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Link Detox is good for finding toxic links, but you still need to manually review them all. It will give you false positives - no tool is 100% on that stuff. Rmoov and Pitchbox are good for outreach, though I favor Rmoov since it was specifically built for link removal. Pitchbox is more for prospecting, finding new opportunities, etc.

I received great answers to my question but Donna's seems to hit home.   I do find my self feeling that I'm lacking in "real-world" SEO experience.   Luckily I love to learn and I guess its never to late to do that even at 51 yrs of age.    I am passionate about this field so going to put in 100% commitment!

FCBM's point about their experience is important: "I think that it was just a bad fit for our business." You have to really consider if Yelp is the right place people are searching for lawyers. In my opinion, Yelp is not the right starting place for people looking for a NEW lawyer to hire. It is more likely to be the right place for someone searching for reviews on a lawyer they are considering hiring. Big difference. The budget? $300/month? You should ask them what the competitor's CTR and CPC are. I just checked for a couple clients and their CPC (on paid ads) with yelp is between 1.3% and 1.6%. CPC is actually set AUTOMATICALLY by Yelp and varies by industry. I've seen $4 to $15 CPC, but no lawyer accounts to help you out with. Keep in mind - Yelp ad reps will send you an email that will seem very compelling, showing you competitor numbers. The problem is they don't break down the competition's organic vs. paid views (and they don't tell you who the competitor is). They did this to a client of ours and we were able to crunch the numbers to show that the competitor got 7 TIMES the amount of organic profile views. But the email made it seem like they got 7 times more views (and leads) because they SPEND MORE. I put together this blog post on Yelp advertising that outlines the all the numbers of this falsely framed email that Yelp will send to business owners. I also write about a client of ours that does extremely well with Yelp advertising and a potential scam that they put us through.

Great response Samuel, thanks for sharing your thoughts.

So glad to be of help, William!

Awesome. That Cutts video was exactly what were were looking for. Thanks Samuel!

The '40-50' is the actual amount of links on that specific page (internal and external). The '1150' is the total amount of internal links on the website (up to 3000 linked pages).

You might try the good folks at http://www.goinflow.com/ - Everett Sizemore in particular. He gave a very good mozinar on eCommerce SEO here: http://moz.com/webinars/ecommerce-seo-fix-and-avoid-common-issues  This is how I became familiar with him. There are also two guys at http://www.melen.net, Matthew Prepis and Oleg Korneitchouk (Oleg is active here in the Moz forum) who performed a high level audit for us that was top notch. They were striving to win our business and are still in the running. They are excellent. Either of these two might come in quite a bit lower than a company like RKG, depending on the scope of the project of course.

Hi Oleg With the apparent reason emphasis on social shares likes and links been possibly a more accurate we are determining for the search engines whether content is popular and focusing on this we already have lots of content on the websites. I have initially posted introduction link to each post on our website copy and pasted into to our twitter, FB.and GP accounts with the same link, but the decided that in short bursts I will do unique introductions to the links. Looking at my competition which is above me in the search engine results they tend to be much larger companies and are not focusing very much on social media so will see if the results pay any dividends all the best Alan I'll give you an update for your interest in the future

Unfortunately, I don't know of any. We use RowFeeder to capture hashtags on Twitter, and I know there are social management tools like SproutSocial that do automatic trend reports. (Though with Sprout, they select the keyword, so you don't have control of what's relevant for your brand.) Sorry that I couldn't be more helpful.

Thank you both! I appreciate the responses very much!

Hi there, To reiterate some things that have been said here: You want to remove / move away from Blogspot and Wordpress blogs that are hosted on .blogspot.com / .wordpress.com. Very few people would ever recommend using Blogspot even for a self-hosted blog - Wordpress is very much superior. Using a Blogspot domain does not give you a boost in Google's rankings, so do not worry about losing out because of that. You also want to remove the duplicate content problem - as is linked to above, Google dislikes duplicate content and will filter out one "version" of the identical content. A query like this one shows that Google has indexed the content on your blogspot blog - if you click to see additional results in that results page, you will see that the way the blogspot blog is set up is absolutely terrible when it comes to duplicate content as well. Google has found 101 versions of the same sentence. The content appears to be drawn into the URL dynamically - the actual text of the post is not visible in the source code of the page, but the entire blog appears to be readable from any blog post URL - all you have to do is scroll up and down. You really need to remove this blogspot blog and work solely on your own site, but if this blog is currently bringing you traffic, then this is going to be tough. Blogspot does not have a native method for 301 redirecting an old blog to a new location. There are a range of options for redirecting visitors at a page level, but I am relatively sure that there is no server-level redirect option yet.

Hi Stacey, I am not sure if you already have your answer. If not here I go. For the local you can claim management on the account which would need to be re-verified. This would let you get in there at least an potentially clean up anything that needs it. You would not loose your reviews. Based on your description of old SEO errors I can imagine it may be link based errors which could have developed a algorithmic penalty which in that case a new domain, in the in term only, may be useful. If you are sure it is not algorithmic though I would think that perhaps re-evaluating the on-page and content would be the next step. Hope this helps if you haven't gotten help already

Hi Kevin, It's inconclusive how careful you have to be when starting afresh after an irreparable spam penalty - also, while I understand that the client needs to see results, I have anecdotal evidence of horrific backlink spam being resolved and penalties being lifted - my former agency worked on a site last year with a backlink profile full of thousands of bad links. Literally thousands had to be removed or disavowed. It took about six or seven months to fix, unfortunately, but the penalty was lifted earlier this year after the biggest link take-down project I have ever seen. However, if you simply cannot fix this, I would go with the .com. Penalties certainly regularly pass through redirects, and I would not be confident that other forms of redirection like 302s and meta refreshes wouldn't count in this case too. Even without a redirect, what Mary says about penalties following brands is feasible since it's not going to be a secret to Google that this is the same business on a new domain name. One thing is certainly true: starting with the new domain is the only way to go if the client cannot commit to a lengthy take-down process. Have another look at whether you have exhausted the disavowal process though... there might be more to get out of that route before you ditch the domain completely. Disavowal is meant to help in situations like this, but it's also true that the team there can be very difficult to get a positive response out of, even when you have done your best to remove the links and are demonstrating that you can't do more. Cheers, Jane

Thanks Robert!

Hi Errol, Yep, these links all come from the same c-block. As Mary says, it's likely that Google is well aware that these sites are related. I disagree that that would automatically put you at high risk for a penalty, given that interlinking owned / managed websites is common practice, even amongst people who are not doing so for SEO purposes. Unless the network of sites appeared very manipulative, it is likely that the links would be discounted and no benefit passed between them rather than you being slapped with a bad penalty... however, nofollowing the links between each site and your hub site is the best practice when it is done to any extent / large scale, just in case this was viewed as manipulative. Since I do not know how many links / sites we're talking about here, I would certainly say that nofollowing these links would be the safe thing to do. Even if you were being super-sneaky with the hosting of these sites, disguising Whois information, making changes to your template, etc., Google is incredibly good at figuring out which sites are related to each other. They've been good at this for a long time, so it's always best to assume that they'll know about professional networks like yours and follow best practice with linking. Hope this helps! Jane

Hi Christy,Thanks so much for your answer. It works perfectly for me and exactly what I was looking for. Your help was much appreciated.