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Hi there Technically, for the time being I would imagine, Google views that as a relevant link, since they are a web development company and developed those sites. I am not the biggest fan of links like this. While most are good hearted and natural, it just always seemed a bit gray hat. The plus side of this is that they tend to be in the footer and low value, especially when trying to rank for phrases outside of "website development". They aren't really worth it, especially if they are sitewide, it looks shady. I would let them do what they're doing - I always thought one link on the client's homepage or an "About Us" page was more natural and effective. Outside of that, I would look for different query and keyword opportunities that tend to be low competition and higher volume, those could be areas you're missing out on. Check out SEMRush for competitive rankings and search opportunities, your Search Console Top Queries for areas you may not know you have, and Keyword Difficulty to gauge what areas you need to work on to possibly see higher rankings (the SERP Analysis report is amazing for this). Here are some good resources as well: Why We Can't Do Keyword Research Like It's 2010 (Whiteboard Friday) The Illustrated SEO Competitive Analysis Workflow (Moz) Beyond that, when it comes to anchor text, I would focus more on branded anchor text and focus your efforts on the content of your website being based on what your audience is searching for. That way, your content associates your brand with the topic and when Google crawls it can understand that your content associates your brand with a topic and relevant variations. If you do this with your anchor text, you run into the issues of overoptimization, and that can possibly lead to issues down the road. Keep your link building and content development natural, and you'll be on the right side of history. Hope this helps! Good luck!

Yes, it would be lost. Yes, you should keep it active.

Hello again - it's hard to say exactly why a website isn't picked up in our index updates. We are constantly working to improve the way our crawler, Rogerbot, operates, so I'm really hoping that your site is picked up in one of the next updates. For now, the best strategy is to keep working on your link building and watch the update schedule for our next index. Thanks, Kevin Help Team

Hi There, Thanks for writing us and I hope this message finds you all amazingly well! While we generally try not to make direct comparisons to competitors, we do love speaking on Moz. Moz is generally excellent because we will actively manage the listing for the course of a year, so edits and to the listing are a part of an annual subscription. After taking a look into Bright Local it seems that they are a monthly service and may have a different policy on edits and changes. David Mihm does an awesome job of covering some of the advanced reporting available in Moz Local. https://moz.com/blog/announcing-local-reporting I would review that and hopefully other users who have encountered Bright Local in the past, can better speak to the services they provide. In the meantime if you have any questions for me let me know!

Hey, So the US v UK example you've cited isn't the same thing. A .com is a generic TLD, not a country-specific TLD - by this I mean '.com' doesn't automatically indicate a US site. Getting a .co.uk site to rank well in the US will be a challenge as Google will automatically consider the site to be UK targeted. Take a look at this SERP: https://www.google.fr/#q=acheter+dvd That's a search on google.fr for 'acheter dvd' (buy dvd). You'll notice the top 3 results are French sites, but they're hosted on .com domains. You'll see that there are a bunch of sites hosted on .fr domains ranking on the first page too. NB I'm not saying that those sites on the .com are ranking better because of the generic TLD - I'm merely highlighting it because I think it shows that it's perfectly possible to rank well with a generic rather than country-targeted TLD

Update to the above. Just checked that the results also apply in Yahoo and Bing, in that I rank first page for .com but 2-3rd page for .co.uk. As I understand setting geographic target in WMT would have no bearing on this? Seems .searchengine.co.uk really prefers .co.uk over .com?

Thanks for the help. I guess it was bad practice on my part to have a lot of unused pages on the website but glad it doesn't have much bad effects. I used site:yoursite and it returned a lot of the unwanted pages (came with the theme). I've removed them now and will return 404 for now until removed.