Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Bump on this! Trying to contact journalists on Twitter. Quite hard actually, I'm going to try and call some on Tuesday (bank holiday weekend) and perhaps try some direct marketing techniques. Got some free samples off www.popupmailers.co.uk. If it works out I'm going purchase.

Keep in mind that our metrics (including MozRank, DA, and PA) don't measure the risk of Google devaluing or penalizing your link profile. By no-following these links, your raw inbound link equity will go down, and it will impact our metrics if those links made up a large portion of your profile. On the other hand, that doesn't mean that it's the wrong thing to do. Taken to extreme, these kinds of footer links are getting increasingly risky. Unfortunately, mitigating that risk does mean losing any positive impact of those links. It's not an easy decision, and it may be painful in the short-term, but you're betting that short-term pain against the risk of long-term catastrophe. Whether that's the right decision for your site today is a tough call (and certainly one we can't make without details), and I'm assuming you had good reason to make it. I wouldn't worry too much about our metrics, and I'd focus instead on the impact on your actual rankings and traffic (especially traffic that converts). Don't reverse the decision too lightly, because switching back and forth can also send negative signals to Google.

Thanks Kenyon (Carlton? LOL) This has been helpful!

Thanks for you answer, it gives me faith that I am doing right.  

Thanks, I tried that and it just brought me to the same page. I think I might just have to make a new one

completely agree. also a domain doesn't mean its your companies name, in many cases it can be but not always. good luck.

Hi Ron, Good to know your city landing pages are doing well organically. Regarding SM, yes, things like Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube could all be good ways to generate visibility for your business. You can create a local Facebook page, tweet about your local appearances in different cities, optimize your videos for different cities, etc. Regarding your trumpet player's home address, honestly, I feel if you had to defend this to Google, they might not go along with the reasoning. You might argue that this is a place your band practices and from which you all head out to engagements in that city, and I can kind of see stretching it to that, making me hesitate to say 'delete it'. Provided that the trumpet player's listing also has a unique local phone number, you could leave things as they currently are and if all stays well, then fine, but should you notice a drop in rankings for your main listing at any point, that second location might be something to view as a culprit. Now, if the second listing is sharing a phone number with the main number, then that is a different story and it is definitely putting at risk your main listing rankings.

My cat's cuter than your cat. (or he used to be before he died)

Personally I would say be very careful with creating pages with minor keyword differences. While it is possible to rank more than one page for a keyword, be careful about site-wide stuffing. In short your home page for 'Dubai City Apartments' is still likely to rank for 'Dubai Apartments' due to the only variation in the keywords being the word 'city'. The homepage is relevant for both keywords. Only if you think another page will add value for your visitors should you add that page at all. Hope this helps.

As a side note...why not get the client to contact the forum and make an official statement so they can clear up any misconceptions that a potential customer may have?

Hey David, Yes, it will be exciting when the new dash is fully rolled out! I do wonder if the upgrade from local to social will be as easy as they say. With Google, few things are easy, right?

Hi Tom You understood it perfectly, I'm aware that some are taking advantage of this system and I'd prefer not to be targeted as one of those as Google will strike down on these down the road. Good idea with with native reviews on specific language and a combined rating across with hreflang. Thank you for your help it's greatly appreciated.

Thanks Kyle

Yes. Here's an example. El Pollo Loco (a fast food restaurant in California) - 1 BRAND Page 5,000 locations - Each location gets a postcard from Google verifying the location. Each post card has a PIN#. Since every Local G+ Page has it's own respective location, people can leave reviews for that particular location, not the company itself.

Why the thumbs down when I said the same as Kate?: "Ensure you have it on your site first"

I'm guessing that they tried to stay safe as possible and intentionally made the posts only "subtly promote" as I am sure you probably guessed by now.

It seems to be that obviously youtube videos rank very well with a good title and tags even without all the views and thumbs up.  I am wondering though how old this video is and how much time was allowed for this person to create these links. Because as we talk about at panfecta when google sees a link spike an action is taken either positive or negative. Another point i would like to add is that when something is newly published online and the first day you build 1 link then 2nd day two 2 links and so on. So at some point when this guy with the video was building links he could have added a 100 or even 1000 per day and got away with it. Hopefully he used partial match or brand partial match as anchor text or this will eventually get caught and suffer.

And the rich snippets testing tool still shows that your authorship is verified for the pages that are showing in the SERPs? If so, run through this checklist, posted in GWT Help: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1306778 and see if there is anything you might have overlooked (like installing Authorship code twice, this is a pretty common issue.) If you still don't see any issues there, you might try running a few different queries for different type of content you have verified Authorship for. Google states that they only show Authorship information for the most relevant queries. What they deem as the most relevant queries can and does change. I've noticed that my Authorship information/photo will show for some keyword searches and not appear for others (alongside the same pages in search results). Searching for the URL almost always shows information.

This thread is fantastic and very helpful to me - thanks to all who chimed in to answer questions.  After a lot of thought and a few months' drafts, I created a post which I hope describes the current "state of the art" for franchise/franchisee web marketing and SEO.  I would be happy to have commentary/debate on the solution!

this is one to request http://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums/293194-seomoz-PRO-feature-requests