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Has anyone tried fabricating a fake, brick-and-mortar store as an SEO experiment? Sort of along the lines of what Starwood is doing (check out this Wikipedia experiment with the Test Galaxy Sheraton), but with a legitimate physical address and all? Was it useful?  And are there any potential legal troubles that could arise from borrowing a vacant address? I'm thinking this could be helpful for my Intern to gain practical experience in local SEO, without the politics of working for a client  But I wouldn't want to blight that address for future occupants if the experiment went horribly awry. We could instead offer pro bono services to a small business with a limited web presence – that would be useful to her, and constructive.  But I'd like to have a better understanding of what signals Google looks for when deciding whether to index a website in local search, and see whether possible to dupe those algos. What are your thoughts, Mozzers? .

Rand makes a really great point in this 2009 post about the shape of crawl paths: "#4. Craft navigation / category pages that are worthy of links.  If you can make these pages worthy of links and attention, you drive PageRank and crawl priority further down your site's architecture into the content (and signal the engine that ALL your pages are important." Which makes sense, intuitively, because you'd like link juice to flow directly and undiluted to your money pages.  "Here's all my Green Widgets, Roger: they're all right here. While you're at it, here's a related blog post—'5 Ridiculously Awesome Things Every Green Widget Buyer Should Know'—and, oh look!  Would you like to see my Blue Widgets as well?" In practice, though, the Home » Widgets » Green Widgets doesn't sound all that alluring.  Useful, absolutely, for UX, but not for getting links.  Anyone have some favorite examples of Category / Subcategory hierarchies that do well as link-bait? Client is a marketing agency dealing in the technical arcana of databases and ad serving, so their money pages won't be as specific as a Green Widget or a Miami Hotel.  Their site isn't huge, and the pages will be extensively interlinked, so the emphasis has more to do with link juice / page authority than indexation.  But I'm wondering if it could it be smart to replace a generic "Services" category with a KW-rich drop-down menu of "Marketing Solutions"  (i.e. 'Increase Customer Retention') and link each landing page to a relevant charcuterie of services, white papers, webinars, case studies, etc., rather than keeping these pages in their respective silos—even as they link horizontally to related services?

Hey SEOMozers! Two prongs to this question; I'll keep it succinct. I've been working as an in-house SEO/SEM Analyst for about 5 months now.  While I'm generally savvy at telling the story behind the traffic/conversion data, and making forensic recommendations (I worked in SEO prior to this while in college), ideally I'd like to see my reports read less like these piddly Excel charts and percent change statistics.  Ideally they'd look more like Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight blog for the New York Times, or OkCupid's periodic dispatches on OkTrends: visual, statistically-informed, and predictive, the kind of report that under other circumstances might plausibly generate backlinks. Data analysts swear by R for statistical modeling, but is it useful for our Google Analytics data sets, holes and uncertainty and all?  Is the steep learning curve worth the effort?  Tutorials I've seen online assume a proficiency in programming or statistics that's beyond me, or they're written to support a textbook exercise.  Any recommendations for a book, online course, or general resource with more of a niche focus? And a general question about stats too, since it's related: what level would you prescribe if I really wanted to kick this up a notch?  I studied a humanity in college and while it helps with the numerical storytelling, I wonder if the practical arcana of Bayesian Methods/abstract probability theorems have a place in Web Analytics.  Do they?  Are there options for us bushy-tailed young analysts to pick this up without resorting to B School? Thanks in advance!