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Don't control your own anchor text - you'll get yourself into trouble.

Power? That sounds like some SEO guru baloney. If the sites are ranking and full of high quality non-spun unique relevant content -  what's the problem?

I've done a TON of research on this to get Google's opinion and the only thing I could find was this:

As long as the new site has unique and relevant content it is not considered spam.

I've probably spent over 20 hours researching this EXACT topic and that was the best I could find in terms of spam vs not spam.

Another route to take is to create relevant content on the main site specific to each location. Perhaps you can create 1 page for the location with the NAP, site manager etc. and then another page off of that page that lists that specific location's directions and then another page off of that page that lists the reviews for that location. That gives you 3 unique relevant pages and 3 new Title tags. You can target the main city on the main page with the NAP info, a sub-city on one of the review pages and another sub-city on the direction page. I suppose this method is more "whitehat" but who really knows.

If the client has good rankings in all of those cities with your microsites what are they complaining about? Fear of a penalty?

If anyone else has ANY info on this I would LOVE to know as well!

"All" was probably a poor choice of words. Sorry.

Do any of us really know what blackhat SEO is anyway?

I didn't say there weren't?

The pros will probably say something academic like:

"Consider your goals. If the video is product-focused it does not belong on YouTube because YouTube is a social media platform."

The realist will say:

"cast your net out and hope for some bites."

Basically, I see nothing wrong with this technique. If you're talking 100s of videos, well, then I might side with the academics.

Not really. We go by "feel" most of the time too. If you know they're not willing to pay as much as you think it's actually going to cost 'hours' wise, sometimes you just have to charge what you think they're willing to pay. Obviously, if you do this for too many clients you'll loose out, but if you're really slow it can make sense.  Moral of the story, try to go for bigger clients :). The smaller ones usually end up burning you if you're on a Cost Per Hour model....in my humble opinion at least.

From my experience it's much easier to go back to the well with larger clients. Smaller clients don't tend to appreciate the "margin of error" bit so I'll try to over-estimate the quote when dealing with them. Smaller clients tend to ask 2x as many questions as well.

10-20% sounds about right for project management, but I won't put that in the proposal. I'll mark project management and reporting as "free" and just include them in the package (with the markup in other areas). I don't put the hours estimated for each task either... though i know some agencies do.

That doesn't 100% answer your question, but I hope it can help.

I apologize, semi-identical would have been a better description. To answer your question about the links at the bottom I agree with Crhis I do not think they're spammy.

I know how that goes :(. Good luck!

How do you focus on keywords without being spammy? Backlink anchor text? Guest post title tags? keyword proximity to your backlink?

Spam in terms of an algorithmic penalty or manual penalty?

In terms of a manual penalty, yes. Why? Because of the first sentence of your post here:

"See these pages that we've created to rank."

It's considered spam to create pages to rank. You're supposed to create pages to be useful to users. The pages you linked have nearly identical content.

Hmm, I seem to take a different approach than most here. I look at each page and see which of my keywords will match up to that specific content. I don't use a top keyword list unless I'm optimizing the homepage. I hardly ever look at competition when placing keywords on the content pages of the site. I ALWAYS look at competition when looking for long-tail blog post type keywords. I used to use 5 different tools to look at competition, but then I realized that you really only need one metric - the allintitle: "keyword." If the allintitle is below 2000 you can rank 1st page with the keyword being furthest to the left in the title tag pretty easily. If it's higher than 2000 the keyword you choose dosn't really matter. It's going to come down to off-site SEO.

Hey Meghan,

Any particular reason you 301 http://blog.instabill.com to **http://blog.instabill.com/index.php

?

http://blog.instabill.com** has more authority and backlinks. You should 301 http://blog.instabill.com/index.php to http://blog.instabill.com instead and see if that helps.

It's hard to tell in such a short time frame, but without knowing additional information that is most likely the cause. If you were Google, why would you rank your site instead of Indeed?

Additionally, you'll probably want to clean up some of your exact match keyword anchor text such as the ones on these pages:

http://subjecttracerbots.com/index.php?c=37

http://director-web.net/World__international_/page-16.html

I like it. Getting video testimonials is so hard! Swiffer is sort of "cheating" check it out:

http://www.swiffer.com/reviews

“Disclaimer: This consumer received rewards from expotv.com for providing their opinion of this product.”

Paying for reviews in any way is unethical, but at least they're saying it in the disclaimer.

Dove isn't paying for the review they're just helping the customer make it happen, which is brilliant.

I wonder if restaurant customers would be willing to fill out a review on an ipad right after their meal. maybe even a video review?

Nice tip. I've been using this one for a while as well. In some cases, the meta description phone number will be clickable on a mobile device too.

I see this all the time. Usually when a pipe "|" or a comma is used in the Title tag. I can't say I know why it's happening though.

Yes they are, but that's not a very good title tag. You don't need the plural and sigular versions in the same title tag. You should refrain from repeating the same keyword as well.

How about:

Invoice Template & Invoicing Software For [application here] | [Brand Name here]

Ideally, you should have a page for your invoice template and a different page for your invoicing software.

Thanks for the rel=publisher clarification. That's pretty much what I assumed. That's a great post by Ann Smarty as well. Thanks!