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Good point about multiple browser tags.  Thanks!

Wouldn't life be great if Google Places just had a customer service department?  I think we would all be willing to pay a service fee, just to get someone on the line. That said.  I agree with Aaron. Before you do, we are seeing problems with residential addresses,  when the places account www is the same as the others.  (Like a franchise main site).  So you may want to look at- Make sure the address and phone is unique. Make sure every locations address and phone number is on the URL used in places, and clearly marked.  Home page and contact page are important. You may want to have individual unique pages for each location if you don't. Add the location city or ID into the name.  Example.  Paul's Shoe Box Aurora Extreme measures may include developing a individual site for the locations with a unique URL. Good luck!

If your looking for numbers to prove that a text reference to a company on a website causes a site to move up in the SERP, then no I do not believe you will find it. On the other hand, if you are wondering if a citation on a site causes people to type in a company name in a search box which in turn causes a spike in search traffic, which evidently will cause a movement in the SERP, then yes it does. This is what trending is based on. Are there numbers to support this? Yes, but those numbers are based on what it is, where the citations are, whether there is a buzz about it, etc, etc,. Every situation will be different and unique. SEO is about creating more traffic, so in essence if someone reads a post about company XYZ and searches for it by name, there is an increase in traffic. This is probably not the statistical data you are looking for, and I'd love for someone else to chime in if they have supporting evidence to back up the contrary.

We simply have the .pdfs on our own site and many people link to them.  We are happy to have those links and those links make these .pdf documents rank in the SERPs for important keywords (you can edit the properties of a .pdf document to produce a "title tag" that will optimized them and display in the SERPs.). We could add a notation to our website that invites people to post them on their own website or add customized branding (still keeping the embedded links to our own site).   Or, we could contact webmasters who link to them on our site and offer the custom brand if they host the document on their own server.  That would get us some additional backlinks.

You make a good point.  That depending on the project requirements and timeline, the extensions may not matter too much.  Great job on the quick rankings!

Thanks for the advice.  I used a fake company for this question and bought all 3 domains for the real company. Thanks, Martin

"I have a client who has a website which is getting fairly descent traffic in the current industry its in. He is launching a new business model, same industry. New domain, new brand etc." Excerpt from question "If the other site no longer need be used, I see no reason not to redirect." I would agree, but she says nothing about not using the old site. That's the issue - the other site already has traffic for more keywords than just the new domain exact match. So why kill all traffic that the client receives from the old domain? - and leave what in it's place? Reliance on Google to catch up?

Interesting idea.  Thanks for sharing it! Did you register RobotInjuryLawyers?  That sounds like a really good one! Language and products are changing all of the time. There is probably still a lot of money to be made in domains.

If you want to go with more of a shopping cart sort of feel you could emphasize products carried within the brand and not really break away from general site navigation like: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/buy/Shop-by-Brand-Roxio/ci/4/N/4294255798/phd/4291243286 Tiger direct uses a brand splash image, common product categories, and then products as seen here: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/campaigns/campaigntemplate.asp?CampaignID=517 Walmart's brand shopping page is very splash heavy: http://see.walmart.com/lego/ Dunno if I'm moving far afield of what you want to do with your site in general, but that should give you a few ideas to throw around.  I came up with the BH Photo example from memory and the other two via a "Shop by brand" search in Google.

Keywords in the domain name are not carrying as much value as they once did.  (See the Matt Cutts video below). The value you that you would get from having your keyword in the domain of a microniche is pretty small. I think, if you had these two options: bodybuildingfortheelderly.com MyMainSite/bodybuildingfortheelderly ...you could still rank the second one really well.  And, any links you build to the second one would help the entire domain. watch?v=rAWFv43qubI

You have two options (well, 1 real good option) - This is a site wide 301 redirect onto your branded site. Brands will always beat keywords in Google these days, so it's the obvious choice. If you can change any of the inbound links to the new site that would be great too, as it will send the right signal to Google that you are looking after the transfer and doing it well. Brand names work well in Google as they are trying to minimise the anount of keyword rich domains that pop up on a regular basis. See the following posts for more information on Brands: http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/what-signals-could-make-you-a-brand-in-google http://www.seomoz.org/blog/dear-google-big-brands-arent-enough http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-next-generation-of-ranking-signals For more help with your transfer, you should look at a .htaccess rewrite (hopefully someone will jump in with a suitable one..!!) Hope this helps enough for now, Regards Aaron

It would depend on the brand name a bit, and if there are common modifiers that tend to go with it. Just do the usual thing and check using Google instant to see any suggestions that come up, plus check search volumes with the keyword tool. If there's searches for "Buy <brand name="">" then yes it will be worth using "buy" and "item" as a prefix and suffix.</brand>

I don't think it will hurt to do that, but there is probably no SEO value to doing it either. It could be a good idea if you want to use an easily remembered URL in offline media and advertising thought.

It is an automated process. Google uses rich snippets to collect this data. The review site need to use rich snippets to transfer. If you are looking for sites to get reviews on, check your competitors and see where their reviews are coming from. Encourage your customers to use the same review sites. Also, give your customers options on where to review you. If someone already is active in Google reviews it doesnt make sense for them to review you in Yelp, especially since yelp will probably filter their result if they sign up for an account to write one review and never come back. If it is your review site, there is a submission process. Here is some info on rich snippets and the submission process to Google. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/05/introducing-rich-snippets.html

Hi Miriam, Thanks for this! Apologies, i'm being a little cautious about saying too much about the industry as this is a delicate situation at the moment!  Essentially a travel agent and hotel chain might be a close comparison where the travel agents are creating places pages claiming the hotels more or less as their own. As you say, merging pages might become a real problem.  I guess managing pages for each agent is a huge amount of work but would be the only real way of keeping any sort of control - it would still leave us with the issue of merging and in any case, i don't think our agents would actually subscribe to this. Anyway, many thanks for your help, it's given me a lot more to think about for sure, especially your interpretation of that particular guideline.

thank you for your reply. do you think i am 15 years too late as google is acquiring ITA. http://www.google.com/press/ita/

Without accurate WHOIS info you face a big problem.  I have had success tracking those people down (but i had to WORK for it). These ideas are geared towards inaccurate and not private registration (save the first one which applies to both): 1. You can place a backorder and wait until the domain expires to snatch it up.  Google how to do this effectively because you aren't the only one who is after that domain. 2.  Search for the whois email in the search engines to see if you can find any sites that have that email on them.  Go through each site and do some investigating and you might get lucky by finding their profile somewhere.  Use any alternate forms of contact you find.  Repeat this step with each form of contact that you find. 3.  Use location information from the whois and whatever names they have there and look up old phone records. i.e. If they gave you st. paul, alberta canada and only part of their name you would find the phonebook (call the local phone companies in the area...they sometimes have old ones that they are happy to mail) that was published just after the domain was registered and go down the list calling each potential match.  This works if they typed their phone number wrong. 4.  Go to the domain you are after and have a look at the website.  If it is a standard template looking thing then you can run some of the words on the page through copyscape.com and see any other domains he has registered.  Also try googling those phrases as well.  This one is hit or miss. 5.  Submit a whois complaint: http://wdprs.internic.net/ Hope this helps! Jason Jackson

I think you're right; I think I'll split things up. Thanks!