Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I'll try answer your questions in the order you had them

• I don't think this would be a problem.  It's only natural that people would set themselves to the task of fixing all of their location data at one time.
• Again, I don't think this is a problem.  There are people out there who are naturally this detail oriented, and would just naturally have perfect listings.
• This could be a problem.  Is your legal business name "Business Name Location?"  If it is, then you shouldn't have to worry about it, but if you are trying to stuff a keyword in there you do have a problem.
• As long as you set your places profile to show that you do business at the their location you are ok with this one.
• From my experience they will just slap the local on top of my normal organic listing.  The only time this doesn't happen is some of my internal pages where I get both a local and universal result.
• Social Media for SEO is still in debate, but the vast majority of SEO's agree that it does have at least a small impact.  That being said, I wouldn't attribute this to your problems unless all of your competitors have massive followings with tons of interaction.
• Google isn't nice enough to announce all of their changes, so the only people that would have any idea are the ones with research departments.  That being said, I haven't heard of any, but I'm sure they are constantly tweaking it.  The only big announcement was Matt Cutts saying that merchant quality was going to become an indicator sometime this year.
• I can feel your pain here.  My company works on a lot of businesses in the same vertical, and the CMS's in this vertical create thousands of pages with the same exact title tags.  My first month is usually spent indexing the site numerous times to try find all the stray Titles that need to be changed.  From my experience this will have a negative impact on your search results.  I'd work quickly to fix the issue.

In the first month of a new client I go on a huge citation building spree, and I've never encountered an issue.  Some of the citations are directories, so I would say that you should have no problems.  Just make sure you just use the companies name in the directories, and don't try getting any keywords in there.  The links aren't worth much at all, like Jesse said, and trying to keyword stuff will just end up hurting your efforts.

If the variations are for cities, then absolutely!  If they are for just slight variations of the words like "car dealers," and "car dealerships," then I would stick to just one page.

So, if it is like your example, and each page is for an individual city, then I would definitely have separate pages for each.

For cases where you are going from dynamic urls to keyword rich ones, it definitely pays off.

i.e. domain.com/112342 to domain.com/keywords

For cases where you are switching from underscores to dashes in the url, it might not pay off.  That would depend on how competitive the vertical is, and if your competitors are doing it properly.  In most cases this change would not be worth it, but if things are really intense on that search, and you can't seem to budge with your internal page, it might be considered.

It won't hurt your site if that's what you are asking.  Will it rank well?  Really depends on how your organic writing style relates to SEO.  Is it broke up into sections?  Do those sections of decent headers?  Are their pictures?  Are the pictures named appropriately?

The more options the worse actually.  Our brains aren't designed to interpret that many options at once, so minimizing the difficulty of decisions at each level helps.

The book "Don't Make Me Think," goes over the average visitors though process quite well, but here's my quick and dirty version:

-  Like a restaurant menu that has everything broken down.  People will quickly scan the menu looking for the classification of food that they want - appetizers, entrees, dinner, etc.

That's just like if they were on a website.  They quickly scan to find what they want, even if it's the at the most macro level, and click that.

-  Now, the next step depends on the size of the menu.  With a huge menu they will probably filter it down again by picking Beef, Chicken or Pasta.  On a small menu, though, they will probably have limited enough choices to be able to select their entree.

This is exactly like on your website.  If you only have a handful of options after the first click, then they will be able to select one.  However, if you have hundreds of options, such as a clothing store, then they will want to filter it down again.

This creates an optimal user experience, and helps focus your authority to your main category pages.  Linking to everything dwindles down the authority with too many internal links on each page, so it makes you spend a lot more time on link building then you actually needed.

Now, well established sites are a little different because they have so many external links pointing at them.  However, you will still see Amazon limit the number of links on it's home page to the main categories.  For example, on the home page they link to Children's Books, but not to Children's Books ages 6-8.  That's because more people search for Children's Books, and they want to make sure that the authority they pass from the home page goes to a page that is more useful to rank for.  Also, with the amount of time they spend analyzing their analytics you know they would adjust if the user experience suffered at all from designing it like this.

What language is the code of the embedded survey?

The amount of authority a page can pass is divisible by the number of links.  So, let's say you have a site authority of around 100 (this is just a random number to make my math easier).  If a page can pass around 90% of it's authority to pages it links to, and you have 100 links on the page, then each page is going to receive about .9 points of authority.  However, if you dropped it down to 10 links, each page would get 9 points of authority.

Source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

Now, there are enough articles confirming that a page can pass around 85+% of it's authority, but there is no exact science when we test for correlation.  Regardless, the more links you have on a page will decrease the amount of authority each page receives.  So, if you want your next level pages to rank better, you should be inclined to decrease the number of links, especially on the home page, and try to pass more authority to those pages.

This also drops into the user experience problem.  People want to be able to find what they are looking for immediately.  A menu with 100 different options, including the drop downs, isn't going to help you achieve that results.  Instead, you would be better off creating the main menu options, the one you see on the home page, with 7 or fewer options.  That way people can quickly find where they are going.  Then, when they select one of those options they get an increase in available options on the next level.

This is what the Telegraph, who hired Distilled - one of the best SEO agencies out there, does: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

This creates an optimal user experience, as well as controlling how the page rank/authority/link juice flows through the website.  I believe Bruce Clay calls this process "creating a silo."

To do this easily in Wordpress look into conditional menus.

The short answer is yes, it will help your whole site.

As for the long answer:

Every page that is included in the structure of your website, has internal links pointing to it, or has external links pointing at it will have some amount of authority/page rank.  Of that authority, a page is able to pass 85+% of it's total authority on to other pages.  So, if you have 10 links on that page it will pass around 8.5% of its total authority on to other pages.

So, let's say you have a blog post about the "50 Best Logos Ever." From there you would want to link back to your logo service to try drive authority back to those pages.  That way if your post gets links you will be able to drive more authority back to your pages that make you money.

Unfortunately, quality back links aren't going to come from a list.  The best kind are naturally earned with great content, but you can supplement this process with a great guest blogging process.  To do this you will want to find blogs in your niche, which would be anything about advertising really, and build a relationship with them so that they will accept your guest blog posts.  There's awesome resources out there for best initial emails to start this process, but I don't have any saved off hand.

The ideal option is actually getting links naturally.  To do this you will want to great engaging content that gets people to link to you.  This may be a list of the best 50 logos ever, or 10 reasons why you need a virtual assistant.  Anything that will get people to read it, comment, and then blog about it.

Kevin is completely correct, but I wanted to expand.  The grading on SEOMoz is a measurement of how well you are following on page SEO best practices.  It takes a look at things like Keywords in Title, H1, etc.  Having a poor grade on SEOMoz doesn't mean that you aren't capable of ranking well for the term, it just means that you haven't taken advantage of known ranking factors.

What that tells me is that you may be in 1st right now, but it wouldn't be hard to pass you up.  If you do improve your on-page SEO, though, you will make it harder for people to pass you.

Future Services to Game Google:

• Get 10,000 visitors who spend 20 minutes on site, and 5000 return visitors!

• Get 5000 Facebook shares, and 10,000 Retweets

• Get A Comment With From an Author Rank of over 9000!

In all seriousness, though, I think this may already be happening.  Going through the analytic histories of some of my clients I've seen them get several hundred visits in one day from a keyword that has less than 10 searches a month in the Google Keyword Tool, and they ranked on page 50 of the SERPS.

The strength of the link does depend on the page that it is on.  So, if the home page did have more authority, then it would have a larger impact.

Is the blog hosted on the same domain as your main website?  Like www.domain.com/blog?

If so, there probably isn't any harm in in unless you have thousands of blog posts.  In reality, though, I would vary up the tag.  It can get old for your readers, as well as the robots.  If your blog is hosted off site, though, things change a bit.

Things to consider, though:

• What % does this make up of the content on the page?

• Does this cause your pages to have an enormous amount of the exact match internal link?

• Would my readers want to see this every week/day/hour?

Depends on how cute the cat is.

Unless I'm in the same vertical... insert evil laughter

Yeah, my list really stinks.  Here's the revision lol

-Don't keyword stuff

-Do write something for people

-Have a call to action

-Use LDA

I'd use Screaming Frog to index my site, and then look at the internal links from each page.  You can see the number of links, the text used to link and a bunch of other stats.

Most of the time I see numbers like this when people have extensive menu's that include links to every page on the website.  So, I'd count the number of links in the menu and footer to see if that may be the culprit.

I work in the automotive niche, and almost all of the website providers have issues with duplicate content, and site structure.  However, we are working to improve that.

Anyway, my off-site is mostly going after guest blog posts from local bloggers, as well as anyone writing in my clients niche.  I'm not good with macro's in Excel, so all of my outreach is done by hand.  Beyond that I focus on citations since my clients are always looking for local customers.

When you checked out the different real estate searches did you see a lot of local results?  Whenever I do those searches I see the 6-pack of local results.  That actually makes me really excited, because the average real estate person only has a handful of citations.  So, you could really take over those searches, in theory, with a citation binge.

Things not to do:

• Don't keyword stuff

• Write something readable

• Have a call to action

• Read about LDA: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lda-and-googles-rankings-well-correlated

On-page optimization is more than just using the keywords.  You have to use contextual clues to reinforce your main keywords.  Talking about Cars?  Write about engines, spark plugs, etc.

I agree with Tom on this point.  I'd create a short snippet, and just link back to the original article.  That way the traffic still flows through you, in case you have Ads on your site.

The only exemption to this for me would be if the content would be so amazing for my community of followers.  In that case I might accept the content, and just no-indexing it.  That way people in your RSS feeds can get it, and not have to jump over to another site, but you won't run into issues with Google.

Hi Marie!  I loved your recent post about the difference between Panda, Penguin and Unnatural Link Penalties recently.

First off, I'd like to say that I'm still getting awesome results with my SEO.  I work on around 100 websites, and both my on-site and off-site techniques are improving the results.

That being said, I can see that the site level metrics are having a larger influence.  I work in a niche that has lots of different providers for websites, and most of them create tons of duplicate content.  The sites that are creating 1000's of pages of duplicate content have been hit hard in the past 6+ months, and it's getting harder to keep them ranking well, but the one's with great architecture are actually getting easier.

For a great example of a company taking the initiative on this I'd look at Autotrader.  They recently, within the last year I believe, decided to no-index all of their inventory.  They did this because all of it was the exact duplicate of what the dealers had posted in dozens of other places online.  Right after they made that change I saw a dramatic improvement in rankings across the board.

Go under "linking domains," and keep expanding until you find one with a bunch.  Right below that group it will say something like "see all links from this domain."  That will bring you back to the inbound links section with a few different filters that weren't originally there.

Another option is to check your Google Webmaster Tools.  If the domain has enough authority it will pop up with how many links you are getting from the one source.

In this article they suggest that local/blogs about your area carry more weight in local results: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2065673/Link-Building-for-Local-Search

So, what kind of link building did you do?  Citations? Blog posts?

This goes along with what Miriam said, but did you include a name, address and phone in the link building?  If so, did you use the same address for all of them?

Are you using schema location data on the site you are optimizing?  Do you have the meta tag for the geo location in the header?

Very true.  Also, if I came off as being a jerk in my post, I do apologize.  That wasn't my intent.

"If I suggest that they make an H2 tag with SEO..."

H1's carry a little more weight than H2's, so I'd suggest using an H1 if you can.  Ian implied that, but he didn't outright say it

Also, the page you have listed has capital letters in it, which isn't ideal, but it's still fine.  However, the lower case version does 404.  So, any links that are sent to the lower case version will not result in you getting link juice to the page.  I'd suggest using a 301 redirect from the lower case version to the upper case one that you have listed.

lower case version:

http://lightsigns.com/uniko_manufacturing_limited.html

From SEOMoz: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/mozrank

"MozRank measures the link juice (ranking power) of both internal and external links"

If the competitor has fewer pages, or at least less pages being linked to from each page, then the "link juice"  being passed between internal links can be greater.  So, while you may have a lot more links going to your home page, you may be linking out to so many different pages from the home page that the link juice passed to internal pages is minimal.  Thus, diluting any return you might get from those internal links.

That's assuming that the official Mozrank page isn't lying about internal links.  Dr. Peter is the only one that can tell us that for sure.

Dr. Pete:

The competitor has a lot less links, actually, but I'm super pumped for this tip!

Rogs.SEO:

How many pages does the competitors site have compared to yours?

Have you ran a screaming frog or a xenu of both sites?

Who has more internal links pushing into the page you scanned?

Are they just menu and footer links, or are some of them in the body?

Your ratio of domains to links is pretty low, do you have a bunch of site wides pointing at your site?

Getting served local results can be hit or miss on some phrases.  It is possible that local results just weren't generated when the rankings were generated, so it had no data to go on.  So, what I'd suggest doing is check your webmaster tools to get an idea of where the keyword has been ranking over the past week, and compare that to prior to your link building.  When you click on the keyword in your webmaster tools it should have a list saying where it has ranked, and not just the average ranking position.

Also, I have a bunch of phrases that generate both universal and local results on the first page.  I primarily work in the automotive vertical, and I see it with internal pages optimized for used cars, and having a Google Places optimized for used cars as well.  The internal page only exists because the home page wasn't converting those customers very well, but it's a nice bonus to take up 2 of the top 5 spots.

1.Is this how I would optimize the titles?

Each page should have a specific keyword group you are trying to target, minus the about us page.  In theory your pages would look more like this:

Rates: Dog Walking Rates in Anytown | Business Name

FAQ: Dog Walking FAQ's in Anytown | Business Name

Etc.

You would then want to link to those pages internally with the their main keywords, if possible.  So, you would like to the home page with "Dog Walking in Anytown."

2.  Do people expect the title tag to be the same as the menu option they click?

People don't really pay attention to the title tags at the top of their browser.  The only time I check is when I'm bouncing between pages.

3.Should I not optimized the titles?

You would create unique title tags for all the pages to just make sure that they were unique.  Duplicates can hinder your site.

4. Should I not use the same keywords on every page?

Search Engines look at the whole context of your site as well as individual pages.  You will want to use the keywords whenever they fall naturally into your text.  You can then link them internally to the page that is most relevant.

5.Should I use a brand domain instead of a keyword domain?

Depends.  Is the person an active blogger, and will they garner a bunch of links from the amazing content?  If yes, then go ahead with a brand.  If not, keep it simple with an exact match domain.

1. Same domain, but they are different pages.

2. Yes, those would be considered different pages.

3. I use the Chrome Extension: Redirect Path.  It creates a little widget in the header of my browser to show me when a redirect happened, and what kind of redirect it is.

Did a new competitor enter your vertical?  You usually don't see a slow death like that unless you are slowly losing your ranking to someone else.  I'd look at your webmaster tools to see where you are ranking for specific keywords.  It has it broken down by position in there, as well as just average ranking.

For example, every time I checked a specific phrase with a tool I ranked #1.  Yet, I was only getting 10% of the traffic from that word.  So, I dug deeper, and it turns out I was popping up #1 50% of the time, but the rest of the time I was somewhere in the top 5.

Mozrank does take into consideration both internal and external links.  Perhaps he has a better structured site that utilizes internal links in a better way?

It all depends on server types.  Apache servers fetch the same exact page regardless of case, where as a IIS-Microsoft server considers the upper case and lower case pages to be different.

You have an Apache server, so I wouldn't worry too much about it.  If you ever consider switching servers, though, you will want to take a look at your URL's.

I wouldn't think so.  I have several sites that are 50,000+ pages with exact match links in the menu and footer that haven't had any problems.

Have you looked to see if any of the sites linking to that site have obvious purchased links?

The page is definitely over-optimized - especially with external links - so you could be right.  Another option is the page layout update.  There are a lot of ads on the individual stories.

The only real way to tell would be to see the analytics, and figure out the date of the drops in rankings.

How much traffic is this site wide link providing?  None?  Deal with it!  Tons? Leave it be.

What he's trying to say is that you need to build links to be able to get your website to rank well.  However, EGOL is right in that this would not be sufficient.  You would be better off spending that time generating great content for your own site, reaching out to other bloggers to post your content on their site (unique content of course) and creating some sort of newsletter to try get contact info from people in a different way.

Yeah, the url structure.

The link profile of your homepage is very well optimized for "motorcycle tires" so it was ranking decently well, whereas your new landing page is not.  So, it was a good step creating a specific landing page for that search, both on a SEO level and usability level, but you will not just transfer over rankings.

Perhaps contact those websites that are linking to your home with your ideal anchor text, and get them to switch it to the new landing page?  Just don't overdo it with the anchor text.

On a separate note, I'd also work on your taxonomy.  You should really have things broken down like /tires/motorcycle and parts/sproket, not the /##/Keyword you currently have.  I just tell my designer what I need changed, so it's super easy for me to tell you that lol

You need to diversify your anchor text.  Only 10-20% of your links should have exact match anchor text in them, and of your 180 domains you have 50 with "unlocked cell phones."  Plus, you have almost no benign links such as "click here" or "website."  If you want to get rid of the penalty you need to either start building links, or start changing the anchor text on the ones you have.

According to this article it should help: http://www.seroundtable.com/404-links-google-15427.html

The main intent with the footer link is to try acquire additional clients, so just having it in a blog post can potentially cost you business.  However, you do have to worry about over-optimizing yourself due to all the links with exact match anchor text.  There was actually a different blog post about this recently:

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2239260/Using-Footer-Links-to-Diversify-Your-Backlink-Profile

In the article it suggested creating a page on your website specifically about this project.  This ensures that you link to a relevant page, in Google's eyes, as well as a relevant page for anyone that is interested in your services.  The blog also suggests no-following all of the links minus the one on the home page.  That way you still get a decent amount of link juice, but don't have to worry about a site-wide link.

I'd break down your footer link by taxonomies.  Motorcycles: parts, tires, etc. ATV's: parts, tires, etc.  Right now it's not really user friendly, and doesn't provide a lot of value.

Your results can change based on the Google data center that is utilized.  Perhaps your mobile devices utilize a different one than your computers?

Home page has more links, better content, and uses the keyword in both the title and body.  A good fix would be to link out from your home page with the exact keyword to your landing page.

SEOMoz will find which page ranks for the term you are tracking, and you will be able to compare that.  So, yes, it will track your competitor's page.