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Wouldn't you hate to be the SEO consultant who had all his clients penalized at the same time? Sheesh!

I think it's like the Highway Patrol.

Everyone speeds, but everyone doesn't get caught.  You point to a similar web page that hasn't been penalized, but there are many who have.

I use an app created by some of the super smart local SEO guys, called Get Five Stars. It lets you direct your client to whatever review sites are the most beneficial for you.

Thanks Miriam,

I got one of these recently, but I think a 4.8 looks more realistic than a 5.0 so I don't mind. Do you think they're doing it just to get Google points? The person who wrote mine is clearly not a client or prospect. She wrote a review about Starbucks being too expensive, so she certainly isn't going to be hiring a marketing consultant.

I feel bad for you. I don't have any answers, but I'm a singer, and your website is excellent. This is not an example of Google rewards quality.

I have seen zero results from Google+ - I don't even see people's own Google+ profiles ranking (when Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. easily rank).

How much does he plan to spend on marketing to reinforce his brand?  I believe .io will rank on Google just as easily as .net .info .us etc. but how much will it take to rank in their customer's brain?  I have a .us and 7.5 years later I still have to reinforce the domain when I am talking to a client.  It's like trying to get a client to say chartreuse instead of lime green.

What is the reason they want to avoid those techniques? It would make it easier to suggest something that fits in with their strengths.

Are the products on those pages important to you? Do you have another method of getting those products sold if you don't add the alt tags? Are you getting as much out of those pages now as you need to?

There's a million things you can do with SEO, but adding alt tags is one of the easiest ways to improve a page's performance.

Only you know if that page matters.

I love doing charity & event sponsorships. Often I can get a link for a client in exchange for helping promote their event. Match the events up with the client's actual interest and they get good publicity, referrals and personal satisfaction in addition to an SEO benefit.

I agree with Jewel - trying to be all things to all people is a recipe for disaster.

I am teaching a social media class to realtors on Wednesday and I know (from experience) that when I ask who is your target market, they'll say anyone who wants to buy or sell a home.  I'm going to try out this response on them.

When you say anyone who wants to buy or sell a home, you say that I am only important to you in the money you can make from me. Do you think that will make me like or trust you. Instead you say your target market is people who like the arts and dogs. Now you are saying that my interests are important to you. If you say your target market is people who like traditional performing arts (ballet, opera and old-fashioned musicals) and dachshunds, you are saying I am important to you. And then you'll be important to me.

Your photographer is telling prospects that he/she just wants to make a buck. The home page should inspire the real prospect to believe that there could be no other photographer in the area that understands me better.

Thank you for this update. I have Tumblr, Blogspot etc. that I use as part of my strategy and it is quite disconcerting this morning to see an individual post on a Tumblr blog with a PA of 94.  It's like looking in your bank and seeing a balance of 100K.

I think the law of unintended consequences would kick in ... soon you'd see Fiverr offerings to get 5 upvotes for your link page for $5.

It's harder to rank on the map without an address, but I see people all the time who are. I would look at different search phrases on the various sites like Yelp, Apple Maps, etc. and see if you can find examples of businesses without an address.  What kind of citations do they have.

Especially with local search, you frequently have to do the research yourself. Different cities and industries don't have the same power citations. You have to find the ones that are right for you.

I don't allow blog comments on my blog posts, and I have tons of posts that rank. It's not comments that help you rank, it's shares and more importantly links.

You should always try and keep track of your backlinks yourself, not rely on a third party tool to tell you who is linking to you.  No tool will give you 100% of the linking information, even when it's a regular, popular TLD.

I love Robert's advice.  I would also suggest adding some long tail keywords. Finding a church is very personal and I'd guess that lots of your prospects are searching things like "Bible based church" "church with active single group" or "church with great music".  Don't put all your emphasis on generic phrases.

No.

Especially the last 3 - anytime the title of a page in links, I believe Google ignores them.

I have had no problem with subdomains and SEO. I have ranked several somewhat difficult keywords and believe that it was easier using the subdomain. I didn't A/B test, so I have no proof, but I am pleased with the result.

For user experience, I think a subdomain is significantly better. The product-geography.com domain looks very spammy to me and doesn't carry the brand's credibility. With the subdomain, I'm certain it's the official site.

Thank you so much for this answer Tyler. I have a bunch of tumblr blogs and one has a spam score of 9.  It looks like the reason for the spam score is that it reblogs one post from a very legit blog with a spam score of 8. That blog is written by the type of guy who headlines social media conferences, so I certainly wouldn't want to disavow him.

If you've owned Binders.com for a long time and it ranks really well in the SERPS, you might think that creating and ranking a new domain won't be difficult. If your company execs think this, they are potentially in for a big disappointment.

If you start a brand new website from scratch, you could wait a long time before it ranks well enough to bring you any sales. Ranking a subdomain on your current site would certainly be quicker.

I would definitely recommend consolidating. Currently you're competing against yourself - if 2 properties are in the same neighborhood, they'll both rank poorly because you're not sending all your juice to the same place.

I created a Pinterest board with pins displaying a particular type of home (Craftsman Bungalow) in Sacramento and it ranks on page one. I did it as an example for realtors on how social media can give them multiple rankings on a page.

It's not all that exciting, but if I were a realtor I think I could make it sing! https://www.pinterest.com/juliemarg/craftsman-bungalow-homes-for-sale-in-sacramento/

Thank you so much!  I suspected this, but wanted to make sure by asking the Big Brains at Moz. You always come thru!

Perhaps you could say to him that Avvo has domain authority of 81, SuperLawyers also domain authority of 81 and Justia domain authority of 76. We could get similar high domain authority links by donating $2500 to the ballet, symphony and animal rescue. What would you like to do?

Good news is that after I did the same tedious process myself, my SEO results went up!

Dot Com!

When I started my business 7.5 years ago, the dot com was unavailable so I went with dot us.  Since then I have had to repeat the phrase "that's dot us, not dot com" several thousand times.  When I don't receive a promised email, and I call to follow up, they frequently have sent it to dot com.

In the SERPS it doesn't matter. I dominate, but I think I would have picked a different url if I'd realized how hard it was for the average consumer to remember. And my clients are biz people!

Do you think anyone can make a dent in Google's dominance?  I had expected Facebook to gain some share this year, but it doesn't seem like they've made an impact.

I have a couple questions. How long have these subpages and their backlinks been live? When you use the Moz tools, have your backlinks been indexed?

Thanks very much. It was easy to set up.

You put your contact info in the description area. Sometimes Google will pick up the description word for word for the serps.

I got the items from past sales at Trulia, but you could easily put your own listings up.  Or you could use Trulia, then put your own live listings at the top, remove them after they've sold.

In each pin's description, even the ones from Trulia, you can put your own description, including a link back to your website.

Pinterest used to pass on page rank, but it no longer does.

Throw a bunch of anchor text links and Voila! there you are.

I have lots of different Pinterest pages ranking.  I have a huge Pinterest following, so that might help, but I have seen small followings rank also.

I researched this for a former client (he quit me when he didn't like my answer) and the risk to using another's intellectual property is high.

If you publish, whether it's a book or a website, you must 1) create it yourself, 2) pay for it yourself or 3) have written permission from the author.  Without that you are risking huge penalties if caught. There is a whole new industry growing of people who look for illegal use of photos, copy, videos etc. so that they can sue.

P.S. I'm not sad about losing that client.

Have you asked the customer to describe their ideal customer? Often they say something completely broad like "everyone who wears shoes" but your task will be much easier if you know exactly who they want to walk in the door.

I think it's easier to do this with small business because they know their customers. Ask them to describe, in detail, their 4 best customers. How old are they, what do they do for a living, their hobbies - the more detailed the better. Then think of those people when you're selecting your keywords.

You've left off a very important fact.

Are you trying to go from 0 to 20 or from 20 to 40. The time required is completely different.

There have been several high profile law suits over theft of web content

http://theartnewspaper.com/news/instagram-model-and-makeup-artist-sues-richard-prince-over-copyright-infringement/

My own experience is that subdomains don't hurt. I have several subdomains on my own site, and pages on that site are top ten in Google. Despite everything that I've read saying that a subdomain doesn't benefit from being attached to a strong domain, my experience has told me otherwise.  Perhaps it's because most SEO advice is geared to Big Biz SEO vs. Local SEO. That's why I love MOZ so much, they don't ignore the little guys.

I certainly think it would hurt you in your link building activity. Many websites will state that they don't support content related to alcohol, tobacco or gambling.

Unless it is a huge money maker for you, I would purge that content.

I believe social influences SEO, but even if it doesn't right this minute, will it?

Do you anticipate changes to the way people search for businesses like yours?

I believe that Facebook is working on grabbing some search share from Google. As that happens, that social investment will pay off even if it's not paying off now.  Already I can use Facebook to search for something like Hotels in NYC and get true personalized results - I'll see the names of my friends who like those pages. Knowing my friends, it will let me know which hotel is swanky, which one is cheap, depending on which of my friends liked it.

I'd like some expert guidance. I've searched for a theme that does what I want and finally found something I like, but I'm wondering what you all think I should do to increase it's searchability.

The plugin has all the listings and styling. All I need to do is past the code into the wordpress site ad voila! I have a page. Using the widget lets me allow upvotes and provide map etc. But it means the content is inside the widget instead of on the page.

What would you modify if you wanted to keep the theme & widget to get the best results.

http://best-of-sacramento.com/dentists

This is my staging site.

I have several Tumblr blogs. Created when Tumblr links were worth more, and now primarily for my amusement.

But, I'd like to get whatever link juice I can out of them.

I thought only the footer links were do follow, but when I check Moz it's showing all links as do follow. Any idea which is true?

I have a client who is very concerned about reputation management ... Google his name and some very provocative photos show up in Google Images.  There are a couple of semi-famous people who share his name, and my plan is to backlink their images that currently rank positions 50 - 100 to try and push them up.

Should I backlink the page that contains the image or the image itself?

Any other recommendations?

I think the Amazon program looks really cool and imagine it would be successful, because people already buy things from Amazon. Yelp seems like it would be the least effective, because it currently has no shopping function and most prospects don't have Yelp accounts.  They may use Yelp to do research, but they don't participate.

They don't look junkie to me. On Ahrefs, Inman has a UR 80, DR 82.

I am about to launch an infographic campaign for a client. The infographic turned out fantastic, and I believe it's going to be very popular with dog bloggers.

Is there anything I need to worry about?  I expect a lot of backlinks from embeds.

Once it launches, I'll share it here so you can see how fabulous it turned out.

I think as far as it goes, Yelp favors small business over big business, but they really have a long history of being anti-business.

Why do I think they're anti-business

• Reviewers are semi-anonymous - even if someone wanted to use their full name, they're not allowed in the Yelp profile
• Snarky reviews have an advantage because the only review compliments/feedback are Useful, Funny and/or Cool. How many times do comedians WIN by being nice? Cool people are rarely sweet.
• In the past, if a user flagged a review for being spam - there was an option that reviews could be flagged because they were deemed phony for being excessively positive as if a competitor couldn't know you by being excessively negative.  I don't know if this is still the case.

I still use Yelp and coach my clients on how to make Yelp work for them, but it's because you can't afford to ignore something that has such a big market share, not because they are pro-business.

I've been working on local for a client, and it looks like the partner's name and one review is outranking the firm name and it's 20 reviews. The firm's GMB profile is better, but they're still buried.

Any advice?

One thing Yelp could easily do that would immediately change the anti-business perception would be to lift the cloak of anonymity from their members. Require a sign in via Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+ and the reviewer would need to stand behind their words in the same way that business owners need to stand behind their service.

Yelp's terms of service prohibit you from asking your customers to write you a good review.

When you ask someone to write a yelp review and they're not yet a yelper, yelp will hide their review.

If you want to ask for a review you have to teach the client how it works. First they get an account, upload their photo, connect with their Facebook friends and write themselves a funny bio. Then they write several reviews over the course of a month or so. Then they write one for you.

I know that you don't like this, but Yelp has their own game.

I completely get it. It's frustrating. Though, I get lots of leads from Yelp because of the time I've invested in making it work for me, so I find the frustration mainly worthwhile.

I teach Yelp classes for business here in Sacramento. I tell them "Yelp is like a report card, you're getting a grade whether you like it or not. If you want an A+, you have to do the Extra Credit work."