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Unfortunately, Google has taken bits and pieces of my business and combined it with non-existent businesses and other rogue information.  So now my business has 3 locations. One proper listing that I created and manage. One that uses my website address but nothing else is correct in the listing. One that contains my name(incorrectly), but the address and everything else about it is incorrect. I have reported these places many times but they continue to hang around and I am lost/confused on what to do next. Please advise.

Can someone please clarify whether hiding tags behind the image header is an accepted best practice or is frowned upon by Google? I was doing some competitive analysis and noticed some websites were doing it, but it certainly wasn't egregious.

I would like to change my sites structure to be more efficient for SEO.  I have a fear that the changes will have a potential impact on my current rankings, but know this would be a good long term decision. My site is wordpress, so the changes are relatively easy to make. What are some ways to change the site structure without damaging your rank?  I would have to have to clean up a bunch of errors, so is the best way to simply do 301 redirects on the old pages?

Hey all... I've been doing some competitive analysis lately on different niches in different cities, and upon looking at source code have noticed MANY sites(typically 2-3 of the top listed sites in each niche) who have hidden text, blocked by a box/logo, colored the same as the background, or both. Is this a typical practice? My understanding is Google seriously frowns on this, so is it worth reporting competitors who are doing such things? I don't see any grey areas in this matter and think it's a serious violation, but here these sites are at the top.

Hi everyone. While I have read answers regarding this on Mike Blumenthal's blog, I have not been able to get an exact clarification on having multiple Google Places listings. According to Mike Blumethal, Google accepts multiple listings in the Places area for specific industries. e.g. One listing for a Dental office, one listing for EACH dentist.  This could include a separate website for each. If this is the case, how far away are we from having one maxed out business owning muiiple positions in the local listing space in the search engines. specifically Google? I would love a good explanation of what is and isn't allowed to have multiple listings.

With Rands latest Blog post about social media linkage and sharing, and upon the discovery of quora.com in his post, I was wondering what other important ones I might be missing? There are certain obvious ones: Facebook Foursquare Twitter Linkedin Merchant Circle Do you guys know of any others that you find important, or see as useful in the near future?

If anyone here is familiar with local SEO, you may have noticed that there are different local results for: "city + Keyword" and just the "keyword". When building links will you end up targeting both with a geo modifier in the link, or is it beneficial to build links without the geo modifer for the keyword?

I just finished watching a documentary on Ray Kurzweil, Transcedent, and began to familiarize myself with his book, The Singularity is Near.  During Ray's explanation of prediction through data gathering and extrapolation, he predicts that by 2029 AI and humans will have merged.  We can debate this at another time, but I was wondering if any of the statistics/data is used by SEO professionals to predict where SEO may be going in the next 12-48 months. It has been my experience that SEO is very reactionary, and very few put their neck out on a limb to predict where it is going. I was just hoping that some of you may share your thoughts on what you are focusing on and where you are steering your clients in order to be ahead of the curve without hurting current placement. Anyone care to share?

After reading a recent blog post on guest blogging and ways to build relationships for link building purposes, I began to wonder about something. It is my understanding that one way backlinks are superior to reciprocal linkage, but reciprocal is better than no link at all. So is it still worthwhile to do reciprocal guest blogging, and will the value of the links be worth it when completed? Or should we just be of the opinion that: One Way Link > Reciprocal > No link