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Were they referencing Rank Brain in their article? The statement sounds similar to an explanation given on what Rank Brain is and how it impacts search. It does seem like a bit of hyperbole but I see their point and I agree with it to a certain extent. I believe the purpose of a machine learner is to continuously innovate without human intervention so that improvements are made while you sleep. It's my understanding that Rank Brain does this based on feedback from users. It's the perfect solution to handling the complexity of search, and would result in a continuously changing algorithm. I do see a lot of websites ranking without backlinks. Try any local home services query - they're mostly propped up by citations which is a little different than your standard backlink.

No problem, hope it helps!

Thanks, I'll send you a PM.

Providing a different address isn't an option Google allows.

You could also use BuzzSumo.com which would also show which posts got shared the most and who by

Hi Adam, Excellent advice from Laura. While Google has never taken a stance that I know of against putting all of your locations on a single page (and you'd be doing so on the Contact Us page, of course), it's considered a better practice in Local SEO to develop a unique, high quality landing page for each physical location for the following reasons: Ranking a page that's clearly focused on a single city is going to be easier that ranking it for three different cities. You'll be sending a clearer signal to both humans and bots that 'dentist orlando' is a primary topic for the business than you would be if you're diluting the focus of the page with multiple cities. It's very likely that your competitors will be making use of the practice of developing these landing pages, and you want to be able to compete with that. Establishing a unique page for each office will enable you to link from all of the citations you build to a dedicated page on the website for each. Historically, this has been viewed as helpful in preventing against accidental merges of your Google+ Local pages, though there seems to be fewer cases of this in recent times. Regardless, it's very clear to be able to link your Orlando Google+ Local page and other citations to your Orlando page on your website, where the first thing one encounters in the compete NAP for the business, identically matching the NAP on the citations. It lessens the potential for error. The prerequisite for developing these types of landing pages will be the willingness of the business owner to invest the necessary time/funding to creating high quality pages with unique content on them. If this is lacking, then it's better to wait until the owner is ready to devote the necessary resources to the project so that the pages are an asset rather than a liability.

Hi Adam, My short and sweet answer to this scenario is: A page for every city and a page for every service So, you'd have a total of 30 pages to budget and plan for (one for each of the 10 cities and one for each of the 20 services). Most small local businesses are not going to have the funding for developing 200 exceptional pages ... what I've seen when small businesses try to go this route of developing a page for every possible service/city combo is that they end up with a collection of so-so pages at best and at worst, thin or duplicate pages. So, for a client like a dental practice, I believe that a sterling quality page for every city and for every service tends to be an achievable goal if structured over a reasonable time frame contract. I definitely do not recommend developing a different website for each city. Build a powerhouse and keep working on improving it for the life of the business. Hope this helps!

Great - glad it was sorted out! -Dan

Hi Adam Sorry for the confusion - what I was getting at is the reason your competitor may be appearing for a generic keyword is because (if they are local to you) they have shown Google that they are associated with a certain keyword and are located by the searcher. For instance, when I search a generic term like "coffee" in my search, I get 5 businesses that pop up around me, or within a close proximity of me, in Chicago. Same when I search "mechanic", "wine", and "ice skating". Depending on what you are searching, I was saying that local search optimization can have a heavy hand in what appears in the SERPs for your search. Now, beyond that, Google also takes into consideration branding. Even then, elements of what I was speaking of above still stand. Here are a couple of references: Brands, Google Plus and the Knowledge Graph: A Love Triangle (Moz) Understanding the Knowledge Graph and Optimizing it for Your Brand (Kahena) What I am getting at here, is your competitor may be a big enough brand that Google is associating them with that broad/generic search you are talking about. If I am not answering your question, again, I apologize and will step back - but I just think these elements above are worthy of your time and research, and will assist you in your chances of appearing as well. Take a look at your competitor though to see if they are taking the same steps - I am willing to bet they are! Hope this helps a bit more - good luck!

Meant to say it's def Yelp that's boosting the rankings. I've investigated and reported lots of cases of using high authority directory pages to help fake spam pages rank. For a long time an atty ranked in 2 spots in the 7 pack for Los Angeles Personal Injury Attorney. One of the most competitive local phrases out there. One listing linked to the Lawyers.com search page for "Los Angeles Personal Injury Attorney" the other one linked to the Avvo.com search page for "Los Angeles Personal Injury Attorney". Think about it. All those pages are filled with local NAPs and local keywords. +++ High authority. BTW this is now against the GMB guidelines since I made a big case out of the LA atty and some other cases. But of course some are still getting away with it.

Hi Adam, Not to point out something that is likely well taken-care of, but did the GA / Analytics code populate across the site? Also, is there any heavy JavaScript on the site, especially above analytics code, that might prevent analytics code from loading properly. We had this happen with a client a few years ago. We built custom analytics for this client (they did not want to run GA). Client placed our code in the footer. Client placed slow-loading CRO code in the header. CRO code took so long to load that people had often clicked away from the page they landed on before our code had had a chance to record their visit, as JavaScript generally loads in the same order as it's placed on the page. We had them move our little piece of code up to the top of the page. Problem was solved (in the mean time, we were recording a 20,000 visit loss each week!). I'm just wondering if this is a tracking issue since all search traffic, not just Google has been affected. It would be quite rare to find an issue that has the same effect at the same time to both Bing and Google's algos. They're similar, but they're not identical and Bing generally tends to take longer to respond to change than Google as well. Any chance you have raw server logs to compare analytics stats to?

Thanks, it definitely seems that results vary greatly by keyword. I've noticed sometimes BuzzFeed is great and Yahoo Answers has junk...but in your case the results were the opposite. Thanks again for the feedback.

Well done. "Keri Morgret AKA "Morgretra Goddess of Content and Cup Cakes" is the on-site Community Manager at Moz" Keri, Thank you for all your great work on Moz you deserve to be recognized for all of your hard work. Sincerely, Thomas

I agree that, for all the reasons listed, selling SEO may be harder. But, for all the reasons listed, you have an opportunity to differentiate yourself. You have access and knowledge of the reasons why potential clients would say no. Address the objections head on and find ways to assure the client that you are different. If you approach SEO as something that does not differ between providers, then you will only end up competing on price. There are lots of good agencies out there. How many are truly great? In what ways can you edge out these good companies by delivering great value?

I agree with Tom.  Backlinks can be from anywhere as long as they don't appear to be blatant spam.  I tend to agree that a backlink serves a greater purpose than just link juice and may actually send relevant traffic and business to your company.  I would try to target as many local links as possible, but branching out to a global mindset won't hurt at all.

Hi Tela, Thanks for the reply. I'm a bit surprised more users haven't been asking for a feature like this. I think it would be great for doing outreach to sites where your competitors just got a link within the past week - strike while the iron is hot. I've been doing a bit of this, but the current interfaces make it a bit time consuming. Main thing I want is to be able to quickly view recent links (preferably from both sources) to a bunch of competitor URLs, in one location (without having to run multiple reports). This could be accomplished by a campaigns type tool, RSS feeds, an API, etc.

please pm me your fees

Not really. We go by "feel" most of the time too. If you know they're not willing to pay as much as you think it's actually going to cost 'hours' wise, sometimes you just have to charge what you think they're willing to pay. Obviously, if you do this for too many clients you'll loose out, but if you're really slow it can make sense.  Moral of the story, try to go for bigger clients :). The smaller ones usually end up burning you if you're on a Cost Per Hour model....in my humble opinion at least.

Ahhh, I see what you're saying Adam. I looked at the infographic page and the 2 links pointing to the homepage should send some PR to your homepage. So I doubt that's the issue. One PR4 link isn't enough (even with the low OBLs of that page) is enough to bump a PR up from 2-3, at least in my experience. It still may not be juuuuust not enough to show up on the toolbar. You could have literally gone from PR2.1 to PR2.9...almost there but not enough.