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Hey echo1, I am guessing you dont want the general answer "just ask your costumers politely to review your business online", For Google and Yelp I guess making your precense online will help a lot try to be active and engage with your known costumers. Give them promo codes or stuff like that. For any kind of Review like facebook etc.there are actually a lot of ways to make costumers review your business or services without even asking. One that I actually like is the "Gamification". If you for example have a wordpress site there are a lot of plugins like Incrwd or Punchtab that will award your costumers with points and achievments. You know they love it. Anyway hoped I helped even a bit.

Infographics are a favorite of mine so buckle up for a long run-down Start by reaching out to various major blogs/sellers in your network/vertical. Offer them the opportunity to co-brand the infographic in-exchange for putting it on their site. For example if your infographics were about cars, then offering a popular blog like Jalopnik the opportunity to post your content with a backlink (and their logo on the graphic on their site) would be a really powerful avenue not only to get listed on these primary sites but also a number of shared properties. Ask industry pros to critique your infographic. I know this may sound odd but it's a sneaky way to warm up a lead. Some industry experts won't post your infographic if you just send i to them, but like all experts who are involved in the community (yup, myself included) we have a bit of an ego - when we are asked for our opinion we will give you suggestions often inline with our own mantra of how to improve it, if you use our suggestions you've  just made your infographic something that helps teach our mantra and therefore we are more likely to share it (doubly so if you credit us as a critic) Consider putting your infographic on a number of visually inclined sites that offer backlinking as well: Visual.ly Infographic Journal Infographics Archive Visual Loop Reddit While these sites are not ones where your prospective buyers are looking, they are domains with a great deal of authority, and with some great property diversity for your backlink profile. They are also the most likely place for your infographic to be shared to other websites and therefore increase the amount of link authority you are gaining for time spent advertising. You may consider sending out an industry press release (or even a more general press release - as its always interesting when you see data visualizations on sites like Gizmodo and Lifehacker). Even if big blogs don't pick you up you'd be surprised at how many affiliate news station blogs may run the piece. Just make sure that you are unique and that you solve problems. As those are the two check marks that every news outlet looks for. Explore other mediums with your infographic, turn it into a PPT to upload on slide-share and then record that and put it as a youtube video with some voice over. Your goal should be link type diversity and property trust diversity, you want to leverage the work you've done as much as possible - not just as much as possible in one medium Submit to your social networks, you never know who will enjoy and share this infographic; but especially when it comes to visuals now is not the time to ignore Pinterest! It's a powerhouse in image linking. Use your infographic as the backbone for guest posting. Write up a few unique blurbs to go along with your infographic and reach out to smaller blogs in your industry that are hungry for content. Offer up your article and infographic which are sure to captivate their readers in exchange for an infographic do-follow backlink Search for other infographics in your industry and then examine their link profile in a tool like ahrefs this will allow you to see some niche specific sites where your competitors are already sharing and getting authority from their infographics. Not only does this help in the game of SEO catchup but it will get you some authority in the content market that you are selling for and that's always a big plus over general sites Leverage industry forums. Once again if you are in the car market check out a community forum like carforum.net and post your infographic there. But do NOT just post it - otherwise it will have no value. Try and build a discussion around your post. Get people talking about it and linking to it - even critiquing it. When forums gain posts and traffic to a certain thread that thread gains more authority and becomes a long term investment. I've posted infographics in SEO forums and started a discussion around them, years later when they are highly referenced threads with a number of pages of discussion and keywords they have become my best links and received a huge PR from Google Linked PDFs, digital PDFs can embed links on an image and this is something many people miss. Put your infographic in a pdf and link it and share it on pdf sharing sites and file sharing sites, as the spiders crawl in they will hit the link but it is once again just diversifying your link type and the kind of sites your links can appear on . Hope this helps.

Hi Alan, One option you might not have considered is buying a pre-buiilt premium responsive theme, either as HTML/CSS templates, or a Wordpress theme, then customize the design to suit from there. Some of the big theme marketplaces like ThemeForest have premium themes focused on holiday rentals, so I can imagine you'll find something suitable. This should reduce your costs quite a lot, whilst still allowing you to keep up with the competition. Let me know if you would like any further advice on this. All the best, Greg

Absolutely, and it's my pleasure to help!

Hello Luke, I will have to agree with you since I manage a site with no content section which makes it very difficult to earn links. What I am doing is to find creative link strategies to earn links. As you mentioned, competing with big names is not easy especially when your budget is limited. The resource that Tom mentioned are great and I use them a lot, also I would suggest this article that is very interesting and might give you some ideas http://pointblankseo.com/creative-link-building Hope it helps

Thanks for the reference.  I understand. My client's expect and deserve unbiased and true reviews. My intention was to offer some sort of incentive for them to visit in the first place.  We are quite confident that they'll be impressed with our level of service and the amenities we provide. In that spirit, do you or anyone else have any ideas on a best practice to invite a critic to visit the hotels?

One domain have authority 44 and other 24... After I merge I will have authority 68? I doubt it.  I think that domain authority is closer to logarithmic rather than linear.... If I am correct, merging a DA 44 with a DA 24 might lift the DA 44 to 47 or 48.   Why?  A DA 24 is very weak compared to a DA 44. Also, if the DA 24 has a lot of the same links that the DA 44 has then don't expect to gain much of anything in the rankings.   The best benefit will occur if the DA 24 has links and other quality signals that are totally different from the DA 44.  Then merging will bring fresh strength to the DA 44 - but again, a 24 is very weak and the benefit might only be worth a few points higher on the DA scale.

There are a lot of them: PRWeb, PRnewswire, i-newswire, PRLeap. And as mentioned earlier, Google does not give a lot of importance of links from Press Release sites, but if you have a good story you can use the PR sites to tell it.

One of the best responses I've read on MOZ - great job!

As someone who worked as a professional journalist for almost fifteen years, I can attest to what an enormously widespread problem this is. I've heard of cases where individuals have had remarkable success simply by sending a cease and desist order to the offending company. I.e. the scare tactics work. There are some really great suggestions above, too, on how to accomplish this. Hope it works out!

I think you need to look for a tool that allows you to block certain terms such as "buy" "$" "pay" etc and then look for the term your looking for. www.mention.net might have what your looking for however its downside is you can only have 5 negative keywords per phrase. I tried other software but without negative keywords you just get a lot of spam. I'll be interested in other's recommendations.

Thanks Chris - that's some very helpful and clear advice.

Generally, my opinion for most small businesses is that ad networks like CityGrid are not the highest-and-best use of their advertising dollars.  However, if it's a new business, or one that has a lot of listing consistency issues, CityGrid can be worth an investment to try to clean up this information quickly. Without knowing more specifics about this case, my generic advice would be to stick to Facebook ads or exact-match long-tail Google Adwords.

Hi Shay, Good question! I'll do my best to provide a thorough answer here, because the topic is somewhat complex. I'll number my points for easier reading. If your business has a single physical location but serves clients in multiple locations (like a plumber, a mobile notary public or a carpet cleaning business) your business would be classified as an SAB (a service area business). Special rules and opportunities apply to SABs. It is of primary importance to understand how Google views local search. In Google's eyes, any business is a most relevant result for its city of location. So, a barber shop in Chicago is a most relevant result for people search for 'barber shop chicago' or searching for 'barber shop' from a Chicago-based device. This also applies to SABs. So, even if a plumber located in San Francisco also serves clients Oakland, Mill Valley and Berkeley, Google still sees him as a most relevant to San-Francisco related or based searches because that is where he has his physical location. What this means is that SABs can typically only pursue Local rankings for their city of location and and must pursue Organic rankings for all of their other service cities. This means that you will only be creating one local business listing at each local business index (like Google Places for Business, Yahoo Local, Bing Places for Business, Yelp, etc.). This listing will revolve around your core business NAP (name, address, phone number) You will NOT be creating local listings for your service cities. Please especially familiarize yourself with the Google Places Quality Guidelines so that you do not risk penalties for accidental guideline violations: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528 You will be working toward high Local rankings for your city of location via a variety of methods, including having a very strong, locally-optimized website, getting listed in various indexes, getting cited by other types of publications such as local blogs and websites and earning a diverse, slow but steady variety of reviews , among other things. For your other service cities, you will be employing traditional SEO methods in hopes of gaining visibility for these other places you serve. This will typically included the development of city landing pages on your website (see: <cite>www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=1403</cite>‎) and earning links from influential places. I'll close with a common SAB question. SAB owners often ask if there is any chance at all of them being included in the local results for their service cities. The answer to this is, it can happen, but it's uncommon. If a business happens to be in an area of very low competition (like the only carpet cleaning company in a large rural area) then it does sometimes happen that they will show up in the local results for more than just their city of location, but this tends to be the exception rather than the rule. With the right approach and lots of hard work, SABs can see tons of benefits from promoting themselves on the web. There are extra hurdles to jump, but it can be done. Hope this helps!

Best way to get useful followers on G+ lately is have your people and the page active in communities and discussions.  You are much more likely to get interactive people adding than just going out and following a bunch of people - anyone with a decent following isn't going to notice or react to your adding them, as they probably get upwards of 50-100 new people a day adding them.  Most of whom turn out to be spam or fake accounts.  I long ago stopped caring who added me on G+, or even looking! Since communities, stream following and circle sharing matters less.  So get your page to join topical and relevant communities (and if there aren't any for your niche, consider starting one if you can cope with the overhead of managing/maintaining it - nothing more offputting than a dead community), and get active in them.  If your people are constantly active in the widgets communities, posting good quality info and tech help, you'll gain a lot of good followers. However, people who've made good/interesting/insightful/funny comments on threads I'm active in, communities are likely to be pro-actively added as I've decided they are worth a try in the stream. G+ can be a heck of a time-sink, but if you're willing to put the time in the right places it's more than worthwhile.

In this case, the primary objective is a good user experience. Send to relevant page. A link to the homepage would be great, but even a deeper link it is still a link to your domain, so be happy with that and start planning your next program!

How does one "associate" a personal profile with a company profile?  As a contributor to that site?  What about the Betty Crocker approach, a company persona Google+ account that is run by whoever is currently staffed to do so?

First of all thanks for your wonderful response. Now, what is the first steps you will make to start build your reputation back-up? Create a social activity like: Facebook, linkedin, Google plus etc? Build you own site in a few languages with high quality contents via wordpress multisite / joomla? Work on a press release plan? How will you track and measure about the value of all actions you will do? I have another small question for you pleas: In case are you going to work with many affiliates for your online business, there is any way they will ranked higher then your company main site? I suggest to build our brand for a few month in advance and then start to work with affiliates but our owner refuse to work this way. Hope to get your help again. Thanks.

Hi Martijn, I am extremely happy you feel the same way. I would really like to see a real-time analytics update running the companies if it does not harm Moz in any way shape or form. For instance I get Hubspot, Kissmetrics and Google analytics updates every day. I know that the product they're working on for analytics is awesome everything they've done has been spectacular so I don't think I'm going to be let down. I don't know if there not comfortable putting it out there right now because it is in the beta stage however you'd think there were just be some way to show a level of interest waning or increasing. To everyone at Moz reading this thanks you for allowing me to type your name shorter 1st off it's a big deal. You know I although I really do not type it (I dictate it) regardless it's much easier. I am talking about placing something in the actual website whenever you're on that shows metrics in a simple manner a scale whatever showing new visitors coming in under new branding only verse having to use what's the obvious to many still I type in SEOmoz when I forget I get redirected. I like to know the stats and I'd like to have real-time. It would be something nobody can argue with when it occurs they would have instant information at their fingertips about a medium-sized business on its way up to being a large when they changed their domain along with their entire branding. For instance what would you give to of been there when Federal Express became FedEx we have all the data now thank God rand has the guts like Fred Smith from Federal Express oh forgive me FedEx. I remember as a boy watching the television and them saying "Federal Express is now FedEx  we hope you like it" the things bonding them are each CEO was told this is not going to work by someone. Fred Smith had designed FedEx at Yale only to receive a F on his billion-dollar idea. Rand took an enormous risk to drop out of school and start what is now Moz. Each ran remarkable companies that earned trust. For instance FedEx was believed to be impossible at the time to ship a package overnight anywhere FedEx employed people to drive their own vehicles to deliver packages. They were tested by Xerox sent multiple overnight packages all over with nothing in them just to see if they actually would get there on the scheduled date. Moz had started in a home with Rand and his mother trying to optimize real estate on the web. This turned into what I believe is the most trusted authority in search on the web the entire World Wide Web that is amazing. I think it's more remarkable than FedEx. I don't think we need that one did not use the Internet and that the other might be replacing a lot of letters by using and seeing that vision of how far they can actually go. Both companies and CEOs acted very similarly in my opinion. Each corporations name was hard to forget once you get used to there companies first brand name. More importantly each company essentially compacted their name where if you were to give somebody 10 guesses you know that if they are familiar with the brand they're going to get it right probably on the 2nd or 1st guess. I would like to ask Moz to put a stat today up that way nobody misses or does not read the case study we actually live it and be part of the history of this great company. One stat a day please I think it would benefit the community and be interesting to everyone. However if it is not best for the company I completely understand and will never say another word about it. Sincerely, Thomas

Social Sharing will not hurt you, it will be great.  You don't need to create the extra channels for sharing, but using the social media that you already have and sharing and liking and tweeting (oh my...) will help with visibility, mainly socially, a long time for organically. You should also encourage your followers/people who like you to like the article on the page so that it will show up in multiple news feeds thereby hopefully garnering more traffic to your website. In terms of SEO, congratulations on the PR links. Hope that helps.