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Assuming there's a logical business reason to link them I would do it but I would take the following precautions:

1. Don't over optimize the anchor text. Use branded anchor text or something like that.

2. Make sure each property has a distinctly different link profile. In other words getting a Forbes link to each of the properties doesn't make much sense and it definitely doesn't signal natural link acquisition to Google.

3. Monitor the rankings and GWT metrics for the properties for the first few months after linking them and see if you see any noticeable decline in traffic or rankings. If so, I would take the links down.

I've been doing Local SEO for 9 years and have never had an issue that frustrated me as much as this one. I have a client who I can't get past the 15th page of Google's SERPS for their #1 KW. Here are the details:

• The domain is 4 months old
• In that 4 month span the site has gone from a DA 1 to a DA 24
• Spam score is a 0. I know this doesn't mean a ton but I can tell you from closely reviewing their AHrefs report, there's no influx of spammy links or anything like that.
• The design is a custom wordpress design
• The content is 100% unique and professionally written content
• The backlink profile (in my opinion) is full of high DA and PA sites from authority sites with high trust flow ... in my opinion their backlinks are superior to all but maybe a handful of competitors.
• I was not expecting 1st page results by now but I would have expected top 50 results a the very least. But to not crack the top 15 tells me there's some major issue here.

I really need some insight as to what could be holding me back here ... I don't want to share the domain publicly but but I will PM you it if you're interested in taking a crack at it. I will seriously pay someone a small fortune if they can help me figure this out.

Thank you Miriam. Those are awesome resources all of which I am familiar with

There are some obvious issues with the backlink profile on this particular site. I've pointed it out to the client as something hazardous and their current SEO is framing it as a difference of opinion when in reality he is putting the client at great risk (in my opinion).

My hope was get a third party to look at this and offer an honest assessment to the client.

Btw, I'm not opposed to paying someone for their time here.

Thanks again!

I have a business i'm working with right now who wants to improve their rankings in a very competitive legal niche.

Are there any Local SEO gurus out there that would be willing to explain in a paragraph or two what's going wrong?

Let me know if you'd like to help and I'll PM you the domain.

Cool site.

I agree, with Egols comment, I think Google is treating these pages as being low quality because there isn't much content on the pages. If you're familiar with worpdress, Google often does the same thing with all the hundreds of pages that WP makes for blog categories, tags, etc.

I would test this theory by picking a few of the random pages and adding some content that is well optimized and see how it performs.

Yes exactly, in that case I would expand my radius to include the nearest metropolitan area. I would maybe not try to encompass the entire city of a city like say Denver, but a portion of it.

In my experience, if you get overly ambitious with your service area, you end up with very poor results.

I would ask yourself this question, how big is the radius around your office, where if you were to rank #1, would give you enough business to earn a living and grow your business, but not too much business where you're overwhelmed? That's where I would I would "cast my net" so to speak. Get rankings in a smaller radius and then you can expand a little from there if you're not getting leads or exposure from there.

Have you done a scan of your website to confirm that you don't have any malware or malicious code? That would be the first thing I would do. I have had this issue a few times with hacked sites. The first thing we do is scan the site, clean it, test it and even relocate it to a new host if the server we're on is compromised.

While technically you can configure Google My Business exactly how you have done it, you are highly unlikely to get rankings across the state of Colorado because of the competition. If you were in a highly uncompetitive niche, it might work, but not for something highly competitive like internet marketing.

If you want to see results, I would cast a much more narrow net with the hopes of getting rankings in one of those cities you menation. I also would pick the city closest to my address to increase the likelihood of ranking.

So David was kind enough to look at the site and found some potential issues. In short, the home page had 57 heading tags which is excessive, there are some heading tags missing from some interior pages and there's a few pages that should be no indexed that aren't

I'm going to fix all of these, give it some time and see if this fixes the issues. I'll keep this thread updated.

Thanks David for your time!

Thanks David - I PM'd you the info

I have a client site that I am beating my head against the wall for right now. Three months into a 100% white hat campaign, we can't get him ranking in the top 150. Here's the cliffsnotes:

• Built a new wordpress website
• All on page SEO has been done and score an A+ for his primary kws
• Robots.txt is setup correctly
• .htaccess is setup correctly
• new domain
• multiple 95 DA, 50 PA links from reputable, national sites.
• Yext Local listings
• SSL, CDN, Speed optimized
• Has 19 pages indexed by Google
• Posting one blog a week for him

Granted his primary keyword is a hyper competitive kw, but still, I've been doing this for 8 years and never seen a guy be stuck on the 16th page for so long for the sort of links we are building him. I'm genuinely stumped here and could use some help.

I know I'm a little late to the game but one suggestion I would recommend reading your post is to take the synonym out of your page title on your home page. For example, I work with a lot of attorneys and if I create separate pages for "lawyer" and "attorney", I never get the respective targeted traffic ... google just ranks the more optimized, higher PA page for both terms.

If that link comes from a Wall St. Journal Property that doesn't allow just anyone to create pages with followed links (i.e. blogspot), I would anticipate that link yielding terrific long term results for your site's page and domain authority. Most small businesses have a very hard time getting those types of links so you should be very proud.

At the same time though, when it comes to linkbuilding always remember to play the long game. Every once in awhile that unicorn link that makes an instant impact comes along but generally speaking that's a result of click through traffic as a result of people clicking on that link when the page goes live ... it sounds like that's NOT the case here if I understand your post correctly so I would just keep doing what you're doing that got you that link in the first place

Also, I'm sure you've already done this but it's always a good idea to share links about your business from other sites on your social media for the bragging rights and of course, it won't hurt the value of that link to have good social signals going to it.

What about the on page SEO for the blank page? Anything there? I agree with the other guys, sounds like this blank page has some signals going to it ... possibly a really powerful link (even by accident) that could be pushing it's PA up.

Yep, I agree with both of these posts. I looked at the site on your profile and if that's the site you are thinking about hiring a writer for, I really don't see the need to pay that much for something like that unless you KNEW for a fact that it was going to be UBER compelling. In my experience, compelling content for local businesses is usually written by someone who is a) an expert in that industry and b) has an extremely unique voice. So unless this individual checks both of these boxes, I wouldn't pay anywhere near that personally.

There's a lot that could be going on here. How are the citations for each of the locations? Also have you configured the local schema on each local landing page? I wrote an article here on Moz a while back that I think might be helpful:

https://moz.com/ugc/get-your-multilocation-business-ranking-in-multiple-cities-with-one-domain-21815

It depends on the purpose and quality of the content. If this is just regular content that you normally post to your site, I would post it.

On the other hand, if the content was a piece that I really thought would be a difference maker and really impactful compared to my "regular" (I know, I know - all content is impactful) content. I would hold off and post the content when I launch the new site to give my audience a legit reason to check out the new eye candy.

Actually that's not true. If you read what Chris Young said above ("The functionality to limit seat access is one of the potential new features in the backlog"), they are planning to eventually add that specific functionality.

Of course that's been considered. Being able to allow a client access to an account is valuable for certain. But is it worth paying $100 or more a month per client? No, it's not.

Google will do this as they see fit in an effort to connect users with the content they are looking for. They will even serve multiple page titles for the same page based on the user search. The factors that determine that are anchor text to the URL and click through rates for specific kws. Essentially Google will treat your SERPs like their own personal Adwords ad, where they will tinker with the ad copy to achieve their desired result.