Hey Richard, for us it all depends on the kind of work. For audits we generally charge up front for smaller jobs and 50% up front and 50% on delivery for medium to large jobs.

If it is a monthly arrangement, then that is generally a monthly billing cycle but I would always make sure the client is serious about the project and has enough going on to ensure they can pay and if payment stops, so does the work.

For content creation we will often do a 50% up front and 50% on delivery as well.

No hard and fast rules really - you just have to figure out what is fair and what works for you and your clients.

Hope that helps

Marcus

Hey Michelle

Just to clarify, are you saying that you have some sites with like a million pages and that these sites have a footer or template link to another site?

If so, this might be an interesting read:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-update

I am not 100% clear here so as ever, examples would be useful but I really can't see that one domain putting a 1,000,000 inbound links to a single page on another domain as being anything but a bad, bad thing. Combine that with some dodgy anchor text and you are on the road to ruin.

It's a shot in the dark without an example but I would suggest an nofollow given what we know.

Hey Christopher

Just to clarify:

• You have two businesses (A & B) both in Edmonton and running at two separate addresses.
• You are moving business A into the address of business B

You do not state what the actual problem is here but I am going to assume it has something to do with a loss of traffic / visibility in local search due to a changed address and merging of the two businesses (please correct me if this is wrong). I see strong local results (7 pack #1) for floral delivery edmonton canada / flower delivery edmonton canada but much less strong results for the other business.

I like to think in real world terms and if these are two distinct businesses, related, but distinct then really Google should not have a problem with this if they are in the same address so I see no reason why you would be 'punished' for this. Lots of physical addresses house more than one office / business so as long as you are not looking to cheat, then you should be fine.

So, we have to think about the practicalities of doing this:

1. Change address on website
2. change address on all citations to match new address

If we want to maintain (and possibly improve) our local SEO then we have to be fastidious in our approach at identifying and updating all external listings of the address (be that structured or unstructured citations).

I would approach this as follows.

**1. Identify all external citations & document in a spreadsheet. **

To do this we need to google for all listings for your business. Structured citations are easy so something like:

"business name" "post code" -www.url.co.uk

You are basically looking for business name, postcode and removing any listings from your own site.

For the unstructured citations you may need to use a little more Google-Fu and play with this a little and look for mentions of your brand name + location - your website. Play with it, be thorough, find all mentions of your site

"business name" "phone number" -www.url.co.uk
"business name" "location" -www.url.co.uk
etc

Then, document all of this in a spreadsheet and start to work through these listings updating the address.

2. Update address on your website, social profiles and any citations under your control

3. Go to work updating all the other structured and unstructured citations

You may need to verify the new address and jump through some hoops so you may see a drop in visibility for a short period but if you are thorough here you will likely come out the other side stronger with better and more consistent citations.

Top tip - co occurrence of keywords and external reviews are hot topics in local SEO so look at this as a chance to update and improve any citations you find and talk about your business, services and make note of any you can look for that can have reviews added.

Ultimately, you should not be punished if you are not doing anything nefarious here so do what you need to do and look at it as an opportunity to improve your listings as you go.

I have not added two existing businesses to one address like this but we have moved lots of businesses from one address to another and usually made solid improvements in the process.

Hope that helps
Marcus

Is it a link or is it a canonical? If it is a link to the canonical then I would not imagine it is going to help anyway but personally, I would try to have high quality links and not these mass link bombs, it's just asking for trouble and you won't get 100,000 links worth of benefit anyway.

As ever, hard to be precise without seeing the site in question but... I would edge towards no follow here.

Exactly (the everything is important bit, not agreeing with me).

Hey, there are a bunch of ways to identify guest blog opportunities, and some sites / services etc, but I tend to think a lot of that is played out to some extent and if they are accepting content from any Tom, Dick and Harry then how much value will your post have from a pure SEO / exposure / link perspective AND for how long?

I tend to think, rather than looking for Blogs that accept guest posts, look for the best Blogs in your target niche and try to spark up a relationship with the owners. Then, try to find a gap or someway you can contribute always focusing on the 'what is in it for them' angle AND be focused on doing it for the exposure you can generate.

Sure, you want a link or two but make sure it is super valuable, super relevant to their core audience and then that post may pick up more links, shares etc from the current audience and subsequently, the links to your site and more importantly the exposure will have more value.

Forget about volume, think about quality and focus on getting links that your competitors can't just pull up in OSE and copy.

Hope that helps!

Marcus

Powermapper is very cool: http://www.powermapper.com/download/mapper/index.htm

It will give you a visual representation of the site and has a free trial so you have a go. I have not used for a site with over 1000 pages but it is certainly good for sites with hundreds of pages.

It allows you to output to HTML, PDF etc so really can help give you an idea of site structure.

Hope it helps.

Marcus

this got posted whilst I was writing my long winded version below else I could have just commented on this post with 'what he said'