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The example directories you have given look pretty spammy to me. They all have the same design and look to have been made to make money rather than service a need. In the print world they would be the crap newspapers put through people's doors, left in supermarkets / shopping centres. My advice would be to try to avoid these. Look for directories that provide a benefit to users and look to have unique content i.e. specific to niche or region.

Since the search engines aren't very good with videos yet, that is the reason behind the practice. For clients, I also always try to include a brief summary below to help out a bit more. Never hurts to cover all the bases!

Hey JB!  Sorry, maybe I'm missing something, but if the pages are non-spidered and not included in search results, are you suggesting that Google is going to know about these pages and exit rates by using your Google Analytics data against you? Although Google is hush-hush about what they use Analytics data for, I don't think their intention is to use it for search results.  Here they say: Shared data will be used to improve the services we provide you and will help create more powerful features for you to choose from. As they become available, only those who share their data with Google will gain access to these services and features (e.g. benchmarking and an enhanced version of AdWords Conversion Optimizer). The DoubleClick Ad Planner Publisher Center will also offer greater insight to the customers who have opted in to share their data in Analytics and Ad Planner.

It's not particularly important. "Blog" doesn't offer any sort of semantic importance to the content underneath. Singular and dense category landing pages are the goal with this strategy. That's more important than creating a URL distinction between your blog and static content.

We were discussing him getting a temporary office in whatever city he wants to be found for, so then this would work with Google places, etc? If it was a real physical address and local phone number, then yes it would work with Google Places. I would suggest using Google for whatever address you plan to obtain and examine the results. I like to obtain addresses zoned for business which appear as businesses on Google. Also, how could he also be ranked for a city in Phoenix, like Scottsdale? Would we have to do the same thing as say Tucson or LA? The website would need to be relevant for the area for which he wishes to rank. Relevance can be established in numerous ways: physical address as suggested above mentions of the locations on the site testimonials from clients in the area links from the areas involved anchor text using the area names There are other means but the above area the major ideas. each page needs to rank for it's own city right? You can't have the home page targeting both one or more cities without taking a hit in the SEs on each city? Actually a single page can rank for multiple areas. It's up to you how you wish to present the site. For major areas which are far away such as Chicago and LA, you may want a specific page for those areas. For other Arizona areas, you may wish to continue using the home page. It really depends on your competitiveness and resources.

Some quick notes regarding your site: you have a flash-based page but you have the HTML code fully supporting a non-flash version of the page too. Very well designed. You are using 11 H1 tags. Try changing to 1. The other tags should be H2 or H3. your Resorts menu shows the other brands have their own primary domains, not subdomains as you suggested. You could merge all your sites into one. This would offer the advantage of combining your DA into one site, allowing all pages to rank better. I think my client is using black hat tactics such as cloaking. You are right. The website is using black hat tactics. In the future if you can share EXACTLY what leads you to this belief, it would probably make finding the problem easier. As you can see, the home page shows almost no text. Even with the flash disabled, the home page appears the same but the image viewer shows a single image instead of a slide show. The html shows a large amount of text which is hidden in a div called "homepage-content". The div is set to be invisible: height 1px, width 1px, overflow hidden, etc. This behavior will be detected by search engines and directly lead to a severe penalty. Most likely the site will be pulled from the index.

So, no one has an opinion?

Hi Aaron, Your 301 redirect is working fine and sending all non www traffic to your www subdomain, so there is no harm to your SEO. The potential for that was explained by Ed in his reponse. Google has simply indexed your non www root domain before you put the 301 redirect in place and has not picked up the redirect and adjusted the index as yet. If you have not already done as Nico suggested and advised Google in your Webmaster Tools account which is your preferred domain, then you can do this. It is likely to enable Google to pick up the 301 more quickly, although I have heard Googlers refer to it as a "hint" which means that you should not hold your breath, or be overly concerned if you do not see a change in the results page straight away. Bing also has the same function in Webmaster Central. Sha

idk if this would help, but Bing looks at Geo Meta Tags when Google does not (ie claims not to)

Hi. Maybe it just takes a bit to cycle through and update. I see the URL now when I search for "movers novi mi. <cite>www.mynovi****movers.com</cite> JjIul.jpg

I tried multiple configurations of what you said with replacing ##caturl## but I think I botched it in the end, if you could help me a bit more.

Only thing I can think of is Dr Pete's experiment - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/catastrophic-canonicalization - but that's not quite the same as the example you're proposing. I think you should still get a good idea of what happens after removing canonical tags though.

Can Google deal with "search engine safe" parameters? I added our sort stuff to Webmaster tools but I'm not sure Google knows what to do and can't find any info on this.

The noindex tag needs to appear in the HTML head of the page. I am not familiar enough with WP to say if that can happen as part of the default software, but my guess would be a SEO plugin may be necessary.

You are welcome to do both, but I would only do such if you felt the link would actually be used by visitors or otherwise added value to your site. The SEO value of footer links is quite small. It is my belief Google understands footer links, understands sitewide links, and assigns a value accordingly.

My plan was to build 3 or 4 location pages for the locations we provide tech support for and target location based keyword Anchor text to these URL's e.g "Tech Support Brighton" and then for the home page build links that have the anchor text "Tech Support". A sound plan from a SEO perspective. The one caution I would mention is to be 100% consistent with your anchor text. It is especially important since your keywords are similar. Whenever "Tech Support Brighton" is used throughout your site, it should be an anchor text link to the appropriate page on your site. This method sends a clear signal to Google as to which page should rank for the term.

I'm going back to where you said your intent is to be a leader in this space. If you want to be a leader, you need to come up with a new angle on the content itself and have a reason for people to come to your site as a direct visit or rss subscription, not coming there because they found you in a google search for a trending topic. Mashable, and sites like them, gets their views and is a leader in their field because they are the ones who went to YouTube and sorted through hundreds of videos to find those ten videos, write descriptions about them, select the order that they appeared, etc. If you truly want to be a leader, you'll need to be the one out there doing that, not rewriting copy after another site does the research. It's less about "does this beat a plagiarism detector and can I stay a step ahead of the Google algorithm" than "can I provide some awesome content or way of looking at things that no one else has done yet".