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is there any recourse to take for competitors that aren't following the SAB guidelines? A way to report or flag?

Thank you all. Please do not think that I am not completely ashamed. Will follow advice to disavow. Punishment served in time lost... that probably could have been used EARNING 10 real quality links.

Out of desperation (lack of time and knowing we were way behind competitors on backlinks) - I went to Fivvr and ordered 50 "high quality" backlinks. I know there are no shortcuts, but this weak little voice push through and said, "Just maybe...it's so cheap, what's the harm?" Well, I should have listened to the rationale voice which is typically so much more assertive!  What to do now?

*Note - I haven't had time to review them all, but at 1st glance, it appears they are off-topic, spammy blog comments - snapshot of links: https://www.dropbox.com/s/9d23c93o1ryrhv1/Screenshot 2016-09-21 11.49.26.png?dl=0

1. Check each page to see if the rank suggested is correct and leave links with legit high page rank?
2. They are all garbage, try to remove them immediately - is this even possible?
3. Watch to see if rank is positively or negatively affected, then go about taking them down if needed?

Other suggestions? (Besides don't do that again, stupid.)

Thanks, Mike. That could be our best option. I wonder about this creating a duplicate content issue though? I suppose if it's what YouTube recommends, they wouldn't smack you for it though??

Client has rebranded and has a new url. They have a lot of great video content on YouTube that has old branding on it. Bad phone numbers, old url, old company name. I was planning to download, rebrand, then re-upload...

But some of the videos have 200 - 2000 views and I prefer not to loose that traction. I assume responses will be along the lines of "you have to weigh which is more important - the brand or the current video rank".

Where I'm stuck is how valuable is 200 - 2000 views on 15-20 videos. Not at all I guess, if they are sending people to the wrong place.

I guess I'm just thinking out loud, but would love to hear some thoughts other than my own!

Just want to thank Miri Offir for the question. Her detailed post and this discussion are the answer to my everything!

Thank you, Miriam! I wish your answer was a bit different, but it is what it is. I appreciate your thoroughness. We'll proceed as suggested and cross our fingers that Google will one day provide a way for SABs to be more competitive in local search...

I've struggled for a few years now trying to find the right solution. Say a client (home services contractor) has only one "location" - only one physical address from which they manage operations. This is not a retail store, not an office where customers would go. Technicians are dispatched to a 50 mile radius to provide service. This 50 mile radius includes a large metro area and many small cities.

Let's take Austin, TX for example. Let's say Contractor ABC has it's office/warehouse in a smaller city just north, Round Rock, and the office's zip code is 78664. But they provide service to all of Austin and some surrounding cities such as Cedar Park, Pflugerville, Lakeway, Buda, etc.

Their competitor, Contractor XYZ, services the exact same areas, but they have the benefit of having a physical address in the heart of downtown Austin, zip 78701.

How does Contractor ABC effectively compete for rankings in Austin as well as the rest of the service area? More specifically, what is the best practice for handling NAP in this scenario?

Most recently our strategy has been to enter the actual physical address where required (not trying to pull one over on google and trusting that google makes the correlation to the metro area) and where we can, we just put the metro (Austin, TX for example). This is also for display purposes so that a potential customer in Austin or Buda doesn't think, "Oh, this company is in RoundRock, this is not for me."

I have multiple clients in this scenario and would like to have more clarity in this strategy before signing them up for MozLocal - P.S. any feedback on the current usefulness of that platform is also welcome!

Currently our blog has been used to add content to our site targeting desired keywords (fairly top-level). For example, if we wanted organic traffic for "Some City Contractors" (by no means a longtail), we would write a blog using this key term in the Title, url, a sub heading perhaps and a couple variations of the term throughout any subheadings or body copy. I think the idea was that since there was so much work to be done to get the static site pages optimized (rewriting that copy), we just decided to crank out fresh content                  targeting these high level KWs, assuming a search engine result is a result and as long as we got real estate there, a click and there was a link to the relevant site page in that article, we were golden (well, maybe not golden, but good).

We are now building a new, responsive site and taking care to make sure that the site's relevant pages are nicely optimized. Higher level page are optimized for high-level KWs and sub pages target longer tail KWs identified in KW research.

Along the way an SEO said it was bad that so many of our blogs were better optimized for key terms than the actual site pages (i.e. service pages, things you would find in the main nav.) This does make some sense to me so...

So what is the new purpose for our blogs in this new age of Google and ever-increasing social influence?

Should we forget about focusing on KWs already addressed within the site's core? Focus more on interesting, super long-tails that maybe don't have a ton of traffic, but are relevant (and oh by they way, something like 3 million terms are searched for the first time each day, right?)? Or forget the keywords, as long as the topic is relevant and interesting the real pay-off is in social interactions.

I'm really interested to see if this results in clear-cut answer or more of a lengthy discussion...

What I'm not seeing addressed specifically in the thread is can the KW term within your H1 & Title differ? I get that if the whole title and whole header differ slightly like:

Title: Best Plumber Local |100% Satisfaction Guaranteed!

H1: Best Plumber Local offers 100% Satisfaction Guarantees!

*Please note - not my best copywriting effort at play here

Then it's not worth sweating over, so long as the searcher does't experience a disconnect between he SERP result and and the landing page messaging.

My concern is over the need to target "ugly" KWs - terms that don't fit well in to the UX equation, but have exponentially more search volume than they "prettier" version.  Let's say "plumber local" has 1,000 monthly searches vs "local plumber" that has 300 monthly searches. But "local plumber" is much better for copy/user readability.  Can you use:

Title for the SERP: Best Plumber Local |100% Satisfaction Guaranteed!

H1 for UX: Best Local Plumber offers 100% Satisfaction Guarantees!

...and still be nicely optimized for "plumber local" assuming you can find a smooth way to work it into copy (easier than doing it in an H1), alt tag, and site has otherwise good authority/reputation. Also, ugly KW (plumber local) would be used in the url).

Thanks is advance!

Thank you all. Please do not think that I am not completely ashamed. Will follow advice to disavow. Punishment served in time lost... that probably could have been used EARNING 10 real quality links.

What I'm not seeing addressed specifically in the thread is can the KW term within your H1 & Title differ? I get that if the whole title and whole header differ slightly like:

Title: Best Plumber Local |100% Satisfaction Guaranteed!

H1: Best Plumber Local offers 100% Satisfaction Guarantees!

*Please note - not my best copywriting effort at play here

Then it's not worth sweating over, so long as the searcher does't experience a disconnect between he SERP result and and the landing page messaging.

My concern is over the need to target "ugly" KWs - terms that don't fit well in to the UX equation, but have exponentially more search volume than they "prettier" version.  Let's say "plumber local" has 1,000 monthly searches vs "local plumber" that has 300 monthly searches. But "local plumber" is much better for copy/user readability.  Can you use:

Title for the SERP: Best Plumber Local |100% Satisfaction Guaranteed!

H1 for UX: Best Local Plumber offers 100% Satisfaction Guarantees!

...and still be nicely optimized for "plumber local" assuming you can find a smooth way to work it into copy (easier than doing it in an H1), alt tag, and site has otherwise good authority/reputation. Also, ugly KW (plumber local) would be used in the url).

Thanks is advance!

Currently our blog has been used to add content to our site targeting desired keywords (fairly top-level). For example, if we wanted organic traffic for "Some City Contractors" (by no means a longtail), we would write a blog using this key term in the Title, url, a sub heading perhaps and a couple variations of the term throughout any subheadings or body copy. I think the idea was that since there was so much work to be done to get the static site pages optimized (rewriting that copy), we just decided to crank out fresh content                  targeting these high level KWs, assuming a search engine result is a result and as long as we got real estate there, a click and there was a link to the relevant site page in that article, we were golden (well, maybe not golden, but good).

We are now building a new, responsive site and taking care to make sure that the site's relevant pages are nicely optimized. Higher level page are optimized for high-level KWs and sub pages target longer tail KWs identified in KW research.

Along the way an SEO said it was bad that so many of our blogs were better optimized for key terms than the actual site pages (i.e. service pages, things you would find in the main nav.) This does make some sense to me so...

So what is the new purpose for our blogs in this new age of Google and ever-increasing social influence?

Should we forget about focusing on KWs already addressed within the site's core? Focus more on interesting, super long-tails that maybe don't have a ton of traffic, but are relevant (and oh by they way, something like 3 million terms are searched for the first time each day, right?)? Or forget the keywords, as long as the topic is relevant and interesting the real pay-off is in social interactions.

I'm really interested to see if this results in clear-cut answer or more of a lengthy discussion...

Out of desperation (lack of time and knowing we were way behind competitors on backlinks) - I went to Fivvr and ordered 50 "high quality" backlinks. I know there are no shortcuts, but this weak little voice push through and said, "Just maybe...it's so cheap, what's the harm?" Well, I should have listened to the rationale voice which is typically so much more assertive!  What to do now?

*Note - I haven't had time to review them all, but at 1st glance, it appears they are off-topic, spammy blog comments - snapshot of links: https://www.dropbox.com/s/9d23c93o1ryrhv1/Screenshot 2016-09-21 11.49.26.png?dl=0

1. Check each page to see if the rank suggested is correct and leave links with legit high page rank?
2. They are all garbage, try to remove them immediately - is this even possible?
3. Watch to see if rank is positively or negatively affected, then go about taking them down if needed?

Other suggestions? (Besides don't do that again, stupid.)