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Hi Mark, They have business pages - see http://www.google.com/+/business/ You basically create a business page under an existing personal G+ account. Thanks, Brad

Lee - its gonna be a big one I think we are all waiting eagerly!

David - Thank you for explaining more clearly, it's really appreciated! If all major keywords have dropped 5-10 spots, it seems that your traffic must be down quite a bit, not to mention brand exposure. I would submit a reinclusion request. I would be totally transparent, tell them what you have done to try to get the links removed, but also tell them that you did not build these links. Show them what links you are responsible for. Unfortunately there is no way to know how long it will take for your client to recover. It's possible that they will be sandboxed for a while. What I would recommend doing is moving forward to building really good links for them, trying to get good press coverage, and try to get in contact with someone on the spam team to review your case. John

I created a company page for our business and it didn't cost anything. I'm not seeing anything about a cost on their company page overview at http://learn.linkedin.com/company-pages/, either.

Definitely eliminate personalization, as alsvik said. Beyond that, though, there are still other factors (Location, I.P address etc.) that you need to account for. The best way I've found to handle it is to forget the idea of a "true reading". There are too many variables to eliminate in the real world. Instead, keep your measuring consistent and prove value that way. If you measure in the same way each time you can demonstrate an increase or decline in rankings, because the variables will always be the same The various tracking tools, while not perfect, will eliminate some of the variables, and will certainly give you a consistent read each time. From a client management perspective, it's more about setting client expectations than anything else. You need to discuss the fact that results may be slightly different when they check. You also need to explain why. Once you've done that, you need to get your client to agree to the process you'll be using to track rank. If you use SEOmoz rank tracker, or Raventools, or whatever else, then get their buy-in that that platform is the one you'll be using to measure the effectiveness of your work . If you don't, you're likely to end up playing the "I'm not ranking where you say I am" game. Edit: If you're tracking rank manually, then consider looking for something like the Bruce Clay toolbar, which will let you run searches via proxy.

Well how about getting people in the industry to review your software? Giving away trials or even free copies/downloads and asking them to blog about it and they will naturally link back to the product pages or even the category/subcategory pages for these products? I would start there.  Also are there any industry blogs that you could guest blog on? And what about your own internal content? Do you write tutorials or installation guides? Start cranking out your own content and leverage internal site linking.

Thanks for answers. My question was a bit unclear as I realise it is better to have links coming from blog websites back to my website and not reciprocal links.  Some good points Moosa. My website is on accommodation so maybe I need to find blogs on travel websites and try to post good value guest posts on places to visit and the best places to stay. Im a bit unclear about the competition idea. (point 2). Can you clarify a bit more please?

I agree with Alan. Use OSE as a guide. It's about the best thing we have for competitor analysis. I have MUCH more information in GWT.

The 301 will give you the credit you're looking for.  You can't really control how people link to you unless you're actually creating the link, so you just have to bear with it.  Be sure to emphasize the non-www address when you're trying to get links so you get the full value of the link.  The issue with non-www is that allot of people are accustomed to typing in a www and may ignore any suggestion you provide.

Thanks again Bryson, I will check out those resources, very kind of you. Cheers Mark

Hey Joshua, Thanks for the quick response. I saw Wil Reynolds post yesterday, but didn't read it. And, it had the answer written all over it. Thanks!

Thanks for the input. In one Mozinar, Rand suggests that it is good practice to link to sites that link to you (naturally) because it helps Google index the page that linked to you which is not something I've heard before but makes pretty good sense.

Facebook notes are an effective way to generate SEO value. Use to be much stronger SEO generated but the SEO value seems to be declining. Regardless, crazy not to take advantage of it if you are using facebook. We are making sure that our notes posted are keyword rich by utilizing the title of our note and our "page name" and making sure it is a unique note with unique content, If you do that you will be happy with the results...... This is a decent posting of some stuff you can do with facebook seo optimization that I used in one of our SEO playbooks I created earlier this year. (see link below) I also copied and pasted her section on fan page notes and what the seo title and meta description ends up being.... Hope this helps. Happy SEO'ing..... http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2110283/Basic-SEO-for-Facebook-Fan-Pages "Facebook Fan Page Notes **SEO Title: **The title of your note plus | Facebook. Meta Description: Your page name wrote a note titled _the title of your note _plus | Facebook. Facebook notes – they don't get a lot of love anymore, but they do have a more controllable SEO title when you create them and, of course, they add to the additional "pages" underneath your fan page / website. Notes allow you to add lengthier updates to your fan page without having to take your fans offsite to get more of your content. Some people use them to syndicate their blog posts on their fan page, but I find this feature is a little inconsistent. Unique notes, on the other hand, could add more value to your page."

In my experience, the best return you get is when you send your press release to individual editors/influencers. I have used PR Web, but have not found nearly as much value as actually contacting individual editors. Time consuming? Yes. But we've gotten some great press/links back.

I used Open Site Explorer, which is available under the "Research Tools" section of SEOMoz.  (look in the main menu above for "Research Tools" then look on the left of the page for the Open Site Explorer. Just put your url in there, and it will bring up lots of links.  Then just go and visit them to see what they are like.  You can also filter for follows vs nofollows, and other attributes, depending on what you are looking for.  I just opened up a half dozen or so of them to get a feel for your links, and found what I mentioned above. There are other tools too, such as Raven Tools, which could also show these to you, but since you are a pro member, you might as well use SEOMoz tools.

None of these are tools that build the links. These are more links tools that help you identify opportunities or some of the good links you should try and get. More like a starting point.

Thanks Ben, but we were using both majestic seo and open site explorer to get a look at as many as we could.  With 1.5 million back links it is almost impossible to see them all anyway. I appreciate your response.