According to the https://plus.google.com/authorship page,

1. Make sure that you have a profile photo with a recognisable headshot.
2. Make sure that a byline containing your name appears on each page of your content (for example, "By Steven Levy").
3. Make sure that your byline name matches the name on your Google+ profile.
4. Verify that you have an email address (such as stevenlevy@wired.com) on the same domain as your content. (Don't have an email address on the same domain?

A brand is rarely an "author" - someone did the writing.  Google wants that person tied to the work they created. Now, there may be ways "around" this but getting "around" stuff in SEO is why so many people scrambled so badly this year.

This page dissects it further: http://www.optimum7.com/internet-marketing/google-optimization/pros-and-cons-of-google-authorship-for-businesses.html

Most notably:

A company or brand’s Google+ page cannot be designated as the author of any web content. Therefore your company and brand name will not come up as the author in the web results.

**Warning:**If you’ve considered creating a company persona under the guise of a real person in order to have all authorship attributed to that particular Google+… Don’t do it! This really undermines AuthorRank and defeats the whole point of authorship. Google may also penalize you for trying to cheat their system… just as they’ve done for poor SEO practices through Google’s Panda-Penguin algorithm updates.

That's what I would follow.  I would not suggest trying to game Authorship at all.

This is a pretty common trick among the photographers I've worked with.  I can say from what I've seen, there's no benefit to having a keyword in the link like that, but as far as changing, no, it shouldn't hurt you.  Short term there may be some movement but that could be positive or negative, depending on about a billion other factors (how relevant to the cities are the page, are the other pages on the site, etc.)  Google could love the changes, could hate them.  From our experience, it's usually worth just setting it up how you want and letting Google figure it out from there.

There are quite a few reasons it's not ranking at the top of Google (.com or .ca)

1. Spammy meta.  Your title contains the keyword twice. Google dislikes this and tends to use another title if possible. Since you haven't  used noodp/noydir, they're using whatever they deem suitable to the search.  Do a search for "silver creek press" and you'll see them change your title.  That's a hint that they don't like your own info.

2. Spammy meta 2. You're using the meta keywords and have repeated your main keyword 11 times in the meta keyword tag.  Take it twice in the title + 11 times in keywords and that's not so good.  Especially since it appears only near the very end of your description.

3. In Chrome if you do a "View Source" on your page, the keyword only appears at the very beginning (meta) and at the very end of the code.  Your page goes from line 7 to line 522 without mentioning "human resource" at all.  This would suggest that the actual page content is not necessarily about what you're telling Google it is about - thus not helping you.

4. Your copyright tag is out of date. (2008-2010).  While some people disagree that this is a factor, and I don't know, IF it is, you're telling Google you haven't updated the page and don't maintain it.  Google ranks older pages that have been "let go" worse than they do new, updated sites.  At least, that's the theory.

5. Your H1 doesn't include your keyword.  There is some evidence that H1 still matters.  Whether or not a larger sample would yield the same, I don't know.

6. Your site does not support your main keywords.  Your "About" page should tell Google pretty clearly what you do.  The phrase "human resource" does not appear until after line 250.  Your meta tags for this page are very basic compared to the home page.  The keyword does not appear at all on your Books, eBooks, Discounts, Guarantee or  even your Resources page.

What that all means is the only page on your site that even remotely seems to be about "human resource" is your main page, which is meta-keyword stuffed but only includes relevant content 90% down the page and no other page on your site supports the main.  It's just a single point of data standing on its own.

7. According to OSE, you have 10 linking domains with 265 links and no social shares to speak of.  One of your page one competitors, www.learn 4good.com, has 600 linking domains and 27,450 links.  www.cite hr.com on page 2 has 168 domains and 8264 links.  Your numbers just aren't anywhere close.

That's not everything, but that's where I would start.  Sorry for the long reply and hope it helps.

Hi Brett,

I moved to Australia a year ago and dealt with the same thing.  Most citation sources are US/UK.  I have compiled a list of AU and CA ones for my own use.  To help you along, I just posted the CA list here:

http://www.highonseo.com/2012/12/canada-citation-list/

Hope that helps.  It's a compilation of a LOT of lists from around the web.  If you download the XLS at the end, it has the pagerank, mozrank, domain authority, etc. for every site on the list, update as of this morning.

Using your own search (appleton plumbing) I did a comparison using ImportXML.

It mattered at nearly every result level.

See the attached image:

appleton plumbing vs plumbing appleton using Googlescraper.

appleton.jpg