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Hi Jared, In the WPE redirect rule editor, it doesn't provide an option for the non-www domain. Only "All domains" and "www.mywwwdomain.com". What do you suggest doing here to eliminate the redirect chain?

Just wanted to add, no I don't think there would be any adverse effects on ranking, unless the site was compromised somehow. Since you are on a completely different system, you should be fine with a resubmission. On a side note, since you are on WordPress now, make sure you have the right file permissions, and shell access turned off. Hackers love a WordPress site that is unprepared. Best of luck with the new site!

Hi Imedia, Smart questions. Let me explain how to differentiate these two forms of user generated content. Reviews: These should be posted directly by the customer on third party platforms (think Yelp, YP, etc.). You should never post a review on behalf of a customer and should not set up a station in your place of business to collect them from customers. Always let customers post reviews on their own, using their own accounts. Also, never take a review off a third party site and re-publish it on your website. You can link from your website to your review profile on third party sites, but do not re-publish the reviews found there. Further, do not encourage customers to post the same review across multiple sites. Be sure to read the guidelines of each of the major review sites so that you know what is allowed in terms of solicitation. For example, Yelp forbids you to ask customers for reviews. They want it to be completely spontaneous. Google doesn't mind review solicitation, provided you are not specifically asking for positive reviews. All reviews should be unbiased. Here is a super page in our new Moz Local Learning Center that links directly to the review guidelines of top platforms. This should really help you: http://moz.com/learn/local/understanding-review-guidelines Testimonials: These are reviews of your business that you are receiving orally or in writing from your customers and then publishing directly on your own website. Do not ever publish these on third party sites, as if you were the customer. Only publish them on your own website. You can put them on a single testimonials page, or you can seed them on different pages, as appropriate, throughout your website. It's great to earn both reviews on third party sites and testimonials on your own site. Both assets make you stronger! There is a paid tool you might like to know about if you're getting serious about creating a review and testimonial acquisition campaign. Check out getfivestars.com. This is a unique and very powerful little tool that walks your customers through a process of leaving feedback and then being guided to either leave a testimonial or review. It also allows you to intervene with a customer who had a negative experience, lessening the chances of them leaving a negative review. You can, of course, handle review and testimonial acquisition manually, but you might at least like to consider GetFiveStars if you're considering implementing a really polished, concrete campaign. Hope this helps!

Hi Imedia, I agree with Sam: don't use this for your location-less service areas. Use it to highlight your physical location.

The Google Disavow tool doesn't work like that.  It won't actually remove links from any pages.  It is basically just a signal to Google that you want those links to be nofollowed.  Ahrefs would have no clue if something has been disavowed or not.

Hi, Two key factors are location and competition. If you are already ranking for your primary area, great.  If you are ranking for other locations as an outlier, even better.  Now to get the outliers to rank higher is tricky. Because of location and competition. If there are many other businesses in the area where you are an outlier, location is a much stronger metric then many others in this case. If competition was low your chances could be better. Here are some ideas: Go crazy and get all the local citations directories and creative means like citations in your relevent youtube videos and other assets. Basically create a stellar citation profile. See if this helps if not so much or not at all, that means location and competition are in the way here and are giving precedence to other businesses. If you are showing up on local results as an outlier, if you are showing up that means eye balls are looking, yes you may be lower than other businesses, but if you can get significantly more higher end reviews. This could set you apart and give you that conversion despite an outlier position. Try ranking for organic results for the city + industry you are going for, it might not be too competitive and this might be a better position than as an outlier Increase social signals to your website, and Google local page. Hope this helps!

Maybe your competitor is using dynamic ad titles and not targeting your brand. Try entering "ABC plumbing" in Google and if title starts with "ABC plumbing" then you know they use dynamic ads. Why dont you create ads for your brands and you will quickly be nr 1 on PPC section and also quickly see price drops and pay very little per click (at least most likely). Let us assume they were targeting your brand: it is unlikely their conversion will be any good since users are looking for your brand.

Another very helpful answer - thank you.  Moving forward, I still think the best approach is one website at the end of the day.  After all, the saying is that it is better to mine one mine deep than to mine several at the same time. In this particular niche, service industries like plumbing have exact match domains with less notable content.  We're still working on the ability to offset this advantage they appear to have. Thanks again!

I agree with you from an SEO standpoint it quickly seems like overkill.  From a content marketing perspective though it does seem endless the amount of content you could produce.  In my own research I think I found a very helpful blog post with some ideas: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-build-a-content-marketing-strategy I think what I'm lacking is a more directed approach to the entire strategy.

That #RCS talk was awesome!  Thanks a bunch for that recommendation.  We've really worked hard on this with the client and they are fully on board with RCS - the CEO built the company on it.  Very interestingly, I had not considered the brand consolidation strategy (asking for a link back from lifted website content).  We are definitely excited about using that as a new outlet for link building, allowing others to do the work for us organically.

I also wanted to put in a little update that we've noticed in this niche particularly.  When we follow the basic outline of the strategy above, we notice that the onsite article gets ranked quickly, while the target landing page drops off out of results for about half a day.  No later than the next day is the landing page back in place and the onsite (blog article if you will) is removed from rankings. I suppose this is just the Google shuffle or something similar happening.  Fortunately we've removed all but 8 errors (out of 3000) and we're just waiting for GWT to update to reflect that information.