Silkstream,

Are you sure that those pages actually have real penalties or is it algo changes?

Also, when you search your keyword phrases... what sorts of results show up in the SERPs? Does the local 7-pack show up?  If so, then your Google+ Local listing would most likely be what would get you to rank for those 'local' terms.

Do you have physical offices in each of the towns represented by the 'category+town' pages ... along with corresponding G+ Local pages for each?  If not, you may have difficulty ranking for many towns not close to the epicenter of your actual business address.

Any update on this?

Also, you could always "nofollow" the outgoing links if you were afraid of giving credit to them.

It looks like Google is showing the "Street View" map image instead of the image you uploaded.

So, this is your listing? https://maps.google.com/maps?cid=1552403007127876102

When you go here: http://www.google.com/local/add/ and log in with that account, do you see the listing? If so, that's where you'd edit the image.

I believe this is the Google Map Maker POI (Point of Interest) for that listing. Does that look right? http://www.google.com/mapmaker?gw=39&fid=0x89e37717ebe05e89:0xbc2be1f7aabc9ee5

And this is the Google + Page, right? https://plus.google.com/117400845160255741148/

Scott O.

What is the CID of your listing?

For example: http://www.orionweb.net/2012/03/20/gain-reviews-to-increase-your-google-places-listing-rank/ read the bottom of this post.

Also, what is the Name of the company? It's possible that you have more than one listing or perhaps Google is pulling in a photo from another authoritative website.

Scott

I think a press page would be a good addition. It wouldn't harm your rankings to link out to quality news sites. You could summarize each mention/link with your own paragraph of text to give the links context.

Scott O.

smaavie, are you going pick one of these fine answers to mark this Q&A as "Answered"?

You could add a noindex if you think the privacy and disclaimer pages, etc, are not bringing any SEO value. Nofollow would block search engines from even spidering them. But a noindex would just stop it from showing up as an entrance/landing page in the SERPs.

I wouldn't say that it helps "retain link juice", but it might help you to show the search engines what your most important pages are.

An alternative would be to perhaps only link to some of those pages from your home page and not from every single page. Are there any pages that you think would be appropriate NOT to link to all those pages? If so, perhaps you can write a conditional statement in your code to only show those links on some pages and not others.

Scott O.

You could go to the "Rankings" tab and export the rankings as a .CSV file. Then, you'll have a list of keywords that you can import into another campaign.

Screen%20Shot%202013-03-19%20at%2011.33.41%20AM.png

I would suggest at least adding those variables in your Google Webmaster Tools account to help Google understand which query strings have an impact on changing content on a page versus the variables that are only associated with affiliates.

In GWT, go to "Configuration" in the left menu, then "URL Parameters"

Scott

Screen%20Shot%202013-03-19%20at%2011.04.40%20AM.png

You could add a noindex if you think the privacy and disclaimer pages, etc, are not bringing any SEO value. Nofollow would block search engines from even spidering them. But a noindex would just stop it from showing up as an entrance/landing page in the SERPs.

I wouldn't say that it helps "retain link juice", but it might help you to show the search engines what your most important pages are.

An alternative would be to perhaps only link to some of those pages from your home page and not from every single page. Are there any pages that you think would be appropriate NOT to link to all those pages? If so, perhaps you can write a conditional statement in your code to only show those links on some pages and not others.

Scott O.

You could go to the "Rankings" tab and export the rankings as a .CSV file. Then, you'll have a list of keywords that you can import into another campaign.

Screen%20Shot%202013-03-19%20at%2011.33.41%20AM.png

I would suggest adding keywords before and/or after the company when linking. For example, if the company name is "Milwaukee Roofing LLC", you could make the anchor text "visit the Milwaukee Roofing LLC website"... perhaps this will give enough variety and make the link profile feel more natural.

Scott O.

References:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/click-here-seo http://www.seomoz.org/blog/beyond-exact-match-anchor-text-to-next-generation-link-signals-whiteboard-friday http://www.seomoz.org/blog/anchor-text-distribution-avoiding-over-optimization

I think a press page would be a good addition. It wouldn't harm your rankings to link out to quality news sites. You could summarize each mention/link with your own paragraph of text to give the links context.

Scott O.

I would suggest at least adding those variables in your Google Webmaster Tools account to help Google understand which query strings have an impact on changing content on a page versus the variables that are only associated with affiliates.

In GWT, go to "Configuration" in the left menu, then "URL Parameters"

Scott

Screen%20Shot%202013-03-19%20at%2011.04.40%20AM.png

Marie, that's true. When talking "penalties", you'd want to first check in Google Webmaster Tools if there truly has been a manual action taken against the site. Otherwise, it would probably be better to refer to it as a "devaluation", correct?

Scott