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I have flagged the reviews as not useful from multiple IPs.  I have attempted reporting the review as well.  Google does nothing.  It's very obvious that the review(s) are fake.  Often all the other reviews of the person's profile are for different cities and all 5 stars for businesses that they are most likely doing SEO work for.  Are (blackhat) SEOs using bad reviews as a technique to keep the competition out in your business/market? What did you do about it?

Thanks!

Does this also hold true for bing / yahoo?

For example, take a look at http://www.dueds.com and scroll all the way to the bottom of the page.  See the link in the bottom left?  Does the fact that it is pushed all the way down to the bottom make the link worth less than if it was directly under the social media buttons?

Wow! that's news to me! thanks!

I know that it is important to have your primary keyword target as the first word or two words of your title tag.  But what about your meta description tag? does it matter where they keyword is in the description tag?  I see a lot of other sites stuffing their keywords right at the front of the description tag and it looks somewhat unnatural.  What's your take? do you put the primary keyword as the first word or two words of your description tag?

For my top 132 keywords, my target ranks an average of 7 positions lower in Bing and an average of 9 positions lower in Yahoo.  Does anyone have some good resources to read, or any tips on why we would rank so much poorer in Bing/Yahoo than in google?

Same keywords, different positions of different companies.  Aren't they using the same algo for their rankings?

Looks like i was wrong. this tool (now that it is online) does not appear to give any traffic volume numbers, unless i am not looking in the correct location??

Sounds like a loophole to me.  But i'll take it!

Thanks for the advice!

-Storwell

But surely google frowns on paid links no?

100% of the directories listed above are paid.

Wow! i should have asked this question months ago!

As for "Define spammy" how about this:

A site that provides no actual service to the public, and purely exists to make money from manipulating search results.

Most of the sites in that list, including Joe Ant look pretty useless to me.  If someone sent me a link to one of those sites i would assume they had a virus in their computer or something of the likes.  What actual purpose do these sites serve?

Do you honestly imagine a non-seo'r ever to visit one of these sites and say to themselves "Wow, i've found an excellent resource, i'm going to bookmark this page to help me find things in the future" ??

Apparently this is it: https://adcenter.microsoft.com/ but it seems to be down right now. gotta love microsoft!

Just wondering if there is a Bing / Yahoo equivalent to this:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal ??

Would be nice to compare the different search patterns between the two search engines, without just assuming that the relative search volume on google for certain keywords is the same bing/yahoo.

But then every title would look cropped in search results.  This seems quite silly.

Also, i completely disagree with you on "being true" to the page titles.  For example a local company that sells blue widgets that is named johns widget corp, would rank much better if their title was "blue widgets - johns widget corp" than if it was simply "johns widget corp".   If people followed your advice they would rank much poorer.

Then why does SEO moz have this list:

http://www.seomoz.org/dp/seo-directory ??

Included in that list are some pretty spammy looking sites such as:

<colgroup><col width="345"></colgroup>
| http://www.site-sift.com/ |
| http://www.2yi.net/ |
| http://www.sevenseek.com/ |
| http://greenstalk.com/ |
| http://anthonyparsons.com/ |
| http://www.rakcha.com/ |
| http://www.goguides.org/ |
| http://gosearchbusiness.com/ |
| http://funender.com/free_link_directory/ |
| http://www.joeant.com/ |
| http://www.browse8.com/ |
| http://linkopedia.com/ |
| http://kwika.org/ |
| http://tygo.com/ |
| http://netzoning.com/ |
| http://goongee.com/ |
| http://bigall.com/ |
| http://www.incrawler.com/ |
| http://rubberstamped.org/ |
| http://lookforth.com/ |
| http://worldsiteindex.com/ |
| http://linksgiving.com/ |
| http://azoos.com/ |
| http://www.uncoverthenet.com/ |
| http://ewilla.com/ |

Should i change my all the page titles for pages that show up in local SERPs to reflect this new limit?  Is there any benefit to leaving it at the old limit and having more keywords in there?  Or would there be benefit to conforming to google's new standard and having shorter titles?

It seems that SEO Moz inturprets & as the html ascii character code: & in my titles.  This is pushing the titles over the limit by 1 or 2 characters in some cases.  Does this matter? does google actually treat & the same way? or is this an SEO Moz bug?

Thanks!

Any idea why google seems to flip flop between those two local search blocks so much?  I have noticed it change almost on a daily basis for some keywords and keyword combinations.

Time and time again i see SEO moz come out with a new rankings report and tell me that I've gone up or down in the rankings by 9 and I get really excited.  Then i go look at the search and once agian we are in the exact same position!  What it seems like is sometimes SEO Moz decides to count the local search block, and other times it decides not too.  Is there any way to fix this? To make it always count the local search block would be preferred.