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Thx for sharing your perspective. I need to look into this more. We are just launching our new local campaign.

We all feel your pain. Looking at the local landscape of SEO firms in our market you see a lot of this. Ryan and Dignan99  have it right I think.  Five or six great links will overcome all the spammy stuff. Look at great content ideas.  Do a day of out of the box thinking about on site content that will draw a crowd. Use the standard content ideas to start  ( Tips, Forums, Contests, Opinion, events).  You need real sites to notice you and real traffic to overcome the less imaginative but prolific 4000 links to a url crowd. In my experience it takes components of at least three for this type strategy, meaning not just the content, but the distribution of it, and the  promotion of it. All three areas have to be good.  Where throwing together a bunch of low quality sites is a component of one thinking.  Low quality linking and SEO (Like most things I suppose) are symptoms of taking the easy road, and the course of least resistance. So,  not only can you write some great content ( or have a professional do it)  that will draw some attention, but you can also promote that content through ad words for a short period, and face book ads, with a very targeted campaign to the bloggers and movers and shakers in the Industry. It's the old my blender can blend an i pad thought process.  I bet if you really find something interesting and unique to demonstrate on the site, promote it well, and distribute the information in a thoughtful targeted manner, you can and will out rank the dark forces.

Thank you.  I have been reading the David Mihn stuff it is a great resource!

Option 2 would be the best possible solution, with a 301 redirect. You maintain MOST of your linkjuice this way and users get an easy redirect, no extra clicking required. Read here for more information.

I find that a lot of the data in  webmaster tools is not that helpful.  It takes some time to sort through and figure out what can help you and what can't.  Some of my suggested keywords are things that no one would search for.  If I optimized my site for these keywords it would just look silly. Similarly, don't forget that the Adwords Keyword tool is not accurate at all when it comes to search volume.  For my main keyword, it tells me that I should have 12,000 searches per month.  I am number one for this keyword and yet I get 5000 impressions per month. If you are focusing on targeting local searches, do you have a local listing?  This is REALLY important.  It's not hard to optimize your local listing so that you appear at or the near top for several terms.

Oh I see. Well I wouldn't worry about it. Google rarely treats reciprocal links badly, so I highly doubt they would hurt you for linking to a page that only mentions you without a link.

Just to open a discussion, I would imagine that Google will not put a lot of weight into the domain name listed on the places page. They are already looking into exact match domain names and their ranking ahead of others, so I would assume that the same would be places. I know for sure that distance from centroid, number and quality of reviews, and categories of the listing have the most weight in ranking in places or maps. Sorry i don't have a straight answer but thought I would give a point of view? Hope it helped

Hi Storwell, Thanks for being a good sport, and it definitely sounds to me as if you are experiencing heavy lag time between citations being created and being imported into your Place Page. It can take months for this to happen. Given the vagaries of Google's Local product, your other citations could show up tomorrow, next month or never. I know how frustrating this is. I wonder, have you started a thread about this at the Google Places Help Forum to see if you can trigger a response from a Google rep? It doesn't always work, but sometimes it does and you may either get A) a response or B) a spine tingling mysterious edit. I've seen both happen. If you do decide to create a thread there, make it as simple but thorough as possible. Obviously, give your business info and link to your Place Page. Then, I would suggest that you cite the 5 biggest citations sources where you are cited but which aren't being shown on your Place Page. I would put them in a simple list, with links to the citations. My bet is that you will get other forum members chiming in over there with, "it takes patience, just wait it out." But, if you could ask a rep for a general idea of when you might expect to see these appearing on your Place Page, you just might get a response. Good luck!

Great I'm glad I assist. If this helped answer your question, please mark it. Thanks!

The domain authority of all these featured sites is very high, I would think that may have something to do with it as it can't be down to content feature as the guardian post reads more like a tweet. Anyone else have any luck gaining this kind of exposure?

Hey! thanks for the info! this is awesome, i'll give them a call tomorrow and see if it gets me anywhere.

thanks!

Nothing is for sure, but in my experience keywords in URL help, however very long URL's are probably not recommended. I've heard that keywords in domain names are not so valuable as before (they still are valuable just not so much). I tested keywords in URLs and one of the website were coming above the other website for the keywords. Again every case is different and it is solely your decision.

Yes, link juice will be passed to a URL link, as it is commonly used across the web and is evidenced in many sites that have this type of inbound link. Sorry I couldn't be more clearer.

Good SEO practices apply for many search engines so if you do things by the book you should do well in all of them (unless we're talking about specialised ones). Bing and Yahoo run on the same engine so you should see similar or same results in both. Google, however, brings so much more traffic that we're internally not even looking at traffic at other individual search engines and instead treating it all as a) Google and b) "Other search engines". More specific to your question, a good starting point would be to go through this: http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmasters/?rfp=1141441469

I've been thinking about Squidoo for a while also... It's not because I like Squidoo... In all honesty, i've been thinking about how I could use it to send some more link juice to my site. Although it definitely is a great vehicle to host spammy pages with the sole purpose of generating backlinks and pass on linkjuice, I think it can also be used for a white-hat approach. The way to do it right should follow rule #1 of good internet marketers: to create valuable and unique content with  useful information that helps people out. In this specific case, it might be a how-to piece "on how to select the best self storage service" or "5 pitfals to avoid when selecting selfstorage". The article should be unique (in terms of content, so it is not picked up as duplicate content), **useful **(so that people actually read it and eventually tweet or +1 it) and **authoritative **(using 3rd party references to support what it says). No hard selling pitches, no blatant promotion of products/services... only useful information, with relevant links to different and authoritative domains... and, of course, a couple of good links back to your site. PS: I haven't tried it... so I don't know if creating such a page would have any impact on a website ranking. What do you guys think? Is it worth spending the time to come up with such a  page?

Hi There, I've been tackling this same issue with my site, and I think I have your problem diagnosed - It's your domain relevancy and authority. You have modest authority, but low relevancy. It looks like you're trying to rank locally for the following terms (or variants): Toronto Storage Etobicoke Storage Mississauga Storage Scarborough Storage But, here's a breakdown of your (relevant) anchor text: Toronto Storage - 5 Linking Root Domains with Anchor Text Self Storage Toronto - 4 Linking Root Domains with Anchor Text Storage in Toronto, Scarborough & Mississauga - 2 Linking Root Domains with Anchor Text Storage Toronto - 1 Linking Root Domains with Anchor Text Besides "Toronto Storage", your links are providing you with very little relevancy in regard to the terms you are trying to rank for. According to David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors, citations, domain authority, and quality of inbound links are the most important factors that you can actually use to set yourself apart from the competition (assuming most people are smart enough to include relevant addresses, categories, etc in their place pages). You are currently doing the equivalent of trying to rank for "dishwasher" with links that only have "kitchen" in the anchor text. Conclusion: Build links with the terms you want to rank for as the anchor text. I just experienced the exact same problem and the link building shot my places traffic though the roof for a very competitive space. How: Fire up Google and do a search for a phrase you want to rank for like "Toronto Storage." Make sure the MozBar is installed and explore the links of your top competitors. Copy the links that aren't junk using the terms you want to rank for as the anchor text. This is somewhat time consuming, but you currently have so few links that you are going to discover a goldmine of opportunity with about two hours worth of work.