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sure!

Excellent! Thanks Takeshi....I need to improve my internal linking then because all my internal linking is from the sites main menu.

Yes I did it! I set up every subfolder for his country: adtriboo.com/es for spain adtriboo.com/es_CL for Chile etc etc....

Thank you Peter, very clear information All the best! Richard

I would space it out to one every couple weeks, that way if that change has any sort of negative impact you can isolate the cause and reverse the decision.

Hi Jayt, Very good question! Step one is to explain to the client that inclusion in Google's local results is based on the business having: A physical address in the target city (not a virtual office, p.o. box or shared address) A local area code phone number in the city of address (not a toll free number, call tracking number or shared number) In-person transactions with customers, face-to-face, either at the company's offices (like a lawyer or doctor) or at the customers' locations (like a plumber or carpet cleaner). From your description, your client's business is virtual (serving customers over the phone and online) and therefor, is not eligible for local inclusion. Share the Google Places Quality Guidelines with the client so that can see Google's own explanation of their policies: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528 Because of your client's virtual, national business model, building visibility on a local level via Local SEO is out. Rather, your client will need to rely on organic SEO in an effort of gaining secondary organic visibility for service+ geography terms (not primary organic visibility via the local packs of results). Realistically speaking, unless the client is in a non-competitive market, this will be an uphill battle, because it is Google's current preference to show mostly true local results for queries they believe have a local intent. If Google already has plenty of businesses that meet the above 3 criteria, your client will need some incredible SEO work to convince Google to show them organically for queries relating to geographic regions where they have no physical presence. I hate to sound negative, and I'm not saying this goal is impossible, but the client needs to be given the education that will help him understand how and why Google operates the way they do in relation to local data so that the client can make the smartest investment of time, money and effort. Organic SEO may be able to take the client part of the way, but don't forget about PPC. That may have to be a large part of the mix for any company seeking this type of national dominance. Hope this helps!

"The other way is to make a few extra bucks and invest in them in tissues.  You will need them when you wake up to the "Site not found in the top 100" X 2." Well Said and yeah that would suck I am thinking that moving from freethiskeyword.com -> thiskeyword.com cant hurt me from a Google sense, unless the EMD does.

I think I'd start slowly in that case. Keep the relationship aspect in mind, too. Even if all three companies know the writer/client and are aware of the relationship, sooner or later one of these articles is going to take off. If one site gets the SEO credit and the other two sites aren't ranking, there may be friction. Even if the work is spread out evenly and all high-quality, you don't control (ultimately) what content finally sticks and is successful. I just think things could get weird all-around if you send every article three places and only one gets credit.

Thanks Andy.  I made this change........domain.com/blue-blog to domain.com/blog using a rewriterule.  It seemed to work.

Hey Tom, Thanks for tipping us off on this post.  We'll take a look at it!

Hi Lee, Some good information here from Marie. You might find it this Reconsideration Request Checklist helpful too: http://www.rmoov.com/google-reconsideration-request-checklist.php Hope that helps, Sha

Mohit, Tom's advice will help you determine which pages are worth redirecting and which should just go to a 404 page (which should be customized instead of the browser/host default, and should also return a 404 response code in the http header!). My guess is that pages with links only from scraper sites aren't going to pass the tests laid out by Tom and thus would just go to a 404 page. However, any that have decent external links would fit the criteria and would be candidates for a 301 redirect.

Hi Jon, You mentioned that you submitted a file with your known bad backlinks and that you also disavowed those links, but did you actually make attempts to get those links manually removed?  Google wants to see that you have tried to remove as many of your unnatural links as possible.  You also need to document this well in a Google Doc so that they can see your efforts. If you have indeed tried to remove backlinks then the next most common reason for sites to fail at reconsideration is because you haven't identified enough of your links as unnatural.  Sometimes what looks natural to you actually may be a link that goes against the quality guidelines. Don't give up on this domain!  I've yet to see one that couldn't be saved.

RCN There is no "penalty transfer" per se. It is just that those links will have no value, but you can still get people there. You could use 302's if there is some concern but don't really need to. Remember, you are redirecting a page and that is purposeful. You could also disallow the links to the 301'd pages if you want to be over careful. Again though, I would do the 301's and move on. Best, Robert

Hmm, alright thank you for answering my question Chris.  

Thanks for your tips, Tom! Really useful piece of advice. We will definitely look into creating a customer reviews box and turning it into a rich snippet. By any chance do you have experience with product markups? There's an option there to add a product image. If we do it, will it appear in SERPS?

Yes, I will look into doing that on GWT. Was a nice and useful chat indeed! Thank you again.

To answer your question: There are lots of tools that can automate this, but that's a good way to get your new site sandboxed. Don't mess with these unless you really know what you're doing. If this site is a long-term investment for you, then you need to get your blog up and running. It will take a while to see results, but this is generally the core link-building engine of any organization.  Establish a budget and get good writers. The links will [slowly] come. Some of the more innocuous link-building methods that you can actively pursue are social media (pinterest & squidoo especially), newsworthy press-releases, social bookmarking, niche blog commenting, niche & high PR directories (both free & paid), and guest blogging / article directories. However, most of these things are dependent on content. The more content that you have (and the better that it is), the easier it becomes to build links. Creating special offers can also work out well if you can get on various "employee discount" pages from reputable sites. If you have a brick-and-mortar business, local citations will also help to get you going. I hope this helps.

thanks. excellent idea to combine it with press release.