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As stated, having a sub directory works, but I don't think it gives that much of a benefit over the example you gave. But yes location and geo targeting with specific pages can be a great strategy. It works well for me, but I'm a local business so everything I do is defined by location. What you want to avoid is creating pages with duplicate content just to appear local. Simply changing out keyword locations in the content is not going to give you a sustainable advantage. If you are going to create GEO specific pages then make content unique to that location. This is just good for SEO but it's good for selling and converting as well.

Send me a private message of your site + competitors id like to take a look.

When link building, is it acceptable to link with a site that has high authority but has minimal relevancy to our site? - If you are being offered a link from a high authority site from a good industry - take it. You have already done all the work and Google is not great at discounting non-relevant links. Also, if we are publishing articles on other sites, should we also publish them on our own site? Should we add "nofollow" if we publish them in our site? - My recommendation is publish great articles on your site first and foremost. And I would not distribute them. Why give others great content? If you are doing article distribution for links, then send out your "not so great" articles and link back to your appropriate webpages.

I've spoken with several people who fell prey to the 'specials' on that forum. At best, you may see marginal results if you're targeting keywords with ultra-low competition. At worst, your site will get penalized heavily (rankings-wise) for a high number of spammy links popping up over a short period of time.

I couldn't agree more, Steve. I tried about 4 different of these networks and the success was only temporary.  It would be absurd to think that Google doesn't have a full time employee whose only job is to discover those networks! I don't even touch spinning any more.  It continuously becomes less effective.  Instead of dealing with those tactics, I would rather spend my time making a quick video and posting it to a couple of video sites, then embedding it on a new post. I'm keeping my money out of those networks.

Hi Anchorwave, You can check out a post published earlier this year by SEER Interactive.  It's my favorite article of all time in helping me determine whether a link is quality or not.  Feel free to check out the 25 ways to qualify a link. Cheers!

Unless the page is over-optimized for the term. @Dylan What's your percentage of exact keyword match?  How long has the keyword been down?  When was the last time your site was indexed?  Have you searched for duplicate content on the web?  When is the last time you updated the page?

Sounds like solid advice to me. I'm very glad I attended today. I was about to pull the trigger on 75+ redirects Thanks for taking the time to Chime in Dr. Pete and thanks to Robert as well for the great answer.

Hello Friend! Could be a stretch but since the SE can't read the flash version and that is the only version with domain authority the only thing they would be seeing is the title which is Criminal Defence Solicitors which could cause the SE to find the site most relevant? I'm not sure, it looks very strange, good luck on your quest for knowledge though! Justin Smith

Hes got 77 Linking Root Domains mostly seems to be coming from his linking network or article sites, while I have only 31.  Also he is only ahead of us in one variant of the keyword (the biggest traffic wise).  It seems that he pretty much focusing on just that keyword 58/77 of the links, while I only have 16/31 using the same keyword. But you think that because the junk links he has, hes not that far ahead of me  ie I don't need to get 30+  good anchor text links to reclaim the top spot?

Same IP address is fine in my experience, just so long you are not registering multiple accounts for the purpose of writing reviews on your own Google Places. I always create separate Google accounts for each clients Google Places page (unless they have multiple offices), my theory is if Google ever deleted my account by mistake or I lost a password or got locked out then i would not lose all my clients Google Places pages tied to that account. Check out my latest blog post if you need any advice on Google Places Optimization

It's somewhat hard to diagnose without a URL. If you want to use your private Q&A question credit for the month, you can ask this question and only SEOmoz staff and associates will be able to view the question and URL. General advice would be to look at Open Site Explorer to see the rest of your backlink profile to make sure that you don't have spam pointing at you, look in Google Webmaster Tools to see if there are any messages from Google about your site being hacked or violating guidelines, and looking at the other sites ranking for your keywords to see if they are ranking because they truly do have better content and links than you.

Hi Meredith, Someone else had the same question at http://www.seomoz.org/q/what-is-traffic-faker. I think it's basically a way to say to the webmaster "hey look at me".

Both Ryan and Yannick have good answers here. In addition, if you get a notice from Google in your webmaster tools or seem to have a penalty, you might file a reconsideration request and let Google know you were hacked but now have everything cleaned up. If you look online, you can find several resources that help to keep your Wordpress site from being hacked and test its security.

I think TEST is the keyword  when Duane is talking about the index. Further down the page it makes it quite clear they will kick it back out again its no good. “If the users love it, it stays. If the users don’t like it, it gets dropped. This is a way to determine if the users feel this was a quality result.” Duane has said many times that they will not be indexing everything; they only want your best pages. "Rand: Right, yeah. I was going to say, and Bing has been pretty good about penalizing a lot of the links that look manipulative on the Web too. Duane: Yeah. It's a natural part of keeping things clean, right? At Bing, we are very keen on having a quality driven index. So, the main focus we have is making sure that everything that gets in is a good resource, when someone makes a query they get a realistic answer that is actually an answer to their query. Not, here's some shallow depth data. I'm going to click on it, and then oh, it's not really what I want. I go back and I try it again. We're trying to shorten that number of searches to get to the final answer." Duane: Right, exactly. I love this idea, Rand, this whole pick your top 200, whatever the number happens to be for you, pick it and run with it. You don't need everything indexed. Pick your best stuff and make sure that's in there. Make sure your quality content is in there, right? Be sure that you look at the site and say, "What's the goal of this page? Is it to monetize ads? Is it to convert somehow? What is the goal of it? Is it optimized properly to do that? If it is, I want that indexed in the search engine ranking well." http://www.seomoz.org/blog/bings-duane-forrester-on-webmaster-tools-metrics-and-sitemap-quality-thresholds That’s good news about the Social media, because every thing I build seems to rank high in Bing, with no social media. I guess that’s something I can fall back on, if rankings start to slip.