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One item that will help with sitelinks is having your site verified in GWT and a clean sitemap.xml submitted to them with the URLs you want for sitelinks being the first URLs in the sitemap. I have worked on two sites that did not have sitelinks for thier brand once I did this they showed up in a week.

Sometimes the sitelinks will disappear after a few weeks and then reappear in a couple weeks when they first start showing up for your site.

Hi Samuel,

This is really going to depend on the type of customers the Fortune 500 company is targeting so I will go with your JCPenney example.

1. Partnerships - Find out who heads up business development and review the sites of every partner. If the partner does not have a link to you then get the Biz Dev person to call them up and ask. Another good tactic is to send a gift basket outside of the holidays, then follow up with a call asking. When a partner page already exists on the site it is easy but if you are major partners then you can ask for one to be built.

2. Charity - Does the company or employees participate in any charitable work? Check out the charities for donor pages and get your site listed if not already. Partner with the charity to do a local or national fund raising drive, hit up bloggers who are fans of either the charity or brand.

4. Identify Brand Advocates - Find the mommy bloggers and others online (forums included) that talk about your brand, competitor brands, the products you offer, etc and engage them. Let them hold a contest on thier blog for a gift certificate is a simple example. Coca Cola

5. Sponsored Blog Posts - This falls a little bit on the more risky side but it is an option. Vacations to Go has employed this so take a look at thier backlink profile for further insight.

6. Offline Marketing - Bridge the gap of offline marketing by creating a page or minisite for each offline campaign that points back to the main site.

7. Coupon / Deal websites - There are hundreds if not thousands of sites that feature coupons & deals by major companies. Dig in and find them. A good tactic is searching twitter, google, technorati, etc for words such as coupon, deal, rebate, sale, discount, promo code, promotion, promotional code. Create a list of the sites and submit your coupons & do an outreach campaign to the bloggers / twitter users.

8. Conferences - There are both industry & consumer focused conferences. Become a sponsor or speaker and get listed on the conference website.

9. Create a Youtube Channel - Make videos about interior design, cooking, back to school shopping, etc. However people use your products make videos of that, just be helpful. There is a reason Oprah, Dr. Oz, Food Network are so popular.

I could go on but this should give you a good starting point & keep you busy. The idea is you need to energize & engage the people who already use your products and leverage that to expand the customer base.

What is your favorite tool for getting a report of URLs that are not cached/indexed in Google & Bing for an entire site? Basically I want a list of URLs not cached in Google and a seperate list for Bing.

Thanks,

Mark

The google estimated cpc and minimum bids are notorious for just flat out being wrong. I have seen terms that suggest less than 10 cents yet when you run a campaign cost over a dollar to be on the first page. Similiarly I have gotten ads on the first page for 25 cents that had suggested bids of over $5 click.

Best bet is to use $100 to test; that is the only way to know. SEMrush and SpyFu both seem to provide more accurate data than Google regarding PPC costs IMHO.

There is no way to do it from the web application interface and in my talks with SEOmoz in the past there is no way to set to a specific time or day. I'd recommend either calling or sending a request to customerservice@seomoz.org. Phone number is on http://www.seomoz.org/about/contact

I would do both at the same time that way if you take any hit/penalty for the changes it is only once. You may also want to submit a change of address through webmaster tools for the subdomain switch.

You will be fine as long as you follow these basic rules

1. No redirects
2. Content on the page
3. Navigation on the page

Highly recommend excluding the pages in your robots.txt file for extra protection.

1. Make sure you have unique content (phone number, hours, address) on each city URL you want to use, pictures are a big plus.
2. Use the bulk upload, see https://www.google.com/local/add/g?hl=en-US&gl=US#uploadfeed. Before you submit make sure to read, http://www.google.com/support/places/bin/answer.py?answer=178024 and http://www.google.com/support/places/bin/static.py?page=guide.cs&guide=28247&topic=28291&answer=173669
3. Make the name in your bulk upload spreadsheet unique for each location (Business Name - City, State)
4. Use the store code field which uniquely identifies each location of your business
5. Fill in as many of the "optional" fields as possible that make sense for your business
6. Use a different phone number for each location
7. Use a unique description for each location

Those are my 7 top tips; I'll add more if I think of any.

Two other options that may help but I have no real experience/proof on is advertising your locations with Google Boost  and Google Tags. If you are legit & spend money you may be able to get your account rep to coughhelp/pullstringcough

Smart Draw is seriously awesome; just downloaded for a 7 day free trial. I used Mockingbird in the past but SD looking way better now.

Regarding #1: Link to your home page or another page that you want to flow link juice to on each subdomain; and have non-linked text around the anchor/link. Ideally you would find a way to migrated these to subfolders rather than subdomains but that might not be an option.

Regarding #2: Using a rel canonical tag will help.

Yes, and duplicate content doesn't matter. So if you want the same copy with different layouts/design it is good.

Add the rel canonical to your template so that whenever the ajax creates the new URL it already has the rel canonical pointing to the preferred page.

Another great way to go is to not put the category in the product URL. That was usually the best solution when I work on e-commerce sites.

You wouldn't want to do that because most likely Google would just ignore your tag. Here are some good write ups:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonical-link-tag/

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

Hi Michael,

Yes you are right about #1, this type of thing would probably be best explained with an in person meeting where you do the searches together live and explain the results. If face to face isn't possible setup using gotomeeting and share your desktop and show the client. If the client doesn't rank for local yet suggest getting ranked local first (easier) and then going national.

It is possible to rank for other cities and your strategy would come down to the goal. Do you want to show up as a local result or just have the site show up in the regular SERPs. There are ways to show up for local results without having a physical location but it starts to fall in the grey hat tactics area.

Putting the product name & image in the same anchor is the best bet. You can put the image anchor in javascript without taking the image out of the search index.

Exporting data on a regular basis from OSE is necessary to do this; and you need to do the analysis in excel to get the answer. Basically you want to export your links & linking root domains at least once a month or after each linkscape/OSE update.

Then you would put linking root domains from last month in a column and linking root domains from current month in a column. In a third column you would do a comparison match with an excel formula to see which are missing. Here is some help documentation on the excel formula: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/use-excel-to-compare-two-lists-of-data-HA001103915.aspx

Assuming last month domains are in column A and current month domains you could use this formula in column

=ISNA(MATCH(B2,$A$2:$A$10001,0))

Try out http://myblogguest.com/ (highly recommend) and https://linker.eightfoldlogic.com/

There is no benefit is submitting the same press release over & over, as you said it is duplicate content. It can be beneficial to rotate the press release distribution service on different press releases because you will get backlinks from unique domains. Take a look at PR Newswire & PR Web.

Yes, when you link to a page that is not indexed from a page that is indexed it will help. The tricky part is getting the currently indexed page re-crawled so it picks up the link to the non indexed page.

A good tactic for getting the page recrawled is RSS such as linking to a page from a new blog post. Or tweet the URL to the page.