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I was advised to deindex pages that had not been visited in the recent past. I deindexed about 150 pages and had a nice bump in the SERPS. Previously I was #9 and I jumped to #4. I have about a hundred more thin pages I'm working on and #crossyourfingers maybe I'll be top three.

I have used old domains as a part of a link campaign, but I think it's too risky for a long term money site.  Even if it worked for a little while, you have no idea if and when Google might tweak a bit and your new site suffers for it. I realize how hard it is to give up a name once you're keen, but my opinion is better to be safe than crying in your beer later.

I have a new client and just discovered on Open Site Explorer hundreds of links to ghost pages. The anchor text is stuff like Criminal Background Checks Las Vegas or Find Missing Persons.

I am not the webmaster.  What advice should I give him?

Julie

Thank you for this update. I have Tumblr, Blogspot etc. that I use as part of my strategy and it is quite disconcerting this morning to see an individual post on a Tumblr blog with a PA of 94.  It's like looking in your bank and seeing a balance of 100K.

I'm doing some experimenting with Instructables, and some profile links are no-follow. I don't know if it's because the accounts are new, or that you need to have a PRO account to get follow links ...

I think as far as it goes, Yelp favors small business over big business, but they really have a long history of being anti-business.

Why do I think they're anti-business

• Reviewers are semi-anonymous - even if someone wanted to use their full name, they're not allowed in the Yelp profile
• Snarky reviews have an advantage because the only review compliments/feedback are Useful, Funny and/or Cool. How many times do comedians WIN by being nice? Cool people are rarely sweet.
• In the past, if a user flagged a review for being spam - there was an option that reviews could be flagged because they were deemed phony for being excessively positive as if a competitor couldn't know you by being excessively negative.  I don't know if this is still the case.

I still use Yelp and coach my clients on how to make Yelp work for them, but it's because you can't afford to ignore something that has such a big market share, not because they are pro-business.

One thing Yelp could easily do that would immediately change the anti-business perception would be to lift the cloak of anonymity from their members. Require a sign in via Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+ and the reviewer would need to stand behind their words in the same way that business owners need to stand behind their service.

I think the Amazon program looks really cool and imagine it would be successful, because people already buy things from Amazon. Yelp seems like it would be the least effective, because it currently has no shopping function and most prospects don't have Yelp accounts.  They may use Yelp to do research, but they don't participate.

I had a similar problem when working at a coworking space. I couldn't get listed. I finally had a conversation with someone from Google (can't recall if it was an actual phone call or an online chat) and expressed my opinion that it was no different than renting a floor in a skyscraper. The Google rep saw my point of view and advised that if I had a suite number as part of my address, Google would see it as a different facility and lift my prohibition. Good luck!

Yes - in Sacramento, one of the competitors who used an exact match domain, but who has zero reviews is back on the map. They had fallen off last summer, but are back.