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Local MOZ online test?  Good idea. Where is it?

Hi all,

We've been researching relevant, real organizations in our area that allow members to link their websites from the directory.

I've basically got two buckets of prospects:

• Chambers of commerce type sites with more authority (DA ~40+) but less relevance to our niche (injury law)
• Bar associations with less authority (DA ~20) but super relevant.

Assuming that they cost the same and covered the same geographic area, which links would you go after if you had to choose one or the other?

Thanks in advance.

Thanks for responses, everybody. Very insightful, as usual.

We are jump starting a link building campaign for a personal injury law firm.

We're planning on doing things right with earning links to content people will actually want to share, sponsoring local events, etc.

We're a little worried that some good opportunities could be missed due to the fact some people have assumptions about personal injury lawyers and would be hesitant to link to us simply because of our injury, regardless of what we're trying to share/promote.

One solution we're considering is creating a foundation associated with the firm that supports relevant causes and provides the public with educational resources. That might get over our branding hurdle a bit.

We've also discussed setting up a separate site for the foundation and actually building links to it rather than our main site, then linking the foundation site to our main site. The hope would be that we could get more links to the foundation site and it would in turn pass on link juice to our main site.

My concern is whether this strategy makes any sense. We'd be putting good content on this foundation site rather than our main site. How much link juice would actually be passed on to our main site in this case? Would so much be lost that it would negate the whole purpose?

I could use a second opinion about moving content from some inactive sites to my main site.

Once upon a time, we had a handful of geotargeted websites set up targeting various cities that we serve. This was in addition to our main site, which was mostly targeted to our primary office and ranked great for those keywords. Our main site has plenty of authority, has been around for ages, etc.

We built out these geo-targeted sites with some good landing pages and kept them active with regularly scheduled blog posts which were unique and either interesting or helpful. Although we had a little success with these, we eventually saw the light and realized that our main site was strong enough to rank for these cities as well, which made life a whole lot easier, not to mention a lot less spammy.

We've got some good content on these other sites that I'd like to use on our main site, especially the blog posts. Now that I've got it through my head that there's no such thing as a duplicate content penalty, I understand that I could just start moving this content over so long as I put a 301 redirect in place where the content used to be on these old sites.

Which leads me to my question. Our SEO was careful not to have these other websites pointing to our main site to avoid looking like we were trying to do something shady from a link building perspective. His concern is that these redirects would undermine that effort and having a bunch of redirects from a half dozen sites could end up hurting us somehow.

Do you think that is the case?

What he is suggesting we do is remove all of the content that we'd like to use and use Webmaster Tools to request that this content be removed from the index. Then, after the sites have been recrawled, we'll check for ourselves to confirm they've been removed and proceed with using the content however we'd like.

Thoughts?

Pardon my delayed response here, but wanted to thank you all for your input. I was pretty confused about the issue at the time, and your advice/info proved to be very helpful.

I have a client who has multiple locations within his state, many of which are satellite offices.

Although they don't have anyone working at these satellite offices full time, they have office space available to them their, someone who can take calls/mail and do use the space frequently in person.

We've been in the process of cleaning up duplicate and incorrect listings in directories to get on the map in the SERPs in these markets, but the local SEO outfit we've hired has come back with a problem I found surprising.

In order to clean up the duplicate & incorrect Google+ profiles that we've got out there for these offices, we evidently need to work with an actual Google moderator. This moderator has said that the satellite offices in question are actually not real business locations and are in violation of G+ guidlines.

The local SEO I'm using says that it's not uncommon for Google to actually send someone out to do an in person improptu visit when they are suspicious that a listing might not belong in their listings, and I find this really surprising.

Do any of you have any experience with whether this is the case?

FWIW, this is a real business that could have someone working remotely in these offices remotely if that's what it took to make Google happy, but they'd rather not and certainly don't need to in order to offer their services in these markets.

I understand that using duplicate images across many websites was become an increasingly important duplicate content issue to be aware of.

We have a couple dozen geotargeted landing pages on our site that are designed to promote our services to residents from various locations in our area.

We've created 400+ word pieces of fresh, original content for each page, some of which talks about the specific region in some detail.

However, we have a powerful list of top reasons to choose us that we'd like to use on each page as is, without rewriting them for each page.

We'd like to simply present this bulleted list as an image file on each page to get around any duplicate written copy concerns.

This image would not appear on any other websites but would appear on about two dozen landing pages for a single site.

Is there anything to worry about this strategy from a duplicate content or duplicate image perspective in terms of SEO?

I have a couple established, content rich sites with some content that I would like to move over to a new site.

My question is what steps I need to take to ensure that neither my older sites nor newer sites are penalized for duplicate content.

The purpose for moving the content is to add some depth to the new site for users, as well as possibly optimize it all for SEO.

There is a fair amount of content involved, about 50 posts and pages per site, so I'd like to know if the potential problem with duplicate content might be serious enough that I should think twice.

What do you recommend?

But.....if you're going for Google's "exact match" URL bonus for your home page, you won't get it if your URL has hyphens.