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I have a client that operates a local service-based business. They are thinking of expanding that business to another geographic area (a drive several hours away in an affluent summer vacation area). The name of the existing business contains the name of the city, so it would not be well-suited to market 'City X' business in 'City Y'. My initial thought was to (for the most part) 'duplicate' the existing site onto a new site (brand new root domain). Much of the content would be the exact same. We could re-word some things so there aren't entire lengthy paragraphs of identical info, but it seems pointless to completely reinvent the wheel. We'll get as creative as possible, but certain things just wouldn't change. This seems like the most pragmatic thing to do given their goals, but I'm worried about duplicate content. It doesn't feel as though this is spammy though, so I'm not sure if there's cause for concern.

When working with WP sites I generally use Michael Torbert's All in One SEO Pack. I've encountered a few examples where when the homepage shows up on a Google search results page the title/title tag shows up as {Business Name:} | {Keyword/Description}. In the 'General Settings' of the plugin in the 'Home Title' field, I have it listed as {Keyword/Description} | {Business Name} I'm not sure why the order is getting switched and where the ':' comes from. I'm not sure if this even has any adverse effect. If anyone has had experience with this, your input would be appreciated. Note - I'm not seeing this issue reflected on Bing.

Any information on when Moz Local will be available in CanadaÉ

Looking at a Google Analytics report for a client - Traffic Sources - Referrals - Landing Pages from one particular referrer. This one referral site is a large trade directory that links onto several deep pages of the site, but also links onto the homepage. Analytics is showing the one landing page as //index.html. That's 2 // - not one. If you click on the link, it's a 404. I've never seen this in Analytics before. I'm looking at the client's info on this trade directory site and I can't see a link that points to this 404. The majority of incoming traffic from this site is apparently coming to this //index.html page, so you'd think it would be coming from their main profile on the site. But it's not there. Also, if you had all this referral traffic coming to a 404, you'd expect a really high bounce rate, but it's not - it's average. The client also has a sister site also listed in this directory, and I'm not seeing this same issue in their Analytics. Is this just some weird glitch in Analytics?

I recently posted an (insightful) comment in a LinkedIn group. I can see that someone from this group has taken a look at my profile, so I'm assuming that they read my comment and they were at least a little intrigued as to who exactly I was. I would regard this person as a prospect. Maybe a slightly unlikely prospect as there's a couple thousand miles that separate us geographically. I'm wondering what sort of etiquette/best practices there are for connecting somehow with this person/company. Initially I thought I'd follow them on Twitter, maybe like them on Facebook, but they have no such presence. I like the idea of connecting with them that way because it's a 'soft' connection - not too aggressive. Doing something like emailing or calling and saying 'Hey, saw that you looked at my LinkedIn profile', seems creepy & desperate. Even sending an invitation to connect seems a little too forward. I feel the only thing to do is to continue to involve myself in this group by posting thoughtful & insightful comments in order to get noticed further that way.

I recently had an old client that called me in a bit of a panic over a significant loss of rankings due to penguin. The internet marketing company she had hired, is actually a very large player in the industry, but because I'm not out to slander anyone, I won't name names. They engaged in some "link building" that resulted in the vast majority of the website's anchor text being keyword-rich, exact match anchor text from such gems as www.link-add.net. They also placed a couple dozen incredibly keyword-rich articles on the site that were clearly not meant for human consumption, and were only accessible through a footer link that's only located on the homepage. The client forwarded me a response from them saying, (quoting verbatim). "We have never engaged in any black hat SEO techniques, nor will we ever engage in any black hat SEO techniques. Just that notion is ridiculous" So clearly, the strategy I outlined above, in the mind of this company, is not black-hat SEO. So getting to my point: **if that's not black hat, then what is? ** I'm posing this question largely because I'm appalled that a large internet marketing company seems to be suggesting that the aforementioned techniques represent good, sound SEO, and I'd like to get an idea as to what people in our industry actually feel are good, acceptable practices. Where is the line? Can we not set higher standards for ourselves?

I recently discovered a cool SEO tool. I didn't write it down, save it, bookmark, etc... And now I can't remember the name of the tool for the life of me, but I'd really like to use it again. I was hoping I could list of the features that I remember, and one of you Mozzers know what I'm talking about. It was a backlink analysis tool. It had a free version, and after you performed so many searches/searched so many backlinks, you had to pay. From what I remember it was a fairly nominal fee with the most popular package in around $25. The reason that I liked it so much was you could take an OSE csv file, dump it in there, and it would sort all of the links by link type, i.e, footer, comment, directory, etc... Then it would put it all into a nice pie chart for you and show you the % of the total links that each link type made up. It would also analyze the anchor text and would show you every anchor text used, and the % of the total each one made up.

I just stumbled upon an SEO company's website that says they are a 'Google Preferred Agency'. This isn't just a line of copy on the site, it's featured prominently on the site, and they use the Google logo as well. I've never heard of a 'Google Preferred Agency'. One would think that even if there was such a thing, that it would involve a link back to a profile page on Google like they do with AdWords/Analytics partners... Am I missing something, or is this company doing something a little shady? I don't want to toss the name of the company out there because I don't want to publicly bash them.

Does anyone know how to make meaningful contact with Facebook??? Last month I tried to set up a couple Facebook PPC campaigns for a couple clients only to find out that I can't because another client of mine for whom I set up a Facebook PPC campaign last fall has an outstanding balance of a whopping $30. To be clear, I was only an admin on the client's Facebook page. Their credit card (not mine) was in use, and they didn't pay their bill. So now, Facebook is holding that against me. I've contacted them through one of the help forms on the site. They clearly don't understand where I'm coming from. I've now sent them 3 emails, and now I'm not receiving a response. I just recently resorted to sending a direct message through Facebook to Facebook Marketing. No response. It really does boggle my mind how they're penalizing me, and in turn, my clients, because another former client of mine from nearly a year ago has a $30 balance. I'm not even an admin on the one client's Facebook page anymore?! With AdWords, I regularly have clients who owe Google money but that doesn't affect all of my other clients.