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I'd probably value branding if it's clear what the store provides. For example, I'd certainly click on Fred's Pet Store, but I wouldn't necessarily click on Fred's Home Goods, even if they happen to have tons of pet supplies. Title changes like that are typically something Google does on their own that you can't change. Take a look at the articles below for other recent info (Jan 2012) about Google changing titles and snippets. For what it's worth, "New Hampshire Cat Toys" isn't showing any local results for me SEO by the Sea: How Classification of Page Elements and Search Results May Influence Alternative Titles and Snippets Displayed in Google Google Webmaster Blog - 01/12/2012: Better Page Titles in Search Results

Brett I did not mean tell client you will do anything for free. What I meant was, assuming your client has an associate in city X where there is no presence by client otherwise, you get your client to agree that you will go to their associate with a proposal to do the local for the associate in city X for no charge. The client would pay you for doing the work, the associate will now have a quality local presence in city X, and your client will be the main portion of the Places, Bing Bus.Port, etc in the city. So, your client is BigMoneySvc.com, in city X their address would be that of the associate in X. You can name the associate in the listing. If the assoc. has their own website, that would be a problem, unless you agree to have a landing page on client site that links to assoc. site. (Assoc. gets link juice). So BigMoneySvc.com/xcity-associate-site. If you use subdomain, you will get no push from the main site. If you use sub directory you will: Mainblog.com/Charlotte. With this, links to Charlotte will help root domain over time and links from root domain will help Charlotte. If you buy exact match domains with or without hyphens your only issue is starting at level zero. Soooo...... that you have to figure out. Start at zero with new domain or sub domain, crate a page on main site that could be helped by mainsite DA, etc. Hope I was helpful for you.

Search engines regularly recrawl every website and will update their information based on changes you make to your site. It is a natural part of the internet. The "site under construction" information is not harmful, but in the future should be blocked from indexing.

Hi Jeff, First of all, you are probably already aware of this, but Yahoo search is now powered by Bing, so any change that affects one will also affect the other. So, there are a few things I would look at if I were you. Duane Forrester from Bing has made it clear that Bing may use the meta keywords tag to identify sites that are attempting to gain rankings by spamming. Danny Sullivan wrote an article on this at Search Engine Land a while ago - The Meta Keywords Tag Lives At Bing And Why Only Spammers Should Use It. On checking your source code I see that the meta keywords tag has been fairly heavily keyword stuffed on all pages, so this will not be winning any Brownie points from Bing. If you want to use the tag, then you should limit it to just a few relevant terms (that are actually included in the page text). I have recently seen evidence with sites I am working on that good, basic optimization improvements, paying attention to fundamentals like keyword placement in Titles and improving the usefulness and readability of page content has brought across the board ranking improvements in Yahoo & Bing. Whatever you do with your content, make sure that the language is natural and not keyword stuffed. If you are wanting to get a good handle on your on-page optimization, you can use the On-page Keyword Analysis Tool to check your pages. You have access to the same tool from within your Pro campaigns, but in there you need to have already added the keyword you want to check into your campaign keyword list. With the version I have linked to (which you can access through Research Tools in your Pro Dashboard), you can check any URL for any keyword. I also noticed that you have multiple instances of instructions in the head of your pages due to having used  different SEO plugins to edit the site. Bing's crawlers have a reputation for being quite sensitive to errors and code issues, so this is something that I would also clean up if I were you. You can also find useful information on optimization in the Beginner's Guide to SEO and this video on the SEOmoz Ranking Factors 2011 Pro Webinar. There is also lots of great information amongst the Whiteboard Friday videos and posts in both the Daily SEO Blog and YouMoz. Hope that helps, Sha

Thought I'd post a follow up on our 6 months later to see if anyone else has seen a similar pattern in Bing rankings. Peaked at the end of June (compared to previous average rank) Declined by ~15% to end of July Same until end of Aug Declined by ~20% until end of Sept Improvement of ~15% until the end of Oct Decline by ~45% in mid-Nov (pretty much back to same levels) as beginning of June levels - mention on WebmasterWorld about this: http://www.webmasterworld.com/msn_microsoft_search/4389293.htm Same until now There have been changes to the content on the site, so not too surprised at some of the results, but would be good to know if the regularity of changes to the Bing algo has been seen by others...

Do you know if that page is cached or if there's a nocache tag on the page ? I have seen some of those scenarios in the past. In my opinion, that should be the reason.

Early on in the linking days, the number of links mattered.  Then, things evolved, and quality and authority were factored.  I see the same thing happening here;  I think some of the lower quality, semi-automated, mass bookmarks are losing value. I believe value is passed from the higher quality bookmarking properties, especially when shared by an authority's profile. Beyond any juice, there is also benefit to mentions, and activity in the social sphere.  That is why it continues to be part of our strategy.

No doubt - you're not the only one who hasn't had a ton of success thus far with the social network.  Google Search Plus Your World is an attempt to integrate the social network into their search engine, using their biggest asset to promote Google+.  With this move, Google hopes to increase the Google+ user base and make their social network relevant. If Google gets its way and Google Search Plus Your World does its part in promoting Google+, you might find those +1 buttons being used more frequently.  That's the idea, anyways. You may have heard that Google Search Plus Your World has been included in the FTC's anti-trust probe.  This is presumably because Google is favoring its own social network in search results over Facebook and Twitter.  Google has said this is only because Facebook and Twitter's terms of service prevent this from happening, and that they are open to the idea of integrating these social networks.  If this happens, Search Plus Your World will have implications not just for your Google+ page, but for the rest of your social media presences as well.

What I call a RollBack is when Google goes back in the Past in terms of ranking. It happens sometimes when they run a new Algorithm or changes. They show older results in some datacenters while updated in others.

Hi Adam, It's based on the preference of the webmaster of those domains. They have simply chosen whether or not to include www in their domain. It doesn't have an effect on SEO because the addition or exclusion of www doesn't give search engines any clue as to the quality of the site. The important thing to remember here is that http://www.example.com and http://example.com are technically different domains, so if you're not careful, it's easy to run into duplicate content issues. If you're working on this for your own website, you should pick one version and make sure the other redirects to it. Hope this helps! Tim

Looks a bit like panda too, that sharp drop. How is your content? thin, duplicated, templated, non-unique? edit: you didnt do anything but you did move affiliate links behind logins? Better go double check you didnt screw something else up unintentionally when doing that What does you IIS/Xenu crawl say? S

In my Opinion your Brand Name should not be in your Titles. At least not on all pages. It should be in Contact pages, in pages and articles texts but it titles not that much. The reason I'm saying this is that there is 2 possible options : 1- Your Brand is not so well known so why trying to rank for your Brand when you could target a more efficient Target in term of relevant traffic generation. 2-Your Brand is well known, so that it is probably already in your Domain name and the texts everywhere everywhere on your sites, in anchor text of incoming links. You probably had a website running for this brand for a while so that Search Engine knows that your web property is the one of your brand. You probably also have a lot of links pointing to your homepage with your Brand for Anchor Text. Search Engine will then know. So instead of focusing on your Brand, I think it's more clever to focused on bringing visitors and customer by using Keyword related to your products and services and have a larger base of customers to get awareness of the brand and then promote and recommend your Brand !

LOL, I like the last line "Good luck convincing the good doctor to change his/her opinion." I can relate!!!!!!!

The voting is part of the website shown in the SERP. Just think of a SERP showing some products including an amazon offer. Amazon added the information from their customers product reviews using rich data etc. Google uses this rich data information to display these stars. But however, not all sites using rich data snippets get those stars.

Given the current state of local, I tend to agree with Robert. Those local results seem to dominate in some cases and they're a powerful draw for search visitors. I should add, though, that it's possible to be in the 7-pack AND organic with blended results - sometimes, Google actually counts a listing as both. I'd say it also depends a lot on the nature of your business. Some queries/industries are naturally local-oriented, and you have to compete in that space. For some queries, local won't matter at all. If your business is naturally local, though, and many queries produce 7-packs or blended results, that's where you have to compete.

How much is the link for the year again, from what I can remember about $299. I think the $299 is better spent else where, if it costs you $20 for a article to be written I would produce 15 articles and either put them on your website or use them for guest blogging, I think this will give you a better return SEO wise then a Yahoo listing. Like Rob said though, if your a large company with a big marketing budget, there is probably 4-5 directories they would signup with and just repeat the subscription year on year.