In the future(if they havent started to already), I think Google is going to be cracking down a bit on websites that are structured like this... Having X amount of pages for the same thing just changing it up a bit to target a new city.

If you have an office or address in those 20 cities, I would start with optimizing any Google+ Local listings and focusing on ranking those first. It's a much easier and legitimate strategy then making a bunch of spammy(most likely) looking pages.

I am seeing your social media buttons throughout your blog archive and single blog posts pages. They all seem to have different numbers associated with them also.

It seems to be working for me, did you figure this out?

Without knowing your client's industry, generally speaking If I had 3 hours to work on Local SEO, I would split it up between Google+/G+ Local and Yelp. If I had any time left over, I would try to make connections with reporters from local news websites.

They can absolutely have a positive effect to support your SEO efforts. One thing I feel you should know is though, simply using a service like Piktochart and some of the other infographic creators and slapping together something quick isn't going to give you the results you are looking for.

I would recommend designing a custom infographic from scratch - or hiring a designer to do it for you after you provide him with a creative brief.

You also need to think of your plans on how you will distribute the infographic. Here is a great youmoz post on how to push an infographic - http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/how-to-push-an-infographic

Just make a new page for every service.

There is no reason to use the multisite function or have each keyword on a new domain. Not only will it not benefit you from an SEO standpoint it will also feel disconnected from a user standpoint. Nobody wants to see a "weirdexactmatchdomain.com" with a small amount of content on it, they would rather see all of your services on one complete website.

Assuming the service and keyword is something like "divorce lawyers in city" (disregard my whole reply if I am wrong :)), there should be Google map listings dominating those SERP's. At least in the test cities I just searched. But for any local based service SERP there is most likely the same look.

In that case if your client has offices in those different cities, it would be easier to claim and optimize your Google+ listings for each location rather than have a bunch of spammy looking pages on your site. There is no reason to have 7 different pages on the exact same topic.

I would determine a top/important page as one that is not only ranking well for your terms, but pages that may be receiving traffic from other sources. Check out Google Analytics and sort by top pages and filter by source and redirect the ones that are actually seeing inbound traffic.

Sooner is better than later.

Make sure when you 301 redirect the site, you not only redirect the site, but redirect the individual pages to the new pages also so that any of the internal ranking pages pass the rank also.

Make sure to verity the new site in Google webmaster tools and notify them that the old domain has permanently moved to the new domain. In my experience, you will usually see direct ranking transfer within 2-4 weeks max.

I wouldnt always go off of the SEOmoz grader tool. You could have a 1000 piece of content about the presidential debate last night, and throw in the word "storage bin" in that article 5 times and you will get a grade "A+", but that doesn't mean the content is good content for storage bins. (Im not saying your content is bad, but dont assume your on-site SEO is good just based off of that tool).

Improving your overall inbound links would be a great place to start, looking at OSE you only have 4 internal links pointing to your site http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fmonsterbins.com%2F. I'm not sure what your SEO level is, so I am making that suggestion blindly. Dont just go out and blindly build links if your not sure how to. I would recommend checking out Point Blank SEO's Link Building Course - or at the very least his blog has great actionable link building tactics.

Dave,

Adding a rel="nofollow" tag to a URL is not going to fix any duplicate content. It just means that moz/Google bot aren't going to follow that link. But they already know that that URL exists so they will continue to index it.

If you dont want Google to index your content because of duplicate content you can use a canonical tag or noindex, nofollow tag. Check out this article on the same issue http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content on how you can resolve your problem.

Hope that helps!

Without looking at keywords or competitors, typically 6 months is a perfect amount of time to get noticeable results on a local campaign. You can most likely rank for local deck building keywords with on-site SEO and good content.

Personally, I would take it on. I would say it depends on your SEO capabilities and track record on weither you want to take the project on. Definitely do not take on any project that you are not comfortable with, those never end well for anyone...

There are many many things you can do with your .htaccess

What are you trying to accomplish? Are you trying to redirect non-www to www? Trying to get a better link structure? Trying to redirect pages? Or a site?

In most cases it depends on your server setup and your needs. Since you mentioned Joomla, this post has some pretty good explanations and examples at the bottom you can download.

The keyword difficulty tool is working 90% for me, its still pulling in all of the SERP results, links, DA, PA, etc. The only thing that is not working is the adwords search numbers - which if you really want to know that, use the Google keyword tool.

And if you read the big bold warning on the tool's page it reads:

Our Keyword Difficulty Tool is having issues displaying AdWords API data. We are working with the AdWords API folks to get a fix soon!

Give them a break, I am sure they are working on it. I know their support team works hard to reply to everyone's emails.

John Doherty did a great post a while back on meta tags that will NOT help SEO. As you can see, "classification" is on that list.

The rel="stylesheet" is just pulling in all of the website's CSS styles. Design related, not SEO.

You can read more about pingback's here.

By default WordPress includes stylesheets and your pingback URL.

You also mentioned you are using meta keyword tags still, I would recommend removing those, they have not been a ranking factor for quite some time now, you are just giving your competitors an insight to the keywords you are targeting.

There was a recent post a few days ago in the UGC blog on how to push an infographic. http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/how-to-push-an-infographic

In reality though, a good infographic should do the work for you.

You can absolutely still rank with good content and site architecture. It doesn't have to do with having a lot of content, just good content. While you aren't going to rank for any competitive terms, but you can climb up high on the first page for some long tail and local based keywords.

Xavier,

I think generally right now they still work to a point, the problem you will likely run into in the future is the mass amount of links with the same anchor text pointing back to the same page on your site.

One way to work around this problem could be to randomly generate anchor text and URL for each site that uses the badge.

Sam,

I am working on a mac, and OSE works across all browsers including Chrome. What version of IE?

You mention "It doesn't work". What exactly do you mean by that? The website is down? The tool is pulling in wrong data? The tool is pulling in no data at all?

No one here can possibly answer your question without more specifics.

No problem, feel free to send me a private message if you need help with the code.

Please check out the authentication wiki page: http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/w/page/29574176/SignedAuthentication

$objectURL = $domain_url;$accessID = "member-XXXXXXXXXXX";

$secretKey = "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX";

$expires = mktime() + 300;

// The request is good for the next 5 minutes, or 300 seconds from now.

$stringToSign = $accessID."\n".$expires;

// Get the "raw" or binary output of the hmac hash.

$binarySignature = hash_hmac('sha1', $stringToSign, $secretKey, true);

// We need to base64-encode it and then url-encode that.

$urlSafeSignature = urlencode(base64_encode($binarySignature));

$urlToFetch = "http://lsapi.seomoz.com/linkscape/links/".urlencode($objectURL)."?AccessID=".$accessID."&Expires=".$expires."&Signature=".$urlSafeSignature."&SourceCols=26&&TargetCols=4&Scope=page_to_domain&Filter=follow&Sort=page_authority&Limit=25";

// You don't have to use fopen and can't in some scenarios. CURL is a better choice for production.

$handle = fopen($urlToFetch, "r");$links_contents = ''; while (!feof($handle)) {    $links_contents .= fread($handle, 8192);} fclose($handle);

echo $links_contents;

?>

Here is how we are pulling it in. Replace $accessID with your API code, you can sort and filter through the different link calls. Replace "Limit" with however much you want to pull in. The code will return a json response, from there you can parse the data however you want.

I hope that helps!