Welcome to the Q&A Forum

First off, if you're diagnosing a Penguin or Panda (or any Google algo) related problem, start by installing Chartelligence on Chrome.  Now, whne you log in to Google Analytics and look at traffic, this plugin will let you overlay the Google algo change dates overtop your traffic chart.  This is a HUGE help at spotting which algo hit you. I doubt keyword stuffing on the page is the problem.  You have to get REALLY nuts with that to get in trouble, honestly. Sitewide links will get you in trouble, though.  Get those removed, and then give it a month or two.

Awesome! Very useful information from Mr. Shaw.

I agree with Paul, 100%. Just do a 301 redirect and move on. As you said, it's dropping in the SERPS and there's really only type-in traffic and there's no SEO value of it's own. Minimal PA, DA. 301 Redirect and Issue Resolved.

If it's always a planned action then I don't know. If none of the experts have noticed a difference then perhaps it doesn't matter. Maybe something to keep in mind in case one day things change. Thanks Miriam

If those blogs don't have back link profiles with good, diverse back links. I'd recommend to ditch them all. Site X already a profile of a bunch of similar blogs with private registration and if they all have similar back link profiles, the dots are going to be connected-if they haven't been already. If the back link profiles and brand citations of Site X are inconsequential, it's likely those 25 tiny blogs are not doing Site X any good at the moment anyway. The site owner may have had good intentions back in the day but it's time to convince him/her that that train has passed and it's time to cut the losses.

Bob, William and Chris have both provided great insight on this. Review velocity has certainly come up as a possible trigger for filters, but so far, citation velocity has not been investigated or pointed out as an issue by anyone I know in the Local SEO community. Does this mean it couldn't become an issue in future? I wonder about this. In the 10 years I've been working on the web, I have watched the rise and fall of directory submissions as a powerful tactic in traditional SEO. I am not sure if velocity had anything to do with that, actually, or if it was simply the Google decided that these types of links were not a great signal of relevance. Obviously, right now, directory-type listings are the core tactic of Local SEM, and it's hard for me to imagine that changing any time soon, though Google appears to be trusting social signals more and more as relevance indicators. But as to the specifics of velocity, your guess is as good as anyone's as to whether Google will, at some point, create a filter that relates to this. We'll all have to wait and see.

Hi Bob, Good question. No, this does not matter. Consider the fact that when you conduct a citation campaign, the different indexes require different formatting in their submission forms. Differences like (111) 111-1111 and 111-111-1111 and 111.111.1111 are build into the system and, in my experience, Google has no problem in understanding these formats.

Hip hip hooray, Bob! So glad to hear that.

Hey Bob, if those links are topic-related and aren't delivering you any traffic I agree with Thom in his huge and detailed answer. Swap it to an editorial article to an improtant page of your site would be my pick.

Hi Bob, To be honest, I'm unfamiliar with the designation 'room number', though 'suite number' is highly common. To me, a room number sounds like something in a hotel or school. Is a room the same thing as a suite? I'm curious. At any rate, yes, if you are in a multi-business building, it is vital that your business is differentiated from the others with a number or letter of some kind. If your profiles and citations lack this, then the danger is that your NAP signal is being partially shared by other businesses. This could lead to duplicates, merging, penalties, etc., that could sap the strength of your listing. Your job is going to be to clean up as many possible citations as you can so that your business is correctly listed at the address (including the number or letter) at which mail gets delivered to your business. I highly suggest doing this: Yourself, manually. Hiring an expert to do this for you manually. I would not recommend using any type of automation in this situation as tools may fail to turn up all instances of listings with this NAP discrepancy. Create a spreadsheet, fill it with links to your citations, work to correct them and check them off the list when you see that the change has gone into place on the various citations. Lots of work, but worth it to secure and clarify your NAP signal.

First thing to do is truly determine if you really need to remove those links, and second is to determine what your brand is.  Start by reading this post by Marie Haynes earlier this week: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-difference-between-penguin-and-an-unnatural-links-penalty-and-some-info-on-panda-too If NLP California is your brand and what people call you, most likely there is no problem having links to your site with anchor text NLP California.

Then create a main "hub" page (the "Complete Guide") that links out to each of these articles, as well as to your actual product page. This is a very good idea. It is actually like the category pages on an information site.  These can be very competitive because they are optimized for the difficult term, they often have lots of content, and they link to much deeper content elsewhere on the same site - and those pages link back.

I agree with Mike. Letting a customer know you are choosing their review to be posted on your site generally gives a good sentiment to the customer. You benefit in both ways, creating a good relationship with your customer(more WOM referrals) and giving your site a legitimate review.

I think part of it has to do with the link in your articles section, heading in the article, url, and title tag all matching or being REALLY close. For instance, if I Google Dynamic Spin Release, I see your website's article; however, if I Google Dynamic Spin Release and the Energy of Your Mind, I do not. I am guess that is because your title tag and url pull more weight than your listing and heading: listing: Dynamic Spin Release and the Energy of Your Mind heading: Article on Dynamic Spin Release and The Energy of Your Mind title: Dynamic Spin Release url: Dynamic Spin Release When you are writing or posting these articles, I would try and match the listing, heading, title, and url to almost match each other if those are the types of queries you are hoping get typed into Google. I hope this helps. Mike

Yes, it makes sense to have issue in exact match case with your CA state but I am not sure over this 100% either. The anchor text you should use here is to mix up your target relevant keywords associated with your brand or company names which help a lot in order to gain natural effect and rank in Google.

PR1 is a good minimum, but it really depends on your niche and how much resources you have to do this outreach. If you want to make sure you are only getting links from quality sites, I would do a manual review to see if the site passes the sniff test, and also run a backlink report to make sure they're not doing anything shady.

Hi I guess it would depend on what the product is and what the article is about, I think the best way is to think like a customer. How would you see your customer using the blog? What would they be interested in reading about? Using your example of the running shoes and the best athlete blogs article, I think it would work really well if you included in the article a picture of each athlete and then a link beneath the image to the page within your e-commerce website that has the pair of running shoes on that they are wearing. That way you get an interesting opinion piece article that will encourage discussion as well as a link to your e-commerce website and different products within it. Hopefully this way people are less likely just to read the article and leave; instead they will have a look and see what type of shoes their favorite athlete wears. (and then hopefully buy them as well!) Hope that helps

I think you may be looking at your topics too broadly and perhaps without enough creativity.  Who's never heard of the teenybopper who wanted to grow up to be a fashion model in high heel designer shoes? What shoe designer hasn't had a model who's little sister didn't want to grow up to be just like her? How many different ways can a teeny bopper save her dollars to buy those shoes she saw in the magazine at the grocery store?  What teeny bopper doesn't have an opinion on the shoes her mom has in her closet or on the shoes her aunt bought her for her birthday? And what writer, worth their salt, couldn't write a tear-jerking, funny, or uplifting piece on any of those topics that that target audience that they wouldn't share among themselves? This is the best part about Google freeing us from the oppression of the "keyword" and letting relevance be more categorical and thematic. Google's listening less intently on what we have to say about ourselves through our content and more so on what those in the social world are saying about us.  This frees us to be more creative in the content that we create for our clients and lets us think more about creating content that our audience will engage with. I think you're better off today writing about topics that are tangentially related to your niche and about ways your audience relates to those topics.  I think audiences today are becoming dead tired of copy that has any scent of SEO and that they are more likely to click through to and engage with that which is fresh in it's perspective. Learn your audience, write stuff that they're going to like, and don't forget your back channels to algorithmic visibility--like structured data, authorship, co-citation, UGC, and, oh yeah, links.

I would space it out to one every couple weeks, that way if that change has any sort of negative impact you can isolate the cause and reverse the decision.

Hi Bob, The first thing I looked for when visiting your site was a big "what is nlp" button, I really had no idea! Maybe google is thinking (or has started thinking) a bit like this for the search term nlp also? With the potential for local results etc mixed in it seems to me that the term could be a bit volitile in terms of rankings and your experience possibly hints at that. I see the sitelinks you mention if I search for nplcalifornia with no space, but am not well aquainted with these expanded sitelinks and their finer points, maybe someone else? I would still be wary of messing too much with those site wide links!