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We have run into the same issue in the past. We found that if you just have a basic free FourSquare account, you can go in and manually add a business and Foursquare seems to publish it immediately (https://foursquare.com/add-place). This is annoying and not as easy as just using Moz Local, but it is a way to get your client's FourSquare profile and NAP shored up. I would love if Moz was able to fix this also.

I would if I were in your shoes. Having all profile and/or comment links be "do-follow links" can cause alot of spam and potentially be the downfall to the longevity and credibility of your forum.

We actually did this earlier in 2017 with a brand name change (going from Marketingxchange to Lure Creative) and url change (going to http://lurecreative.com/). We saw quite a drop in rankings and DA, but had all of our old website pages 301ed to the most relevant pages on the new website.

This was quite a project and now about 3 months later we are finally seeing an increase in traffic, we have gone through and updated a lot of our old brand name links and also sought new links with our new brand name as well, which is what I would recommend doing.

Our goal was to try and swing most of our external links anchor texts to be our new brand name (which we used Yext, and alot of time manually link building to do this). It still took multiple months, so it was a pain either way, but we are trending up again.

They are just trying to follow "best practices", but you're one "dollow" link to their website is not hurting their SEO. Either your link is actually helping them a little bit, or it is being ignored by Google and has no factor in their rankings.

Good questions. I would assume it could be due to alot of uniquely generated content in a short amount of time that Google could tell was real and that page probably had a high CTR and Time on Page metrics, etc. Another theory could be that the discussion got linked to or shared somewhere that increased the discussion's thread authority in Google's eyes. It likely would have not ranked high long-term, and Google could have almost treated it like a timely, relevant news story.

This is a great question, in doing A/B testing with some of our clients we have generally seen improved rankings for a specific city if we include that city in the meta title of the website page. Since you are targeting 3 cities, I would consider writing unique "city landing pages", for each city and then only mention that one city in the meta title. If you do this, try to make each city landing page as unique and helpful as possible, with unique city data, customer review/testimonials from that city, etc.

Agreed, we see that all the time for locally competitive searches. We recommend utilizing the Moz Link Explorer to do a link profile comparison between your website & a website that is ranking high for one of the target keywords that you are not. 9 times out of 10, they will have more authoritative, relevant links.