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Seems to me like the third party reviews are still making an impact on the rankings, it is just that google is no longer displaying them due to legal reasons.

I'm trying to build links from more local blogs at the moment and considering a huge list of blogs that are in my city, of which many do accept guest posts.

I'm trying to discover a metric to thin this list down further.  Is there any way of finding out if google considers a specific blog to be local to a certain area?  What signals does google consider when it is making this analysis?  Is it the content? or is it the "about the blog author" section?

Thanks,

Storwell

Are the domains owned by the same central agency?  i.e. is the registration information identical?

Also, are the domains hosted on the same hosting and share the same IP?

If either of the above are true i would say the short answer would be "don't do it"

If both of the above is false, then i would choose which site you want to have the most authority and send links from all the other sites to that one site.  I would avoid crosslinking unnecessarily between all the sites.  Overall i would work towards a 'natural' linking structure.  Try to find believable reasons to cross link between the sites.  If you are talking about elephants on one site in a blog post and you have another site that is all about elephants than that would be an excellent oportunity to crosslink.  Do it naturally.  I can't emphasize this enough.

Short answer is no.  It would be all to easy for black hat SEO's to knock down the competition by setting up links like these to competators.  Google wouldn't allow such activity as it would make their SERPs all to easily gamed.

I wouldn't worry about it.  Just keep link building high quality links from trusted sites and you should be totally fine.

No.  But not because of no follow, because it's a comment on a blog.  If it's a super easy link to obtain you can almost garuntee yourself that it:

1. won't have much effect on your rankings.

2. isn't worth your time

"My personal opinion is that citations will not diminish, at least in the short term, in importance for Google’s algorithm.  Particularly here in Brazil it’s amazing how reliant they are on sources beyond claimed Places.  They’ve just gone 100% of the way to obfuscating what those sources are." - David Mihm

Personally, i have seen that citations are still quite powerful, especially if you can get quality citations from authority sites, not just all those fluff directories, those are just useless filler.

Hah! first they take the "more about this place" out of the places pages, and now this. I feel like I've wasted so much time chasing after citations and directory links!!

Lesson learned the hard way i guess.

Thanks Ryan.  I have been meaning to make those changes to the onpage stuff.  I did fix the title tags as you sugested.  And from some other link building we did recently we are now ranking #1 for that local SERP, so i am actually somewhat hesitant to change anything on that page right now.

http://www.google.ca/search?q=storage+mississauga&pws=0&hl=en&num=10

I think it really depends on the purpose.  I make websites everyday, and i use style="display:none;" on almost ever page of them.  I think if it is used for a design purpose it is completely ok, and no i don't think it is keyword stuffing.  Is there a function on the site where a user action unhides this content? or are you trying to hide it always?

Recently i noticed one of our competitors is getting a citation out of a directory called Refer Links.  I contacted them to find out their pricing, and to be listed in that directory it is $365/year.

I noticed that all the links to the websites are cloaked with php redirects and rel=nofollows' so i doubt it would do much for our page rank, so strictly from a citation standpoint, is this worth it?

Here is our competitors listing:

http://www.referlinks.com/listing/all-canadian-self-storage-inc--mobile-self-storage.html

Also, i would like to know if it is a bad idea to point three or four keyword1keyword2.com type domain names at your main domain in an attempt to boost rankings for those keywords.  Is this they type of behavior that would get penalized by google?

For example, how http://redacted.name points to http://www.nikolasschiller.com and thus making him rank #1 for the search term "redacted name" despite the fact that OSE shows 0 backlinks with "redacted name" in them for http://www.nikolasschiller.com and he does not even mention "redacted name" anywhere in the content of his homepage.

For example, we all know that there is a ranking boost to having a domain name: http://bluewidgets.com when someone searches for "blue widgets".

But would the domain name http://widgetsblue.com also get a bonus in the serp for "blue widgets" ?

thanks for the link, didn't know that existed!

EGOL,

I agree we have been having some server issues, and were considering switching hosts. we also could do a bit of javascript and css optimization to get load times down, we aren't as optimized as we could be in that department.

As for homepage v.s. subpage, we were doing it that we because we heard that was the best way to approach multiple locations in local SEO.  See here:

David Mihm at SMX: http://www.aimclearblog.com/2011/06/08/so-where-are-you-actionable-local-seo-tactics-from-smx-advanced/

Muti-Location Tips

• Implement flat site architecture, give each site own page, make it unique, indexable

The title tags with full adresses was a mistake, i admit, it was a test, because i read somewhere to do it, it didn't work out, infact it backfired in our faces and in some cases our rankings droped. not in this particular case, but in others it did.  We have changed it back, but we are still waiting for google to pickup on the change.

In the local serp for "storage mississauga": http://www.google.ca/search?q=storage+mississauga&pws=0&hl=en&num=10

We are ranked #3 underneath #2 which absolutely blows my mind how they outrank us.  If you compare PA/DA we beat them.  We have more citations, more reviews, and a more complete places page.  The have hardly any backlinks compared to us.  So in my mind the only way they are outranking us is from the "storage" in their domain name.

The only other factor that might be coming into play here is that they are 2Km closer to city center than we are.

Please do correct me if i am wrong here, i would love to know!

Thanks for the advice.  We have been considering this for a while now, but have not yet come to a solid agreement on which SEO to hire to do this for us.  I'm definitely open to specific suggestions.

We're in there, but we are very far from the city center so we don't pop up for "toronto self storage".  It is a very competative local SERP, and the companies closest to the city center are really benefiting from the location bonus.  We do rank for some of the other smaller suburbs of toronto though, like "mississauga storage" or "scarborough storage" or even "etobicoke storage" (the only serp where we are #1).

Seems like it must be a little behind this month then, as we are already 38 days since the last update.  Any word on when it will likely come out this month?

Hello,

We have been working on the SEO of our site for almost a year now, and we are still not really seeing the success we would like to see.  I notice often we get outranked by other sites that have lower PA/DA/citations/reviews etc than us, and the only explaination i can find is that they are getting a boost for a Partial Keyword Match in the domain name.

Right now our domain name is: http://www.storwell.com

And we are considering switching to http://www.storwellselfstorage.com and of course 301 redirecting all the individual pages from the old domain to the new domain's pages.

How much would we risk loosing out in this transition?  Can we safely transfer domains, or do we risk loosing the majority of our PA & DA because the backlinks will point at redirects instead of the actual location?

Has anyone successfully managed to transfer domains and keep their DA & PA?