Welcome to the Q&A Forum

ok, thanks Egol. I shall indeed do so.

Thanks!  I downloaded the paid version of JoomSEF... the free version includes a link in the footer... kinda tacky for a client's website.  The paid version was only $35.57 USD.  So... crossing fingers.. here goes nothing!

The two thoughts that come to my mind when thinking of anchor text are: what word or phrase would encourage readers to click what word or phrase would work best for search engines? What is a user likely to type into google? You offered the phrase: "See what Cerritos Nissan customers have to say about their experience at this great Orange County Nissan Dealership. I would suggest something along the lines of: Read feedback from Cerritos Nissan customers regarding their experience at this great Orange County Nissan dealer. "Feedback from Ceritos Nissan customers" would be a link to your our-experience.htm page. "Orange County Nissan dealer" would be a link to your home page.

I don't have experience with linking packages, but I do have some concerns about this company. The first being the following Q&A: Don’t the links need to be related to my keywords or niche? Not at all. What you are talking about is Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), and the search engines just do not have the ability to tell if a site is related to the link’s keywords. Another concern is this statement: "Last month's list of Angela's links only had 13 out of 30 sites still working in a matter of days." Do you want to work with a company that choose sites that churn that frequently? The home page has a special for October, one of the package pages says it is no longer taking orders and to check back on November 30. Others can comment about link building services in general, but the dated nature of what is on this site and statements about search engines not being able to tell if a link is related would cause me not to spend my money at this location if I were in the market for such services.

Susan, Have not heard back from you. Does this help? Have you tried this method? Looking for additional insight?

If you're already at 90% UK traffic I'd look into diversifying and go after easy fits like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and South Africa. Is the site on a UK domain with UK hosting? If so, that will be more of a location signal than links and the major factor in UK boost. Stronger links--from anywhere--will apply to the strength of your site globally, plus the UK. I'd start going after those.

You can start by claiming & completing your listing. Make sure that it is complete, with a good description, images, special offer, relevant categories, etc. Next, start compiling citations. I like Whitespark's Local Citation Finder - http://www.whitespark.ca/local-citation-finder/. He's a fellow Mozer too! Make sure to be consistent with how you list your business. I'd recommend reading http://www.davidmihm.com/. David Milhm's site offers some great insight to local search. Also, take a look at the sites that have high visibility. What citations do they have? How many reviews, what does their profile look like? Good luck! LHC

Well I'd say that the nonindex issue Gareth pointed out, and the major markability error I discovered are your two biggest concerns initially.  But yeah, once the dust settles, the other issues I point out are all a concern.  Unique content that's specific to each page is quite important to long term SEO success.

I don't believe it is considered duplicate content. I think Rand might have mentioned this during a recent webinar.

No, I didn't know, that's great. Thank you Keri.

Ryan, Your suggested use of Webmaster tools doesn't mesh with what Google says. "Sites with country-coded top-level domains (such as .ie) are already associated with a geographic region, in this case Ireland. In this case, you won't be able to specify a geographic location." In this case, the .ca site would already be recognized as "country specific" through its TLD & IP address at a Canadian host. While we could perform the same task for the .com site, that would equate to 'cutting off our nose to spite our face.' As I mentioned, we have .com rankings on Google.ca - not sure we want to suddenly cut that off by making the .com focused on US only. You may want to read up on it yourself: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=62399 Thanks anyways!

Mike, I agree with Alan that it is a serious issue that warrants some attention and planning. Worst case scenario, the expired pages return a 404 and you're missing a big opportunity to boost the rest of the site. Best case scenario, you 301 or link to category or cross-promotional pages to pass PR and visitors to the next most relevant page/category. The 301 would accomplish this, but like Alan said you run the risk of inadvertently creating redirect loops if there's no long-term planning for potentially thousands of pages and/or categories.