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Do you know if Google is counting the reviews based on their IP address? Most of my competitor have fake reviews and I suspect they use their own computers to do that.

What is the best way to find local resources to gain reviews and citations from to help with strengthening  your position in Google Places?

I disagree. I don't think blog commenting is a waste of time as long as your comment brings value to that blog.  It is not the fact that you are commenting but the quality of it. If the link is on a authoritative site and you have something valuable to say, I think it will pass some good link juice and will not be seen as spam by search engines. Of course, this should not be used a a link building technique by itself.

Thanks Adam!

When commenting on blogs and the only link you can have is your author name (Ex. Commented by Mike), what are you gonna have, a name, the name of your company or the keyword that you are trying to rank for?

Thanks!

2011, what are the best social bookmarking sites to use for getting backlinks and what are your strategies?

Thank for looking into this. The new site has been uploaded almost a month ago. Since then, Google crawled our website at least 4 times; nevertheless, the image snippet is still from the old template. Although, as you pointed out, there some minor issues, they are certainly not the reason why we dropped so bad. 
As Rand pointed out to me about 2 weeks ago, sometimes Google works in mysterious ways that even the best in SEO cannot understand. 
I'll wait for Google to show the snippet image of my Homepage, just to make sure he completely crawled it.

Thanks again for your help!

_(echo limousine dot com) _

_keywords - Chicago limo service, Chicago limousine service, _Chicago limo | Chicago car service

As we redesigned the website, we decided to focus more on the first 3 keywords to better achieve the positions desired. We decided to remove "car service" from the Title to better target the other ones. I was not sure if by keeping it there it will dilute the first part so I decided to remove it; we ranked on first page for this keyword and on page two at the very top for the first two; the third one is very competitive and there are a couple of very old website on the first page which have a partial match domain which seems to be working in their favor still and it will take longer to beat them based on those facts.

Thanks for your quick reply Ryan

“If you remove a group of pages then the PR flow of your site is greatly disrupted” – No important pages have been removed, just some low end pages that did not gain any external links and also did not play any role in the internal linking process.

"Before you can begin to troubleshoot any ranking issues your new site should be 100% indexed"  - it is indexed 100%

_“_I know you shared the 301 redirects are properly set, but you may wish to check them again” - all ok

_“_robots.txt is blocking the page – all ok _“the page is tagged with noindex, all ok

the page is not properly linked to internally or externally -_ internal links are all in place as well the external ones the page does not have unique content – the content on the homepage has been written about a week after the website has been uploaded and it is 100% unique.

“Check your new site's log for 404 errors where links are broken” – there are 20 broken links (according to Xenu) which are coming from template’s CSS but those are related to some images which have not been published (some those images were part of some old presets from the original template). The user cannot access those broken links from inside our website and they have not been indexed anyway.

“Crawl the new site checking for issues” – in Seomoz campaign there are only 2 warnings and they are related to the Title element being too short for Contact page and Sitemap page.

“Perform a site: search for content that is in JS to see if it is indexed” – we did, every single page has been indexed and that shows in GWT as well.

Other issues:

• Homepage content in 90% new, all keywords have been kept in place and optimized.
• Title has been changed once
• all other webpages have kept their metrics
• we have dropped for every single keyword that we were targeting on our Homepage (echo limousine dot com) but all metrics are the same (PA, DA, Mr, mT...)

In my opinion, it is an issue with our homepage. I’m not sure what to check anymore; the JavaScript slideshow on the Homepage shows a lot of code. We used a third party company to upload the new template and I am not sure if there is an issue with that; upon CCS validation there were 3 errors and 354 warnings and W3C returned 31 errors and 2 warnings. Now, they told us that these errors are somewhat normal because they are not pure html and they will never be validated. They might be right but at this moment I take everything into account. I verified everything I knew and I cannot find an answer.

We have changed our website template about a month ago and since then we experienced a huge drop in rankings, especially with our home page. We kept the same url structure on entire website, pretty much the same content and the same on-page seo. We kind of knew we will have a rank drop but not that huge. We used to rank with the homepage on the top of the second page, and now we lost about 20-25 positions. What we changed is that we made a new homepage structure, more user-friendly and with much more organized information, we also have a slider presenting our main services. 80% of our content on the homepage is included inside the slideshow and 3 tabs, but all these elements are JavaScript. The content is unique and is seo optimized but when I am disabling the JavaScript, it becomes completely unavailable. Could this be the reason for the huge rank drop?

I used the Webmaster Tolls' Fetch as Googlebot tool and it looks like Google reads perfectly what's inside the JavaScrip slideshow so I did not worried until now when I found this on SEOMoz: "Try to avoid ... using javascript ... since the search engines will ... not indexed them ... "

One more weird thing is that although we have no duplicate content and the entire website has been cached, for a few pages (including the homepage), the picture snipet is from the old website.

All main urls are the same, we removed some old ones that we don't need anymore, so we kept all the inbound links. The 301 redirects are properly set. But still, we have a huge rank drop. Also, (not sure if this important or not), the robots.txt file is disallowing some folders like: images, modules, templates... (Joomla components). We still have some html errors and warnings but way less than we had with the old website.

Any advice would be much appreciated, thank you!

We will open a new office at a new location and I would like to add it to our Google places. How do I do this?  Per Google guidelines:

"Do not create more than one listing for each business location, either in a single account or multiple accounts."  - Website & Phone: Provide a phone number that connects to your individual business location as directly as possible, and provide one website that represents your individual business location_._ Do I have to another contact page on my website for that location too? I will end up having to business listing with the same name but different locations. I want people to know that we have 2 separate offices because they serve different clients. I want to show up in Google places for the second location as well. Any thoughts?

Thanks again!

Hey guys, thanks for your input! CafePress, I have to apologize but the example given above it was pure fictional, I did not expect anybody would research that.

This is the twist; the name of the company is Joe taxi? How is that going to affect anything? As it is now, we have keyword | company name. We decided to do it this way based on what Seomoz is recommending.

There is a huge difference between exact search and broad search. IMO, I think it's all be coming down to link building and anchor text. If I'm targeting Seattle taxi service (1900 exact searches) I will be definitely targeting Seattle limo (4400 exact searches) as well and, it will sound better too. On the other hand, I will probably be losing out if I would target taxi service Seattle because the Title will not be an exact match, I mean, I do have all the words but in different order which means somebody who is targeting the same keyword in its original order will probably rank better. I think I will go with Seattle taxi service but if you have more arguments for or against it I will be more than happy to hear them.

What would be the best Title of your Homepage if your top 3 keywords would be:

taxi service Seattle (5400 exact searches) Seatle taxi                 (4400 exact searches) Seattle taxi service (1900 exact searches)

Would you go for all of them or just the one with more searches? I guess you can target them all on one page being almost the same but what is the best strategy to apply in this case to get the most out of it? Do you take into account the broad numbers of searches which are different from the exact numbers?

Tools I used:Google sktool

Thanks for reading!

Thanks again for everything!

Thank you, that is the answer I was looking for!