Clever!!

Strategy:

• Add value to visitors from those specific cities. It's the only way to do it right.

Ideas:

• Provide a resource for "where to buy" within those cities. CityGrid/CitySearch, Yelp, Foursquare will provide the locations through their API's. More here..
• City knowledge graph, demographics, what's trending, what's hot, authority social profiles. Help define your market, with transparency.
• Price comparisons between physical stores & online store. Pricebot? hmm..

PRweb & if money isn't really the issue, go with BusinessWire. The PRweb.com link itself will probably be the most valuable from a PRWeb release though, unless you get picked up outside of the typical syndication network. BusinessWire works the same way, but has a better professional image.

If you have the money and do not have newsworthy announcements, look into facilitating an outreach campaign or buying some friendships of authoritative sites within your industry. Donating to relevant foundations, sponsoring local events (with websites) and work harder to get known online, digitally within your industry online.

There are tools & strategies that will help you identify the resource-related authority sites within your industry too.

It's beyond editing template files.. did you vote for it, here:

http://vbseo.uservoice.com/forums/25627-vbseo-plugin/suggestions/2296381-pagination-with-rel-next-and-rel-prev-

I tend to see links from webmaster tools containing a sizable number of actual links. Their index is bigger than any other service like OSE or Majestic. If you're watching the latest links, they do tend to be accurate as well. I'm a subscriber to OSE, Majestic & Ahrefs. On my big sites, I always turn to WMT's now for the total # of links.

OSE still provides metrics with integrity. Majestic and Ahref's pickup fresh links before WMT's displays them. Google may actually find them first, but they do not push out fresh link data every day.

You're also going to miss out on clique hunter, competitor links and you'll risk spending a lot of time in Excel should you opt-out of the third party services.

Argh, don't make me pull up archive.org!

I see they are bogus, but have they always been bogus? Did you recently update the descriptions? When was Googlebot last on these pages?

There are several other issues with the site & URL structure I would address before fretting about meta descriptions.

The /ezine dir is still working for me. If I can access it, surely Google still can.

Here are your options:

1. Robots.txt - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93708 - easy option.
2. Noindex tags - http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-noindex-behavior/
3. Removal request - https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=59819

1. finish blog posts.

2. get links.

3. if your items are unique to you, funky and in-demand, I suggest looking at sharing (social) at the product-listing level.

4. get up some pinterest boards. Apparel is HOT right now.

5. listen to the rest of the responses specific to on-site. Long-tail is a good strategy, especially now when you have no domain authority. Get tracking, spend wisely and watch & learn on your campaigns successes and failures.

Work on links now, get some fresh links coming in & then focus on the rest. Nobody will link to you just because you have a PRweb release, have competitive pricing, decent product & a beautiful site. It does happen occasionally, but the reality is (for the majority) it is all about gaining momentum, building your digital footprint and networking.

First question, it's personal preference. Just be sure you decide early on what you want to do, then stick with it. Changing it after the fact is where you're going to lose out a  bit.

Second part, if you're using web publisher, look at the long-term strategy for URL structure before making the switch. ID's will probably still be necessary/recommended, but that's not to say you can't spruce them up with article titles and page numbers as well.

I guess I need to brush up on my Danish

It came up as something completely different in the English translation.

https://dandomain.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Title-tag/132397-15889

Translation sucks a bit, but I think it's saying it can be set at the page level in the CMS dashboard.

Are both pages serving the same purpose?

I would NOT 404 it. I'm a firm believer in not deleting pages. If anything, it sounds like a job for the canonical tag to me.

Rankings will ultimately suffer as the increased distribution decreases the flow of juice. It's not really an issue I seem to not be something you can work through if it is necessary to navigation.  However, if you're seeing redundancy between pages, generating individual pages focused on each keyword variation, it will most likely be an issue.

How many links are we talking about?

You may get no traffic from ranking #4 these days, especially on queries with a competitive paid portion of the SERP.

What I would do is stop assessing the "what if" scenario's and start focusing all your energy towards acquiring those editorial type links grasshopper was talking about.. right now! You'll get that ranking and secure it for long-term traffic.

Agreed. I've run into a small group of bloggers who are all members of a community.. writers associations, blogger groups, pr groups, etc. Even when they have similiar link profiles to their actual domains, you don't really see problems unless it's aggressive interlinking between the sites. Very aggressive, with only one purpose in mind.

To me, the true clue would be whether or not the URL ranked well previously.

If it has not.. you need more links. It is probably a page authority issue.

If it has.. you may have over-optimized on the anchor text, sitewide links will do this. You may rank well for awhile, then you'll find yourself on page five shaking your fist at Google.

Is the URL no longer in Google's index at all?

I think knowing why you want the follower counts would help us provide a better way to obtain the data.

For example, I look at profile metrics/authority when I'm setting a new profile up in a specific vertical. BUT, I know that I can use Topsy's twitter search to identify those authoritative tweeple. They have a nice hover-over feature that will show you follower stats for each user talking about the search query. I can also use TweetAdder to do this manually. I don't need to slow down, neigh,  I would rather not slow down to record or even read a list of follower counts.

If you truly do want the data for bulk processing within a site, some sort of new tool.. then pulling it directly from Twitter may be the answer. It really depends.

Ditto.

haha, with your quality standard,  calling it both agency & in-house is probably something the community would let slide

Never. Stop. Link Building.

Look at it like buying real estate. You want to protect your investment, you want to build it up as best as you can, and one day, if you choose to sell it, it'll resale quite nicely.

Sure, if you have other open projects, you can now kick up their priority status a bit, but always continue to drive authority to the domain.

Do you rank for 1-3 short tail keywords? What about long-tail keywords? What about variations? Market defined variations? #pointstoponder

Sure,

Ontolo does this fairly well with data from OpenSiteExplorer. It is also possible to do it with excel &vlookups, this will probably be the only option that won't cost you more $$. The domain comparison is an often overlooked little trick, even SEO Elite included this comparison view back when we were all pulling links from Yahoo's index.

If you run the clique hunter in MajesticSEO, you'll even get a pretty little bubble chart though

Sure.

It is fairly simple Chandana. Much like marketing yourself offline, you need to establish valuable contacts and relationships within your professional industry. The same goes for the web. Search engines derive authority from links, citations, likes, tweets and any measurable metric they can tally. However, links are still the most important.

Showing Google your companies digital footprint (or web presence) is vast, robust and mentioned on sites they trust will actually make a site with GOOD on-site SEO very powerful. Without that, you'll only see a handful of your pages indexed and served in positions of prominence.

If link building truly is a priority, I would look up Garrett French and read his articles, look at his tools and the Ontolo link building book.

Here's what you need to know:

1. Big sites require domain authority or scalable long-tail strategies.
2. You must always focus on driving authority to the domain.
3. Build links. Lots of links. Diversify the link profile.

Don't believe me? Look at how many search-results pages walmart.com has ranking now across all their verticals. Sure, on-site is very important but driving authority to the domain is something that NEEDS to happen and can take months to process, let alone, facilitate the link building campaigns.

Linking Strategies:

1. Outreach campaigns.
2. Linkbait.
3. Linkable assets.

I would and have built from scratch as well.

Social components can really make directories pop these days, and not many are utilizing the open graph as they should be.

Such a rare occurrence. You're not going to sway Highwayfive to not put up a niche dir by throwing this out there.

http://directorypress.net/

There are so many variables now.

1. Data centers - Many different DC's showing different results. One could have had a new update/refresh pushed through, the others may not.

2. Increased activity in rankings (up & down daily)

3. User-error, especially when taking in geographic locations, personalized results and history.

Rank trackers have been through hell. You have the brand-related SERP pages with three less total listings as well.. just this last week.

Out of the thousands of keywords I watch daily, many will show substantially different rankings for WEEKS before I see it here. The good thing is, I look like genius since I have identified the pattern between data centers and, within reason, can predict our ranking change within a few days.

Hrm.. are you sure that URL is correct? It's not really returning any results for me for the aforementioned URL.

www, simply because it gets the link love by default.

The ROI just isn't there. Not unless you stumble into a Chuck Testa video. I don't envy you, don't take this as criticism, but rather a rambling from someone who has been there. In fact, I'm interested to hear what you come up with .

I tried:

1. Linkbait

2. Consistent content (mainly educational resources targeting 'local + kw' strings)

3. PPC

4. All local directories

5. Videos

Rankings, sure. No problem. However, the traffic just wasn't there to make it FUN. You know? Whatever you do, don't forget to promote your own brand and work towards non-regional clients.

You're best bet is to think about offline resources and find ones you can leverage online. Most of it, it's going through competitor contacts/network, vendors, partners, distributors and lean on those contacts for content & links. Don't spend too much time on viral/linkbait, because it's expensive to create & I'm guessing these companies won't pay you for your time.. or appreciate it.

The other thing we did that worked well, harvested all local blogs. From there, we identified non-direct competitor blogs and leveraged guest posting that way. It cut down on the cost of new content and earned us a few links. Not to mention, got me a couple of free lunches.

Back when I had an agency, we'd use whitespark.

Have you tried Whitespark?

I've seen great-beautiful rank trackers that will sometimes overlook the obvious, like pulling from a country code version of Google w/out requiring a geographically-similar based IP.

I would look into proxies with similar locations to your user and hope you don't pull from the wonkiest data center.. which seems to happen to me all the time.

Rank tracking quality is definitely declining. The fluidity and dynamic results are so temperamental right now. Always changing. Hang in there, watch your impressions and traffic as well as rankings. It's almost becoming more of a novelty value or "big picture" value than traditional, "I rank #1 for this keyword" type mentality.

Favorite resources:

http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml#topten

http://www.seobook.com/depth-review-whitesparks-local-citation-finder

http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/seo-industry/best-citation-sources-by-category/

I knew it!!

(y)

Come across this issue as well. Remember, www vs. non-www version can show differences as well.. it's not always logical why they include bulk of pages w/ one over the other as well. Even on sites defined www as preferred version, I've seen non-www version showing more pages in the index. This is why (one of the many reasons) I was very glad to see more data coming through on indexed pages in Webmaster Tools.

I would say, "I don't care" (to myself, not you!)  and work on building authority to the site with links. Give Google a reason to trust each page. Honestly, there are so many reasons this could have happened speculation is just not worth the effort (eg. content duplicated off-site, throughout the site, reused title tags, lack of trust, etc.).

Just curious, what does your link profile look like right now?

"But that page seems to show what is most popular by default, not the newest.  If you change the filter to 'Latest' or 'Last 24 Hours', the content updates, but the URL doesn't."

I believe watchthatpage would, it'll show a lot of updates because of the bumping though & threads falling off first page. In which case, you could probably shoestring something together with:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/reputation-management?page=1

http://www.seomoz.org/q/reputation-management?page=2

http://www.seomoz.org/q/reputation-management?page=3

You're right though, it's going to be messy. I'm not 100% sure if it will respect the "bumps" and only pick up new posts though. It's worth a shot!

I would look at WatchThatPage. As long as their as the page is not sitting behind a login and has a specific URL, watchthatpage may be a viable option.

If you want to get fancier, look into IFTTT. Let me know if you want specifics on this, I could probably help you out this afternoon.

Good question & idea!

lol, probably freshdesk after what they said about them on Twitter

citation:

"Freshdesk is a freaking ripoff" says Zendesk CEO

Did you guys actually take it down now? Or is it just broken?

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Thanks Jen.

I'm just not sold. The only reason I have a subscription anymore is to refresh out of amusement. It's sad really.

So now I will put much less weight in the dates on the calendar. Would a 5-10 day window surrounding the "next update" date be wise?

Sorry if this seems like an attack, I realize the service has many hands in on the project and you are trying to speak on behalf of many. Trying my best not to shoot the messenger here

Hi Brent!

I just noticed on the Linkscape calendar the update that was supposed to happen yesterday is pushed back to the 6th.

It would be better not knowing. Is this a possibility? Or use the calendar internally, I don't care. Credibility in any announcement or claim looses muster once you do not do what you say you are going to do over and over again. Just a thought..

Just kidding! It's July 6th now. SUPER!

It's always tough to say without seeing the site. As you know, so many variables are involved. That is strange & it would be helpful to look back at the cache to see which one it picked up before you dropped off those specific SERPs. My guess is you'll be back where you started within a few days.

It's like checking your own reflexes. You just have to somehow blindside yourself while in tickle monster mode. But those of us who are not compatible with tickling should start our own linkedin group.

Maile Ohye stated (at SESSF 2010), when an image is linking out, the alt img text is just as important as anchor text is in a contextual link. That is something to keep in mind when you are going through your link profile..

In my ten years, I have definitely heard of this happening. It's a bigger risk when your SEO provider has a private network of sites.Heck, I have even heard of people holding this over their clients; "If you quit you will lose all your traffic/rankings."

It's really no different than people paying YP for a directory listing, they are billed for "Search Engine Marketing" monthly and when they stop, the link is removed.

I view SEO similar to web design/creative -- if you pay us, it is yours, you retain ownership and that is the way it should be.

Are you talking about one business (same physical address) with multiple Google.com/Places profiles?

Or, one business with multiple addresses with each having an individual profile?