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Thanks for the reminder of that post – had completely forgotten about it!

I know you may see it as a "cop out" and others might as well, but the recent stint was by a 3rd party, and was taken swift action upon the news..... So I am not sure How "Blackhat" gaining one follow link from a blog in the grand scheme of Google's over 400 million backlinks is......... But in this I understand we may not see eye to eye and it can be seen as hypocritical. And i agree in General that paying someone to review something and implying it should be a good review is unethical and un-helpful, but not really "Black-Hat" that is a word that gets thrown around alot. The first reaction from any client/CEO to anything new usually is "Ugh"... come on man. When do challenges in business ever stop...? I think we will just have to agree to disagree on this But i will definitely research the other Blackhat claims as I had not heard of them. And I was not trying to say you do not do well in SERPS, just that alot of people seem to have an axe to grind with Google cause they feel they should be doing better, even though there are millions of other sites out there. So that brings alot of anti Google sentiment that really is just all about competition. Have A great Night! Shane

As stated, having a sub directory works, but I don't think it gives that much of a benefit over the example you gave. But yes location and geo targeting with specific pages can be a great strategy. It works well for me, but I'm a local business so everything I do is defined by location. What you want to avoid is creating pages with duplicate content just to appear local. Simply changing out keyword locations in the content is not going to give you a sustainable advantage. If you are going to create GEO specific pages then make content unique to that location. This is just good for SEO but it's good for selling and converting as well.