishing guidelines

I doubt you would see a penalty from something like this, as there are plenty of websites out there with poorly optimized images, but at the same time you are not doing your on-page SEO score any favors. Is it a make or break item? No, but at the same time I'm sure you could correct the entire page in a manner of a few minutes

If it is memorable then it could work. I see plenty of keyword driven domains ranking all day long, even if they are a bit longer. My honest opinion, I would figure out a clever way of adding a keyword into a branded name, rather than going right for the citykeyword.com

Our domain is an example of that. www.webdesignandcompany.com covers many different phrases due to how we merge on page and off page content. (our logo is an ampersand, so it all fits together) Also by having the word "company" in our name we can also rank for when someone searches for Internet marketing company, seo company, web design company, web development company, etc etc.

Here are a few examples: (Linking to Google searches, not our site or pages)

St Louis internet marketing company
St Louis web design company
St Louis seo company

I would have your name, then possibly your keyword. Something like YOURNAMEwebdesign.com, and use your content (on page/off page) and citations to make the web understand where you are. yourcitywebdesign.com is kind of forgettable, plus it can make it harder to rank for services outside of your main one. I know from experience, as it took some work to get our Internet profile to be understood by all search engines. Now we show up on page one for a lot of different phrases. SEO was always our number one focus, so we target that phrase the most.

Will it work? Yes. Could you use a long domain name? Sure. Could you rank for additional items? Yep. Could you find a better domain name? Absolutely. I wouldn't worry about it too much unless the name is REALLY long to where it doesn't make sense, and a user has a harder time remembering it. Also, I would use a shorter domain for your email if you decide to move everything to a longer domain.

Sounds like you have an "Issue" that you need to "Trak" down no? Lol sorry, its the first thing I thought of when I saw this post and your profile picture.

What type of site is it? Wordpress? CMS? Joomla? It may be that the new site has bad URL rewriting parameters, so that a normal page is accessable another way. For example in Joomla you can access the seo-friendly version of a page, or the CMS version unless you block / redirect it. ?compenent/blah/bla/randomnumber/page

Perhaps it was submitted through a page like the above url off of a sidebar form or something like that? You can always correct the problem by changing your Goal page URL in Google Analytics. Set it to /thank-you or something that a user cannot access that is also blocked from indexing in robots.txt.

Without seeing the site and analytics it's hard to diagnose, but I think you may have a URL rewrite issue combined with incorrect analytics settings.

I'll take a look at it for a few minutes

First, I noticed that you have two home page URL's, that could get picked up as duplicate content. You only want one true URL to display for the homepage, or subpage. Example:

http://www.nlpca.com/index.php

http://www.nlpca.com/

This is a common item, especially if you are using a CMS. Easy to fix, just use a 301 redirect to send the index.php to the standard URL. If you need help, I can send you the redirect code tomorrow.

Some of the page content is a bit long, ad I'm not sure your users, (even those who are really interested) will read through it that deep. See if there are additional ways to break up what you are trying to say. How? On a page, if you have to change the subject, or go off topic, you should give that content it's own page. Page count increases, chance of ranking for the specific topics increases, possible user retention and on-site time increases. "Meet the Trainers" and "How We Teach" could each be their own page, and if the methods used to teach are similar, this can be linked to from multiple pages. Example:

http://www.nlpca.com/DCweb/dcwebnlp-hypnosis-language-patterns.html

You should also take a look at the URL structure under the training dropdown, as it includes /DCweb on some, and doesn't on others. This may be intentional due to where the service is offered, but if not, focus on making them as clean and focused as possible.

Your main directory links in your menu force users into the submenu, and miss a valuable opportuniy to have the main top level pages be links into the categories. For example, if you are on the home page and click the training link, you get this "http://www.nlpca.com/#" and the page doesn't go anywhere.  Think about how you could use this top level page to direct your users where you want them to go.

name="keywords" content="NLPCA" />
http://www.nlpca.com/master-practitioner-training.html
name="description" content="The NLP Master Practitioner Training is offered by the NLP and Coaching Institute. It covers Sleight of Mouth, timelines, and much more. It is offered in both Utah and San Francisco." />

Keywords are very brief. Think of all the items a user would type in to find these services AND items that are on page to revise your keywords. (if the keyword phrase is not mentioned or covered on that page, chances for ranking for it will decrease) Descriptions currently on site are very matter of fact, and are not worded in a "natural" way of speaking. Think about it like this, if you only had one sentence to sum up the whole page to a person who wanted to know more, what would you say? This seems to be a site-wide issue, so come up with a strong back end SEO template, as this can save you some time when editing.

Yikes! H3 tags out of place! Your page should flow in the most natural order, h1, h2, h3 etc.
http://seo-browser.com/index.php?address=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nlpca.com%2Fmaster-practitioner-training.html&button0.x=52&button0.y=17&button0=Simple

Use SEO-browser to look at how your page renders to a search engine. If you need it to visually appear a certain way, use css classes to make the p text look like an h3, or use inline styles. Inline styles can increase page load time, so it is best to use classes where you can.

After you get that all fixed up, be sure to use image compression and a minify your css for the fastest load time possible.

No Authorship. 
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http://www.nlpca.com/master-practitioner-training.html
Even if you rank in a SERP, the listing will not stand out. Use reviews, authorship, and ANYTHING you can to get the listing to jump out at a user. On a page full of blue links, its nice to be the cool guy (or girl), plus people tend to click on those a lot more too

This is a good start. Hope this helps, and best of luck! Let me know if you need any additional advice.

Set up a separate page for each keyword phrase, and link to them where it makes sense to the user. You could also have a drop-down menu, and in the order of top to bottom:

Installation

Repair

Maintenance

Company info

That will allow you to set up a separate url and page title to optimize for each, and not be spammy. I would use this approach because those terms in that large of an area will be very competitive. Also, this will allow you opportunities for proper anchor linking to very specific pages.

As long as you have sitemaps listing where all these pages are, you should be fine.

What I would look at more closely, and perhaps more importantly, is when a user or search engine finally gets to the end page, meaning the end of the menu links, what content are they seeing?

Google used to have something in place where they didn't want to see more than 100 links per page, but I believe that has been removed now.

EDIT* confirmed: 
http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-we-dropped-the-100-links-per-page-guideline-but-we-may-take-action-if-it-is-too-spammy-178197

Pay special attention to how your internal linking is currently set up, and if it makes sense to your user. If your menu system is too complex, people wont use it, and Google will have issues indexing it. Take a look at site with large menu systems, and try and emulate their success and structure.

Domain 1 had domain age, and the authority of the citation sites linking to it. Most likely Google had already crawled them, knew they existed, and will now have to recrawl and assign a new ranking. Be ready to wait a while.

This was very common at an SEO firm I used to work at, where they would create location or keyword-based domains in addition to the main branded domain in an effort to gain additional rank. They were frequently pummeled by the larger branded sites in rankings. Google targets these types of sites which have thin content, short term domain registrations, lack of citations/backlinks, etc etc.

If the site is hosted on the same ip address, in the same webmaster/analytics account AND has similar wording, I'm willing to bet Google will see them as similar and smack them both, or index the newer domain due to being seen as "fresher" content. Unless the time has been spent in giving both domains some love regarding citations and content I do not see this doing well in the SERP.

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."

Check the prestashop forums, and see if another user has a custom htaccess rule you can put in place. Most likely this is a simple error that can be fixed using url rewriting. If you cannot set the items to redirect for any reason,  set the offending pages to no-index in your robots.txt file.

Search Engine Land and Matt Cutts spoke about this recently.

They removed the on page link restriction, but stated that they will still take action if it is too spammy. Makes sense, as sites are getting larger.

"That being said, Google said if a site looks to be spammy and has way too many links on a single page — Google reserves the right to take action on the site.

Matt also explained that your PageRank is divided by the number of links on a page. So if page A links to page B, C and D, that PageRank is split into three. If you have hundreds of links, it is divided by hundreds, and so forth."

• 10 Social Bookmarks:

If you are meaning setting up new profiles, perhaps a few hours. A full 8-10 hours if they are taking advantage of all the features from that social platform. Setting them up is fast and easy. Making them stand out and being creative is what takes the extra time. You get what you pay for.

• 11 Keyword Linkings

If you are meaning backlinks, it really depends. Backlinks you actually want and canthe authority help your site will take time. Backlinks you don't and won't can take minutes lol. Quality backlinking is in my opinion the most time cosuming part of SEO, and often the most worthwhile. I would estimate between 20-40 hours for a good head start into getting quality backlinks for 11 keywords.

• 10 Directory Listings

Again, it comes down to quality. If you are referring to ciatation sites as a directory, then I would estimate between 8-10 hours, with spending about an hour on each. If you are referring to paid directories, I would avoid that approach unless it's a trusted source such as BBB or Chamber of Commerce. Google is on a rampage against paid directory listings right now. Matt Cutts even blogged about a way of submitting paid links directly. Blog Post

Are you asking to validate a price you were given by an SEO? I wouldn't focus on any given number of items, or pay for any SEO "package" from a provider. All the items above can help you, but usually it's an ongoing process to improve rank and authority. How accurate is the back end SEO? How good is the content? Make sure to look at all areas of your site.

Do it through the menu items, rather than the main dashboard. Much easier. This will also allow you to add a custom title, and meta for each menu link you have, which will help your rankings if done correctly

http://imgur.com/IqZCvo9

If it will not let you over ride the setting, I would install RSSEO, which will allow the page title over ride. Out of curiousity, why is it required that you have that tag attached to the home page? Doesn't really offer you any benefit.

Best way to obtain the link is to have content that is linkworthy. After having what you feel is a great post created, contact the site owner of the desired linking domain. Do not approach them in a saleman type of tone, as this will most likely turn them off to anything you have to say.

Simply state that you have created content that you feel is beneficial to their users, and would like to know if there are any opportunities to have your content posted on their website. You need to create a mutual business relationship, and focus on how your content can benefit their website then use that to market yourself to them. If they refuse, dont worry. I'm sure there are plenty of other high ranking sites that could help.

This can help you get started:

http://moz.com/blog/5-strategic-steps-to-big-content

btw, I would train your mind not to use terms like "linkbait". This process is not about baiting people into clicking your links, but providing benficial information that is likeable, sharable, and linkworthy.

There are a lot of ways to save money, and do your SEO for less cost.

FaceBook: What are the details of your ads? Do you target local or nationwide? Are you promoting the page or a certain post? Advertising on FB can be tricky, and may take you a few ad runs to find out what resonates with your audience. $50 a day isnt that bad, considering that most FB ads don't use the full amount. Could be you just need a few killer posts to really get your page promoted and more likes. I don't see this as a big conversion source platform, (unless your posts are conversion-focused) but it could help to raise better brand awareness.

Google Adwords:
What type of campaign are you running? Do you target only a few keywords, or are you running multiple ads? You can keep the cost of your ads lower by getting a higher ad rank. This is based on the quality score of your ad and landing page. Better quality can lead to lower costs Learn more here: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2454010

If you are looking for direct conversions, (I'm assuming you are since you state that "However, the conversion rate isn't ideal... only less than 2%") I would add more into your Adwords budget and diversify your keyword targets. Decide on a set amount you want to spend daily per keyword, and keep track of your ads and performance. Create a separate page for goal tracking from PPC in analytics to see what ads are worth keeping, and which ones need to be modified.

MOZ: 
The more you help people, the better it works out for you. The points system works in your favor. You help the community, you gain points. If you gain more than 200 per month you get a free month of MOZ pro. I'm guessing this is their way of saying "you scratch our back, we'll scratch yours"

Since you are trying to learn more about SEO, here is a post we did about how to analyze your competitors. This can be the fastest way to see what works for your industry, and how your high ranking competitors get conversions. A few other sites to learn (besides this one) are Search Engine Land and SEO Roundtable

Hope this points you in the right direction! If you need additional help, feel free to shoot me a PM.

Perhaps you didn't do anything wrong, but didn't do anything right..?

It's really important to look at ALL the factors as you mentioned. I looked at the site, and here is what I found in about 5 minutes.

1. IMPROPER VISUAL CUES: The site is about * removed per member request *, correct? On the home page, nothing immediately pops out at me and says * removed per member request ! Visual engagement can be the first thing that makes a user interact, or leave your site. Look at analytics to see where people are leaving, and see if there is a trend.
2. UNCLEAR TARGETING: What is your goal? Are you trying to rank locally, (since you mention the location) or nationwide? Perhaps since it is unclear on the site, search engines are also unsure.
3. BROKEN REDIRECTS: Notice that you can access the site from multiple ways, both with www. and without. Doing with prompts a security error which I'm guessing is a incorrect setup cpanel redirect or SSL, given the visual cues. Does a search engine even know what version to index? (www. vs. non-www) To word it better: have you told them what version to index, and submitted that version to the search providers? Don't just do an SSL because an SEO says it will improve your ranking. Make sure you understand how to implement said redirect, and all website pages to the proper version.
4. IMPROPER KEYWORD TARGETS: We hear people say every once and a while, that they don't show up for keywords. But we also see that they get a ton of traffic and leads. Targeting what people are actually searching for vs. what you think they are searching for can be a huge difference in perceived success and failure. What keywords have you seen improve? What keywords have you seen drop off since you mention you went to a lower ranking? How is this tracked? What keywords fell off? Did you gain in rank for any keyword variations?
5. IMAGE SEO: Went through and checked some images. Noticed that none of them are titled specifically what you want to rank for. You never know what a user will type in, as there are many thousands of variations, but you can be sure to cover your bases from the very base level. A user might search in the web view, but could also use the images tab to see what they are getting. I can assure you, * removed per member request * will rank better than * removed per member request * almost every time. 
6. H TAG MADDNESS! Might want to see how your site renders out in the eyes of a search engine: removed per member request *
Lots of H tags make it hard for a search engine to determine what your page is about. Sure, lots of things have changed since the introduction of HTML 5, but the basics remain in place. Think of the pages on your site like a document you would write for college. You would have a header, secondary header that elaborates your opening header statement, and so on. The page layout in the eyes of a search engine is confusing, and needs to be cleaned up a bit. Contact your coder or CSS person to have some of the headers render out as

text rather than <h1, h2="" h3,="" h4="">tags. 
7. PROPER ROBOTS SETTINGS: Did a site search and found 99 results. Might want to check and see if 99 URLS are how many exist for your site. if not, you may have other links from server and database generated wordpress pages. Overall, the pages of results I looked through looked legit, but most were a bit generic in terms of basic SEO. Example:

• removed per member request *</h1,>

This is just a basic analysis, and there are plenty of other places to look/ data to analyze. I hope this helps to give you a wider scope of where to start. I have this thread on auto-alert so any reply you post will email me.

• Dave

Really technical in here lol.

Just wanted to say I could see why they would do it, but it's kind of silly to run out and grab one. Most server and site security can be locked down from the server side if you have your own root account. My guess is that they partnered with someone who sells ssl certificates, and is now saying this to strengthen that alliance or help them make money. I could see this being worth the time and effort if you took sensitive information, but to dangle a carrot saying "we will rank you higher if you use an ssl on your roofing/plumber/seo/etc" website is just silly.

I'm all for security and protecting people's information, dont get me wrong, but it seems like another attempt to control things.

PlayHazel.com

Lumina, you beat me to it, lol. I was going to say that the "play" part of the first domain you listed is much more suggestive, and lets the user know that an action will be required of some sort. (action words, yay!) Plus, it is easier to remember and say, which could help in your branding efforts while the project gets off the ground.

It is hard to predict, but I always say go with a .com if you can get it. The thing to remember is: will the .org rank better due to having more of the keywords placed in it?

I thought for sure that Google would have discredited EMDs years ago, but yet you still see them ranking, very much so with local businesses.

Here is what I would ask myself if I was in your shoes.

1. What is working for businesses already ranking high for that area/service? If the EMD seems to be working, is the .net version available? I think people would prefer a .net over a .org unless the site was strictly educational or informational. If it is service-based or product based I would use the .net

2. If the EMD .org is available, was it owned before and does it have any history that could be harmful in the short-term?

3. What is the EMD .org site being used for? An add-on domain or site, or as the main company website?

4. If the .com covers the most important two of the three KWs, are they the most important two? Think of webdevelopmentsoftware.org vs developmentsoftware.com. If the 2 keywords are the most important two that cannot be misconstrued or misinterpreted by Search Engines then I would say use the .com

In the example above the .org domain specifies WEB, meaning you would be targeting a certain type of software, whereas the .com leaves the interpretation more open-ended and open to misinterpretation.

Moz did a study about EMDs and what was used the most often. I think it's worth a read in your case:

https://moz.com/blog/bing-vs-google-prominence-of-ranking-elements

Hope this helps!

https://moz.com/blog/bing-vs-google-prominence-of-ranking-elements

Have you done a comparison month to month, or year over year since you received the penalty and after it was lifted?

Analytics can tell you where your visitors are leaving. Even if the content was revised, or changed completely, that doesn't mean it's connecting with your visitors. Check your exit pages, and on page time comparison with the following period to see if there are any negative changes that were made. I would look at your impressions as well.

Also, look at your competitors ranking closer, not just using tools. Tools only show a portion of data. If your competitors are using rich snippet markup, even if you outrank them, chances are their listing could stand out more and be getting more clicks.

For your link building, start with largest and most popular ciatation sites (Yelp, Yellow Pages, Foursquare, Merchant Circle, etc). Google will treat those sites with more weight and authority than a small local directory. That's not to say that you shouldn't target local directories, but only to state that you should target the trusted and validated networks first.

If you want to speed up the process you could always use Yext or Moz Local. For the differences between the two your can view this page: https://moz.com/community/q/does-anyone-use-moz-local-yext

Also, when targeting small local link directories, make sure it is a validated or trusted source. You wouldn't want to do your site more harm then good. Hope this helps!

EDIT: If you were to focus on the big local sites, see if you can get into large news sites through press releases. Getting a backlink from the New York Times or someone like that.

To answer your question, yes it can help if the directory is local, but more often than not it depends on who is doing the linking. If you got a link from the home page of Moz that would be more valuable than any small local directory. Make sense?

In addition to parking the domain, did you add a parked domain htaccess rule? In addition to search engines, make sure your visitors are getting to the right place, without duplicate content.

After a while, all the new urls should replace the old ones, but I have seen this process take up to 6-8 months.

This is to target a language specifically. A better explanation of how to utilize this feature is at the link at the bottom of this post. But first, a few snippets:

"your ads can appear for customers who use Google products and third-party websites in the languages that your campaign targets. This helps ensure that your ads will appear on sites that are written in the language of the customers you'd like to reach."

"Let's say you sell coffee beans online, and you want to target Spanish-speaking customers. You set up an AdWords campaign targeted to the Spanish language, with Spanish ads and keywords. As long as your customers' Google interface language settings are set to Spanish, your coffee ads can show when your Spanish language customers search for your keywords."

https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/1722078?hl=en

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.

Just wanted to add:

Do both urls show up for a page? Meaning if you had a page about dog treats, can that page be accessed through both urls on the Web (manually or in serp results)? If so, you need to redirect the domain you don't want to use immediately to prevent duplications. Just parking one on top of the other usually will not take care of replacing the other url. You don't want to have both indexed at the same time.

If it isn't too much work for your staff, I would consider branching off into individual actors interviews, instead of grouping them into one long page. This will allow for better optimization on each page, and better usability for traffic, since they dont have to scroll through a huge page with many interviews. At the bottom of each, have a link that allows users to access the next interview easily. This way, you are focusing on a wider scope of keywords, have multiple opportunities for rankings, and can set up a top-level menu item based around the event with links to the internal pages.

Something like:

DOMAIN.com/inside-tick-tick-boom -- landing page

DOMAIN.com/inside-tick-tick-boom/interviews

DOMAIN.com/inside-tick-tick-boom/interviews/actors_names

By using this method you also will have multiple opportunities for social sharing, since you have an increased number of pages each with their own share links.

Hope this helps!

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.

1. Make sure you have no internal links pointing to that page
2. Put a rule in place with a 410, meaning GONE before filing the reconsideration request.
3. Do not redirect the page with a 301 or any other method. Remember, you want the page to disappear, not redirect.

Also, what is the message you received stating that only that one URL was penalized? Very strange to hear that only one was affected. Run a link check to see what other sites or listings are pointing to that URL, and if possible, log in to the citation or platform and change the link to one you know is not affected.

Nothing he can do? Lmao what a terrible answer. On the old site, you should still have Ftp setup. In that account, go into your htaccess file and add the rule that redirects all traffic  to your existing domain, or the one you want to get indexed. Also add a robots rule denying any access to the old domain ftp.

Option 2 is to delete any and all old site files in the domain Ftp you want to get rid of, have the site urls return a 404 error, and do a url removal request in webmaster tools. Option 1 would be safer imo, but doing option 2 will get rid of the old domain for good.

Could not get the site to load, so I could not take a look at what you have going on. I'm guessing you are messing around with some redirects.

But I can help with the MOZ and Yoast graders. The tools you are describing are only tools. If you look at the report that MOZ gives you, its only there to point out any areas where there may be missed opportunities, or if there are any standout errors. If the report is showing the page to have an F grade, it most likely is not set to target the correct keyword, or is trying to check multiple pages for the same keyword phrase. People often have issues with the MOZ grader, but don't understand how to set it up. I hope that one of the Admins on here can direct you to a tutorial, as I did a few Google searches and didnt find any worthy results.

Yoast is a great tool and plugin. One thing you have to watch out for is again: its only a tool and will recommend best practices based upon the settings you enter. If you have followed its recommendations to a perfect degree, that may get you a green bar and a nice score, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the page is well optimized for that keyword. For most SEO-graders, as long as you stay with a set character limit, and make sure the URL is search engine friendly and all fields are filled out, you will get a high grade. This can have nothing to do with the content that populates those areas, only that you met the predefined requirements to get you a high grade.

Once you fix all these redirect errors, I would resubmit the entire site and sitemap to Google, as they probably have a mixed idea of what the real destimation URL's are after all the issues.

Have all the pages on all the sites you control and have revised been resubmitted? If you leave it to Google to do this on their own, it will take a very long time, most likely years before they are all gone. Even tho its a very simple tool, try using the "fetch as Google" tool in Webmaster tools. This can be done on both an individual URL basis, or you can resubmit the entire page and all its connected links. Once you have submitted all the offending URL's that contain the revised information, refresh the sitemap, and resubmit the entire site(s).

For the Wiki pages that you dont own, it will take a long time for the indexed result to change, but as long as the information on the page that it links to doesnt contain the information you dont want, you are fine. Since Wiki is so large, it may take some time for them to revise that indexed data. On the other hand, since Wiki is so big and is most likely crawled daily by Google, you might see chnages quickly. How long has it been since you modified the info?

For the on site issues, if you are seeing a very slow reindex of the modified pages, you could also create entirely new pages, and have the old page 301 redirect to the new one that does not contain the sponser.

One more thing you could try is a press release stating that the alliance no longer exists. Word it in a positive light.

www.site.com/category-page/product-page

I would prefer this method, because that is what a user would expect, although it can go either way.

Using the bolded method above is better for navigation, as a user and search engine can see how the product relates to the category it placed in. Generally, URL structures like this also include breadcrumbs, allowing for a user to quickly go back to the main category page and begin a new search, if desired. Having simple navagation can increase onsite time, since it's easy to view content and products.

I can also vouch for the other method for a few reasons. Using a shortened URL is more direct, and IMO better for seo. This allows you to set up the top level or category page with anchor text links directed at the subpages or products. When one of those is clicked, the page the user lands on will be the shorter, more direct version, with a clean URL. I think Google likes this method better, as the end URL is more directly related to the product being referenced, without any pollution. (unless you are using markup for breadcrumbs).

Contact the sites responsible for showing the rich snippet. If you do not want to have it displayed, then they should be able to turn that snippet off for you. Same with the reservation system. Depending upon what platform you are using, there is probably a reservation system available within the code, or through a plugin.

I 'm not sure if setting up a strickly internal booking system only on the hotel's website makes sense tho. Depending upon what site people find the hotel listed on, they are going to want to book it right then and there, and not have to link to another site to do so. Be careful to not make it more complicated then it needs to be.

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.

I've never seen a site that was "unfixable" just some that took a lot longer than others to recover.

What steps have you taken so far, and also what methods are you using to track the changes?