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I'm looking for a recommendation of a provider that can completely manage the submissions to Google, infoUSA, Localeze, and Axciom for a business with ~300 locations.

Anyone have a good recommendation?

To be a tad more specific I have a site that is a simple calculator utility that allows visitors to look up tire variations that are close to their current tire size.  The site was created in 2007 and has some back-links including some references in wikipedia.

My goal is to build a simple calculator that encompasses the core tools into a widget that other "car" sites can use at their sites.  My hopeful out come is to build 5-15 new inbound links from sites that will use the calculator on their sites.

Im planning on building a small utility widget that my site will distribute to related sites.  I plan on implementing this with JS and including a small anchor link back to my site.

In the new penguin world, will the possibly be destructive to my SEO efforts? Any do's or don'ts when developing a widget/badge for distribution to lets say a dozen sites?

I'm working on a recently hacked site for a client and and in trying to identify how exactly the hack is running I need to use the fetch as Google bot feature in GWT.

I'd love to use this but it thinks the robots.txt is blocking it's acces but the only thing in the robots.txt file is a link to the sitemap.

Unde the Blocked URLs section of the GWT it shows that the robots.txt was last downloaded yesterday but it's incorrect information.  Is there a way to force Google to look again?

It's now been 60 hours since the intrusion.  The intrusion was full cleaned up less than 26 hours it originally occurred and I finally got a notice in GWT which I responded to.

I think the lesson here is even if GWT isn't reporting it, keep checking back as they might be days behind in notifying you in GWT.  Once an alert is then posted to GWT you can then respond accordingly to get the "compromised" notice removed from the SERPs.

Hi Jennifer - your edits are always appreciated and I completely understand the objective and goals when running community.

With that said I think your statement of "I know for fact" is a little over the top.  I think you could easily say something like "in my opinion" but stating that this is a fact is little certain and being that you are one of the leaders within the community I would not expect you to throw lots of "f_acts_" around especially when judging one's goals/intention/motives.

A fact is something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven.
          Look for clues such as: " 56% of...., or "The patient experienced..."

An opinion is what someone thinks about that subject.
          Look for clues such as:"I believe...", "It's obvious...", or "They should..."

(I hope that comes out right but in general even if you know someone IRL I would feel that you would NOT know for fact what and individual' true intentions and motives are.  I would say it feels a lot more like an opinion.)

Hi John,

Your help here was right on.  For people that stumble across this in the future for me the hack indeed was being called with malicious code in the .htaccess file that was referencing additional code that was tucked away in the php.ini file, the /wp-includes/user.php, and another file that they placed in the /wp-includes/ folder.

I've now rectified the issue which I'm very happy about and if it wasn't for my weekly regular backups I will say this issue would have required much more work. Either way I'm very pleased that this was spotted less than 24 hours from the time the hack took place or there perhaps might have been "traffic effecting" results.

Also, while Google is showing that the site might have been compormised I still have no alerts in GWT and no apparent drop in CTR from Google.

The hacker came from the IP 59.115.0.40 and later returned on 59.115.6.243  out of Taiwan.

-Ryan

If you would like to continually bump your post count like you do on nearly every post feel free to continuing adding comments.  Everyone in this community is well aware that you race to every new thread to get some comment in.  Sometimes you have very helpful comments, sometimes you dont.

-- Jen Lopez edited

Thanks for pointing that out.  I actually wasn't aware how much spam there was from when the site was on Blogger.

With that said I'm cleaning the spam comments up.  Ther are no alerts in GWT and as I mentioned before I've done a security audit through the servers as well as the other sites on the same account and I dont see any newly added or edited files.

With that said though I don't understand where the Google Cache got the information it's showing for the rating microformat and for the spammy Xanex items which is what really is troubling me.

So the real question I'm getting at is this.  Do you feel the that SEs might be evaluating the date as a sign of un-fresh content it a new page is created with a 2007 date in it?

http://www.quora.com/Are-dates-and-months-in-the-url-of-a-blog-post-detrimental-to-long-term-SEO

http://www.seobook.com/do-you-put-dates-your-urls

http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/url-configuration-wordpress/

http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/avoid-numbers-your-url/

I've come across a case where I'm asking myself what the best direction would be to go and while there is no right direction I would like to here some feedback from others.

I'm working with some great content pages all about wine.  As you probably know the difference between a 07 wine and a 95 is vastly different and up to this point I'm using the full year in the url much like this: grapesinyourtoesexample.com/2007-cellar-pod-viognier-adelaide-hills/.

What I'm worried about is my use of the year in the URL.  I feel it's very important for it to be used in the page title and on page but I'm concerned that it might be setting me back with my use of it in the url.  My concern is that search engines might be interpretting it as a datestamp rather than as a informational piece of data describing the asset.

Looking at my competitors, my content is one of the only sites using the year and in most searches for various wines my content is in the second half of the SERPs.

If you were creating this content would you use the year?  If you were working with current content would you drop the year across all of the site and implement to necessary redirects?

Just to be clear this is a client related project so my use of "my site|my content" refers to the client's content.

I don't feel there is an all-in-one tool to meet your need but you might want to look at Getclicky.com.  Getclicky will allow you to identify unique visitors and also has tools to monitor specific keywords from Google.

I wouldn't say that the advice you were given was wrong but like anything there is good ways to do things and there are always better ways to do things.

For instance lets say you are a small business with a low budget and the idea of re-working your entire site or theme isn't a viable solution.  Or maybe your site is just a single page and there isn't the need for a heading.  That said implementing an H1 as an image with appropriate alt text isn't a horrible solution.

What is not a good solution is implementing an H1 on an image just to hide overly spammy and descriptive alt text underneath the image and slide it in as an H1 on the page.

It's a lot like anything else, start by researching your competitors are work backwards.  Open Site Explorer will be your friend in this case and hopefully you will find a couple of resources that your weren't aware of.

Beyond just your competitors I also found it valuable to search for businesses in other regions/cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco to see where they are finding citations.

Without knowing more about your site it's really hard to say.  There are a number of "right" ways to do it depending on your site architecture and site-search architecture.

I personally like the idea of having a single "Brand" page and leaving the sorting to a search experience that is "walled off" from being indexed and crawled which is something Rand covered in a WBF about two years ago.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-faceted-navigation

If publisher who you are an affiliate of allows for any custom variable to also be sent with the visitor you can include this and hopefully query it in your reporting from the partner.  This is the case for CJ, Amazon, and eBay but often times private affiliate programs have limited tracking.

Hi Guys,

I'm looking for any good examples of small business sites that you've come across that do a good job at converting potential visitors to clients.  I'm primarily thinking about service oriented business such as Doctors, Dentists, Salons, Clothing stores, small restuarants, car detailing services, local photographers, etc.

I'm just trying to digest other examples and look for new inspirations.