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I would build links in to the site through outreach and content production on the site - does your client have business partnerships they can leverage for links? You need to develop equity into the site. Position your client as an innovator, leader, something to set them apart from the competition, and then go out and promote them. Establish relationships with bloggers and influencers and have them write about your client as well. Lots to do to promote the site, but in today's day and age, you still need links to rank your content, especially in a competitive niche like electronic cigarettes. Good luck, Mark

What CMS platform are you using? Also do you have your mod rewrites in place on your .htaccess file?

I agree with João and I add the possibility that you switch to a shared hosting server, where in theory you might encounter "bad neighboor" problems. This is when someone on your same shared hosted server is doing spamming or bad things Always check your neightboors with services like spy on web or others. Best regards, DoMiSol

Agreed

Nice to know that you found my answer helpful mate. Will be waiting for your responce of how the plugin worked for you.

I have ranked 100's of keywords on sites that I wasn't allowed to touch the front page of.  The keywords were not mentioned on their pages at all either.  In some instances your keyword doesn't even need to be on the page to rank like i this instance. Have a great day.

No problem my friend. You are most welcome. As most of your site gets served through https, you need to have your http version of URLs re-directed to their https equivalents. I repeat, HTTP to HTTPS. Make sure that the re-direction gives an HTTP header status message 301 and not anything else. If you do so you do not loose any of your efforts put in to building links to the https version. You can check the HTTP header status messages for your URLs by using any of the tools like the one found here: http://web-sniffer.net Best regards, Devanur Rafi.

Thankx Irving for your inputs on this... I have a clear picture on this now

I completely understand, it looks like I am going to have to merge all the sites into the lawfirmname.com site and just work very hard on building the practice area pages up to rank well.  The transition is what I am concerned about, but I guess I will just try to make it as painless for their rankings as possible, by taking down the microsites slowly as we build up the lawfirmname.com site and definitely not linking any of them together in the meantime, just leave them like they are until I can take them down.  Thanks for your responses.

Hey Irving, Thanks for these insights...I have been doing the keyword optimization on the site and perhaps that is not such a great idea.  I was happy when the moz page analyzer gave me an A for the homepage but I was looking at keywords and not overall page health. I think I need a good on-site SEO person who can systematically work through these issues and implement solutions.  Naively, I thought my developer of the Magento site would bring these skills to the table but  perhaps that is a very different skill set.  Do you agree?  If so, are there some folks you can recommend (that are reasonable and available....difficult combination I know)? I really appreciate your time...it is kind of like therapy as I feel like I am on my own out here! Hunter

Exactly, it would mean that you're minimizing the risk of having the site penalised as well. Let me know how it goes!

Like already mentioned...it won't harm you if you buy it and in some instance might help you as well, as long as you utilize it in a proper and genuine manner. Just keep up with the best practices. And, I am still waiting for someone to answer this part of my original reply: "BTW, I am not sure about whether there is some kind of penalty that exists if you buy domain names that closely resemble your website URL and then permanently re-direct it to your Live/ Main URL/ Website. Can someone answer this?? After all your intention is not to spam but to stop others from misusing an URL that closely resembles your brand."

In my opinion, this is not a good project.  I would find something else.

Take a look at KeywordSearchRankings.com - the tool monitors Google SERP rankings as they are displayed in almost any country and city in the world. It also has a "custom location" feature, where you can type in the exact cities from which you want to check rankings.

outstanding low hanging fruit is simply keywords that you rank for or come close to ranking for however you probably were not yet aware of them? they are ones that are prime for link building built links designed for those keywords in the pages that they're on more than the actual words these days. Did you see some of the issues if you did an audit do a complete audit on your website use every tool. And then when you are scrolling over the issues shown it will give you much better look into what's actually happening. Also set it up with your Google analytics account. what methods are using to currently build links? have you thought about using video? if so Wista.com offers free 3 free videos they are very powerful and the way that Google treats them also you may want to use the Raven schema WordPress plug-in it rocks and is free. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/schema-creator/screenshots/ I am going to give you my phone number in the private thing you may call me at any time I have to go and get lunch. I hope this is been helpful & I hope to hear from you soon. Thomas

I have not had clients  for a long time... but if you want to get them in a small community build a small local website that achieves top rankings for some of the queries where you might obtain clients. Then you have something to point at when you call on them. If you go see the autoglass guy, show him that you already have top rankings for "smalltown autoglass" and offer to give him an ad there.... rent him the page.... or help his website get ranked in the local map listings (if they appear for your community).  In a small community a site that focuses on small service or retail business is still a viable way to do this.  When you build that site and get it ranked you will get the experience and relationships needed to help your clients to success. I would not offer to sell my services unless I already had some experience getting websites ranked in similar SERPs.

Hi and thanks TommyTan Actually I only recently put the site up and as such..it has zero backlinks.. I think your second guess might be more likely.. but still....it was started with a different theme where this post was NOT on the home page..

Hi Mark! Thanks for asking this good question. While there is no limit to how big a website can be, I think you can see from the general response here that most members would encourage you to stick to manually developing quality pages rather than automating hundreds of thousands of pages, solely for ranking purposes. I second this advice. Now, I would like to clarify your business model. Are you a physical, actual business that customers come to, either to buy paintball equipment or to play paintball in a gallery? Or, is your business virtual, with no in person transactions? I'm not quite understanding this from your description. If the former, I would certainly encourage you to develop a very strong, unique page for each of your physical locations. If you have 10 locations (with unique street addresses and phone numbers), then that would be 10 pages. If you've got 20 locations, that would be 20 pages, etc. But don't approach these with a 'just switch out the city name in the title tags' mindset. Make these pages as exceptional as possible. Tell stories, show off testimonials, share pictures and  videos, entertain, educate, inspire. These city landing pages will be intimately linked into your whole Local SEM campaign, provided they each represent a business location with a unique dedicated street address and unique local area code phone number. But, if you are considering simply building a page for every city in the UK, I just can't see justification for doing so. Ask yourself - what is the value? There are business models (such as carpet cleaners, chimney sweeps, general contractors, etc.) that go to their clients' locations to serve and for which I would be advising that they create city landing pages for each of their service cities, but this would be extremely regional...not statewide or national or International. A carpet cleaner might serve 15 different towns and cities in his region, and I would encourage him to start gathering project notes and testimonials, videos and photos to begin developing a body of content important enough for him to start creating strong, interesting and unique pages for each of these cities. But I've also had local business owners tell me they want to cover every city in California, for instance, because they think it will help them to do so, and I discourage this. Even if the business is virtual and doesn't have any in-person transactions with clients or physical locations, I would still discourage this blanketing-the-whole-nation-with-pages approach. A national retailer needs to build up its brand so that it becomes known and visible organically for its products rather than your theoretical approach of targeting every city in the nation. In short order, the mindset behind that approach just doesn't make good horse sense. And, as others have stated, adding thousands of thin, potentially duplicate pages to any site could definitely have a very negative effect on rankings. My advice is to make the time to start developing a content strategy for cities in which you have a legitimate presence. If budget means you can't hire a copywriter to help you with this and to speed up the work, accept that this project deserves all the time you can give it and that a slow development of exceptional pages is better than a fast automation of poor quality pages. Hope this helps!

Hi Chris With over 4000 pages on your site I'm assuming you are using some kind of CMS? Either way I would recommend the use of the rel=canonical tag to counter this potential duplicate content issue. It helps by a. proving to the search engine's you are already aware of this issue and b. clarify which of the duplicate pages they should prioritise and pass DA to. SEOmoz have published a great post on the various options on how to implement the code which can be found here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content. The other option would be to use 301's. In my experience implementing 301's on a window's server (assuming this is the case as your url extension is .asp?) can be tricky. The management of hundred's of 301's can also become very cumbersome and complicated often resulting in infinite loop errors. Hope that helps. All the best Alex