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Yes. Here's an example. El Pollo Loco (a fast food restaurant in California) - 1 BRAND Page 5,000 locations - Each location gets a postcard from Google verifying the location. Each post card has a PIN#. Since every Local G+ Page has it's own respective location, people can leave reviews for that particular location, not the company itself.

That is good to hear, Jo. Thanks for letting us know. feedback is good. Be vigilant, because the hackers never stop. My dedicated server constantly has hackers trying to break in, mostly chinese and russians. Complex passwords and countermeasures keep us safe, but it only takes one weak link somewhere to break it all down.

Thanks for the really helpful response, I'll do that and talk to the client about the domain change. Much appreciated.

I think our situation falls into that of the gentleman with the NYT links, except our sites aren't quite that bad. We do occasional round-up posts (ie: best co-working spaces, etc.) and some of those folks link back to us to show that they were included. Is that OK?

Sounds like a decent backlink to me. There are directories like this in many niches (like findlaw.com) and they can provide a high authority, subject relevant link. PR4 isn't terribly high, but depending on the cost of membership (and the other benefits of membership) it could be worth it.

Thank you, very much appreciate you responses.

I agree with Irving. And it is not rare to stumble upon junk sites who are using redirects to boost their ranking.

Excellent point on the anchor text.  I reviewed a number of high ranking sites with DA of 95+ that use these links in the footer and they only use the site name in the anchor text. Best, Christopher

Definitely manipulative. However, as others here have said, give Google some time. They are constantly refining their algorithm to identify these kinds of manipulations. Again, this is one of hundreds and thousands of techniques people use to manipulate their SERPS and with millions of websites on the web, Google wants to automatically identify these, not manually.

Thanks for your reply, very helpful.  I'm trying to do the same with rel publisher to get my clients logos appearing from their google plus page.  I mainly use wordpress sites and using authorsure plugin, but I'm still getting to grips with it and running lots of tests. I think the ghostwriting is the best option.  The director of the company will be happy to use his image, but he doesnt (or didnt) have a google plus profile.  I've just set him one up. Does authorship really only benefit by showing you the face of the author is or there actually any additional 'google points' for it being a highly engaged and highly circled account? Thanks for your response anyway, much appreciated!

Graph Search is personalized to each user based on their friends and connections, so it doesn't make sense to talk about "tracking rankings". The actual search engine component of Graph Search is handled by Bing, so doing well in Bing should help you do well in Graph Search as well.

The web search portion of Graph Search is powered by Bing, so if you do well in Bing you should do well on FB too. Generally, optimizing for Bing is pretty much the same as optimizing for Google, just work on building more links.