We are not using Wordpress for any of the tools, and all will be handled using PHP. This is a separate directory from our main site used strictly for the tools. Our main site does not use Wordpress either.

The server resources are not an issue at this time, as we have a very powerful setup.

I am not worried about how many times a subscribed user wants to ping their site. I am more concerned about where the ping is being sent out from and how many times.

Thank you for your response. As to the IP getting blacklisted, since we have full server control we could always assign another dedicated IP address to the site. The issue is that we would not know if and when it happened to take such action. Obviously, we don't want to have to do this, and it could create headaches if the main site IP is blacklisted for our search position until we get it resolved.

We are also planning on adding in website submission limits. For example, you could only submit mysitehere.com up to 3 times per month per subscriber account. The only way they could spam the system is to create another account and sign up all over again. I doubt anyone would go through that much effort, but I could be wrong.

Thoughts?

Confusing title I know, but let me explain.

We are in the middle of programming a lot of SEO "action" tools for our site. These will be available for users to help better optimize their sites in SERPs. We were thinking about adding a "Ping" tool based in PHP so users can ping their domain and hopefully get some extra attention/speed up indexing of updates.

This would be hosted on a subdomain of our site. My question is: If we get enough users using the product, could that potentially get us blacklisted with Google, Bing etc? Technically it needs to send out the Ping request, and that would be coming from the same IP address that our main site is hosted on. If we end up getting over a 1000 users all trying to send ping requests I don't want to potentially jeopardize our IP.

Thoughts?

I had a question about this, as even though we had quite a few mentions of the city and service they were spread out throughout the description and not bulked together in the traditional definition of keyword-stuffing. If what you were saying about the description having no part to play is true, how would that have had an impact on the LBL drop?

Help me understand, my mind is a sponge right now

Linda,

Thank you for your insights into this issue. We have cleaned up the description, and now it appears to rank again. This is simply maddening lol, especially when you see all the keyword driven URL's and old-SEO-world tactics that still work in our area. I can't imagine what it's like trying to rank in a larger area such as Chicago or NYC, although I'd enjoy that battle to the top.

We try to practice white-hat to the core, and it is very frustrating when we see other companies submitting to link farms, using stuffed content and other methods and still ranking well. Doing it the right way is definitely more time consuming, but I feel it is the best for a sustainable result.

I'm not sure what caused the drop. We were showing up for over a year in the number one position, and I don't have to explain what that can do for validation to potential clients when you have the number one LBL and organic.

Now that it is working, I wonder if we should still make the change to deleting the service area and sticking with the local address. Linda, your thoughts? As I'm sure you are aware, sometimes when you shake up things in Google it can have the adverse reaction you were expecting.

"I looked at your images and you have a big VERY nice professional agency office. So I don't understand why you set up a service area. Again SABs don't rank lower per se BUT miscategorizing your business could cause a problem. You don't do the work onsite like a plumber and do have a commercial office, so don't think you should have service area at all. There is no reason to. No way it would help and could in fact hurt."

**We did this to let people know that we come out to their location, and also to try to expand our reach. For example, if you were searching for an SEO company in Chesterfield, that is an area that is about 30 mins from us. I'm not sure our local office listing would "carry" that far out, and thus the service area was created as a test. A test that for a long time was working well. I'm not sure that the bot would take that long to recrawl the listing, and I would have thought that it would have happened by now if that was the case. All speculation of course, but it is an interesting point to consider. Thank you for your kind words about the office, as I have personally spent many hours trying to get it "just right". **

Miriam and Linda, thank you for all your help and insight regarding this issue. It has been truly helpful and educating. When I first had this question there was no doubt in my mind of where to ask. Literally said to myself "Just put a question up on MOZ, they will know" lol.

*sorry for so many edits. The text editor is not playing nice tonight

Linda,

Thank you for your reply and in trying to help. Let me give some details:

We offer SEO and optimization services in the St Louis area. Currently, our listing is set to be a service area, but we also include the checkbox that we serve people at our location. We have an office building that is fully staffed for people to visit and discuss their business goals in detail. The office is where the majority of our work is performed, but we also offer consultations and meetings at the client's location (hence the service area we are willing to drive to). The service area includes other areas around St Louis up to a 30-mile radius.

We made no listing changes and very few site changes that would have dropped us from showing in the maps (LBL) area. We still show up there, but you actually have to open the maps view and scroll down the list using the more information or more businesses link that Google provides. The site changes that were made were primarily visual, and the site load speed etc remain the same.

If you do a search for "St Louis SEO company" we used to show up as the number one listing, and also as the number one organic. The organic has stayed the same. The LBL has more depth than that of our competition and includes longer descriptions, more links to associated profiles, and images. This is why I am wondering what happened? Why did it move to a lower position when it was static and remained there for months on end?

This is why I am wondering if we should revise the listing to say that we only service people at our office, and if that will influence the LBL display. From our research, it didn't matter where you were typing it from, and it always showed up in the top three. Even if you searched from a further location from our office.

We have been seeing some strange things happen in Google local after the most recent update. We used to show up in the maps all the time and have made no major edits or changes to the profile.

Now when we search for our services, we show up high in the organic results, and not at all in maps (local listings). We have our profile setup as a service area since we do meet with people and provide services at their location, but also have checked the option that we also serve people at our address.

I am wondering if the recent update favors actual storefronts when people are searching for services. Any ideas? Technically all the actual work is provided at our location, and the service we provide at the service area locations is based upon consultations. If we switched it to an actual storefront listing could that possibly help? Our profile is fairly strong, and has reviews, long history of posts, etc.

What gives Google?

We actually have a project in the works that will put whitespark down a few notches. They offer a great service, and I applaud their attention to detail and service to their clients.

BUT...I can't talk about it yet though. It will be a service and site to behold

As to Yext vs MOZ local, it just depends on what works best for your client's needs. Also, you are only allowed 5 listings with Acxiom before they charge you for each submission (goes off of submission IP address). Just an FYI for those that don't know.

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 is pointing to the other server now. We have it blocked from indexing on that end, just wanted to make sure that was enough.

So does this work better because Google will not show an IP address in search results?

Hello fellow mozzers!

Let me see if I can explain this properly.

First, our server admin is out of contact at the moment,
so we are having to take this project on somewhat blind. (forgive the ignorance of terms).

We have a client that needs a cname record setup, as they need a sales.DOMAIN.com to go to a different
provider of data. They have a "store" platform that is hosted elsewhere and they require a cname to be 
sent to a custom subdomain they set up on their end.

My question is, how do we prevent the cname from being indexed along with the main domain? If we 
process a redirect for the subdomain, then the site will not be able to go out and grab the other providers
info and display it. Currently, if you type in the sales.DOMAIN.com it shows the main site's homepage.
That cannot be allow to take place as we all know, having more than one domain with
exact same content = very bad for seo. I'd rather not rely on Google to figure it out.

Should we just have the cname host (where its pointing at) add a robots rule and have it set to not index
the cname? The store does not need to be indexed, as the items are changed almost daily.

Lastly, is an A record required for this type of situation in any way?

Forgive my ignorance of subdomains, cname records and related terms. Our server admin being
unavailable is not helping this project move along any. Any advice on the best way to handle
this would be very helpful!

Agree with others. We have seen 3-6 months depending upon the size of the site. I would cover all the basics first, meaning:

1. Sitemap submission
2. All pages set to fetch in GWT, Bing WT
3. Updated crawl request of your site and all linked pages
4. Cleanup of any and all backlinks to old site domain, including social profiles
5. Updated sitemap crawl frequency (daily vs weekly) just to spur Google along
6. Manual search for broken backlinks or old 404 pages

Hope this helps!

Its a tough call. Honestly I think it comes down to "Is it worth the time to optimize every page?" I would say yes, if you have the financial ability to do so. I don't think that Google looks at pages individualistically, and looks at the entire site as a whole. If you increase the entire quality score of your site, that will help you more than optimizing a few, or even in your case a few hundred pages. Chances are your competitors will not be going through the same amount of SEO work, and your site ranking will improve. We have tested this theory on many ecommerce sites hosted by us, and seen excellent results. Many smaller websites out rank the leaders like Home Depot, Ebay, Amazon, etc consistantly.

For your meta descriptions I would do something more like:

I know Matt Cutts states that meta descriptions don't have an impact on ranking, but I just flat out don't agree. Depending upon what you search for, you can clearly see the bolded and highlighted words in the link URLs, description, page title etc. Look at the bolded words in the sample above to think of what the description covers.

1. Childrens face paint
2. Halloween face paint
3. Black face paint
4. Face paint

If you so choose, you could also leave the descriptions blank, as long as your on-page descriptions absolutely rock. One rule we always follow internally: "You never know where Google will pull content from, so make sure anywhere they can is awesomely optimized" This would include titles, meta, on page, keywords, everything. Hope this helps!

Personally, I think true directory or public information outlets are the best.

I would look at the service or product you provide, and try to understand where people would go to look for that item. If it is a service, where do people go to find out information about that service? Are there any leading authorities that you could become a member of, or post content to?

If it is a product, how do people look for it? Where do people go to look for it? Do people review it? Is your focus local or national?

When looking for opportunities, you have to be creative. I understand you are looking to increase your ranking, but you also want to have links that people will USE, not just to sit on some directory in a hope of being a ranking factor. If you are deadset on getting just links, use the MOZ backlink analyzer to see who your competitors have linking back to them.