Welcome to the Q&A Forum

What is the reason they want to avoid those techniques? It would make it easier to suggest something that fits in with their strengths.

How much does he plan to spend on marketing to reinforce his brand?  I believe .io will rank on Google just as easily as .net .info .us etc. but how much will it take to rank in their customer's brain?  I have a .us and 7.5 years later I still have to reinforce the domain when I am talking to a client.  It's like trying to get a client to say chartreuse instead of lime green.

Thank you so much for this answer Tyler. I have a bunch of tumblr blogs and one has a spam score of 9.  It looks like the reason for the spam score is that it reblogs one post from a very legit blog with a spam score of 8. That blog is written by the type of guy who headlines social media conferences, so I certainly wouldn't want to disavow him.

I feel bad for you. I don't have any answers, but I'm a singer, and your website is excellent. This is not an example of Google rewards quality.

Maslavista,

That response is a keeper!  I wish there was some way within Moz to create a file of favorites.

I don't think any benchmark exists. Obviously, a lot more people look at a New York Times article, at least the writer hopes so, then look at an individual home for sale.

In addition, who's the audience? A NYT article that appeals to a social media savvy audience will have more shares than an article geared towards a less social audience. Same with your home for sale. Is it in Palo Alto or Bozeman, Montana?

Any benchmark would be useless.

I have a section of my website where I heavily use embedded content.  Embeds from Youtube, Slideshare, Twitter, Quora etc.  Google thinks they're thin, and they don't show up in my analytics because you can read the content without clicking on the page.

http://getonthemap.us/twitter/blog

But I like them, and I think they're helpful. So I no-indexed all but one of the blog posts in that section.  It retains the backlinks to the posts, but cleans me up with Google.

If you're deleting, can't you do that quickly from your console?

Thanks very much. It was easy to set up.

You put your contact info in the description area. Sometimes Google will pick up the description word for word for the serps.

I got the items from past sales at Trulia, but you could easily put your own listings up.  Or you could use Trulia, then put your own live listings at the top, remove them after they've sold.

In each pin's description, even the ones from Trulia, you can put your own description, including a link back to your website.

Pinterest used to pass on page rank, but it no longer does.

Throw a bunch of anchor text links and Voila! there you are.

I have lots of different Pinterest pages ranking.  I have a huge Pinterest following, so that might help, but I have seen small followings rank also.

Dot Com!

When I started my business 7.5 years ago, the dot com was unavailable so I went with dot us.  Since then I have had to repeat the phrase "that's dot us, not dot com" several thousand times.  When I don't receive a promised email, and I call to follow up, they frequently have sent it to dot com.

In the SERPS it doesn't matter. I dominate, but I think I would have picked a different url if I'd realized how hard it was for the average consumer to remember. And my clients are biz people!

I understand your dilemma.

I think Robert's advice is excellent, but it's still worth thinking about why those other firms are beating you in the SERPS.  I find that a tremendous amount of SEO and social media advice is relevant only for Fortune 500 companies.  The only way to find out what works for me, and for my clients, is to take their advice with a grain of salt.  Test what works for me.

What if you tried developing landing pages for your 5 biggest markets using somewhat old school methods? Not black hat but keywords in url, titles, alt tags, etc? See what happens.

How are the pages ranking now? If they're where you want them to be, I might agree with you that would be overwhelming.

But, if you have pages that could rank higher and bring you profit, then alt tags might be the thing that moves the page up. I have a bunch of landing pages that rank really well for competitive local searches. I've given them alt tags, embedded video, schema markup, heading tags.

On other pages, I've asked Google to no index. If it's not important to be found in the search results, no need to use SEO markup.

I think few people are in the circumstance of EGOL, so it would be best not to follow his lead.

The internet changes so rapidly that you need to be predictive. What is the next big thing? What will Facebook do? In my crystal ball, I think that Facebook will take on Google and Yelp.  They are already trying, but I think they'll get better at it.

So, if Facebook becomes Google, most businesses will want to be there, with a Facebook Page that has a good number of likes and a couple updates a month at least. No need to go overboard, but make sure the page doesn't look abandoned.

Plus, Facebook and the other social sites rank really well on Google. Does a business want to give up that real estate? When someone looks up my company by name in Google they see

• Company website
• Company Yelp page - with 5 Star Rating
• Company LinkedIn Page
• Person LinkedIn Page
• Company Facebook Page - with 5 Star Rating
• Company Angie's List Page
• Some stinky competitor trying to rank for my biz name
• Personal Experts Page
• Company Groupon Page
• Thumbtack Consolidator

Without social, people would see several of my competitors who try to optimize for my name "Get on the Map" and some dull profiles from websites like Manta.

It also depends on your sample size.

If you can trigger the law of big numbers, you can get accurate information from your analytics, but if you have a small following, I recommend just using common sense.  If you have a smaller reach, the assumptions you make from your reports might lead you astray.  Is your audience on Thursday at 6pm low because they'll always be low on Thursdays at 6 or because last Thursday there was a Sacramento Kings game and many of your fans were attending.  This week the Kings game is Wednesday and you might have moved all your Thursday activities to Wednesday if you interpreted the information wrong.

No.

Especially the last 3 - anytime the title of a page in links, I believe Google ignores them.

I hope you succeed with your quest to make it easier to get college businesses listed. I am helping with a music festival in February on Sacramento State's campus. Hundreds of people attending, many who will get lost because the building is not on the map. The campus road system is convoluted with random detours and dead ends to slow down the speeders who are late for class.

For your own primary website, I always recommend using a popular TLD domain.

But if your purpose is networking and backlinks, sites like blogspot and weebly offer many advantages. Because of the strength of their root domain, it is easier to build page authority for a blog. You can get link diversity and high page authority in one fell swoop.  You can benefit from the way those blogspot blogs link to each other.

I'd invest some time in becoming a power house social media user. It has an easy to understand metric (# of followers) that can be leveraged to get people interested in you.  If I retweet your message to my 15,000 followers, I'm doing something that could benefit you a lot. You might get your potential partners reaching to you.

I get so little traffic from Bing and Yahoo that I often question whether they exist.  I've never seen a Google Analytics report for any customer that showed enough traffic to justify risking what we have with Google. Who does good with them?

Do your own research to see if it works in your market.

When I reverse engineer the other local digital agencies in the SERPS, links from clients often seem to be their only link building strategy. We've all read that Google doesn't like it, or some people think it's spammy. I think that most of what we hear from Google and the many gurus is designed as advice for Fortune 500 companies.  If you're working with a dozen small customers, what works for Fortune 500 won't work for you, so don't accept their guidelines as gospel.

I would definitely recommend consolidating. Currently you're competing against yourself - if 2 properties are in the same neighborhood, they'll both rank poorly because you're not sending all your juice to the same place.

I created a Pinterest board with pins displaying a particular type of home (Craftsman Bungalow) in Sacramento and it ranks on page one. I did it as an example for realtors on how social media can give them multiple rankings on a page.

It's not all that exciting, but if I were a realtor I think I could make it sing! https://www.pinterest.com/juliemarg/craftsman-bungalow-homes-for-sale-in-sacramento/