Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Egle,

I think you may be on to something

Egle

As it is used within the on-page report card, it is a bit confusing. I looked at the use of Broad for Page Title, Document, and then the various uses of Appropriate. Interestingly, every time appropriate is used, there is a number associated with it. So appropriate/document - use it at least 4 times, H1 - 2 or less, title tag length - 66 char. Only for Characters in URL did appropriate not have a number.

For Broad, it appears the word is being used globally(the whole page) to point to a specific place: Broad usage - Document, broad usage - title tag. Appropriate seems to define a number range as it is used here. (I do not think it is an appropriate use of the word.)    

I can't wait to see the mozzanswer.

MPS,

First the only way to get city specific like that is to go into the SERP Control Panel in Firefox. (Doesn't work in Chrome, etc). At the bottom there is an option to create a new profile. Click that and follow along. USA/Washington/Bellevue and then name your profile. Obviously, you will want to select non personalized search.

Now as to doing the same in a campaign or utilizing rank checker, the only option is to use the city as a keyword: Home construction Spokane, etc.

I am testing the Bright local software and the same is true, if you want to get specific you must add the city as a keyword.

Hope it helps a bit.

We can certainly dream about an end to the spammers!

V

I tried reading the whole Gblog but got bored. If you look at the SearchEngineLand piece, what it points out from the blog is important:

Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.

So, there is not a "We ain't usin' no stinkin' links no mo!" But, "Hey dudes and dudettes, we are gonna change some portion of the weight we give this around a particular portion of how we look at 'em."

What could be more clear???!!!! Maybe they are giving less weight to root domains linking to a link that links to you. Maybe they are re-evaluating anchor text usage or how it is used, etc. So, as it stands today, we know that there is some weight that is applied based on links. How it is applied or the given weight of the application is not known. As the result, we don't know what changed about what we didn't fully know before.

Is that clear???!!!

Keep building links dude.

Best.

Dan is correct and the biggest reason to redirect the www to non www or non www to www is that the chance will always exist that they will be seen as two sites and by virtue of that you will split the value of the site. We see it every day when we take on new clients.  While the DA is the same on both, the PA for a home page or important other ranking page is different. One I just finished sending a proposal on has a DA of 23 for the site. The www version home page has a PA of 32 while the non www version has a PA of 21. There are four links on the non www that do not exist on the www.

So, your call, Dan is right.

Best

Christine,

First, don't allow frustration to get in the way of moving ahead. Mainly, because you don't know why they are ahead, yet. Don't assume it is due to spammy backlinks from spun articles. Now, if you are open to sharing some urls, that would make it easier for some of the mozzers to assist you. Short of that, I will give it a go:

Remember that you have a competitive advantage over your competitors........

Great, your on page is ahead of the competitor on page. That is a good start. Now, to get a feel for where you are and need to go, are you running a campaign in your pro account and have you picked out your top competitors to look at? Make sure you put in three as you will learn more.  
Have you attached Google Analytics to the campaign so that you can derive more actionable data? This can assist you a lot of ways, and one is in exploring different keywords, etc.

Next, go to this link and do not leave until you understand it Best Kept SEO Secret-SEOMoz toolset.

Remember, you don't know why they are ranking until you dig really deep. It is human nature (OK it is my nature) to look at where I am excelling over a competitor as opposed to what I need to do to improve myself and get ahead of them...forever.

Next, SEO is not a billboard ad on the freeway at rush hour. Single, call 800-find-Luv. Where once the billboard is up you will know if it works in a short amount of time. SEO is a labor that pays off incrementally. Those of us who do it for a living see everyday where a client is used to TV spending, print spending, PPC spending, etc. and having an instant result (unfortunately, they typically remember the good and forget the bad). Those clients want the same from SEO and must be managed if they are to win. Treat yourself as your client and manage the desire to want it now. Focus on building a foundation that will be strong. Good on page, good content, quality links, etc. You can get ahead.

Oh, yeah, the competitive advantage.....you are a mozzer, you are on the team. We will smoke 'em.

Best

SirMax,

First the answer is, based on the question you are asking: 1. and totally forget 2. (Developing micro sites/ landing pages) please.

So that you will know that I know that is correct, we handle attorney sites (quite a few - but we are not a vertical marketing firm like a findlaw, etc.). By going to the trouble of creating multiple micro sites you will dilute your efforts, content, and links and since you are already in Places - needs some help - there is no other place page you can create for those other cities/areas.

So, resist the urge to name every surrounding city, etc. It won't help you. Optimize for the three in your title tag for the home page (get rid of the word 'and' in both places and the word area at the end). On the title tag, between lawyer and S___ get rid of the dash and put 'a pipe' like this | (usually on the forward slash key). Take out all the keywords in your cms you don't need them and the engines don't use them.

On your H1 use an identifier like city with the key word you are stressing like Chapter 7 this city or chapter 7 bankruptcy this city, (If you are going to have a bankruptcy lawyer or bk atty page, then on chapter 7 do not put chapter 7 bankruptcy attorney 5 times. You do not need the attorney kw there. really.

On your H2 (you can have multiple H2's) you can have Bankruptcy Attorney in ZZZZ, Bankruptcy attorney in YYYY if you must

Now, if you want something that will help get clients stop stuffing the meta description with keywords as the meta description is not used for ranking. It is a sales tool for you. So, for bankruptcy (a suggestion):

Stop being afraid and feeling bad about your situation, call me today at 111111111. I am an experienced bankruptcy attorney and I understand how you feel. (Not sure on length of this one, but it is close to good)

If you are using chapter 7 your city, make the meta desc. about chapter 7:

If you are in the ____ area and need answers about chapter 7 bankruptcy, I am here to help. 9(((((9999. I understand it can be tough and I am experienced at protecting my clients. (again, keep it around 150 to 160 characters).

Lastly, on your places page you need to work on Categories as yours are not showing. Do not use any local identifiers. Just categories. For bankruptcy, the default is going to first be Bankruptcy Attorney. You can use Lawyer as well. Then I would type in three to four of my own: Chapter 7 bankruptcy attorney, chapter 13 bankruptcy attorney, etc.

Again, don't stuff it and do not use locations/city names.

This will help you 20x more than what you had. Give it a try.

Best,

PS On keyword research in the area you are in, attorney is used more than lawyer. You can interchange but don't try to have an attorney page and a lawyer page.

levalencia1

What did you disallow?

Are there specific categories or products you know are missing?

Is there a specific sub directory(s) that is missing?

What is it you wanted to block with robots?

John Joe

The schedule is here: http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/w/page/25141119/Linkscape-Schedule

The Competitive link analysis in campaigns cannot be updated more frequently than linkscape updates so there has not been a weekly. Because campaign reports come weekly, it seems that way, but not so. SEOmoz strives to crawl monthly, but this next one is the 29th after the 16th of Jan. being the previous date. Sooo, the web is getting wider it seems and there is a lot more to crawl.

Hope this clarifies,

I would attempt to focus on the artist and display a couple of his/her pieces on the landing page. So, for each artist, your ad would be around something specific in the medium used or possibly genre of art, the landing page would potentially be a couple of specific pieces and a short bio w a call to action, etc. 
Your question will be: What was the searcher's query? Artists in city X? 3D art by Y, etc. This I think is important for a PPC in such a low volume search area. (I have been collecting for years and my wife does contemporary abstract in oil and acrylics). With art, you might really explore destination advertising on the web as well. You will be the one who can decide which is best/cost effective for you.
Now, if your store were more of a furniture/art/design type store, then I would have to look at what drives people there and maybe look at what someone like restoration hardware or their new model does.

Best

As per EGOL, it is both. Another thing with the changes you are making to the pages, if you change things to the point that the meta desc. does not match the content, you will cause a higher bounce rate because when someone clicks, sees something other than what they thought they would see, they leave. That will also affect PR (IMO).

EGOL nails a lot here.

Bob,

Remember, PR is arrived at mathematically and any change to a variable will cause a change to the result. That said, usually the minor changes with loss of a link here or there, addition of same, on page changes, we do not notice right away because Google only adjusts on occasion and not internet wide (I keep asking for the schedule but they won't give it to me). Now, if you had dropped from 4 to 0 or 1, that would be different in my opinion and a signal something was amiss in the eyes of Oz.

Best

Lakshmi

You almost answer your own question with ...1000's of posts and i cant get back links for each...

So, you need to make sure you are not spreading your "weight" around the site when you could simply be the Gorilla of a single page. By focusing keywords/phrases to single pages, you do not lose anything to the other pages on your site (slight over simplification). Now, if you have all these posts and they are older and have a bit of weight, you could redirect some of them to the keyword page you want to push. Outside of that, with 1000's the content is likely older and of less use anyway.

That said, it does not mean that in certain verticals you won't rank for the same SERP page with different urls. We have some sites that have a specific keyword phrase and we will have two urls on the same page 1. One is an attorney and the first url is thatSite.com/particular-service and the second is thatSite.com/how-to-guide-that-service/

I would not spend time attempting to make that happen, however. Lastly, Marcin makes a really good point in c): ("buy laptop" is highly competitive,... You will need a mix of links with optimized anchor text..... Follow his advice.

Hope this cleared up a few ponderables...

Handcrafter

First, it depends on what your ad is. But, if you are advertising to sell sneakers, a specific variety, a specific sale, to a specific segment, etc. I doubt that you will want to have an ad go to the product page with: Nike-running-shoe/mens/black/372 as the url then a title, a pic, a couple of this is what it is lines and a price with a place in cart option.

If you are spending on the ads, focus on what about the ad is going to get me to click to go to the product. (Ad copy on Google ad that drives CTR)

Then, the last thing you want is to have them bounce as they saw one thing and it wasn't what they wanted. Make your ad be about a reason to stay, shop, buy, etc So, leap year day only sale, Nike Super Jumper 10% off, buy two get free shipping, IF you know that the item is hot, have them land on a full page that really shows it off. etc.

Yes, you could do it the other way, but I wouldn't. Even with our service clients, we want landing pages as opposed to basic site pages as you drive a specific need and then you fulfill that need. With our SEO, we use the meta desc. to answer the query and optimize the page. The same is happening with an ad we are just using ad copy and a landing page.

hope this helps

Hello Marie,

I don't think it is a bad idea and I have no opinion as to how well it might work. I had to smile when I read the first sentence to the webmaster. Knowing a few, I would have to say you might want to slightly reword it. It could be perceived as a bit of: "Noticed your ugly FB page and thought you might want to learn something; I will teach you for a link!" So, soften it a bit and try being a bit self effacing in the beginning. 
Hello webmaster, I am just learning the value of web masters and of linking and am trying to offer something in return for a little help. (Think of me as the internet version of the person on the street with the sign: Will work for food.) I have been told I am good at developing FB pages for business and if you had an interest, I would be more than willing to assist you with one for a simple link to my site. My FB page is here and my site is here........

So, that's my two cents worth. Let me know how it goes.

Best.

OK, I am going to say this and I will follow up with you in another format. You must insure that they are not using your name, etc. and simply driving traffic by capturing what you would have already. I think you may be missing something important.

I am assuming the sale must take place on your site. (I went to it and drew the assumption).

Back Burner

Our firm, years ago, was first a lead gen firm and then began using affiliate aggregators to assist in the production of those leads. I have worked with some of the bigger and a few smaller aggregators and there are plusses and minuses. We no longer do lead gen (other than having clients who develop leads for their own businesses) and we do not use publishers or aggregators.

That said, the issue is not necessarily Link Share itself. (and I have never used them), it is that having affiliates is a full time job requiring a full time tracker, modifier, enforcer, discoverer, etc. Many publishers are the original SEO Blackhats and I give them a lot of credit for exposing the flaws that existed. Unfortunately, for every solid high end publisher who is doing it legit, you have 100 sleazy, low end, pubs trying to simply beat the system if only for the evening. That is what makes it difficult. They are trying to minimize their cost in order to profit on your offer. That ultimately leads to abuse. So, it is not necessarily that any one aggregator is flawed, it is that the system is flawed. Remember the best publisher would be superb at SEO and have no cost to speak of yet drive you traffic. Most are not that.

I doubt this helps you, but if you are trying to convince people who believe it is good, ask this question: How many real site visits has it brought and from those how many sales? Was it worth it? Then you will have the answer.

I spent lots of $$$ in that world...I won't again.

Best,

Come on Nick,

I made some good guesses there and you go and tell us this. I am so hurt, I am not going to wash my SEOmoz T-shirt this week. No, no, I am not.

Certainly gonna quit guessing at ----.

Thx for the update,

Your link returns a 404. Could you cut and paste?

I don't see an issue with G translate, alexa counter, analytics, salesforce, etc. As to JS, the recommendation from a page load perspective is to put it at the bottom of the page as JS blocks parallel downloads. So, while it is loading the browser will not allow anything else to begin load which will slow down page load speed. If possible put it at the bottom to circumvent this.

Hope that helps.

Waquid

In the legal field you see it a lot. While I cannot point out any place where there is a penalty for it that I have seen I will tell you that without it I am able to add links and pass those above. The question becomes is it the links they are using or is it the content we are using, etc. that eventually moves us ahead?

I will leave it to you to decide, but in the legal marketing arena I have not seen any penalty for it. To my knowledge there is no benefit....

Best.

Chirah,

It is not unusual even with the www taken care of correctly for mozrank or trust to be a little to somewhat different.

Without your urls, I would guess that whatever is going on in your competitive analysis has to do with your competitor not having resolved the www. That I see with our clients regularly.

You did not say how many links you had in the root, but that you had only two in the sub. This issue could be a timing issue depending on when you did the redirect.

We have a client I just looked at who we took on in Sept and his root vs sub are equal with the exception of the mozRank and mozTrust. Since those are equations as opposed to counts it would make sense that they would take longer to resolve. But, they will never be the same is my guess....look at SEOmoz.org.....

Hope it was helpful.

I think Harald is correct. It is already known so leave it be. Besides, you are talking about two sites and the effect they alone have on one another for linking. Why go to the expense and bother to have multiple IPs and manage them when you can focus elsewhere and keep this as it is and manage from one screen?

In the agency business we were tempted and did for a very short while go to a multiple IP approach. We even went so far as to never register as ourselves when we got the client domain names, etc. But, in the end, even with lots of sites, it is a pain in the butt and not worth the hassle. Our time is better spent in constructive pursuits.

Good question though and great answer Harald.    Edit, sorry, Harry!

Sam, 
I am not a Twitter expert by any means but I will tell you my thought on how to: Don't get the feeds and inundate people with every piece of news no matter how relevant it might be to the genre you are in. When I look today at those who have capitalized on Twitter with envy, it is the ones who use it intelligently and personalize it. They are not just Tweety birds with no music, they are putting out tweets to individuals as well as on the whole. They are not tweeting 50 i am here, there, looky, looky. With moz, they occasionally tweet check this out. With some of the really good SEO's who are great bloggers they will mention others when they see something good and relevant.

Early in the craze we put up a site (I won't tell out of embarrassment) and our social dept (one person) decided that we would put a feed, get it out, etc. It worked in terms of ego gratification in that in a couple of months we had nearly two thousand followers. But we didn't. We had two thousand who said they were for whatever reason.

Again, keep it simple, keep it relevant, humanize it. Target it to the audience you serve and make them want to see it. Make them want to know: What's Sam thinking today?

Best

Samuel,

Everyday (OK, at least some days, but it feels like everyday) in SEO I look at some competitor (typically of a client of ours) and one how in the h3ll they got ahead of our guy/gal. I peruse, I read content, I compare PA/DA, I look at links (quantity, quality, matching c blocks, etc.). I can see that obviously we have the better of them in 75% of the important areas. I scratch my head, curse (mildly), wonder, and complain. But, then it hits me. What's the point?

First, I cannot draw a conclusion from one set of data. You are trying to do that. If you are willing to give up a keyword and the two urls, you might be surprised at what a few mozzers can teach one another. For you, speaking solely of links, have you looked at internal vs. external, anchor text and anchor text distribution, C blocks, over use of internal links, too many unnatural links, absence of nofollows, etc, etc, etc. (That was purely off the top of my head after being up an hour and a half (0530 now). So, there is more than just the reciprocity factor in the links.

For me, one thing I have learned from mozzers I have come to respect on this Q & A is what I will call SEOP. Search Engine Optimization Perspective: You cannot point to my PR, PA, DA, Link profile is better, I should outrank. You cannot even do a thorough analysis and believe that you couldn't be missing some one small thing. On a forum like this for SEO the majority of those visiting regularly are in the top 30% of SEO conservatively (Yes, IMO). When we look out at those who claim to be gurus and originators and friends of Sergey and Larry, we are all struck by the wonderment of how they can pull it off. I literally am in an argument with someone around local search at a much larger firm than ours (national), that they cannot use same address of a business, same phone, different URL, and have it in Places, et. al. - they are a Local search firm..... So, it gives me a sense of being a bit too bright some times. I think if they are so stupid then I must be.... WOW!

So, what I do today is this: When I am truly perplexed at how we are being outranked by an inferior :0 and I have researched it as best I can I realize that maybe, today I am not the brightest guy in the room and I come over here to realize how smart others are and learn. I also realize that there are factors I cannot see: for that term, on that page, is there something they have done that is getting them an amazing CTR? Remember, what we do is much prettier, catchier, nuanced, etc. than the other guy....to us. Maybe show the page to two or three others and let them tell you what they see.

No, this is not likely the answer you wanted. So, for me, I will do an occasional reciprocal link if it makes sense with my content and my audience. No, I will not go to the wall with relationships like that as there is no end point that works, again, IMO.

So, I hope you work it out. I would look at content. I would really look at CTR (compare meta descriptions and ask yourself this question: Does yours answer the query better than any other meta description out there?) Then ask this, when they get to your page, will the page reflect the meta description and make them want to hang out? If all things are equal in SEO from one page to another, look there.

Best

For a magazine not published in two years i can only say wow.

I would not 301 given this data (yes, more info could change that, but I doubt it). I would look to do two things:

Discover where the traffic is coming from and why and see if there is a way to captitalize on it or improve it. Then, I would institute a good linking strategy going url to url as opposed to pushing all to home page of commercial site. Make sure the anchor text is good, links come from content above the fold where possible (Don't do footer, sidebar links out of convenience, take the time). I would do around 30 to 40 links per month just because I like a slower approach and the ability to change my approach based on new info.

For a good primer on anchor text, Here is a Whiteboard on anchor text from Rand Fishkin 

Hope this helps you out, would love to be posted as you watch it, even if just by PM. What I do on projects like these is get a baseline using campaigns and then evaluate it weekly or monthly as I add. For a total site 301 url to url, I watch both sites and graph the result so that we learn from it.

If you are up to it, and you take a road similar or somewhat different and keep all your results, you could write a blog by simply stating the question, the answers, what you did, and then the results over time. In three or four months, you would have a great piece.

Best to you.

Gary,

This is a bit over broad, but I will attempt to assist you. You have a site that you have for some reason other than commercial. You also have a commercial site. You want to point keywords from non to other. (I am assuming you mean link to other from this on keyword relevant pages). You desire to do this to add value if possible to commercial site.

Given that there are some considerations: If they are on the same C block or IP address it will effect how much juice you get. Also, if they are only loosely related, ultimately there will be less value and all the linking norms must be followed to achieve whatever you are able to achieve at a max.

Now, the real issue is the content is 2 to 10 years old which would seem to mean you are doing nothing with the site at the moment. If that is so, I think you would be better served to go another direction.

Assuming the site serves no current or important purpose or that the commercial site could take up that slack, you could do a 301 redirect of the pertinent pages of non comm to comm. This would assist you in a couple of ways: you have one less site to worry about (soon), you are able to take the link value of non comm and send it to comm with less than a ten percent loss on that value, there is no IP or C block issue or same owner issue, over a month to three or four you will see the value of non comm positively effect commercial.

Again, as with linking, you must follow the norms of 301 redirect like url to url in .htaccess and not domain to domain, etc.

If I failed in the details of what you wanted, I apologize and would take another stab if I knew the urls or more details.

Best.

While I understand what you are saying, I would say that we have other SAS apps as well. We have some we pay more for and some we pay less. (And we are on the Pro Plus here). I would say give it a chance and see what the vale us for you. 
I have employees who go online on this account all of the time to do the work. A couple have non paid accounts as well. They are not allowed to give me a thumbs up and I fire them if they are caught thumbing me down... just kidding.

Between the great resources on here, the whiteboard Friday, great youmoz users blog, SEOmoz blog, Q and A that is rocking with quality SEO types, etc. I have learned a ton in a year and a half. Forget about the tools available and the fact there is a concerted effort to keep them updated, the other things are more than worth the fees.

Give it a try for a couple of months, if after that it is not worth it, try another.

Best

While I understand what you are saying, I would say that we have other SAS apps as well. We have some we pay more for and some we pay less. (And we are on the Pro Plus here). I would say give it a chance and see what the vale us for you. 
I have employees who go online on this account all of the time to do the work. A couple have non paid accounts as well. They are not allowed to give me a thumbs up and I fire them if they are caught thumbing me down... just kidding.

Between the great resources on here, the whiteboard Friday, great youmoz users blog, SEOmoz blog, Q and A that is rocking with quality SEO types, etc. I have learned a ton in a year and a half. Forget about the tools available and the fact there is a concerted effort to keep them updated, the other things are more than worth the fees.

Give it a try for a couple of months, if after that it is not worth it, try another.

Best

What I was talking about is sometimes we will add a phone number in the meta description to see if people will call straight to that number from the query as opposed to necessarily clicking through. (also, return customers will use it to call you back on a quick search they do remembering you have a number there). When we do this we use a tracking number that rolls to their main line. Since we employ a different tracking number for every client & every item for that client we are able to get a better grasp as to what is actually going on. An example is an attorney here that we thought was somehow having traffic 'assigned' to a large media firm he was doing business with. When we put in the meta desc. change with a number.....Voila! We had the answer.

Probably not what you are doing, but it made me wonder if that would increase your calls, while lowering your traffic, even thought 50% drop could be a lot.

Best Alan

Love most Masala so I shall....

Thanks

Alan,

Full disclosure, I am not a coder but have several that speak to me daily I believe this will help you out: It is around using the navigator object in JS for detection. Here are a couple of links with possible answers for you:

http://www.javascriptkit.com/javatutors/objdetect2.shtml and http://www.javascriptkit.com/javatutors/navigator.shtml

and http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/njava/

These are from two different sites, hope you find a bit of help here,

Best

I will PM someone who is all over asp.net and have him look at question. He will know answer.

That is quite interesting. I looked at Detroit, San Francisco, and Philadelphia and all had issues when going to the site:

directory.detroit.cbslocal.com

directory.sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com

directory.philadelphia.cbslocal.com/

On the directory pages the directory has somehow been superimposed over their home page and is not navigable. When you click on a business most have no info. So, to me that is a huge red flag.

At $1500 per month one must ask what do you get. If you could provide us any of those details that would be great. As it stands, if you are talking about a basic local business site without too many bells and whistles, I just cannot justify it based on the info in hand. Even if they optimize unbelievably for 20 directories and the 3 search engines, what do they continue to do to earn $1500 per month? 
Obviously, for your associate, if he is spending the $1500 and his traffic is doubled through these sources and his revenue is up above the cost and ancillaries such that it is making him additional profit, then that is a value question only he can answer.
When all my marketing was my own money (before I was an agency), I never wanted to break even or make 2 times the ad spend as it was not profitable given other expenses to create the revenue. At three and four to one that was getting the sweet spot.

So, he will have to decide for himself. I do think you have shined a light on a smelly subject that we are seeing more and more of with (old) media companies. As they try to move their model into something that can be preserved, they are stepping into an arena for which they do not possess the requisite skillset or experience. In fact into an arena they fought from the beginning. Look at Yellow Pages, etc. They are still delivering phone books that no one wants as the model still makes money.....by adding the "value add" of SEO.

So, its just an opinion, but I would pass on the deal given all I know to now.

Best to you and your associate.

OK Jeff, what are the urls associated with these? These are where you are ranking, you have to remember that if you are not using non personalized search it will be different on your machine it will be different for you than on moz

Don't worry about me Steve; the therapist said I will mend. It just takes time.......

xenu linksleuth is the answer to your question. Good luck. Nothing better I am aware of.

Shara,

I would approach the changes like this: For your better selling products and products you want to sell better (think about that last one in terms of what makes you the most money, is easiest to fulfill, least headaches, etc.). Work on those first. If you have something that is really moving, be careful and slowly implement the changes.

As to what needs to change, I think you need to approach it from not changing each page as much as seeing what can be done to the site. It is a Drupal site as I recall and there are ways to work with it.

Best

Point to the appropriate URL as that is where you want to be able to increase ranking and get business from. While linking to home page will help (internal link to the chester url) it is not as effective as letting the page stand on its own. 
You are going in the right direction.

Best

Oh Steve I am hurt by this...

What I am saying is that since PR is a factor that is established based on Linking, relevance, QDF, etc. it will be most important on the whole predicated on the question asked. (If he works on quality content, quality linking, etc. will his page rank rise or not?)  I did not say focus on PR and do not want to leave that conclusion. Let PR rise as it will with you taking care of all that affects it.

With an individual page at a moment in time, there will be other factors: recent page with a lot of traffic, etc. will often outrank other older higher PR pages. A page that is a local business that has a highly optimized Places listing will very often outrank a higher PR page without.

Also, with the question he asked it was about googles key word ranking versus serps:

are other factors such as page rank, Alexa rating and mozRank used to determine where I will show up in search results, over Goggle's key word rank for my key words?

I am thinking that he may be looking at a couple of things: he may be on one of the sites that uses the term Google in their url but are not really Google and give keyword rankings. Since I am unaware of a keyword ranking system other than a page ranking for a given keyword query, it makes me scratch my head.

So, I hope I have extricated myself from the PR is all dilemma.

Best to you

Yes, the problem could be that you are doing it for the client. Have you submitted a bulk upload verification request (where they verify they have it). Did you follow the guidelines provided? I believe only the business owner can verify the upload:

If you are the business owner, you can verify your bulk listings if they comply with the Google Places quality guidelines. You can submit your file for verification using the bulk verification request form linked in your account. Please note that we don't respond to all requests for bulk upload verification.

This is taken from http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83312

Hope it helps.

Lawrence,

First I would ask: where are they ranking in Places - page one, number 3, etc.? (The change may not be negative, but need more info.) Has traffic, calls, leads, etc. changed? On the Places ad, did you change anything re categories, address, phone, etc.? Was the organic listing around a different area, etc.?

More info really is needed to dissect this: urls, target area, etc.

If you can supply those you will get more assistance as there are several really good local SEO pros on moz.

Best

Edit: Lawrence, I wanted to find some substantiation before I said this, but there is a lot of wait attached to a verified listing: From Google Places for Business:

With individual listings, once the listing is verified, your information will be trusted more than conflicting information from any other sources. I would really look at the site and see if anything is conflicting with what you have in Places. I am assuming the Places accurately links to the site url.

I don't know that it will help your site or not, but it should not hurt it. All recipes is not a poor site in the black hat sense, etc. It does have some serious ads going on but not totally over the top.

Whether it helps will depend on what page you are linking from and how good your content is. If your page rank on recipe site grows as the result of your recipe or someone else's, it should help by sending a bit of juice to your site. How much help will depend on number of other links from that site. Where the link is in the content and on the page, anchor text, etc.

BTW, what is your favorite item to cook...(uh, not meat please kinda like my animals a bit.

Best.

There are several determinants for where you will rank in Google SERP's, but the most important is PR. When you say Google's keyword rank what do you mean? Alexa shows traffic and there is not a corollary per se to where you will rank. mozRank will be closer to PR than anything I am aware of.

The other issues will be recent traffic to page, local optimization as applicable, competitiveness of the vertical, etc.

Best

Submit them yourself and in case I lacked clarity, submit them yourself or hire a staffer to do so. Most article submission sites are .... not liked by me.

The problem is that the engines know who is generally spinning, etc. and there are more poor than truly effective article submission sites IMO.

Look for blogs on moz about this and how to get articles picked up and remember quality content will get uptake. When you see someone else in your industry that blogs and you like their stuff, comment on it and follow up later with some of yours regarding posting.

Best

Hello Jeff and welcome to the land of Moz.

As to sub domains, yes www is a subdomain of www.example.com. But, my.example.com is a sub domain of example.com and your.domain.com is a subdomain of example.com. So, based on your question I am going to give you a question:

Have you set a preferred domain in GWMT, Bing, etc.? You need to tell them whether or not you prefer www.yoursite.com or yoursite.com otherwise these are seen as two sites. Now, the other thing you need to do is correctly set them in your .htaccess file if you are using Apache for example. If you are unsure of how, let the community know here or in another question.

Once that is done. Assuming you are only using your domain and not a sub domain, you will simply submit your preferred domain. The reason for this is: For ranking purposes, a domain and a sub domain are not treated as a single site/entity; they are treated as separate domains. So a link to one does not attribute anything to the other per se.

Hope it helps,

No, there are too many open variables: age of pages, localization, keyword popularity, etc.

Edit: look at mozTrust of urls and domain mozTrust of various sites. This will show you that a + b is not equal to c.

hope it helps clarify.

Alan, if direct calls are slightly increasing but traffic is down, have you added a number to meta description, local seo, etc.?

Karan,

I would suggest that you may want to go back and take a look as if you believed it were just the opposite. When you see it as though there is no effect on inner page value does the change in perspective change what you see?

When you think about it, a highly ranked Home Page can be the result of popularity and strong content throughout a site. Such that, the content and popularity cause more people to go to that home page (an easy first thought is media like CNN.com). Because I know they have some news I like, I go to their home page first and most people will bookmark that page. By virtue of that, when I get there, I go to other pages on the site. (Note, some of these will have PR=1)

Now, if we take a look at a site that gets tons of pub when a business first opens or has a new offering and the home page is the target url, you will often see lots of lower ranked pages behind it. I have seen this a lot when a company is in a competitive space trying to catch up in some way and they do a big spend to drive traffic. They get an increase in Home PR, but as people go into the site they leave due to poor development, navigation issues, not what they were looking for, etc. The result is less internal pages with backlinks and/or traffic and subsequent lower rank.

If you look at mozRank which is a corollary to the SE algorithms, it shows this better IMHO. Such that, you will see Domains that rank highly (often because of history/longevity of domain causing more links, traffic to home page) along with Pages that out rank the home page, because they are getting more traffic/links, etc. than home page sometimes because site is newer and the traffic was developed to a specific product or service as opposed to the home page.

What one has to be careful of is that if you are trying to increase your page rank of your home page in order to affect the PR of the inner pages, are you losing valuable commercial traffic in the interim by not instead taking care of the money making pages? If you take care of them, the home page will gain naturally from the traffic due to human behavior like bookmarking, remembering the domain name url as opposed to the inner due to ease of shorter url, etc.

So, I can see how you would arrive at that assumption; however, I would recheck the premise.

Best to you on a great question.