Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I do not know what to do with this... and could use a bit of advice on this issue:

"Doing things right", resulted in great organic rankings and a bonus by showing top of local search results for our area. Sounds great... until Google decides it was time to mix things up a little.

I do not know if this applies to all types of businesses, but for ours it means that you will no longer get any organic page 1 listing if you are a local business that (un)luckily ranks in local results too.

One day G will include local results on a keyword, the next they won't... making our SEOMoz Campaign rankings weekly a true yo-yo of "50 keywords declined by >48 and >49 places", and "30 keywords improved by <47 and <49". It turned this feature in campaigns completely useless for me (ever since SEOMoz decided to include the local result light bulb that is)

Some traffic dropped from 240 a day for one keyword, to 30 now for that same keyword. Frustrated? You bet. I do not understand why Google seems to create a war with local businesses.

Should we get out of Local results or does anyone have any ideas, suggestions?

Thanks a bunch guys!

I get the link farm idea. However, a link farm typically is a cluster of spammy or low quality (PR0-1) sites that are set up for a link farm purpose.

If the vast majority of your websites are stand-alone, with quality and age, targeting specific markets, you don't have anything to worry about, in my opinion.

The remark about anchor text, however, is valid. Pull a report in Open Site Explorer and do a quick run over the anchor that is being used. If it is too keyword rich, I would play it safe and change the anchor to just the company name for example. From your comments I understand you are not linking from a pizza restaurant in Oregon to a bowling alley in Miami, correct? Businesses are related or the external link to the next website makes sense, correct? If not, followed or not followed is not the question, the link has to go.

Being honest and straightforward should not trigger a penalty from bots, simply because you happen to own those other websites.

You may want to consider bringing your support under a subdomain of your website. This will not really create a complete separation of your site(s) but will resolve your duplicate url issue.

There is a tendency these days to work with folders, rather than subdomains. In this case I would suggest the subdomain though. (example: www.mywebsite.com as your main site and support.mywebsite.com as your subdomain.

As an update, those visits as we see them in Analytics are not hitting our servers. Not sure how they are doing this, but traffic does show in analytics but we do not see any spike on our servers.

We take the country out through filters at this point so we can at least review some true data.

Your question about how to ignore it after the fact can be done similar:

Go to Google Analytics > Custom Reports > Add Filter > EXCLUDE the country > Save

Now your GA will show all past results without those entries.

It is a custom report, but better than no data at all?

Hope this helps

thank you thank you Phil.

It was actually a video from Distilled that pushed me to do it. (Rand Fishkin funny line on video xml maps for youtube videos)

Do you have something to read up, on in regards to video, within Distilled or SEOMoz by chance?

There has not been a PR update in the past few days (as far as I know). Therefore it is doubtful that your browser PR return is steered by G, but something else is overtaking your stats.

Your site is hosted on a shared domain. If something happens to any of those sites, your site would/could see an immediate effect.

I would move away from sharing the same URL and go for hosting on a dedicated server.

Good luck!