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Full and correct NAP (Name, Address, Phone) Local Citations with consistent NAP Verified G+ Local Page - this needs to be properly set up And your business appearing on the map is influence by the keyword competition and your competitors as well (how many reviews they have, how may relevant citations, etc).

So glad you guys and gals like the Moz Local Learning Center. That's great to hear! It can even be a useful thing to share with your clients to help them start speaking the Local language with you

Legend. Thanks Purkey.

Hi, No it is n't as we may believe this old blog: check this link: https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/myth-busting-virtual-hosts-vs-dedicated-ip-addresses/ Grtz, Leonie

I believe Wedding Photography is a competitive keyword and ranking on local for this kind of keyword we need to think and act beyond basics. Miriam Ellis did a great post on Moz that illustrates guide on local SEO rankings: http://moz.com/blog/top-20-local-search-ranking-factors-an-illustrated-guide Please take a look and go from there accordingly. Hope this helps!

What if you have a client with a LOT of ugly URLs that need to be cleaned up? The plan is to create 301 redirects for every page that we change. But, let's say we're talking about 50+ product pages. In your opinion, is it a problem to make that many changes at once? Would you paste them out? If so, how many at a time? Also, is it a problem to have that many 301's on your website? Thank you!

Thanks. Let us bask in the warm glow of Motorhead.

To add to Who Wudda Thunk's response above, SEMRush's position tool can show top 20, but if you have the budget for an enterprise level tool, BrightEdge's Data Cube tool offers this reverse rank checking feature and displays keywords ranking in positions 1-100--80 more positions than what SEMRush covers.

Thanks for everyone's responses! Matt-Antonino, I'll look to implement that solution. Appreciate it!

mcafee.com/activate

Hi Gavo, Just want to be sure that in addition to changing your address on your Google listing, you've also been cleaning up any other citations that reference the old address. I'm asking this because it's so important to understand that Google also draws their information from third party sources, beyond simply relying on what the business owner says in his dashboard. Yes, it can take some time to see the change. If you don't see the change within 10 days, you may need to take further steps.

Another vote for WhiteSpark. And don't forget, you can get a deal on WhiteSpark using your Moz Perks. Paul

Thanks Sam and Matt, Great responses and I'll now get going on disavowing the project I'm working on. Much appreciated.

Thanks for your help Phil and Egol! Much appreciated. Will look to try both those social share bars and see how they fair.

Hi, As everyone else has mentioned, nofollowed links are not passing PageRank and therefore should not be influencing search visibility as assessed by the Google Algorithm. If there is no manual action in place then there should be no reason to disavow them. However, I look very differently at nofollowed links in the backlink profile of a site that has a manual action in place. In that case I ask two questions: Is the site one that is in any way undesirable? Are the nofollowed links part of an obvious large-scale manipulative effort? If the answer to either or both of these questions is yes, then I choose to both attempt to get the links removed and also disavow. The reason for this: of course I don't want links from dubious sites which even though not passing PageRank could be doing damage to my brand and reputation  and; when asking for reconsideration (judged by a real human being conducting a manual review) I believe that ignoring links that were obviously placed with the intention of manipulating search rankings simply because it didn't work, hardly shows a commitment to the "good faith effort" expected by the Webspam team. So, I go to the extra effort to try to remove and also disavow. Marie is quite correct in suggesting that there are cases where links on some pages are followed and on other pages nofollowed - in fact we see instances at rmoov where URLs that contain multiple links to a site are actually a mix of followed and nofollowed links as well. As suggested ...you have no control over those links at all, so once you have decided which ones really need to be dealt with disavowing is the safest option available unless you can actually get them removed. Again, I think the point has been fairly well made above ...Local directories are not all bad. Check for compliance with the Webmaster Quality Guidelines (which for paid directories includes a clear statement in their terms of service which indicates that you are paying for a site review and not for inclusion). The most relevant Guideline is the one about what Google views as "Link Schemes" Hope that helps, Sha

True Social Metrics offers some free tools. Jen writes more about how we use it at Moz at http://moz.com/blog/social-engagement-metrics-that-matter.

Thanks everyone who has contributed to answering this question of mine. Samuel, great article and something that definitely makes us think what we are doing to better improve our PR for sites. Thanks Jane for your comments and making clear the possibilities as too recommendations of routes to go down!

Hi there, When developing a new site, if there is no need for subdomains, we generally recommend staying away from them and using subfolders. However as Andy says, there's no reason why subdomains can't be used to create successful rankings and well-performing websites if they're used correctly. I would suggest changing this structure if it appears the site is performing poorly... but if you can see a lot of other things you could fix to improve performance that have nothing to do with the subdomain issue, I would look at doing those first. The exception to this is link building - if you think that link building is what is needed to improve performance, make the decision about whether to keep the subdomains or use pages / subfolders first. You don't really want to do a lot of link building to URLs that you will then 301 redirect - redirection transfers a good amount of authority from one URL to another, but probably not 100%. Focus link building efforts on URLs that probably won't change any time soon. My former agency took over SEO for an aged, successful business a few years ago that was using subdomains to target different regions. We didn't like the set up from a purely SEO point of view, but would never have changed it due to the rankings the site already had. We didn't want to put them in jeopardy (it was a very competitive industry). We worked well with what we had. The decision has to be based upon cost / benefit of changing and risking what rankings the site has currently, and how well you believe the site could do if it were structured differently. Cheers, Jane

Well I appreciate your experience enough to believe you are probably correct.  I have read many of your responses to people here.  You know your stuff.

Hi, If you have a look at this URL, there are plenty to choose from, and all appear to have reviews. -Andy