It is a directory of companies' phone numbers, which go directly to a person (bypassing the machines.) I think this directory actually does provide users with value, and is far from your typical link farm.

It is probably a great resource for people who want to call companies to sell them a service.  We get calls every week from incompetent SEOs.  They are a huge waste of our time.

Why would you want to submit your website to a directory that is going to be used by telemarketers?  Do you enjoy talking to these people?

Doug says... "Ignore the links"....  I agree....

If this is an "on site" blog you should be focused on the message.  You should be blogging to educate your readers or present your point-of-view.  Link to another page on your site only when needed or when you want to let the reader know that you offer a service (and this should be limited to genuinely relevant links).

Blogging on your own site isn't about generating links to other pages.  It is about demonstrating your expertise.  The links that you should be after is the ones that people read what you have to say, are impressed by it, and link to it from their own website because what you have said is so important that they want THEIR readers to know about it.

I've seen this "1 link per 125 words" for blog posts suggestion pop up a variety of places. I wanted to know if that's "correct" or a best practice?

Where are you reading this stuff?   I wouldn't read that author any more.

In my posts, I generally write between 800 to 1200 words with about 4 to 6 links in the body of the post.

Wow... that sounds like a great way to get a Penguin attack.

However, (and this may be a problem) I add about 13 links in my closing paragraph, "if you have any legal questions, etc etc, click here for your "Tampa personal injury attorney, Clearwater Personal Injury Attorney, etc etc for all the areas we practice in related to that blog post."

I would stop doing this right away.

...the day my guest post was published on one of the biggest blogs in my niche (DA over 70) my Google impressions dropped to an all time low...

Giving your content away is creating new competitors and feeding existing competitors.  This is just like giving Goliath a club to beat you with and giving Google a reason to demote the rankings of your site for duplicate content.

Have the courage to not give your content away.   Don't give it to anyone.  Post in only on your own site.  That will bring visitors to you instead of to your competitors.  It sounds like you have fans who visit your site and will spread the word about it for you naturally.

...as it gets closer to the game's release date, I get pushed further down the google rankings...

This happens to everyone but the strongest site.  As an important date approaches more news, content and product pages are added to the search results.  The competition gets heavier.   The only way to survive this is to improve your website so that it is stronger than the competition.

• Is there a min percentage to aim for?
• Also is there a similar min rate of content production to aim for.

I am shoveling as much coal as I can, as fast as I can and have been doing this for years.

The answer to your question is.... It depends who you are competing against.  If your SERPs are full of aggressive websites then you will have your work cut out for you.  But, if you are in sleepy SERPs you might be able to work at an enjoyable pace.  And, it also depends if you want all of the apples or are happy with just a few.

Is their a kind of tipping point to get past that google will think they are doing things right i should keep an eye on them!

I think that if you catch Google's eye in this way then you are going to make a big pile of money.

If I was writing one high quality post a week it would go on my site and no where else.

When you give content away it feeds existing competitors and creates new ones.

I don't syndicate my content. Never have, never will.  I know that I am in the minority.  That's A-OK.

A few people give me content and I post it on my site.  Some of them don't like it when their content on my site outranks their website for their important keywords and I am getting thousands of visitors a month into their article page on my site.

They got a link.  I got a page, thousands of visitors per month, nice ad rev, some conversions, and I am ranking above other websites on new turf using their labor.  Sweet deal for me.   I can't understand why they make these types of deals.

1. Write a Perl program (or other language script) that will: a) read the target webpage, b) extract the data relevant for your geographic locations, c) write a small html file to your server that formats the data into a table that will fit on the webpage where you want it published.

2. Save that Perl program in your /cgi-bin/ folder.   (you will need to change file permissions to allow the perl program to execute and the small html file to be overwritten)

3. Most servers allow you to execute files from your /cgi-bin/ on a schedule such as hourly or daily.  These are usually called "cron jobs".  Find this in your server's control panel.   Set up a cron job that will execute your Perl program automatically.

4. Place a server-side include the size and shape of your data table on the webpage where you want the information to appear.

This set-up will work until the URL or format of the target webpage changes.  Then your script will produce errors or write garbage.  When that happens you will need to change the URL in the script and/or the format that it is read in.

I used to have separate pages for "each color" and other product variations.  However, I changed to one larger page for the entire product group and it has worked better in my opinion.

If your blog posts are substantive in length and do not contain duplicate content then I would index/follow them.  A good blog post on a popular topic can bring in a lot of traffic.

Category pages can also be set to index/follow if they contain very short excerpts of the blog posts and if they each have enough content to be substantive.  When a blog is new and you have just one or two posts per category, each consisting of a short excerpt then I would not index them.  What you can do is wait until you have several posts in a category before you start a category page.

A superior method of category page treatment, in my opinion, is to create a page that present all of your posts in a organization that is more logical the chronological default that you get in wordpress.  Get a great image for each post and create a page that has your best posts, most popular posts, most recent posts presented for the visitor.  New visitors should see your best or your most popular.  Returning visitors want the new stuff.  If there are posts that you want everyone to see they can be placed in a prominent position.  This page can be rearranged if there is something hot in the news and you want to call attention to your writing on that topic.  This will be a growing adaptive page that is much more visitor friendly than the chronological.

lowes, bed bath and beyond, walmart, target, ace hardware...

Yes, just in the past month, some of these big brands and others have moved strongly into my SERPs.

Is this due to recent Google changes?

YES.  Google is favoring them.

** Is there any way to improve our rankings and compete with these large companies? **

I have a whole website about a single product niche, with more information about these products than all competitors combined, yet google ranks these companies when they have one cheap, low-quality product from the niche.

I am killing the big brands on all of the long tail, but they are really strong in the head terms.

Keep hammering!  Attack the long tail.  Saturate it with good content.  Make your site the information place for these products.  The people at walmart and other big brands can't answer questions about these products.  They know nothing about them.  Lots of people will be from you because they know that you are informed about these products and can help them.  Walmart knows nothing and is worthless for help.

Tom... that is some of the best that I have seen in a long time.

Thanks!  

With a gun to my head....

lol...  Wow.  That is a great way to word this.

So, my response is, yes, put a gun to my head and I will pick between these two bad choices.

Really, if you are paying someone to write all of this content you can hire one writer and have them take a year to do it... or you can hire 12 writers and have the job done in a month.  Same cost either way.

If I was selling Joe Bloggs Kettles in three different colors.  We would dedicate ONE page to it instead of four.  Instead of having a category page I would have one sales page with all three items listed.  Three separate product pages would not be used.

That reduces the number of pages on your site and I believe that compact sites compete better than fat ones.

That allows you to place all of the content for these products on one page instead of spreading it across four.   Richer content pages generally rank higher.

In my opinion this is also better for the shopper because he can compare colors and any price difference on a single page.  If you have four pages for these product the shopper might need to do some clicking around to compare and that could result in lower sales.  Give them everything that they need on one page.

Less work and less bandwidth for you too!

If I was the boss at FB...  this guy would have been paid - more than $500 -  and given a hot line to the chief of security.

Every article that I write has an

centered at the top of the page.

Then, the text begins in the left column and the first paragraph with an

above it is left justified.

I believe that google started blogger to make blogging immediately easy for people who have no technical inclination and who would not want to pay the costs of hosting a website.

In my opinion, a law firm is not an appropriate user of Blogger.  They should have the content on their own website where it can be used to impress their visitors and demonstrate why the visitor should hire this law firm.

Lots of people think that links from blogger to their website are going to be valuable.  That is only true of outside websites are linking to the blogger blog.  And when that happens only a fraction of the power will pass to the law firm site.  However, if the blog is on the law firm site and an outside website links to a blog post then the entire law firm site will benefit from that link.

If I owned a site like the one that you are talking about, I would look at the existing blogger blog and if it does not have very many links then I would move all of the posts to the law firm site.   All future blogging would be on the law firm site.

All of my blogs are on my own domain.

Their site says $250,000-1 million in online sales are eligible.

That's REALLY small if you ask me.

What kind of service are you interested in?  Do you want to learn or do you want to hand this off to someone?

If you want to "learn" then get the Express Review service from SiteTuners.  They will study your pages, then get on the phone with you and tell you what they would do to kick up the conversions.  You get off of the phone with a "to do list" of things to change.  You make the changes and then get back on the phone to discuss.  You will learn a lot if you have not had this type of coaching before.   Or, you can use the Express Fix (after the Express Review) and they will kick the pages up a notch for you.

We work on minimum 6-month engagements, starting from $26,000/month. We give all our clients a 3-month money-back guarantee."

That's a lot of dough.  But if you have a lot of business and they can kick it up a lot then you can make money.  This is not for the $1 million/year biz if you ask me.

This is the way to go if you have a really big biz and want to hand the work off to someone else.  Go the SiteTuners route if you want to learn about how to improve your site.  I used SiteTuners and learned a lot.

I can't imagine why a law firm would blog from an outhouse rather than blog on their own site?

I have used SiteTuners and thought that they were good.  Learned a lot from them.

A lot of the blog posts and articles that I publish are about objects and products that I do not own.  If I believe a blog post about that object or product would be valuable  I don't hesitate to spend $10, $50 and sometimes $100 to purchase the item for testing, photos and the ability to speak directly about  my experience with the item.  I have several articles where several hundred dollars was spent on items for testing, photos and experience.

If you have worthwhile content ideas, don't hesitate to invest in them.  When you have great photos and an author who can speak from experience then you have kickass content as long as you can write effectively.

Thanks for sharing your perspective.

Tell people how to select your products, how to use them full advantage.

Visit a business that uses your product. See what advice they would give.

Take photos and videos... use them to explain upsells.

Secondly, people are bombarded with nuisance calls now on a daily basis, to me it shows some respect when sending an email through first (no harm in mentioning the fact that you're avoiding to call them first).

If you do that to me I will tell you that if I was interested in your offer I would have acted upon your email message.... and that you calling me as follow up is rude.

Just being honest.

Lots of people send me email messages.

If I am interested in what they send I act on it.   If I am not interested in what they sent I delete it.

If they call after I deleted their message I am really pissed off.  They are interrupting me and wasting my time.

If what they had to say was really important they would have gotten action.  A lack of action should let them know that their message was SPAM.

I've been informed recently that keyword within your image alt tags can be a trigger for penguin if you have your keyword mentioned too often on the page.

I don't think that keywords in your alt tag should be a problem.   The alt tag is intended to give essential information about your image to someone who is using a screen reader because they are visually impaired.  So, your alt tag should contain words that describe the image.  That might be keywords it might not be keywords.  Just be accurate.  Google is not going to slap you because of your alt tags.

if you have your keyword mentioned too often on the page.

Here is the problem.  Fix this.

I would not "noindex" the site.

Because once you do that, google can visit less often and you might have to wait a while before the noindex is undone - especially for a new site with a very low page rank.

Thank you Gagan and Sheldon,  I appreciate your thoughts on this.

I am going to prepare about ten articles and see what happens.   I have some where google is already showing indepth articles from other websites.  Some where they are not.  All of these are really good content that google should consider.  I'll give you an update if I get any results.  Should be doing this late this month.

Google started featuring "In-Depth Articles" a few days ago.  You can read about them here and here.

I have two questions about them...

1. If you already hold a great position in the SERPs.  Let's say your existing article ranks at #2 or #3.   If that article becomes one of the "In-Depth Articles", will it disappear from the #2 or #3 position?   I have lots of content that I could mark as an In-Depth Article, but I don't want to do that if it will pull me out of a hard-earned SERP position.

2. Has anyone seen "In-Depth Articles" that do not have the Schema markup?

Thanks!

Published yesterday by Aaron Wall...

http://www.seobook.com/google-press-release-links

you miss 100% of the shots you don't take

That's true.

If you visit their site and see that they regularly mention new and valuable content on the web then you have a really good chance of getting a mention if your content is great.    But if you are asking them to promote their product and they never do that then your call is probably going to be a waste of time.

See my frustration!?

Yes.  I see it.   I see some of this in my own SERPs.

In my SERPs that target items that are heavily purchased at Christmas the spammers buy a big load of links in the fall, get the rankings just before Christmas, then cut the links.   Pisses me off every year.

Would it be a good idea to call them?

When people call me about this kind of stuff I am usually not very nice to them.

Just being honest.  

First, give thanks if you have a page ranking well for a valuable keyword.  This really isn't a problem - you have an opportunity.

If your preferred page is not ranking highest for this keyword then get to work improving it.  The page that is beating it must be a really good page or,  you have bad optimization, poison links, low visitor engagement or some other problem with your preferred page.

If the undesired page is extremely powerful and you can't move your preferred page above it, figure out how to move the traffic to the page that you want them to see.  We use "house ads" and very obvious links to what we want the visitor to see.  If visitor really wants to see your preferred page and you have a big, contrasting, inviting ad to tell them what you got above the fold and really obvious then he is going to click it.  If he doesn't click it then he doesn't give a damn about your preferred page or you suck at making ads.  

They say they send stuff to 20,000 publications, who knows how true that is.

Yes.  This is exactly why I would not use them - even if they paid me hundreds of dollars.

This is something to recommend to your competitors.   Definitely not to use for yourself.

When I do this type of clean up I always look at analytics to see how much traffic these pages are receiving.  Are they pulling traffic from search, are the receiving traffic from links, do people who enter my site through other pages consume these articles.

Only after that analysis will I delete those posts.  I often find that some of these pages are valuable and I write updates or completely rewrite them.

Once all of that is done then I delete and redirect.  I feel good about deleting these because they cut dead weight from the site.

I think that the problem arises when the release is loaded with KW anchor links and spammed out to every PR site on the web... and the PR companies email spam every blogger email address that they can get their hands on - even if the blogger does not cover anything even close to the topic of the release.  Some PR companies know nothing of Penguin and happily think that they are "spreading the word".

Why did you move the domain?   Were you having problems on an old domain?

Just askin' because if you had Panda, Penguin or other problems on the old domain they might have followed you and are getting activated by new Google actions.

Press releases used to be dignified and worthy efforts.  Then the web turned the PR industry into a bunch of spammers who wear suits to work.

So, is it worth it to spend a few hundred bucks to distribute a press release...

That might cost you an awful lot more if you get slapped with a Penguin problem.

Just from a quick look.

Duplicate content on multiple domains. see here

I would rewrite many of the title tags to target local search terms  <title>Sump Pump Repair | Sump Pump Problems |title>          I would instead write something like this...  <tltle>Sump Pump Repair: One Hour Response in Cleveland and work "problems" into the content.  When people have a sump pump problem they want you there FAST. </tltle>

Really thin content on some of these pages...  http://environmentaldisasterservices.com/mold-testing/

If this was my site I would have a LOT more content.  A LOT more.   I would write articles about the types of problems that are specific to the areas that you serve.  These would be informative articles.  Not chest pounding marketing with the company name or "our team" used twice in every sentence.   This would be very similar to "local news" (but evergreen topics).

Saturate the SERPs.  Show your expertise.

I think that google is overreaching when the modify title tags.

At best they are generalizing and at worst they are stinking up careful marketing or turning an accurate description into spam (title that does not match the content).

They are changing title tags that some people have spent a lot of time writing.

They should pull their nose out of our title tags and get it back into the work of running a search engine.

....could you point me to some credible industry reports that shows the direct impact of organic SEO

Most of the reports that are published are case studies of kickass results.  Nobody writes up their busts.

The real bottom line is....   ROI varies wildly from one "SEO expert" to another... and just to be fair... for some websites you need a magician instead of an SEO.

Honestly...  I can't say that I would tell a friend that he should hut toads.