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How is this site pulling this off? I have seen other sites get placed in the google directory before, but for some reason this site is managing to get backlinks from every different countries google directory!

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/http%253A%252F%252Fwww.moving-storage.net%252F/a!links

Two things.

1. I would focus on nautral linking between your sites if you are going to link between them.  If you happen to be talking about something in a post on one of the sites that actually relates to one of the other sites, or content you have written for the other site, then place a link there, because that is what someone would naturally do.  Google rewards people for being people, not people who are trying to manipulate the search engines.  But like you said these sites don't have much page rank to begin with, so you will not ever see much of a benefit from your cross linking, mostly it is a waste of time.

2. Yes and no, on the one hand, i don't think the directories will help you all that much, in terms of gaining rankings again you should be focusing on gaining natural good quality links from other sources with good page and trust rank.  These directories will not help you achieve that.  They might give you a small/marginal boost in rankings, but they will not be significant.  Also do not be so afraid of being penalized by good.  If it was so easy to get penalized a Black Hat SEO could very easily take down the rankings of a competators site.  All that SEO would need to do is submit the site to directories, and boom google penalizes them, right? wrong!

Well i think i just figured out the answer to part one of my question:

"Getting Your Site Into Portals and Search Engines Using ODP Data

If your site has been accepted into the Open Directory, it may take anywhere from 2 weeks to several months for your site to be listed on partner sites which use the Open Directory data, such as AOL Search, Google, Netscape Search, Yahoo Search, and hundreds of other sites. We make updates of the data available weekly, but each partner has their own update schedule."

Would still like your opinions on if you have any experiance with speeding up this process??? Because we've been in DMOZ for a couple months now, but still no google directory.

I have seen other sites showing up in OSE with backlinks from both DMOZ and Google Directory.  We are in DMOZ, and our backling is showing for that in OSE, but i don't understand how to get added to the Google directory?  When i go to the appropriate category, and click "submit link" it just takes me back to DMOZ!

Is there something i'm doing wrong here?

This is the page we are on in DMOZ

And this is the page i believe we should be on in the google directory

As a side note, i would love to hear your opinions if this really even matters? does google really use it's own directory as part of its search algorithm?

True it is techinically against google's TOS. but i think that relates more to people who are doing it in a malicious way.  I think everything we have explained above is legit, even if he temporarily holds two of the same location in his places account.

If they actually got ahold of him to complain about it, it would probably be useful, because he could state his story and they would resolve the issue quicker.

But it's not like that would ever happen.  Google staff are way to preoccupied to approach businesses on a case by case basis like that.

OMFG I did not know this tool existed!!!! i have been hosting on shared accounts for years, and always wondered, but never knew. now i do. WOW!

I wish i could give you 2 thumbs up.

I guess that confirms my suspicions then.

1. claim the second listing, the good one.

2. fill out the profile to 100% complete (5 videos, 10 pictures, categories, all the works)

3. make sure that this new listing is now set to active in your places acount (you should now have 2 listings in your places account)

4. find the listing with no reviews inside your places account and click **"**Remove this listing from my Google Places account".

5. wait a couple days, if that listing is still showing up in the search results, go to its places page, and click the Report A Problem link, and select “Place has another listing”. If you can, include a link to your claimed place page in the comments section.

Yeah, it is monthly.  I think the main reason it isn't more frequent than that is computing power/resources.  It takes quite a lot of time to scrape the entire internet, that's a lot of websites to download and analyze.  It probably also has something to do with their bandwidth costs.  I'm sure if you up it to 4 times a month you just quadrupled an already very expensive bandwidth bill.

I'm not 100% sure this is the reason, but it seems like a likely answer in my mind.

then why do other SEOers do it so much? it must work if people do it this much, look at any of these for example.  You will find literally thousands of fake profiles on each, and this is just a tiny microscopic subsection of what is out there.

http://cartthrob.com/forums/member_profile/memberlist
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/forums/observer/memberlist
http://ee.twitchfilm.net/site/forums/member/memberlist
http://www.crossfitbrandx.com/index.php/forums/member/memberlist
http://www.andrewjohnstonmusic.com/forum/member/memberlist
http://www.miniaturewargaming.com/index.php/forums/gamers/memberlist
http://www.trakax.com/software/forum/member/memberlist
http://www.realmacsoftware.com/forums/index.php/forums/member/memberlist
http://www.asbcla.org/forums/member/memberlist
http://www.cbi.com/member/memberlist

What about sites other than forums? like what about our links here on our SEOMoz profiles?

Not all your inbound links will be listed in webmaster tools.  I find it is somewhat of a random selection of your inbound links.  A little bit of a splash of what google sees.  I've talked to a lot of people about it and nobody really knows exactly what makes google choose the ones that it shows and doesn't show.  One thing i have noticed though, is that the links that do tend to stick in there longer are links that are more credible.  If you go around posting blog spam, and adding your link in shady places, google often picks up on them for a while, and then drops them after a month or two.

Just stick to classic, honest, strong link building.  And don't focus so much on what google "says" is going on inside webmaster tools.  Yahoo's link explorer, or OSE are far better at giving the big picture in that department anyway.

Or do you find that this takes more time than it is worth?  I mean there are literally thousands of websites that allow you to signup and create a public profile and drop your link in there.  But is this really worth the efforts?

Would like to hear from some people on both sides of the argument, as i am sure there are people who do this, and also people who don't on here.

I think that this question would be more suited to be posed directly to the SEOMoz staff than to the open Q&A forum.  Go to the contact page and shoot them an e-mail.  Everytime i have done this i have gotten a response in under 24 hours.

Cheers,

Storwell

That is a tough decision to make, but i would suggest that your best couse of action would be clicking the little "inform google about an error on this page" link on the places page and just waiting it out.  A big part of what means anything in local optimization is the age of the places page, so you do not want to throw that away.

Also, from what i have read and heard from other SEO's the whole "more about this place" getting citations added to it is happening a LOT slower than it used to.  We have over 100 citations out there for each of our locations and probably only 10-15 appearing on each of our places pages after over 1/2 a year of having them out there.

Patience is a virtue in this game.  While you wait for those citations to happen why not focus on garneshing a handful of reviews on all the sites that google picks up reviews from.  I have seen google suddenly recognize a citation after finding a review attached to it on qype.co.uk and i'm sure it happens with other sites as well like yelp.

Best of luck,

Storwell