Roman,

Here are my thoughts:

1. Can we PM our followers on twitter or facebook and directly ask? As long as you stick to people you know would be a brand advocate for you, I don't see why not.

2. Which medium is generally most successful? We've generally only done email, but primarily because that's how we communicate with them on a normal basis anyway.

3. What if we tweeted something like: "we need your help, anyone that leaves an honest review on yelp will get _____ (money, gift card, appreciation, etc.) -  I know it's tempting and seems logical to make offers like that, but it violates Google's guidelines. Even if it's not for Google reviews, they might get wind of it and discount those reviews. Reviews are supposed to show a reflection of your business, not what you've offered in exchange for good reviews.

4. Which review site is the best for improving reputation and SERP- google plus, yelp, bbb?  Those 3 are the top ones I'd stick to.

5. Would you recommend sending people to consumer affairs to try to offset the bad rating or to just focus on all the other review sites and have them usurp consumer affairs' position? Definitely try to get some better ratings on CA to cancel out the bad.

Hi Roman,

According to Google's Search Quality Raters Guidelines, third party reviews can have a negative impact on your organic visibility. Google is actively pursuing reputation information from third party sites and factoring that into the way they determine the "best results" for a query.

The best thing you can do to curb this, and hopefully improve your overall ratings, is to get some new good reviews to overpower the bad ones. My suggestion would be to start by picking a handful of customers you know have been happy with your products/services and reach out to them. If you've (or the client if you're not in-house) got some staff internally that interact with these customers, have them do it. People are much more likely to be responsive if they're asked by someone whom they've dealt with before. The message should be very candid, but not canned, people see right through that.

And as Patrick mentioned, always follow up on bad reviews. The only thing worse than a bad review, is one that goes unaddressed.

Hope that's helpful!

I'd recommend hanging on to live chat at least until you're able to run that cross-check. You might find some really good data supporting its effectiveness.

Yep, I totally get that. The annoyance factor is why I proposed having it only show up based on certain engagement thresholds.

Do you do any data collection on the close rate for people who started a conversation on live chat and then went to purchase?

Hi James,

My choice: Love Live Chat Pop Ups

Reason: Compare your conversion rates for users that chat and users that don't. We have one eComm client who saw 3-4 times the conversion rate for users whose session included a live chat vs. those who didn't chat.

It doesn't have to be all or nothing either. You say you're recommending disabling it and that it automatically pops up 1.66 times per session - you can curb that a bit and only show it based on site engagement. For example, you could show it only after a user has been on a product detail page for X amount of seconds. Or after Z amount of products viewed.

I usually go with the one that has the biggest opportunity for impressions - the one/two with the highest search volume. Usually means more competition for it, but you'll never outrank them if you don't try.

Hi John,

I recommend grouping your keywords into similar topics and associating them with either an existing URL on your site, or if the topic isn't currently discussed on your site, proposing a new URL. This process is called keyword mapping, where you take each keyword your tracking and pair it with a preferred URL. I start all of my SEO projects off with one, here's why:

1. Provides a road map of what _existing _content needs to be updated
2. Lays out what new content I need to create
3. Prevents me from diluting the emphasis of one keyword by addressing a very similar one on another page
4. Helps me set priorities on which content should be updated/generated first (I aggregate search volume for all associated URLs and work in a descending order)

Hi,

Here's a pretty recent list that HubSpot put together. Though I should warn you, directories in general, are not the best approach to acquiring high-quality links.

A good rule of thumb is this: If a link was obtained easily, especially if you have full control over it, it's probably not going to help too much.

http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/10322/The-Ultimate-List-50-Local-Business-Directories.aspx#sm.000i6lxxx2nmcze110f1lhnf2q08g

Hi Anton,

You really only need to worry about having an actual address if your customers come to you, i.e. retail stores, restaurants, mechanics, etc.

I can't access the site you reference, but it looks like it's probably a courier service or something along those lines. In that case, your serving the customers at their location, in which case they don't really have a need to know your actual address, just what areas you service.

So no, you're not likely to see any affect on your SEO by providing an actual address as opposed to a P.O. Box.

No worries, that's what this community is here for!

Google views subdomains as different entities. They have different authority metrics and therefore different ranking power. Removing a URL on a subdomain won't have any affect on it's brother over on a different subdomain (for example: dev. and www.).

Good call to keep the disallow: / on the dev.chiplab.com/robots.txt file - I forgot to mention that you should leave it there, for anti-crawling purpose.

This is the query you'll want to keep an eye on. The info: operator is new and can be used to show you what Google has indexed as your 'canonical' homepage.

You should be all set# I wouldn't worry about link equity, but it certainly wouldn't hurt to keep an eye on your domain authority over the next few days.

Hi Chase,

Removing the subdomain within Search Console (WMT) will not remove the rest of your WWW URLs. Since you have different properties in Search Console for each, they are treated separately. That removal is only temporary though.

The most sure-fire way to ensure you don't get dev. URLs indexed is to put a NOINDEX tag on that entire subdomain. NOFOLLOW simply means that links on whatever page that tag is on won't be followed by bots.

Remember, crawling and indexing are different things. For example, if on your live www. site you had an absolute link somewhere in the mix that had dev.chiplab.com in it, since you presumably haven't nofollowed your live site, a bot will still access that page. The same situation goes for a robots.txt disallow. That only prevents crawling, not indexing. In theory, a bot can get to a disallowed URL and still index it. See this query for an example.