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Those pages, while not great, are far from the worst out there. At least the articles make sense, And they are relevant to your Client site. You probably can't get all of the links removed, and you may remove some that are helping you, so your problem may worsen. I would go looking to see if there are worse examples and try to get those removed first. Look for pages where the text makes no sense or the site name and site theme doesn't relate to the client site.

Measuring SEO effectiveness can be done a number of ways, but it largely depends on the scale of the change that is being targeted.  If you are looking for a 5% increase in traffic, it's often hard to attribute such change to a particular SEO effort.  However, if you are looking for a 10X increase, it is usually pretty clear whether your efforts hit the mark, or missed it in a big way.

**How to develop your ****_1-true-keyword _**into a topical theme: Determine your primary keyword(s) - 1-10 terms that you think describe your site well. List acronyms & jargon related to your primary keyword(s). List synonyms, plurals, and related phrases. Start adding modifiers to the set of words you've grown. Repeat the process with each "categorical topical theme" your site is about. Now you've developed a long list of targets, and it's time to prioritize. Do your research. Get data on the search volume for each keyword in your list. Determine searcher intent. Figure out if you have existing resources available to serve up for each keyword in your list. Go Pro at SEOmoz, and record each keyword's keyword difficulty score. Average out the ranking domain and page authority of the top 3-5 sites for each term you're targeting to better understand your playing field. With this data, you can now make educated decisions about which keywords from your set to target first. You can evaluate which keywords might be the least difficult to rank for, and which might be the most rewarding to rank for, and make decisions that will truly optimize your search engine marketing efforts. _ http://www.quora.com/Is-it-better-to-target-one-keyword-at-a-time-for-SEO-or-two+_ If you're localizing your keyword list, you can use a spreadsheet program like Excel or OpenOffice, or use online tools to append local terms (like area codes and city names) to your primary keywords list: Local Marketing Source developed this useful local keyword research tool which appends local search terms to your list of primary keywords. 5Minutes has a very useful tool for generating and appending local search terms to your targeted general keyword list as well. let+the+wookie+win.jpg

Hi Zach, Welcome back to the Local jungle! The most significant change in Local that has taken place in the last year is how significant a part the website plays in a business' overall ranking abilities. If you were doing Local SEO a few years back, the SERPs were filled with business ranking highly (in the old pack-style rankings) that didn't even have websites. This is rare now. Instead, you've got to have a great website, a clean Places record, review acquisition, citation acquisition, and in competitive verticals or populous regions, good links. Local business index listings are the first place to start with linkbuilding. I recommend that you read David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors Report from 2011 to catch up on some of the top local business indexes. Also, read Myles' Anderson Top 50 Citation Sources for the USA and UK at Search Engine Land. While not all citations sources are link sources, many of them are. Beyond this, what Matt Williamson is describing is pretty much what you'll be doing: building quality content that earns links. And, definitely take the time to memorize the current Google Places Quality Guidelines which have changed rather significantly over the past few years. Check back often because they keep changing them! I hope this gets you off to a good start. Good luck and have fun! Miriam

Great new Rhys!

Totally agree with Cornel. Don't ruin what you have as you might not get it back! Put your effort into making the product page also rank well for the keyword.

Why don't you move everything to the root domain? You can keep all the subdomains in existence and put in 301 redirects from the sub-domain to the root domain and then any links that may be coming in you just ask to get them changed? Then the search feature also is tweaked to only look at root domain? This would simplify the site a lot and make it much easier to manage in the long term. Just my opinion, but hope it helps. P.S. Spend the money wisely, we're in a recession don't you know?

I think if there are in context references to the other brands and you're not linking all the time, then probably still apply no-follow. Basically, apply a simple principle - if you think you may be, or someone else could perceive that you're being manipulative, don't do it. Same with any ethical situation in life.

File extensions doesn't make any difference. I think you must have read about static page vs dynamic pages. Generally aspx or php is used for developing a dynamic websites (database driven websites). But, even if you're developing any such website you can deal with by URL re-writing. You can ask you developer/programmer to re-write the URL into SEO friendly static urls, i.e. without query (?) string in URL. Hope it should answer your query properly

Is nesting a native function of wordpress?  Is it when you create a new category inside of another category in the post options.  I'm pretty sure that's how it works. Yes, nesting of categories is native to WordPress. No plugins or anything required. I believe you control this in the Categories menu (sidebar) Also, I think it's somewhat helpful letting people search by 'Jobs involving travel', 'Outdoor Jobs', etc.  Are those good examples of tags?  Or does that fall into something else? Yep, tags can be anything that is not already a category, and more detailed than the categories. I would just try to keep them specific. -Dan

When I do a query like that I get "most relevant pages" returned.

thanks, been using majestic SEO - pretty sweet actually as it has been finding links from 2007 that were actually broken so i could fix them

Hi Gary, Not sure I can add anything not said here, but if you feel inclined to send me a PM with the URLs, I'd be more than happy to take a look at it.

I think your header links will look spammy. Also, your sharing out our Page Rank to your duplicate sites! I would either remove the links or no follow (are the links of value to your visitors? if not get rid!).

Perfect, I really appreciate the response.