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I have a client where we put the specific local listing page url (example.com/locations/phoenix/location1) in the Google Places URL field. It works out really well as we get the home page ranking organically (depending on the query) and the specific places result locally. Sometimes they are combined and other times they are not, but we are in the mix somewhere almost always.
That is possible but the links could be helping them. I would wait to disavow until its actually a problem. you don't want to shoot yourself in the foot.
I have had something similar done to my site. One of my competitors "targeted" our business for negative SEO. I noticed a bunch of spammy links pointing to our site with outright X-rated / vile anchor text. The good news is that we haven't seen a drop in traffic or rankings and it's been going on for a while now. Google is pretty good a catching things like this. If you are doing "white hat" SEO and marketing, you probably don't need to worry about it.
In my experience, I had a client with the positioning like yours. We created the Places account and it just went into the local / maps results. The good news was that the SERP didn't contain any other organic listings at the top. If you have prominent and consistent rankings and are confident in your strategy, then you might not need to create a places account. Just be aware that moving down 1 spot could really be 8 or 9 spots on the real estate of the SERP. Moving down to #2 organically could mean being below the entire local results. You will need to judge the risk / rewards. Hope that helps.
Google has always changed title in the SERPs to what they think is best. In some cases, it can be a total nightmare. Search Engine Land posted this article yesterday on this exact same issue with two different companies: http://searchengineland.com/google-title-wrong-157819
Hopefully, Google will allow webmaster more control over their listings in the SERPs!
There are a couple of options for site owners in your situation. The first option is to create a 301 redirect from the "duplicate" page to the "preferred" page. This will eliminate that extra URL and forward it to the preferred one. If that's not possible for whatever reason, you can specify the rel canonical tag in your head section which basically tells search bots to prefer the page you specify in that tag. Here is info on rel canonical: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
You can post a job on Inbound.org for $50 for 30 days. Typically, higher caliber and quality experts will view the jobs on this site. http://www.inbound.org/jobs
You can also try Odesk or Elance but the results there can definitely vary.
Having a blog is definitely a smart idea. Even though you are using Open Cart, you can just create a subfolder on your host called 'blog' and run WordPress out of there. This way, your main Ecommerce site will be on example.com and your blog will be on example.com/blog. Google won't care that you're running two different CMSs. You are creating the content on your domain and as long as both CMSs are linking to each other then both your blog and Ecom site will gain benefit to any links.
Since Open Cart and WP are both open source, with the right development (or developer) you can actually tweak both systems enough to share the same template files, this way they look the same from a design standpoint. That's really another question in itself, but to summarize, yes, you should start your blog and definitely use wordpress for it if you are comfortable with it.
Personally, the only reason a pingback is useful for me is for the notification that someone is linking to me. When you "accept" the pingpack it displays it on the blog as if it were a comment. When you view the pingback in the comments on the post page it really doesn't make any sense at all and doesn't really have any value to the page or those looking at it. I typically just delete the pingback and go forward now knowing another site linked to me.
Also, there is the possibility that Google may crawl the link in your comments. In that case it will now look like a 2 way / reciprocal link, where there have been several cases that Google has discounted / devalued those types of links. Hope that helps.
Since people will not be able to visit the locations of your driver's addresses, I agree with you that you would not want to use that. Also, it will be a bad idea to setup home based service area businesses at your drivers' houses since they will essentially be able to control the listings you create. You will need to come up with some sort of space that is controlled and utilized by your business in those locations. It doesn't have to be a large space but it will have to be a unique address. Even though customers may never come to it, you'll still need to get it setup. Then, in Google places set the business up as a service area business with the appropriate areas that your drivers in that area can legitimately serve. Click the "hide address" box and you'll be good to go. You'll want to setup local phone numbers for each location as well.
Then you can create unique content around those other areas where you can do business directly on your website. Have localized content (services, reviews, phone number, etc) specific to each location. Set the URL for the places pages to those specific area locations on your website.
Edit: spelling and grammar
I have had experience with all three.
To answer your question, I think Localeze is the best for distributing your NAP, however, there is no substitute for or better value than manually claiming local citations. It also takes awhile for the listing to get distributed across of their local search platforms.
In my opinion, Yext is overpriced, but is valuable in claiming major citation sources. The number of profiles available are capped. David Mihm recently posted on this: http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/seo-industry/yext-local-marketing/
UBL is good, but I only spend the $39 core syndication annually since they have access to the Acxiom database.
In short, you can pay for all three, but don't just set it and leave it. Always claim and manage as many citations as you can manually. You can take advantage of all of the local search platform's features without overlooking anything.
Personally, the only reason a pingback is useful for me is for the notification that someone is linking to me. When you "accept" the pingpack it displays it on the blog as if it were a comment. When you view the pingback in the comments on the post page it really doesn't make any sense at all and doesn't really have any value to the page or those looking at it. I typically just delete the pingback and go forward now knowing another site linked to me.
Also, there is the possibility that Google may crawl the link in your comments. In that case it will now look like a 2 way / reciprocal link, where there have been several cases that Google has discounted / devalued those types of links. Hope that helps.
"In summary, is it correct to say that H1 and H2 tags are stronger signals to the search bots of what the page is about?"
Absolutely. These tags are strong signals to search engines as to what the page is about, along with title tags and meta descriptions. You can prioritize content and break down the page with H1 through H6 headline tags. SEOmoz has a great on-page best practice guide for setting up the page, which makes sense for your users as well as search engines. Try not to spam keywords anywhere, just make sure it is "keyword friednly" but at the same time readable and would make sense to a human.
Hey-
I have not used this site before but heard good things about it. It's affordable, but the directories are not super high quality. PR 4 or so. I think they have different tiers for better directories. This isn't auto submission, it's simply a service that submits manually for you. Also, they vary the anchor text I think up to 10 times I think?
http://www.submit2please.com/directory-submission.html
For awesome directories - I always submit my client's site to Best of The Web, Business.com, and the Yahoo Directory. They have similar guidelines to Google so they are very well trusted.
Hope this helps!
Google can definitely see and crawl that link. It will be up to them whether it passes page rank or is indexed based on whether or not they think the link is deceptive to users or manipulative to Googlebot. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66353
In my experience, I had a client with the positioning like yours. We created the Places account and it just went into the local / maps results. The good news was that the SERP didn't contain any other organic listings at the top. If you have prominent and consistent rankings and are confident in your strategy, then you might not need to create a places account. Just be aware that moving down 1 spot could really be 8 or 9 spots on the real estate of the SERP. Moving down to #2 organically could mean being below the entire local results. You will need to judge the risk / rewards. Hope that helps.
I just did that search and I am seeing you right at the #6 spot. Since you have tried incognito I am wondering if Google is demoting your result based on geographical location.
Have you tried searching from a proxy or other service like https://startpage.com/ that strips your IP? You can narrow it down that way. Definitely odd but the good news is that I can see you right there.
It is against the Google Places guidelines to setup a Google+ Local page if you are not a business owner or representative of that business. They may never approve the listing.
Places / +Local listings are meant to give the user / searcher direct access to the business, not their affiliates or advertisers.
If you want to promote your clients' businesses then you should help them get it setup under their own accounts with all of their direct information.
There are ways to market local businesses online but in my opinion (and I' pretty sure Google's) a inauthentic Places page is not the answer.
There are a couple of options for site owners in your situation. The first option is to create a 301 redirect from the "duplicate" page to the "preferred" page. This will eliminate that extra URL and forward it to the preferred one. If that's not possible for whatever reason, you can specify the rel canonical tag in your head section which basically tells search bots to prefer the page you specify in that tag. Here is info on rel canonical: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
There are a ton of things you can do. Some of my favorites:
Optimize the page speed to load as quick as possibly. Good plugin: W3 Total Cache, http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/
Setup your theme and templates to use structured data in the HTML. This will tell Google specifically what your pages and products are best categorized as. http://schema.org. You can use this especially for product reviews which may show up as rich snippets in the search results.
Setup Google Authorship (rel=author) and/or Google Publisher tags for your blog posts and or/pages
Change your permalink structure to %postname%
Use the Redirection plugin to track your 404s, 301s, and other typical server response codes: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/
Yoast has an Analytics plugin with many customization options for tracking
There is obviously a lot you can do since WP is an open source platform. These should get you started and busy for a while!