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The answer is yes, absolutely. There is mass confusion over this and there have been many posts in the Q & A about this. I have struggled with this and researched this extensively. You first need to set up a proper Google+ page for your company. This is tricky as I', sure you've discovered because you don't want that page connected to one specific person's Google profile. Here is a link to an interview and partial transcript that tells you exactly how to do this correctly: http://www.widerfunnel.com/events/google-and-search-engine-optimization-an-interview-with-janet-driscoll-miller Thanks goes to Chris Goward of Wider Funnel Marketing. He interviewed Janet Driscoll Miller at SMX West after her presentation on Google+ and SEO Here is the excerpt that answered my question about Google+, personal Gmail accounts, Google+ pages for businesses and branding: "The administration of those pages can be tricky, because it's not exactly like Facebook pages. People expect it to be like Facebook and it's not. You can have multiple administrators but there's still one owner. So, for instance, if you're the business owner, you should go in and do it, so it's under your email address and you always have the ultimate control. So make sure that the person you're giving it to, that either it's an email address that multiple people can get to or that the owner of the company could. The other challenge is that most people use their Gmail account to sign up. Well, the problem is, if I'm the social adminstrator and I leave the company and I used my Gmail address to set up the page, I can never transfer that Gmail, necessarily. So you want to try...you can set up unique profiles, with your own domain name. So I like to recommend that, just because I feel like it's safer for companies." So here's the best way to set up a Google+ page for business: 1. Have a business owner create the account using a Gmail username related to the business or brand, something like this: MyBrandName@gmail.com 2. Don't use a gmail account as the email address in the sign up process. Use an email account that is a general email address at your company that multiple people could have access to if necessary., something like this GooglePlusPage@MyBrandName.com 3. Have your social adminstrator or social media manager and team members associate their Google+ profiles  with the core Google+ page set up by the owner. That way, if they change positions or leave the company, they can be disassociated with the business page, but maintain their personal profile as they move on to something else. This information was copied from my own response to this Q & A: http://www.seomoz.org/q/do-you-have-to-have-a-google-profile-page-for-a-person-before-you-can-build-a-google-brand-page I hope this helps. I have actually written to Google asking them to clarify all of this because everyone is so confused. As of yet, they've not provided any help. Dana

Hi Derrick, I hear you on that, but Google's total guidelines for Local businesses (http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528) are very cursory...some might say intentionally so. Google is not motivated to explain word for word how to achieve high rankings in their system, so while the basic mantra of creating content for users and not search engines is their public message, the truth of the matter is that a great deal of what Local SEOs and SEOs do is experimental and is very much about the bots and not people. When something is found to work, the idea gets spread around and becomes an accepted best practice that aids ranking efforts, until Google changes their rules (think Penguin, Panda, and the never-ending changes of policy in Local). Schema and other types of markup are relatively new, so everyone is pretty much experimenting with this. What you would be doing would fall in line with that, if you choose to test your strategy idea. Who knows, you might discover something no one else has noticed! You're not alone in wishing the guidelines were totally clear about every scenario, but one might say that it's not in Google's best interests to operate that way, right?

Tom has given you good advice.  I'll put in my 2 cents' worth as well. There are 3 main reasons for a site to fail at reconsideration: 1. Not enough links were assessed by the site owner to be unnatural. 2. Not enough effort was put into removing links and documenting that to Google. 3. Improper use of the disavow tool. In most cases #1 is the main cause.  Almost every time I do a reconsideration request my client is surprised at what kind of links are considered unnatural.  From what I have seen, Google is usually pretty good at figuring out whether you have been manually trying to manipulate the SERPS or whether links are just spam bot type of links. Here are a few things to consider: Are you being COMPLETELY honest with yourself about the spammy links you are seeing?  How did Russian and porn sites end up linking to you?  Most sites don't just get those by accident.  Sometimes this can happen when sites use linkbuilding companies that use automated methods to build links.  Even still, do all you can to address those links, and then for the ones that you can't get removed, document your efforts, show Google and then disavow them. Even if these are foreign language sites, many of them will have whois emails that you can contact. Are you ABSOLUTELY sure that your good links are truly natural?  Just because they are from news sources is not a good enough reason.  Have you read all the interflora stuff recently?  They had a pile of links from advertorials (amongst other things) that now need to be cleaned up.

I am with you on this. Good to check for any issues. Before focusing on SEO, functionality if my main concern.

"Also any reason you need such accurate information? I mean't WMT numbers should be good enough." I need this information to be sure of a good internal link structure and linkjuice purpose.

I really liked it. It worked great for the company where I worked previously as an in-house SEO. We would be using it where I am now for a new niche business we built, however, Volusion's platform, at this time, is not capable of accurately calculating sales tax. If Congress passes the Main Street tax for Web site e-commerce, Volusion's platform will need to catch up and be capable of calculating sales taz accurately across all 50 states, or their business will be in trouble. For the niche site here, we selected 3dcart because it integrates with Avalara Avatax, which is a great (but fairly pricey) service that automatically and accuralte calculates sales tax for difficult states like California and Washington. However, 3dcart has some serious limitations and the backend is not nealy as intuitive as Volusion's. Merchandising on 3dcart, particularly bundled products is pretty much a messy nightmare. Volusion is much nicer. Volusion also has a nicer way of organizing all the backend content, including design elements. 3dcart is very disjunct in terms of how design elements are orgnized for editing in the back end. As far as SEO goes, I think they are both fine. Perhaps 3DCart might have a tiny bit of an edge because it does allow you the ability to 100% customize your URLs. Hope that's good food for thought! Dana

I agree with Danny, but let me add this in as well. If you are keeping a tight control over the blog content and quality (hopefully you are) then subfolder is the way to go. If you are allowing guest bloggers to post weak content and external links, and they have the ability to publish live without you vetting prior to release, then a subdomain would be better to protect the main site.

Don't ask me how i understand this question but somehow i do. You had someone doing link building for you and they used the wrong anchor text. Consider yourself lucky that he made that mistake, it won't result in your main keywords getting penalized. Stop submitting to directories and spammy places and work on your onsite optimization and content.

These guys are right. I use to manage a few sites with servers located in Asia and Europe and the rankings were never affected by the location of the server. So just some hands on experience for you.