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I disagree with some of your advice. "Submit manually your website to all search engines" is unnecessary. "do social bookmarking" to build a bunch of backlinks could actually hurt your site, as most do-follow social bookmarking sites are low quality spammy sites.

There are some unusual things going on with that page code, including:

• Div names that include "seo"
• Page displays different content with Javascript turned off

I can't find rich snippet markup in the page code, but I suppose it's possible that they are pulling something in via JavaScript, and googlebot read the JavaScript. I think this calls to for minds more adept at coding than myself.

Thanks for the suggestion. So far the only significant difference in optimization I've found has been that they added Schema.org markup.

Open Site Explorer will have to crawl and index the link first. The index is updated about once a month.

Your SEO firm is probably correct, in my opinion. Having an overly high percentage of your anchor texts be keywords is one of the factors that makes your site likely to get penalized by Penguin or other algorithmic penalties. See http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2172839/Google-Penguin-Update-Impact-of-Anchor-Text-Diversity-Link-Relevancy

Your SEO firm has most likely determined that your backlink profile uses too many keyword anchor texts, and they are trying to fix the unbalance by building mostly non-keyword anchor texts for awhile. In other words, they are trying to dilute your too-keyword-focused anchor text portfolio. Here are two more articles you may find helpful:

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/anchor-text-optimization-case-study-whats-natural/43404/ (written by yours truly)

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/anchor-text-distribution-avoiding-over-optimization

Just to be sure I understand - the url would be the same, but the content and price point would differ based on the user's IP address? I would not recommend that. For one thing, Google is only going to crawl and index one page at any given url. For another (as you mentioned) geo-targeting is not 100% accurate.

I would recommend two separate pages or sections of your site.

"use hreflang and that acts like a canonical"

Google and other sources don't indicate that hreflang will pass/consolidate link authority. So I think hreflang and canonical tags are different in that regard. Based on that and what I've seen, I don't see that hreflang tag would negate the disadvantages of a subdomain. If you have evidence it does, though, I am very interested!

I'll start off by sharing one:

Choose 2-3 really good communities in your niche to become involved in. If you can get a dofollow link from a profile or signature, great. But the main goal is to use the communities to contribute and establish yourself as an expert, do market research, promote linkbait, form partnerships, etc.

Can you share the site you are getting that error for?

You might also want to email help@seomoz.org

Stephen,

Thanks for the explanation - I just had a client ask me about this script. Based on your explanation, this script will change your bounce rate. This is because once the event is triggered, the visit will no longer be considered a bounce, even if the user only visits one page. So it's an artificial/false decrease in bounce rate, not a "fix" as others claim.

I wrote a short blog post on this (and referenced your description)!

~Adam

I've seen a variety of services on the fringe of the SEO world that send a flow of (fake) traffic to your website via Google, to drive up your SERP CTR and site engagement. Seems gray hat, but I'm curious as to whether it actually works.

The latest data I've seen from trustworthy sources (example and example 2) seems mixed on whether CTR has a direct impact on search rankings. Google claims it doesn't. I think it's possible it directly impacts rankings, or its possible Google is using some other metric to reward high engagement pages and CTR correlates with that.

Any insight on whether CTR manipulation services actually work?

If I am unsure about the site being linked to, I approve the comment and nofollow or remove the link.

Your situation sounds very intriguing. I, like you, would suspect that content had been copied from somewhere. But maybe not, if you can't find it anywhere online. Or maybe they copied it from a print book or ebook or something...

I would probably approve it, then check back in a week and see if you can find duplicate content then.

A few suggestions:

• Google can show different results based on your location - even for users in different areas of the same country.
• I doubt the SEOmoz rank tracker even calculates where your location is. If anything, results are probably given for wherever SEOmoz's servers are.
• When you do a Google search, you can change your location manually to see results for a different location than where you are.
• Clearing browsing history and restarting their browser may not be enough. They should also be signed out of Google.

Good point. All those sub-pages (listing pages) have content that is duplicated across multiple other sites, too.

I generally agree with you that Google is getting better at detecting tricks, but Google is far from perfect and there are a lot of tricks that still work. I'm looking for specific results/data specifically on the CTR manipulation services...

Have you done any tests with CTR manipulation services work?

This is not a tactic white hat SEOs would use, but it's still good for us to know whether it works, so we can respond correctly if our competitors use it, to figure out white hat ways to combat it, to answer client questions, to have a better understanding of Google's algorithms, etc.

Yes, it usually takes weeks or often months to see SEO results.

If SEOmoz is crawling all those duplicate/unnecessary URLs, the search engines probably are, too.

Best solution: Change the navigation on your site so that each page is linked to using a single URL.

Google has almost certainly figured out that you own all the sites, and may have discounted the interlinking accordingly.

Yeh, I think this is a good topic to be aware of, even if we wouldn't use it. That way we can respond correctly if our competitors use it, figure out white-hat ways to combat it, have a better understanding of Google's algorithms, etc. All else failing, it wouldn't be expensive to test them out.

Quite true.