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Miriam, Thank you for the in-depth response. I really appreciate it. I have yet to try the null approach. This business is in good standing, and has been for the 4 years I've worked with them. We did change website the domain name recently, and TDLF did relocate almost a year ago. A great deal of leads came from mobile search, which, of course, come from local places listings and this has caused a serious drop in phone calls. Ben (the owner) noticed immediately, before even knowing what had happened. One thing we did take into consideration, is that other law firms sometimes play dirty. I'm wondering if someone could have flagged this as being closed in an effort to "get ahead". I know of other law firms I work with who claim that other firms will engage in similar behavior by clicking on PPC ads of competitors' - knowing that an "injury attorney in Denver" ad may cost $30-40 per click. We've even caught competitors bidding on our firm's names, which lead to a landing page about why not to hire that firm, yada yada yada. So...yesterday I actually spent 3 hours on the phone and was able to reach the person who, supposedly, in charge of the "map" in the entire state of New Mexico. For some reason I have doubts about this, but we'll see what kind of response we get. It just seems like there would be a "switch" somewhere with the options: Open or Closed. I'll post an update when I resolve this...if I have anything going for me its persitence. I once reached the CEO of a well known airline after 4 hours on the phone - when my bags were misplaced.

Thanks for the insights and I'll investiage both options. Cheers!

Hi Stacey, I am not sure there is _one top provider _in this industry. As some have different methods for acquiring rewards and giving out the rewards. It may be the question of what works better for your customers. Here is a good article at various types of programs available: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/31990/7-Customer-Loyalty-Programs-That-Actually-Add-Value.aspx http://mashable.com/2012/04/05/customer-loyalty-program-tips/ Hope this helps!

OK, so as I expected there would be nobody able to answer this question So I asked John Mueller at Google! I got a very precise answer. widget A div with an onclick is nofollow. so this would be a bad idea if you want internal pagerank to flow. Currently the only way to make your clickable areas functional and Google friendly is this way below: widget

Yes, high quality links will be what easily makes and breaks any SEO attempt. You're onto something when you say local chamber links, getting links from places like that is usually doable and should be something that you explore.

I would check with GoDaddy.  If you do a whois lookup they're managing all the DNS for that website so likely the ones managing the redirect if it's not with their webhost or htaccess. JIm

The word your looking for is content personalization. It's the new thing with CMS providers, especially e-commerce sites. Most platforms with this feature are commercial, but there options like http://wordpress.org/plugins/siteapps/. I haven't used that plugin but it looks promising.

My advice is to go easy with robots.txt--it's a bit like dynamite, powerful, but can take your leg (or entire website) off. I like this checker: http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml If you look ok after running that checker, then use the built-in Google one. Note that robots.txt syntax DOES NOT have wildcards.  Apparently this doesn't stop a ton of people from using wildcards in them (to no effect, and clearly they didn't bother to test!). Another reason to avoid disallow in robots.txt is that if you disallow the engines from looking at a page's contents, then you're ALSO stopping the link juice that might have flowed to other pages it links to. So let's say you have 100 pages on your site that you're currently blocking with disallow in robots.txt.  If instead, you put a meta robots "noindex,follow" in each of those pages, then every page linked to from those 100 pages (i.e. everything in your main menu) would get an extra 100 internal links worth of link juice.

Too close on those numbers, especially in terms of spots 8,6,5 & 2. You're going to have to take a deeper look. I'd start with digging into the link profiles. Find the links that your competitors have that are really high trust links--I'm talking BBB, industry accreditation sites, quality PR hits/mentions etc. Find the easy wins and try to identify the really high level links that your competitors have that you may be missing. My second priority would be to check out your bounce rates and time on site. It may be that traffic is better served on those sites and therefore Google is giving them the nod in the rankings. Third, I'd check out http://moz.com/blog/ranking-factors-2013\. Dig in and see where your competitors are beating you in that regard step by step. Process of elimination I'm afraid....we can't really know for sure!

Kane, Thanks for the response.  I agree that few will type that in but I wonder if the user's location matters--That is: since Google knows where people are located why wouldn't Google try to match up their location with the webpage content?.  For restaurants, it appears to matter to Google--when I put in a national restaurant like Bob Evans one of the results is all-menus.com/state/myneabylocaltown.    Why not for a retail store like a Kohls that also has a physical location?  .OTOH a coupon site isn't a store with a local presence--it's just a site that can exist anywhere.  Still, logically it seems to me that if my content is geared toward a physical location (ie the coupon is good locally), then Google would/should check for whether a user search has a potential location-connection, and prioritize that in the results---like it appears to do with the allmenus.com site. This issue has caused me a lot of grief lately as I want to have the location breakdown but fear it won't be rewarded, yet logically IMO it should be.  Kane if you or anyone else has further insight please do share.

Thanks Andy! I'll add the second step of the URL removal tool.

This was exactly what I was looking for. Thank you very much you have really helped me out.

Bob, I would suggest creating great content and then using social media and email to spread the content like fire. A term that we stole from Jay Baer is content is fire and social media is the gasoline to that fire. For example why don't you add an important piece of content to your email signature or email it to a few influencers in the community. They might find it important and want to share it with everyone or even link to it.

What I am seeing for "Nickel Alloys" is the page for nickel alloys under neonickel.com (http://www.neonickel.com/alloys/nickel-alloys/). This page is optimized very well for this and Google thinks it is the most relevant page on your site, which it is. Even if this page has less authority than your homepage, the relevancy of this page is why Google is ranking this over the homepage. If someone is searching for nickel alloys and they get this page which is specifically about nickel alloys on your site, why would you not want them to land on this page? The artificial grass is an interesting case. I don't see that site in the first 5 pages of search but if I search only under that domain, the homepage is ranked near the bottom compared to all your other pages. Was this page possibly just resubmitted to Google via Webmaster Tools or removal of a noindex tag? Your homepage has good authority and relevance so there is no reason I'm seeing as to why it is not ranking. Has it ranked higher in the past and been a big change in organic traffic? Something I would definitely recommend is plugging in Webmaster Tools and check the crawl diagnostics there to see if you can get any insight. You should also submit a sitemap as well if you not have not already done so. This will help Google recognize all the pages on your site and increase the number of pages Google crawls. Hope this can help

Thank you very much for all your answers. i think its because the Google-Places-Account and the Google+-Page are on different Google-Accounts. I try to connect them both. Many thanks!!!  

A few years ago I added a location finder which then auto generated product content for ERIKS. This generated 1000's of URLs overnight, the problem was Google thought I was spamming it's indexes. Google does follow all links on a web page/sitemap however it's what it does with them that counts. The ERIKS Hose Technology Site http://www.eriks-hose-technology.com relies on this type of coding using Classic ASP. I have a number of other sites which also rank highly on Google You'll find Revolvo by searching for 'Split Roller Bearings'. So it's also not as bad at ranking as some people may tend to think. I would agree however that English URLs are better than coded. The main issue here is to make sure that your main keyword is in the URI to ensure that Google knows what your page is about.

Thanks Tom That's a good point.  Part of my problem lies in the number of URL's with parameters (thousands).  Applying status codes of any type isn't really viable. Starting to see the url's clean up with the addition of the entries in robot.txt. Regards Ian

Yea right, with the sharks eating up the smaller guys, and growing bigger and bigger. The reassuring thing is that Google is generally on your side, and will tell you to play by the rules because it has stated that there is a lot of spam to fight, but it is tackling it one big spam tactic at a time.

Thank you for a reply, Andy! Now the other question: how much can we change the content not to lose the ranking? Does the change of titles and the content structure influence? What if I leave the keywords but change the content structure?