Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Andy,

You are tearing it up this morning. Go Dawg.

Robert

I would suggest that it would be vertical specific. But, if you are open to spending the money we suggest Yahoo Directory ($299) and Best of the Web (typically 99. to $150.)specifically. As to the dmoz mention, two things: while you can submit to DMOZ, you are not guaranteed to get into it and it often takes time, the second is I am still surprised by the people who utilize noodp, noydir. When you use those meta robots you block anything from those links. The reason for blocking is past based on my experience. I see sites with DMOZ links and they have noodp. (no open directory project - DMOZ).

For local, restaurants must be in Yelp, CitySearch, etc. (and some others - I am making a point about given verticals).

Always go for the BBB, Chamber of Commerce, etc. if you are a local business as these are high value links. Understand there are rules for each (BBB most cities you must have a site/business up a year, etc.). I think over time we will see more directories like these counting and less of the others.

As to the SEOmoz list, it is not bad in my opinion. I think these things are changing as fast as updates from the zoo. (Pandas, Penguins, etc). My hope is that Yellow Pages, Avvo, SuperPages, etc. go straight to, uhhh purgatory. They got in early and they are worthless in my opinion. The bigger issue is when they duplicate the clients content with cut and paste and the client doesn't do business with them. But, they got the early links all over the web and on Places, etc. because people were simply unaware.

As long as there are humans who are curating the directories there is the chance they will have value.

EDIT: Tate Larson has a list of 7 good ones here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/the-ultimate-top-10-directory-list

Hope this helps.

GreenHornet77

I would say you will create more problems and here is why: If you are working on Google + first, you are obviously going to have it correctly. When you add the number for the citation sites, you could create a G+ problem in that you are saying it changed, but it is still there. For many citation sites, they are just trolling for numbers and they are going to get both invariably IMO. Since we have had to fight these battles too many times, we try to be really careful with carrying one theme (phone number) for the main number. We do use tracking numbers in various ways, but we are very careful with them.

Hope this helps,

Robert

Corey,

Got to give you props on the info and the post. I had not seen it before and now am glad I came to Q&A tonight. Excellent info.

Good CMS advice (if you gotta fix, don't recreate it). Super advice on the canonical.

Boodreaux, given your experience level, if you are not using a CMS like WP or Joomla, make sure your developer understands the custom coding and the various permutations.

Best to both.

Jake

Nice hit with the Tag Manager. I did not know about it... Learn something everyday and that is what I love about this gig.

Best.

EGOL,

This is a great add. Jason, please read what EGOL has here as it elucidates what I should have spelled out along with talking with the client. My point in talking with them was to discover how these keywords convert for them and the impact that has on their business.

Egol, thanks again.

Nice add Miriam,

As always!

Best

Greenhornet

I thought I had replied to this but it doesn't show up. Google can be handled by post card and we send the client a shot of the post card and how it will look with instructions to disseminate the info so no one throws it out with junk mail.

If you are handling a lot of Google + clients, you can set it up where you manage all the accounts from one dashboard and all you are waiting on are their codes. If you need a bit of help, PM me and I will have our coordinator walk you through the process once.

Best

Jason,

Client is the key word here. First, you have to talk with them and make them aware of the plusses and minuses of the change. Let them decide is my advice. As to if it were mine, I would not change the index page at first and would construct what pages I am going to have for given terms. So, if on index page the most crucial keyword is red widget, it stays and I start looking at how to set up other pages and maximize red widget where it is.

Obviously, over time the chances of maintaining or growing a ranking is higher with a specific page (assuming the same effort, etc.). If you do link buildiing and set it to only go to index page, that will be more of an issue. So, your linking should be specific to what you wish to rank.

Remember, as you start to make changes, chances are you will drop before you begin to climb. If the client is aware of that going in, you have an ally. No, there is no hard rule on when the increase will happen.

I hope this helps you clarify,

Robert

Do not swap out city state as it will still be duplicate content. Take the time to do it right and it won't take long at all.

The question is are you physically located in say Tyler and Shreveport? If so, do local in both first. Then have pages that are city specific, but with different content. Not spun, different.

You will be glad you did. I would suggest minimally acquiring phone numbers that are specific to the cities you serve from the pov of user interaction with search.

Hope it helps.

Robert

Terry,

So you are saying it looks like this: Our Services | Plumbing in Denver, CO | Home Mechanics as an example.

For me, the constant repetition is not necessary but I will not tell you that it has no value. I would use this format:

Rooter Plumber | Home Mechanics

Residential Plumber | Home Mechanics

Siding Repair | Home Mechanics, etc.

Now, if you are fully optimized locally IMO you do not add a lot with the addition of the city name and most do not search on City + state variants. But if I were to add it, it would be Rooter Plumber in Denver | Home Mechanics.

Hope this helps, just remember, local in G+/ Google Places formerly, is more valuable that the name over and over in the Title tags.

Best

Ewan,

I would remove the 301 on a very simple premise: the previous domain had (based on you stating it was penalized) a lot of poor links. If that is true, why would you want to even go down that road to try to bring juice that likely does not exist any longer? Also, was the "penalty" a manual or algorithmic? Was it based on a date of inception for something like Panda, Penguin, or an update of same?

But, even though I would remove the 301, you cannot draw a correlation that a new domain: example.co.uk is ranking poorly due to the 301's from the .com. That is correlation equalling causation and, typically, it does not. First, what additional quality links are now coming to new domain that are independent of the 301 coming in? Second, is on-page, KW analysis, etc. for new domain all as it should be or did previous SEO miss on any of that? If it is possible for localization there with the domain, when new domain was created did someone make changes to local, citation sites, etc.? Is there a change from previous social such that the social now resolves to the new domain.

There are many questions here, but I think I would be remiss to claim that taking the 301 off would cause some rise in rankings. It is more likely that other factors will have a larger impact. Note, given you still need to redirect to the new site, you could use a 302 (temporary) redirect to prevent juice passing. You could use a meta refresh but that is a bit slow to most and not really recommended. There are other redirects and I would be interested to see what others suggest as a way to redirect while preserving the "autonomy" of the new domain. My first thought is still the 302. On a certain level, you could continue to attempt removal and mitigation of poor links to old site while you keep new up. Ryan Kent  does a lot more with link removal I believe. If the site is of particular value in customers/revenue, etc. you might PM him. If you do a site search on him here, you will find several links to answers on link removal/penalty removal.

I hope this helps you out,

Robert

GreenHornet77,

First the easy answer: Use a third party like Yest? No, don't in my humble opinion.

As to correcting the address, are you dealing with Google +/places? Are the others important for the business?

For Google + for business (Places), you should be able to edit the address. You can watch after the change and if need be make an edit in Google Map Maker that may well help.

For citation sites like Yelp, Citysearch, etc. those can be changed as well. If this is not something you have done before, I would suggest that you do it as a way to learn the ins and outs of it if you are planning to assist a lot of clients with their local. Our Local Coordinator started with us a year ago and because she has done this over and over it takes a lot less time. So, your first few may take a little longer, but after you know the ropes it should lessen your workload.

For us, I would say if you were changing 10 citation sites, etc. you should allocate an hour per site.

Best,

Robert

Prime 85

For me, everything is a question of proportion these days. So when you say "to a bunch of sites" I think, probably a waste of time. If you submit to a few, and keep the content of the blog something people would want to  read and pass on, then I think you are fine. As you gain some experience, you can add as you think it makes sense. 
Obviously, what you would like to have is people grabbing the feed, adding a link back to you and make your life more happy.

Note: With FeedAge, there are a lot of feeds that are SALE!!!!. I would try to make them better.

Hope this helps.

I would say this,

Instead of saying how many, present one that has good content, etc. and was affected by the EMD and let's dissect it to see what we all learn.

There is no correlation to search results and affected pages. Simply put, EMD also means electro magnetic discharge and many SEO's blogged about the EMD from Google without having necessarily experienced an adverse occurrence.

Quime

I would suggest that Google provides more information on "low quality content" than you may be aware of. I will provide one example from GWT:

**"Google is piloting the display of author information in search results to help users discover great content." **

So, I would provide an if/then: If, you are using authorship and taking credit for the content, Then, Google is likely seeing it as more trusted (better) content. Yes, not exact, but if the content were constantly spun or stolen, that author will lose standing over time based on the direction Google seems to be heading.

I think Google is more clear than we often want to believe. I think it requires a lot of reading and searching and testing. Most are not willing to go to the lengths necessary to attain the skill sets or knowledge. those who do, will likely make a lot of money going forward.

Best, Thanks for your input.

Carlos,

I like your voice of reason.

If all will look at Dr. Pete's data, it is obvious that many who are saying they dropped due to this are not looking at all the details. Given what he is showing, roughly 3 to 4% of EMD's may have dropped. Oddly, that would seem a bit high based on Matt Cutts saying roughly .6% of queries affected, but usually there are certain verticals hit harder than others.

I have met few people who say, "Yeah, my site doesn't have good content and i stuck a bunch of keywords in." I have had potential clients say, "I wrote it." when asked about their home page content, and then done a search to find everyone in their industry had stolen that content to the letter!

I think we are pretty strong in a lot of areas at my firm; I can go to any site we have built, SEO'd, etc. and find something i do not like on any given day. Why, because this SEO stuff is not easy. It takes patience and diligence.

Great comments and answers Carlos.

James,

First, as to "... it seems many other people have faced the same." I would disagree. When you read Dr. Pete's post, few sites/pages were impacted.

Carlos makes a great point: EMD is not a penalty. In fact, it would be surprising if the EMD update would cause a site to fall say ten places (e.g. from #5 pg 1 to #15 pg 2). If it did, it would be more surprising if that fall was not for the exact match keyword. So, if I own monkeysuits.com and am ranked #2 for monkey accessories, there should be little impact from this one change on monkey accessories. But, I may feel some impact if monkey suits is a keyword that is a moneymaker for me.

If you read Dr. Pete's post : Googles EMD Algo Update - Early Data, , you will see that based on tracking EMD's over time, the change in the impact of EMD's was around 10%. From his data, out of 1,000 EMD's tracked, a net of about 3.5% of domains were impacted but :

Across our data set of 1000 SERPs, 41 EMDs fell out of the Top 10 (5 new EMDs entered, so the net change was 36 domains). Please note that we can’t prove that a domain lost ranking due to the algorithm change –

When you read further you will see additional details around the ones that lost the ranking. Many had somewhat less than optimal content. (I'm paraphrasing). When you read Matt Cutt's tweet (no opinion here on whether or not he is really Darth Vader, just reporting a tweet.): "Small upcoming Google algo change will reduce low-quality "exact-match" domains in search results."

So, if you feel you have been impacted, the way I would deal with it is to evaluate all else and make the appropriate changes. Do you have good quality content that you created? Have you over used keywords?, etc. If so, make the changes and track the rise in rankings.

Unfortunately, in the SEO world, we have no easy days with easy answers. Too much changes too fast. But, i have learned that if I latch onto the first "obvious" reason for a negative result, I waste time in finding the correct reason. No, not all the time. Sometimes it is the first. But, many times it is the third or fourth or a combination of factors that affect a site.

Hope this helps you out a bit.

Robert

People ask similar questions regularly. I just saw you had no answer and wanted to be sure someone had given it a shot for you.

I would suggest go to Schema.org and to GWT and read the info there. By using the tool you confirmed that it was correct.  What you don't want to do is corrupt what the intention is by adding in your url, etc. Keep the item property what it is and keep it simple. Remember its semantic web for a reason. 
Hope it helps,

Not sure what bump is? I am older so...you know how we are not quite as UTD.

Edit: Had to know so went and checked it out. You can tell I do not spend a lot of times on general or other forums. My guess it the tactic won't work on this one (These guys are fairly sharp at moz.) But, best of luck.

Of course I am assuming you mean to 'bump' this to top of Q&A for some reason. Frankly, if you use the tools on moz you will see that the links are no followed from here. If this was not what you meant/intended, my apologies, LMK.

Best

Gerd, 
In terms of listing the meta keywords, you do not want to do this. It is not necessary and engines dont use them.

Good catch on the images.

Best,

Shaun,

I hope that I can provide a bit of insight for you. Remember, I am in the US with a US IP address and view things from a US point of view in terms of marketing. For SEO, overall, not bad. Need canonicals now or near term but do not believe that is affecting your ranking per se. Your page that ranks for concrete repair and concrete repairs is your concrete repair page and not your home page. From here searching Google.co.uk you rank 18th for repair and 15th for repairs. Remember, if your local is strong there that could improve.

The first change I would make would be to the meta description (not an algo factor, but a CTR factor). This is your sales pitch and only opportunity to get them to your site. I would lose the We are a , etc.

Mine would be like this: Complex and simple concrete repair including lower cost high structure repairs and emergency repairs. Services throughout UK. Free quotes rendered quickly. (No, I did not count the characters but this would be close). Use your words, but get the message out quickly. Make them click on you.

In order to rank this page higher based on your competition you need QUALITY links to this page. Yahoo Directory and Best of the web might be a place to start. Have an editor submit you to DMOZ. (these are low hanging fruit).

I would have a blog that gave a long snippet on this page and they could click on to read the rest and I would put new content on it twice monthly. I would add a FaceBook Like and Share (saw the button that takes me off site - hate it), I would add Google +, I would add LinkedIn, and Twitter. This will get you some additional trust.

If you look at who is first, they mainly have 20 times as many linking root domains as you and an EMD.

The only thing I would add is that if you had someone look at the site from a UI/UX perspective (how a user uses it) you might glean an insight or two.

Hope it helps,

Paul,

I have one question I have kicked to our head of Dev and will answer the Schema question with his answer to me. On the whole it looks ok. However, here is your content:

Pink sweatbands are great for sporting events. These wholesale pink wristbands work to prevent sweat from affecting your game. They also have a very stylish look to them and are comfortable to wear. Some organization use pink sweatbands to support breast cancer awareness during sports games or events. You really can't go wrong with these pink sweat wristbands.

When I look at this it appears not "Spammy," but misleading. First your link re breast cancer awareness is a 404. I have no idea given that this is the month for breast cancer awareness how long it has been as such. But it looks as if you might in some way be doing something to support breast cancer awareness. Are you? Or, are you simply selling pink wristbands with and without the ribbon?

My suggestion is this: If you are not in any way contributing to the American Cancer Society or another organization tied to providing solace, research, or information to women and their families regarding breast cancer, you should so state that you are not. If you are, you should state plainly who the contributions go to and what amount per sale goes to them.

As a Registered Nurse who has seen too much, I will tell you this, if you agree to donate all proceeds above the actual cost of the bracelets or shipping to the American Cancer Society, my agency, upon receipt of a copy of your cancelled check (or other instrument) will match your donation (it must be at least $100) up to $500. Along with that, I will personally look over your site and will give you a written set of tips to improve your site and will provide up to one hour of phone consultation to you as well.

Best,

Robert

MeMNV.png

Uhhh, how much alcohol? I have a reasonably stocked wine cellar.... Good point re JCPenny.

Best to you,

Ryan,

I do not believe I have seen this laid out more clearly or succinctly. The most important part that most seem to gloss over in this quest of reconsideration is your statement, ..."** forums are full of angry site owners sharing stories of how they submitted 10 Reconsideration Requests and all 10 have been denied**."

If you rush to get site reconsidered, you are slowing yourself down. You might as well do it all first and not be unhappy because you did no research on links, got two or three you saw as bad (or knew were bad) removed and ask for reconsideration. Without documentation (proof you did all in your power to have the links removed) of what you have done, what reasonable person would believe you did it?

"It does beg a question for me:

Is there a way to tell whether or not a penalty was caused by a webspam report to Google?

Thanks for great response.

Hello TheeDesign

First, yes it has happened to many. Second, I am a bit unsure that there is any correlation between Places/Google+ as we have seen this when it was Google Places and we did not see anything and I have not read of that happening concomitantly with the G+ change. (We handle a few G+/formerly Places accounts).

So, Your client is Client and the other listing is OtherGuy. Client offices at 123 hohum lane, Denver. OtherGuy offices at 123 hohum lane, Denver; is this correct?

Do both share same phone number? What types of businesses? Are both results showing or has Client disappeared and only listing is OtherGuy but with your Client's info?

There are multiple ways to approach this and with a couple of details i will endeavor to assist.

Best

Leave the site up. It won't show because of redirects. No new content.

Thanks, hey, how do I get outta this friggin' cooler??? It's cold as well a freezer!!

Hugh,

Just so I am not impaled by public opinion, I want to say again that this is a rough way of doing this. Looking at what you have, for me or me as my agency, I would say that I could pull off the above(what you have) 80% of the time or more.

There will always be factors that must be found and mitigated - the finding is where I see more failure than in mitigation. The reason IMO is that as SEO's we are prone to sight-blocking hubris. OK, sorry, I am prone to sight-blocking hubris and must be ever vigilant.

So, that said, I wish you the best and leave you with this: as to red and blue oceans remember the premise of the book; the effort is less and the payoff is higher in blue than in red oceans.

Best

Hello Hugh,

This is a very understandable question. I hope to provide you a small guide on this.

If you have a range of terms for more than one site and you have most entered into kw tool you will see that in some verticals you have a high difficulty and not a lot of searches. In others you can see high difficulty and many, many searches. That to me is one component.

The next is whether or not the search would be for a product or service that is perceived or marketed on a local basis. (A muffler shop comes to mind).

The next, which is very important is: Where are you starting from? So, for us as an agency if the client has a site and is already ranking in some areas, etc. it will provide a boost if we are helping them spread out. (making it easier even for a difficult term). But, if the client is going into unchartered waters or is essentially new to the space, it will mean having to build authority for site and pages while competing.

So, if I am looking at a global US search and have a new client with little they have done right on the Internet and we are going into what has been described as a "red ocean" in Blue Ocean Strategy, and, if the terms I am after are highly searched and difficult, page one could be 6 months or longer away.

Assuming the difficulty stays the same, but the search is now changed to be local and all else is the same, I think, I can begin to rank them for some of the terms within 3months plus or minus.

Then, if we go back to global but change them to having some Internet sophistication already, there is a significant increase in the speed with which we can help them rank. Change this to also include local and it gets faster. If, the search is a small number of searches monthly in local for any of the above, I find that it is easier to rank as less and less competitors focus on the longer tail or less familiar terms. NOTE: This is a major reason I do something I do not thoroughly enjoy: KW research.

So, I hope I have lessened your frustration to a degree,

All the best,

Robert

Hey Karen,

As to getting back to you so quickly: I was in the neighborhood and happy to assist

I am assuming product schema, but LMK.

With some of our content, we actually are training copywriters to put the schema in. Now, I would not do this in ecommerce as it is a different dev cycle/approach. But, for review or person schema, etc. its not a bad thought.

Each of our copywriters have pay changes based on learning and achievement. (No, we are not making them devs and they are judged based on content quality as well.)

I believe that every kid should learn basic html, etc. and am even starting a program where we provide a dev to a school to teach coding to middle schoolers (We pay the dev and the school/kids pay nothing). If they can be taught with all they are going through, anyone can. We are approaching a place where most will need basic html, etc. and schema ain't that tough.

LMK how it goes. You can even PM me.

Best

Digirank,

I do not see how you could use it for that, but admittedly have kicked your ball over to our head of dev just to be sure. Curious, how would you want to use it for schema given it is set to be more for tracking?

Best

ccgdm

You can redirect the traffic based on IP address of the traffic coming in so long as the googlebot is seeing the same redirection. This is from GWMT on geolocation and IP delivery. Otherwise you are cloaking in the eyes of Google:

IP delivery: Serving targeted/different content to users based on their IP address, often because the IP address provides geographic information. Because IP delivery can be viewed as a specific type of geolocation, similar rules apply. Googlebot should see the same content a typical user from the same IP address would see. (Bold is mine).

There are a ton of scripts on the web for doing this depending on your situation.

Best

Project#Labs,

I think there may actually be a couple of things at play here. One is that depending on the resolution of the screen you are viewing the image in, it may be very small. I use a high res screen on Mac and really have to squint often (and I wear glasses). As to could they be trying to get clicks, yes. As to image link versus text link, well I like infographics and we use them. But, according to Matt Cutts, Google has talked of devaluing them as they believe the intent was not always to provide a link back, etc. (I am paraphrasing grossly).

Good question.

essdee

I would suggest that you 301 each url from each of the current domains to a url on the new domain that is relevant to that domain. So, if on SiteOne.com and Sitetwo.com you have pages regarding /muffin-making/ and on the BrandSite.com you have muffin-construction. 301 SiteOne.com/muffin-making to BrandSite.com/muffin-construction and 301 SiteTwo.com/muffin-making to BrandSite.com/muffin-construction.

If you had some pages that were irrelevant in terms of links or no directory similar, etc. you could redirect to homepage or other relevant page. In case I misunderstood you, when you do 301's, you leave the old sites up but add no new content.

Remember you are doing this url to url in the .htaccess file of each.

Hope it helps,

Rand, Had to say that I am impressed on a lot of levels. But, I always have been.

Best to you and yours,

Robert

Maxime,

I saw this too, and there are certainly variants. Given, that for Google I have generally used WMT as the final source and usually that worked, I lean a bit more that way. But, your point is well stated and not wrong. For purposes of being absolutely safe, it will not hurt to have the hreflang attribute there. A better question might be: is it really necessary given the you have ccTLD's and the same language?

From WMT:

Some example scenarios where rel="alternate" hreflang="x" is recommended:

• You translate only the template of your page, such as the navigation and footer, and keep the main content in a single language. This is common on pages that feature user-generated content, like a forum post.
• Your pages have broadly similar content within a single language, but the content has small regional variations. For example, you might have English-language content targeted at readers in the US, GB, and Ireland.
• Your site content is fully translated. For example, you have both German and English versions of each page.

I will assume that it is a given that google uses the ccTLD as the indicator of country and that it is considered a "Strong" signal to Google.

WIthin GWMT re: multilingual/regional sites (the bolded/italics are mine

Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this may not always be possible. There is generally no need to "hide" the duplicates by disallowing crawling in a robots.txt file or by using a "noindex" robots meta tag. However, if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both __example.de/ and example.com/de/ show German language content for users in Germany), you should pick a preferred version and redirect (or use the rel=canonical link element) appropriately. In addition, you should follow the guidelines on rel-alternate-hreflang to make sure that the correct language or regional URL is served to searchers.

Again, thanks for the replies. I find it really helpful to discuss back and forth as it adds to the learning adventure we are all on.

Best to you,

Robert

Good question Charles.

First and foremost you have to look at these results in context.

One reason you are ranking is... your competitors are not doing much on page either. (only looked at the one I saw first on the first query and then saw again on second. They are D while you are F on one term.

If you were competing in a vertical against people who were all over their SEO, you would find ranking much more difficult IMO. Yes, it is an opinion, but about the SEO.

If I had a spy equipment client in the UK and put my resources to bear, what would I do based on what I have seen?

First and foremost on-page SEO because - of the ones I looked at - most are not doing any. Of the main competitor I see, they outrank you by one or two and vice versa, but both of you are getting ranked on home page. I would build a spy equipment page that rocked. I would build a surviellance page that exploded. I would build a spy catcher page (didn't see one and thought it was obvious) and I would build pages around each keyword that had the kind of traffic i was interested in. I would also be the king of content and people would flock from near and far just to read what I had written about spying on people (I think someone is watching us...).

With every page, I would have a meta description that speaks to the searcher, correct on page, good links, etc. and all tied to the keywords.

So, again, with the grading tool you have to keep it in context. If you were in an area with thousands of competitors and you did not do quality on page, content, etc., you would find ranking much more problematic.

Hope this clarifies ( and I hope you go smoke your competitors with some major on page, etc.!!)

Robert

Edit: An additional point here - if you did the pages with great on-page, you would have the ability to rank for both urls given the home page is already there.

C

This is one of the reasons I love this forum: it requires thinking because many who ask questions are thinking. (think about it;) While I understand what eyepaq is saying in one sense that search engines "could" treat them as stand alone; it appears search engines do/could because as the subdomain holder you are not seeing links going only to the main domain or other subs, you are the one who controls it, can move its hosting, etc.  But, according to Google, they do not in the sense of linking:

If you own a site that’s on a subdomain (such as googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com) or in a subfolder (www.google.com/support/webmasters/) and don’t own the root domain, you’ll still only see links from URLs starting with that subdomain or subfolder in your internal links, and all others will be categorized as external links. We’ve made a few backend changes so that these numbers should be even more accurate for you.

Note that, if you own a root domain like example.com or www.example.com, your number of external links may appear to go down with this change; this is because, as described above, some of the URLs we were previously classifying as external links will have moved into the internal links report. Your total number of links (internal + external) should not be affected by this change.

So, as for external linking, it is clear that if there ever was a question about domains and subdomains, there is none now. But, that does not mean you should not use subdomains. Eyepaqs point around user abuse is an excellent one, but you should also be monitoring this like a hawk.

At the end of the day, I would think that using subdirectories is going to be easier if you are planning on a large site. But, the ease you mention for the user with the short domain name is intriguing. I agree with Muhammad on sub domains might get a little expensive and, if your choice is to use both (I wouldn't as it seems to me that you are creating more and more work for your dev team) the canonical should be the subdomain.

Again, thanks for the thought provoking question.

Robert

Agency,

In-house is so... boring

Back at ya Cesar

Taysir,

Google Places does not exist. I believe the effective date of the change was June 1. So, as to a badge or seal, there is none (for either).

As to encouraging traffic to the Google + for business for your client. For us, we set up ways for our clients to ask their customers to place reviews for them. An issue here is that if you are getting too many or you try to do the reviews via proxy, they will be removed.

I think you would be better served to put G+, FB like/share, Twitter, etc. buttons on the page in a conspicuous place and, possibly, put a slight amount of text or an image below asking them to click if they love you.

Hope it helps,

Check to be sure you haven't missed any.

Sherry,

First, you are going to use Google US or Google Mexico. Next, you are looking for odd queries that will not exist. Try searching on ropas and then vender ropas. Or try searching on abogados. What you will see is that the results are all over the place. The most telling is ropas - search returns everything from the designer by that name, rock/paper/scissors game, ropas (as clothes in ES), etc. If you then look at abogados, you see the attorneys who get multilingual and those who don't. 
I was talking with one of our fluent Spanish speaking SEO's and we stuck in zapatos rojos. (Red Shoes). I am a big believer in what an excellent company Zappos is, but their ad returned a Spanish title with totally English ad.

If you type in English and Spanish, (which is going to be rare, I repeat - rare) you will see what comes up and you can do the KW research on the terms.

I will say to you what I say to many: If this is not something you are strong in, find a company that will work with you and let you learn as you work with your client and them. (Get an upfront agreement that they cannot approach, etc., NDA,). I can tell you I am not too proud to ask for assistance and recently contacted a European SEO firm re a Chinese site we are going to handle. I will work with them as I have no experience in that market or with Baidu directly. You cannot be afraid to say you don't know it all in this business. Trust me, I am here to learn just like you.

Best