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I'm looking for advice for what you would start with if you were working on a website that was extremely over-optimized for 1 keyword. So, for example, I'm going to pretend this client is a dog trainer in Toronto (I can't publicly post the URL).

I've read places that having exact-match anchor text links to inner pages in the footer of the site can cause problems and removing it has resulted in big ranking jumps. I'm looking to see if there are other big items that you would tackle first if this was your client.

Some examples of things the site has:

• There is a page for dog training under their Services menu. However, internal links on their site link "dog training" to both the homepage and to this service page. Is that going to cause issues?

• The anchor text for internal linking is almost always the exact same word - "Dog Training".

• There is a banner that goes across the top of the site that appears on every page that says "Dog Training Toronto". I'm guessing I should remove that. Would the same keyword being overly used on every page cause confusion?

• Almost every image on his site is saved in the format "Dog Training Toronto".

I'm looking to see if anyone has general tips on where to start with a site that has been over-optimized for 1 keyword. He actually has a ton of good content on his blog that gets a ton of traffic (because it's actually useful) so it's not that his content sucks - it's just been overly structured and SEO'd to death.

I found a few articles on this but other than the footer advice I didn't find too many case studies of others that have run into this issue and done a few steps that actually worked.

I'm curious for those who have used broken backlinking as a tactic for clients - what % of emails do you normally get results from. For example, if you email 100 webmasters, how many would actually replace the broken link with yours?

I have a business that I just recently started working with and he has written a ton of blog articles (some of which are really good) and decided it would be a good idea to insert the keyword hes targeting into the content or title of many of his blogs. Lets just say for example that the keyword is plumbers chicago. So I searched on Google and the words "plumbers chicago" (in that exact order) are on 199 pages on his site, not including filtered content.

He is on page 2-3 for that keyword and I'm wondering what people's advice would be for a site that has so much content referencing the same exact keyword. It is a keyword that is service + location too so it actually doesn't even make sense when you read it in half the sentences it's in.

I think one of the main issues of why it's on so many pages is he has a tag for it in Wordpress and tons of the blog articles have that particular tag.

This should give you all your answers

http://www.buuteeq.com/blog/a-hotels-guide-to-google-hotel-finder/

The good thing about EMDs is that sometimes (not always) they rank well for one specific query (the one that matches the domain) but unless they have all the other factors in place, they rank for nothing else. I had a client who was a lawyer who had multiple sites and the negatives way outweighed the positives.

If you're recovering from Penguin you might want to have a professional who specializes in this look at your site. I've seen cases where people disavowing links wrong had the opposite effect they were looking for (made them drop even further) because it wasn't done right. My recommendation would be Marie Haynes.

Most lawyer searches on Google show Google Places results first. How does your site rank in that section?

I read this article recently and I think it might be helpful: https://lawyerist.com/66919/stop-using-location-practice-area-attorney/

I would spend more time on custom descriptions for the ones that you have reviews on. The goal would be to have as many citations with gold stars as possible rank high for your brand name on Google. That way when customers search for you, they are blasted with nothing but gold stars.

This brand name is a good example: ME Contracting

One thing I have found with all these local citation building services is that they focus on the big core group of directories that apply to every business but they leave out the niche directories that exist for each vertical.  I think the niche directories are really key to helping Google categorize your business better. One tool I've been just recently using is Link Prospector. For $1-2 you can run a report that gives you a list of the niche directories related to the keyword/industry you are looking to rank for.

If you do a report for the directories category and list the keywords (include the cityname) you want to rank for, it will pull a list of all the directories related to that keyword/industry. So, for example, if I was a plumber in Seattle I would list "plumber seattle" as the "phrase".  Whitespark helped build this tool as well.

We also use Moz Local. It's really fast and easy to use. Much cheaper than Yext.