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This is very unfortunate, as asking private questions is often a way to ask for a quick site audit and be fairly sure your competitors won't see the strategy you are using, especially in highly competitive niches. Maybe that's naive of me to think, but asking private questions assured me of an unbiased response that was not given to promote someone else's SEO services. Time and time again I have seen grandstanding and borderline advertisements from people answering Public Q&A questions, from people who couldn't be bothered to actually look at the site in question, but instead delivered a regurgitated 'best practice' such as a 'create amazing content.' I also think the argument that <4% use the feature works against itself - if the feature isn't being used much, why not keep it? I understand economies of scale and that its easier to provide a service to 96% of the members than a higher end service to the 4%, however I think the 4% that DO ask these questions, are members that are more VESTED into the site, and are its more avid promoters. If you think about it, these are people who are committed to bettering themselves through SEO and utilize Seomoz to its fullest - why would you want to take it away. If anything, I would quietly revoke this from new membership offerings, but I would retain it for grandfathered members until the end of their billing cycle, and phase this out gradually. You have added new features so its a fair trade, however its only fair that you retain this for those of us that pay for this and who originally signed up BECAUSE of this service.

Okay I admit, I've been naughty....I have 270+ domains that are all exact match for city+keyword and have built tons of back links to all of them. I reaped the benefits....and now google has found my duplicate templates and flagged them all down. Question is, how to get the reincluded quickly?

Do you guys think converting a site to a basic wordpress template and then simply using 275 different templates and begging applying each site manually would do it, or do you recommend.

1. create a unique site template for each site

2. create unique content

any other advice for getting reincluded? Aside from owning up and saying, "hey i used the same template for all the sites, and I have created new templates and unique content, so please let me back".

No, they were red flagged on Webmaster Tools. It says your site has violated google guidelines.

I'm guessing that means its a manual penalty?

I think this almost warrants a youmoz post, but I was wondering if anyone has used MLM or 'shady' industry companies to see where they place their reputation/brand links to dominate the first 2-3 pages of google for things like 'company name + scam' 'company name + reviews'. On a side note what is your opinion of a company that goes to great lengths to create a very strong push to control those keywords? Would you recommend your clients dominate the first 2-3 pages with 'honest review about company x' and 'the truth about company x' fakeditorials? Do you guys think people see right through them.

Take any MLM..for instance

legal shield scam (not my company, but an MLM that I am very wary of)

as professionals what do you think of their reputation management build out......what do you think consumers would see when they read this? is there such a thing as going to far to refute false claims and building sponsored reviews? I'm personally against doing sponsored reviews and spamming with them, but maybe I am naive.

Adam

I think for reputation management, and to get an initial base of links it still makes a difference. For example your own company has quite a few, aside from the basic ones. You have:

manta

crunchbase

elance

digital spinner

ematters

sortfolio

designer listings

free press release

guru.com

agency tool

indeed

etc. I'm looking for legit places like this.

etc.

Do you have a list of these I can use but that give away a do follow link?

Kevin

I'm dealing with my first 2 paid clients recently, and one of them is actually in the same boat as you are - a fairly brand new site with no links. I was able to rank with just good on page in a non-competitive niche, however I will say that you may want to throw a few low level links at the site just to prod it along. It doesn't need to be direct anchor text - you can just have the link be the website name or company name.

Also, I'm not sure if the old site was linked to from all the local profile sites such as yelp, google places, citysearch, etc. It probably has a 'blended' result because its age, and google maps rank. Have you done a competitive analysis of the niche? Have you checked the rankings of your new site? Is it in the top 4 pages? if its not even in the top 4-5 pages for the main keywords you probably got something wrong in the on-page optimization.

Lastly, I think the main problem is that the old site, while being spammy - WORKED. You disrupted something that was working/chugging along, and now the client is going to be looking to you to improve. You essentially overpromised and underdelivered, without even getting paid. Now you'll have to shovel your way out. I recommend using this as a way to practice your on-page skills, and to make sure that the content is relevant, and related to the niche you're targeting. I would also throw some cheap links at it - make sure the site is listed in all the major local yellow pages/profiles correctly.

We didn't move up or down anywhere. In all of our keyword niches, the top players are still ranking with blatant partner links, unrelated viagra reciprocal links, paid right-side-menu links, profile/forum spam, and blog commenting. This is what's getting first places in the IT industry right now and its really starting to aggravate me.

Thank you guys.

Anthony, I am not sure I agree; indexing and crawling are 2 different things. I guess that is really what I'm getting at here. I can force google to crawl my whole site daily (or almost daily) with rss feeds, sitemaps, proper structure, frequent updates, etc....but WILL that freshness of content force google to go hm....despite the page being very insignificant, it might be important enough to go into my index.

Saibose, unfortunately i'm well beyond the 100 link limit....I am noticing quite a bit of the pages that ARE indexed, ARE ranking since they're well optimized through on-page and they are targeting extremely long-tail keyphrases. So my main goal is to convince goal to index these pages because once I do, they will rank.

What I have done so far:

1. Made sure that the page is easily accessible from at least 1 page on the website

2. Create a sitemap (proper sitemap index and several underlying sitemap files).

3. Submitted the sitemaps and increase google crawl rate; (I noted google is crawling around 1700 pages/day on my site.

4. Made sure that the page is at most 3 levels deep. (site/state/city) (we'er talking about city level pages)

5. created proper urls (/site/state/city)

I think maybe I misspoke. I am not doubting that google will 'crawl' the page. What I am asking is if I can't link externally to it, and the internal page rank passed is very small, will adding fresh content and making google think that the page gets updated frequently convince google to index it? Does frequent crawling finally force indexing or is it possible google may say "no matter how often you update this page, its just NOT important enough for me to index it," if noone links to it outside your site.

To be honest I'm starting to wonder about the presence of these mysterious boring niche sites that everyone purports to be ranking using high level white hat strategies. Every single service niche site I have ever seen, ranks at best with profile links, blatantly paid directory and footer links, and sponsored reviews. I have yet to see a local service site that actually USES this tactic you're talking about -  content that actually 'sticks'. I'll re-state the question: show me a site that does this successfully. It doesn't have to be a client...it can be any site.  It feels like your answer 'skirts' the question to be honest and instead tries to showcase your strategy (which isn't what I asked for). I didn't ask "what would your strategy be for a boring service niche site". I asked "show me an example of one that does. I don't mean to sound harsh but this is the second question of mine you have weighed  in on where you have 'dangled' an answer without actually answering the original question. I'm asking for a URL I can study and examine myself.  I'm not looking for an elaborate theoretical answer.

If you have a site that offers a same day service, e.g. plumbing, electrical, computer support: do you think it would always be a good idea to stick the phone # in the meta description?