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That would be rel=publisher but I haven't seen it show up for searches when I'm not signed in to my Google+.  Meaning that I believe (no evidence) that it only shows up the company logo when someone who is searching is signed into G+ and already follows the brand.  Not 100% on that.

You can check to see if rel=publisher is markedup correctly in Google's rich snippets testing tool.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

I have it for my homepage,  http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=www.vzpro.com  You'll see half way down the page that there is a place that shows Publisher markup

There are a few ways to do this.

1. You can create individual pages for each city/town (ie. lake worth, west palm beach, wellington, royal palm beach, jupiter, etc.)  So for example...  www.westpalmbeachdentist.com/dentist-wellington

You'll have to make sure you have unique content on each page and unique title tags and meta tags

2. You can add a listing of cities you serve and you can link to your pages using a multitude of anchor text.  For instance if you have your homepage as www.westpalmbeachdentist.com you can link to it using the anchor text "Lake Worth Dentist".

The first one works really well and you can if you set up a campaign in SEOmoz you can actually see those pages rank individually.  You'll add the keyword (for example) "dentist wellington" and when your page www.westpalmbeachdentist.com/dentist-wellington shows up in the top 50 you'll know.  Just keep up with Google WMT to make sure you aren't showing duplicate content.

Is there a none of the above option?  .com is still king and will always be.  Until a major brand uses one of them as their MAIN url, it won't happen.  If Overstock.com couldn't make O.co stick, then I don't see ANY of these working very well.  I think a Brand may use them for a specific purpose but it won't be anything significant.  If I had to guess I think .shop would work.  I could see nfl.shop or something like that catching on.

I happen to think that your link profile needs to be robust to your internal pages.  Think about user experience here.  If someone is on another blog and writing about red apples, would the person want to go to the home page of a farmers website about red apples or a sub-page about red apples.  I just think that is natural.  If they go to the homepage of your site then they will have to find the page on red apples.  I can image that your bounce rate would be pretty high if that was the case.   I don't worry to much about percentages on any sort of link building campaign.  I don't know if 10:1 or 15:1 or 1:1 is correct.  I can tell you from just about everything the search engines do that percentages don't matter.  It's about quality.  As a general rule of thumb, its going to depend on your type of website you are building.  If you have an e-commerce site and the link is from some where talking about sites as a whole, the link to your home page is fine.  But, if the source of the link is talking about a particular product, then I think that link needs to be to a particular sub-page talking about that product. Again, don't get caught up in percentages.  If you have high quality link prospects then you will naturally be varying your link profile.  If you are using automated links then you won't.  Hope that helps a little.

• quick dislaimer:  I've only done international seo for a site that had sub domains and sub folders. Never cross-domains.  So take the recommendation below with that in mind.

Hey Paul,

I generally translate "equivalent" as "this page (X) is the same as page Y but in a different language or intended for a different region".

When you said, "This is being done to prevent North American pages from being served in the UK, Spain pages from being served in Portugal, or any other combination of possibilities..." I wanted to let you know that you might not need to do anything in your sitemap.  I don't know exactly how you set up your domains or translations if any so I use caution with that statement. But, if one of your sites is meant for Portugal, you can set geotargeting in Search Console to accomplish this.  Even if the content is the same on another site but that other site is set to a different country, you shouldn't have a problem with duplicate content.  That geotargeting is basically a signal to Google that you want users in Spain to see the Spain site and people in Portugal to see the Portugal site and these two pages won't be competing.

Where you would want your href lang is on translations of those sites in the perspective countries.  So let's say the Portugal site has an Portuguese, English and French version (the main languages in Portugal) then you would set alternate href lang tags for all the translations on that site.  But if your site dedicated to Spain also has an English version, you wouldn't need to cross reference the Portugal site if you use geotargeting.  (Hope that makes sense)

Alyda Solis, who is an associate here at Moz, has a really cool tool on her site that can help you build the syntax.  https://www.aleydasolis.com/english/international-seo-tools/hreflang-tags-generator/

Many sites that will have a >60 DA are going to be very particular about the guest posts they allow.

Many sites will not allow more than a few links on a guest post.

It would take the same amount of time to check all the things you mentioned if you just did it yourself.  Not sure hiring someone for this makes a whole lot of sense.  I do some out reach every day and it's well worth the time. Especially in the beginning as you'll get to understand what it takes to get a successful blog post published.  You can then write an SOP (standard operating procedure) to get it done by someone else.

Below is a link to a Whiteboard Friday ( a little dated but still relevant ) where Rand talks about guest blogging strategies.

guest-blogging-strategies-whiteboard-friday

Google's guidelines state

1. Choose the listing that you'd prefer to keep in your account.
   1. Make sure that you have all your enhanced content (photos, business hours, description) attached to this listing.
   2. Make sure that its status is "active".

and that all the rest should be deleted.

This happened to an AC repair company client but it took almost 5 weeks for the listing to disappear and once it did we shot up in the 7 pack.

https://support.google.com/places/answer/183009?hl=en

I'm not sure I follow exactly what you are trying to convey but I do know that Google doesn't allow two or more site links in the same ad group (and/or campaign) to point to the same landing page or the same content.  You also can't use the site link to point to the same URL as the ad itself.  I think the content needs to be 80% unique to be considered different content.

Let me know if that makes sense or if you can maybe show an example or two.   I am a Google Certified AdWords Partner so if you need me to take a look at your account let me know.

Darin @vzPRO

Thank you Donna,

We do have a map embedded already on the page, we have schema markup on the page (both local business and attorney) and we have reviews on tons of sites but only 3 in Google itself.  We have reviews in yellowpages, yelp, some law directories, etc.  I'm not really sure how else I would "diversify my reviews".  None of them are staff or fake so how would you recommend I diversify them?

Their main location is in a smaller suburb of a much larger city.  There is 1 other law firm that is in this town and it's huge. (they do like $150 Million/year in settlements and have a large marketing firm doing their advertising, marketing and seo.  There are a few other small firms but we are both centrally located to the city.  Yes, they are a little closer to the centroid but if they were #1 in Maps and we were in the top 3 I would be good with that.  My client only spends $300k per year on advertising and they spend over $3 Million.  I can't fathom the drop to #38 in a city with maybe 10 or so competitors who most don't even have a "verified" map location.

Just know that you'll need to have a personal profile and a page profile to accomplish this.

Michelle Ross over at Search Engine Journal did a great post a few months ago on how to get started on Google+

That is a great start there but I think the best one I've seen for Businesses is by Marvin Shervington (marvinshervington.com) and he created a complete guide for Google+ for brands

You're question is kind of like asking "how do I get started in SEO"  It's really hard to answer without giving you some sources first and when you have specifics then you can come back and ask those question and get better discussion.

In my opinion Google+ is Twitter, Facebook and Google combined.  There are a lot of nuances with it and giving you one big overview is pretty tough.  Read up on the resources I've provided, and others that you can search for and feel free to ask any specifics you have.

The disavow tool is something I would use cautiously!  Continue to do the same practices you are currently using (contact the webmasters) and make sure that you are adding quality links going forward.  I have a client that had the same issue and we got our rankings back (though not all the way) by contacting webmasters and creating a positive link structure with all of their new links.  (they were doing a lot of "blackhat" stuff before they dropped and called us)

If you do decide to use the disavow tool, I would check out this great article by DeJanSEO that they posted back in October (http://dejanseo.com.au/google-link-disavow-complete-guide/)

Let me be clear and say that I'm not saying that every link you want to be removed should go on the disavow document.  It should only be used for those excessively spammy links and where you've tried to contact the webmasters and have had no success.  You can write notes to Google in your document that tells them the efforts you have made to remove the links.  They do actually take that into consideration and if you provide more positive links going forward, that should do the trick.

In my experience, on average Google will only index about 80% of your sitemap.  Do you already have links to those pages or is this a new site?   Generally, I give it two full weeks to see where it is at and see if any errors come back.

Are you using WMT to verify submission or site:operator?

As far as time goes.  Make sure that your site's crawl rate is optimized too.  GoogleBot works on a kind of time "budget" and can't crawl everything all the time.

Check for Dup Content.  Google doesn't "hit" your site but will choose one version or another to index if the content is similar or nearly similar.

These are some starting points but 4 days isn't very long for that many pages.  Give it some time and keep us posted on how it's going.

You can use the country and language in your language preferences.  ie. en-gb for the UK version and en-us for the US version.

I always add the code for our german and english version of our blog

Also check out his page on Moz for some additional help

https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag and you can help generate your tags at http://www.aleydasolis.com/en/international-seo-tools/hreflang-tags-generator/ (cited in moz article)

You should be able to head over to https://moz.com/subscriptions (while signed in) and see the option there.

If you need any help with the tools before you cancel let us know and we'll help.  Moz is a great resource.

I haven't come across your particular situation before but I looked at your FB page and noticed the name of it is "DISH TV".  I know that Facebook's open graph search is very particular to Page Names and not FB URLs.  If you search for DISH TV your page does show up in FB search however.  If you change your FB page name to Dish Costs Less I would assume you would get the results you are looking for.  You have over 1k followers so you'll have to verify your business with them first.

On a side note.  I've personally seen strong correlation between ranking a FB page in Google with having the keyword as the page name.  Not saying that is correct but the pages that I manage that I do that with, have been successful.  This search https://www.google.com/search?q=ac+repair+miramar+fl&pws=0 and this search https://www.google.com/search?q=ac+repair+parkland&pws=0 are both on the first page of Google.  The first page has an exact fb.com/url and the second one doesn't match the title name.  They both rank though. FYI

Hope this helps.

Darin.

I have to disagree with William Lau.

I think that blog commenting has changed a bit.  It think it is still relevant.  I prefer the term Comment Marketing and Link Earning because that is my goal, to market my site and earn links.  Here is how I do it now.

I find blogs that are relevant to my industry and of people who I really want to have link to me (authority figures).  I follow their blogs and comment regularly on them.  My goal is to build up enough trust and awareness of what I am all about.  I have two goals here.  1) if my comments are good then people will want to learn more about me and click on my profile/link to go to my site (not so much for SEO purposes but for site traffice) ( I don't care if I'm number one if no one goes to my site.  Traffic is important to me.  Even better, relevant traffic.) and 2) I want to be able to eventually earn the right to become a guest blogger or have that person read about me and link to my site because of it's good content.

I think the idea of posting a comment for the sake of posting a comment is pointless.  SEO is changing (for the better) and SEO now should stand for Search EXPERIENCE Optimization and not Search Engine Optimization.  Comment Marketing is relevant if you use it to help build traffic and not to earn "traditional SEO links".

Google doesn't want to take up to much bandwidth on your server so it will "budget" its time during a crawl.  Make sure your page load times are fast, server has a good "up time", constantly add new content so when Google does the next crawl it will see that it is a site that is constantly updated, and make sure your pages aren't too large.  You can actually speed up Google's crawl (or slow it down) under configuration>settings> but you don't need to do anything here but make sure that the radial that says "Let Google Decide" is selected under crawl rate.

If you haven't done so already, you can Fetch as Google and submit to index with all linked pages.  Technically Google sees your site so you don't have to do this but I always see an increase in the crawl rate when I do it.  (Don't do it if you've already done it recently).  I also like to submit individual pages to the Fetch as Google when I create new content and I only index that particular page if it's a brand new page that I've added.

When your PR increases, you'll also see an increase to the crawl rate.

Yes, Ahtisham is right.  Reviews has a strong correlation with ranking better in Places.   I have places pages that have ZERO links to them but are number one.  What matters is the reviews, your NAP format.

Do you have a Suite Number and do people come to you or are you a service business?  Those matter in how you set up your profile.  Each need to be "on-page" optimized differently.

There was a great Mozinar earlier this year on Google Places.  Definitely take the time to watch it.

http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/all-about-google-places

I don't work for Moz but Moz Pro refunds are considered on a case-by-case basis, please email help@moz.com from your account email and provide the last 4 digits and the name on the card that was charged. We'll be able to review your account and respond within 24 hours.

Nothing at Google is here to stay.  I can think of at least 5 cover photo changes already.  I didn't see any announcements but I now that the Google+ for Android rolled out yesterday.

Here are my thoughts

What I like about it:

• "that giant monstrosity of an image" that Mike Roberts mentioned is gone!  I hated having to scroll UP to see all of it.  That was just dumb.
• I like the 'info card' on the left side vs the bottom long drawn out text area we had before.
• I like that the 'info card' doesn't cover ANY of the image.  We spend a lot of money on photography and I don't want it covered.

What I don't like:

• It looks very blocky (<-- is that a word?).  I think a more artistic design would have been better.  www.google.com/+vzpro is very boring whereas www.google.com/+labovick, who designed their cover before to allow for the text area to be easily read, looks great.  I think making the 'info card' be a little longer and have a little shadowing behind it would make a world of difference as far as design.  I know we can design images to do that now but I think it is an easy adjustment for G+ to do.
• I don't like the fact that the background of the 'info card' is the same image as the one to the right and is extremely blurred.  I don't know if a solid color would be better but I just know I don't like it very much.

Ok,  I'm off my soapbox now.  Carry on...