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Google should be the one displaying the locations that are closest to the user. Your addresses should be showing in full if you are marking the locations as storefronts that have real visitors. It really sounds like your locations are not trusted by Google and therefore not being shown and/or being displayed incorrectly.  At a quick glance, "Ultimate Workout Gym and Bootcamp" looks like a highly overstuffed keyword ridden business name. It will be hard to make that name your own. I mean if your name was "Zoobox" it would be pretty easy to establish trusted locations.

Either way, you will need to prove to Google you are a real business at each location by providing trusted and consistent citations. Switching business names repeatedly will not help you here.

Build your community.

If you have maxed out your keyword traffic and are no longer seeing an increase, then focus on keeping the visitors that you are capturing. Keep them engaged and coming back for more. Reach out to them. Get them to sign up for emails and newsletters. Work on repeat visits. Fine tune your content so that time on page grows. Make your content shareable so that visitors will attract more visitors.

I could see linking to an image file itself as useful if the image were larger and you wanted to display it outside of a paragraph of text. Many infographics could qualify for a page of their own. The site would still benefit from traffic and from authority.

Fair enough. If you believe there is a benefit to your users then proceed. Sounds like they are seasonal navigational links and that they could be good for users. But because this tactic could be used to manipulate search, it might still raise flags.

If you are automating these links and they all appear on the same day at the same time with the "Exact same fantastically keyword stuffed anchor text" then it will look suspicious. If these are links pointing to a uniquely titled event, "November SEO Evangelist Raleigh" and the news is published casually in content over a few days after the original announcement then it will look less suspicious. Especially if the each publication adds in some additional commentary about the event that makes it useful for each site's distinctive audience.

As with everything SEO, test it out. You should know fairly quickly if you get an algo penalty. You should also know fairly quickly if users are finding the links useful. I would certainly "NoFollow" the links.

You are looking at site structure. You want it to make sense and you want to link from the broad subject down to the specifics. Example:  Shoes > Women's Shoes > High Heels > Brand Name High Heel Shoe

The reciprocal linking in the content of each page can become confusing if your Shoes page is linking anchor text "High Heel shoes" to the High Heels page, while the High Heels page is linking to anchor text "shoes" back to the  shoes page. I believe that the best way to establish your pyramid is through breadcrumb links, and URL structure. Folders can be useful for defining hierarchy.

The pages you cross link must make sense to users. Dropping in a "Children's Toy" link on a High Heels page doesn't usually make sense. Whenever you consider doing something for "keyword optimization" or "ranking" you need to consider how does this benefit a user.

Well it certainly doesn't sound natural. Is there a benefit to creating these links outside of SEO?

The error that is most problematic is when you have 404 pages that you are linking to internally and/or are found in your site map. Google reporting that an external site is linking to a 404 page isn't as damaging. If it truly is an error then a 404 is okay to have, but not preferable. If the page linking to you made an error, it would be preferable to seek out the owner of that page and ask them to fix it. However, if you can't reach the owner and if the referring website is a valuable traffic source and/or that link juice is important then, yes, add a 301 redirect.

ahref.com and majesticseo.com both keep historical linking data. You could use these tools as well to determine if you have any inbound links that are not being redirected.

So the root domain authority is an average of the domain? Isn't Root Domain just the Root of the domain, not the entire domain?

So just curious, but on my domain, http://www.bulwarkpestcontrol.com the Page Authority is 59 and the root domain authority 52. That seems odd as it is the same page. Explanation?

I think it's always a bad idea to link to a 400 page. So if your site is producing links to these 400 pages then yes, that is a problem. I believe 300s are less troublesome, but if it were my site then I would eliminate as many of them as I could.

I see a lot of search queries being indexed and found by Google. If the page generated offers something unique and not purely duplicate content then I could see this as helpful. It would be a tough line to define of what is strictly spammy SEO and what is helpful. Most often I see these pages for obscure searches, like "best spots with a view for holiday dinners in ibiza".

If you do decide to test these pages, then I would suggest to not dilute your strong pages. If you already rank for "holidays in ibiza" then don't try to rank a similar page like "Ibiza holidays"

I look a the general factors of traffic and ranking first. Then I move to pages that receive new visitors.

But I also try to monitor the top 100 in the 'pest control' search at US level. Someone said this was irrelevant as it's not how users search.

I am curious as to other factors: Webmaster tools for Indexed pages? Traffic? Impressions? Clearly a link warning would be an indicator. So what other tools could indicate how much of an impact updates are having?

I like these. Visibility is a great addition to the simple traffic and ranking.

Having a conversation with a fellow SEO via twitter and we were discussing measuring algorithm updates.

In the aftermath of Google Penguin 4 how do you determine the effects it has on your site/sites and your respective verticals?

If you want more data then you must pay for it.

"Beggars can't be choosers."

You need a 301 redirect from a www to a non www. Or vice-versa.

You need to read this article: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

Here is some help if you have a windows server:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/301-redirect-on-windows-iis-help-part-2

A Canonical tag can be used when the split pages are the same pages but with two different URLs. So site.com/sneakers.php and site.com/sneakers, here you could create a canonical tag to let the bots know which page you'd prefer them to index.

Read more here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization

Yes, I believe google would give you a boost if you could acquire an influential writer in your field. Author rank is still new territory, so the only way to be certain is to test.

Hard to beat what Dan has said here.

The only think I could possibly add is to monitor whether google has added those pages to the index, and/or removed them. I find it telling to see what google acknowledges by way of their own search results.

I agree with Jesse. Pull quotes isn't the problem. Copy article and add nothing extra of value is the duplicate content problem.

lol... "wait 'googs stolz my cheezburger??"

You pay a "ghost writer" to be invisible. Therefore you claim the content as your own. If the content is original quality content than it could and most like would boost your authority. But author rank is more than just having a lot of content published by you, it is about influence. So simply writing a lot of good content does not make you an influencer. Your influence and in turn author rank are based on the citations you receive and the traffic you command.

Back to your 'ghost writer" question. Ghost writers have been used on and offline for sometime now. It seems to be a generally acceptable practice. But this does not mean that Google does or will always accept this. So if you were to ask me if this were acceptable, then I would judge this by how much you are contributing to the content.

An alternative method would be to set up a "persona" as the writer. This is justified by saying authors use pen names. Indeed, Franklin once wrote newspaper columns under a pen name in his early years for fear his age would discredit his work. But this "persona" approach may also run a risk with google.

So pick one or the other, and stick with your story.

That is a tall order, especially when you throw in local directories like Yelp and Yellow Pages. I'd love to know if there is such a tool out there. I do know that Authority Labs provides results based on a location. Have you check theirs out?

The re-ordering of content on a page could give the page different emphasis. You would have to take a look at the page as a Google bot, to determine if the responsive theme displays the content differently. This could even go as far as throwing up links that should be navigational as content. What does or doesn't fall between a

and

makes a difference.

For the most part, I wouldn't expect a properly designed responsive site to change your SEO.

I don't believe adding a blog to a website would generally cause a drop in authority. But here are a few scenarios where I feel it could drop your authority.

• It could be negative if the content added to that blog section is duplicate content.
• It could be negative if the content is too thin in that blog section.
• It could be negative if the bounce back rate is too high in the blog section.
• It could be negative if the blog is overly syndicated to other low quality blogs.

So unless you fall into one of those, then I don't think your drop in authority is likely related to you adding a blog. Now if you lost rank, then perhaps google is trying to determine between pages that are too similar which one should rank.

To your 2nd question, internal links to your homepage will most likely not hurt you especially if they are part of the navigation structure. It is natural for a page to link back to the home page in the navigation. But links to your home page within the blog content that are keyword stuffed could hurt you, these links are not natural.

Have you lost a significant amount of traffic? What exactly do you consider a loss of authority?

Classic answer, ..."It depends."

At one time theses links would have been considered external. But Google has grown up and realizes that most of these are internal links. Maybe it had something to do with Hubpages using sub-domains to escape the panda.

While this article is not specific to your link graph, it may help to realize that google is on to this type of linking... http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/08/reorganizing-internal-vs-external.html

However, the "it depends" can come into play when you don't own the domain, say wordpress.com. Those subdomains are likely treated very differently. Each subdomain on wordpress.com is unique it's authors. Perhaps this is why Google wants to push authorhship.

If it makes sense for sites to link back and forth then I don't see a problem.

I'm a local pest control company. I can create a page for other local businesses I would recommend. They can do the same.

But as with anything, don't go crazy with it. If the links are given solely to get reciprocal links then you are in trouble.

I look at site authority. I look at the number of comments other articles get on the site. I look at distribution of articles (tweets, digg, facebook). But more than anything, "how relative is the site my subject?". A link from a high authority video game site really isn't going to pass much juice to a pest control site.

Who is the linking root domain?

Start by figuring out if you can change the link from the linking root domain. If it's your own website then you've got to fix the problem yourself. There are a lot of reasons that 404's happen across a domain. Usually it's a matter of a page or template referencing the wrong source. Or a folder not referencing the root domain.

If it's outside of your website then try contacting the owner. If that doesn't work then create redirects where needed.

I've noticed several discrepancies in google's cache system. It seems many of their documents lag and are not updated immediately. It could just be errors in cross data population. If you really want to know the last time the Google bot visited your website then you will want to visit your server logs.

If your server logs don't show a visit from google on the 25th then we really do have to wonder. My guess is that the webmaster tools is reflective of the correct date. Either way, I'd check for the error they are reporting.

I am sure there are number of opinions on the best way to accomplish this. I for one still believe you can create a unique page for each of the surrounding areas of a metro city. Metro areas are commonly associated with their surrounding towns and suburbs. In fact, if you search "Wellington town fl" in the related search you will find "town of jupiter" which then has "village of tequesta" in it's related search.

I do so for locations like San Antonio. San Antonio is the main city, Converse, TX would be a subset of that metro.

Was Diablo 3 prior to Matt's 2005 post?

I show you as number 6 for "Psoriasis videos" that seems pretty good.... although google didn't pick up the actual video.

Where were you before the release?

With many of the updates over the last year, do you think that scraper sites like chron.com could actually hurt your SEO efforts?

I am sure the general SEO statement of "It depends" applies here as well. I picked on PRweb.com specifically because they are not a "Free-For-All" PR site.

My suspicion is that many of the sites that call themselves PR sites are of very poor quality.

Do PR releases help? Do links from PRweb.com carry no value? Was Matt Cutts being specific to the user's website in the Google Webmaster discussion, when Matt said "I wouldn't expect links from press release web sites to benefit your rankings, however."

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/O178PwARnZw/discussion

There are clearly benefits to both.

Brand -

1. Trust.
2. No confusion as to who owns the page.
3. Further Brand recognition

Keyword -

1. Could be easier to remember
2. Could help your rankings.
3. Could get direct traffic all by itself.
4. Could generate brand awareness

If I were Nike, then I'd go with my brand name over 'shoes'. But as an unknown pest control guy, I'd take 'pestcontrol'

Or on-site / off-site

#semantics

Thanks for the reply EGOL.

I agree, and I approach my content in a similar fashion to you. Your #2 means you are an "Author" which equates to "Authority".

However, I am still intrigued by the theory of finding common phrases among top rankers for a specific query, and using that in the content creation. There is a logic that says google tells you by the results what they want there.

For the most part, I think most people that push LSI only do so because it sounds kind of fancy.

In theory, analyzing the top results for a given phrase and comparing the common words and phrases would indicate what google considers relative language to the query. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) was and still is a buzz phrase for some SEOs. But how much stock do you give to the idea that if you can determine the common language for top rankers and then duplicate that language and density of common words that your website will then rank for that query you desire?

Has anyone here tested the theory of using semantic language from the results themselves to better rank?

You aren't going to get much support for an automated link building system around here. You may want to check into some black hat forums for that kind of feedback.

In the end, if it's a tool or system that everyone can use than you are going to find that Google is already of aware of it, and that it will give you no competitive advantage because anyone can do it.

Having said that, many SEOs get a short boost from spamming tools, but at the cost of loosing all rankings in the future. If you want to play a game of constant building and burning then you are free to live the treadmill life of nonstop running.

I simply use incognito in Google Chrome.

Title & Description really get read?<sarcasm></sarcasm>

I appreciate the feedback. Very insightful. And it is reassuring to know that titles do help CTR.

So I did a little more digging. This is actually a branded term, and it appears that the maps listing is currently in the 2nd position. Which leads to the next potential discovery, ...Does google webmaster tools consider a map listing a rank 1-10? Further investigation of my keywords suggests "Yes". So the map listing is getting a higher CTR than the first position.

I'm digging through my Google Webmaster tools and found something really odd. On one particular keyword phrase Google is reporting a higher CTR on the 2nd position over the first. A lot higher. Per Google the 2nd position is getting a 31% CTR. Has anyone else seen this?

Well I am just a pest control guy....

But I don't think I am the only one that has had this happen to them.. http://www.seomoz.org/q/one-keyword-rank-inexplicably-blasted-into-oblivion

Link juice is lost in a redirect. You should never expect to gain 100% of link value from a redirect.

I'd certainly look at cleaning up the duplicate titles and content. Add cononicals if you have multiple URLs referencing the same material.

What does your link portfolio look like? Anchor text distribution?

If you don't see any huge red flags then take a breathe while google puts you under water. There is constant flux in the serps. Sometimes drops in rank are simply google testing. I've had sites drop out for a week or two at a time then rebound to where they were previously.