Welcome to the Q&A Forum

In general we have found that if a local site has a significantly higher PA or DA  and no Local places account it will rank above the Maps.

We all get to "deal" with these type situations from time to time. Your question is of course impossible to answer, but I would say you are putting all your eggs in the back link basket. If you are faced with a competitor who has a zillion low quality links, you may need to look for other traffic opportunities.  SEO is ultimately about getting quality traffic to your clients site. If your client see's it as nothing more than a rankings competition, you are in deep trouble.

Using the new opportunities in Social media , as well as searching out and finding the best quality links, and building highly creative on site content ( Tips, Calculators, Cartoons, Educational video, Forums , contests)  may go alot further than building links 24 hours a day.

I feel your frustration,  we all do.

We have used lot's of different tactics.  It depends on the the type of business.  A contractor may want to send a thank you card with a $5.00  Starbucks certificate thanking the customer and then asking them to review them on one of the various review sites.

What works better is sending an email to the customer with a LINK  and instructions.  Most sites require they sign up or in to review a company.  Let them know exactly what to expect before they click.  Our emails are several paragraphs with easy instructions.

Good luck!

I think Google has an almost impossible task, that being to determine the quality of over a trillion web pages (and of course growing) using technology to do it, which is the only possible tactic they could use.

Looking at their recent moves, I think they are trying to get the user communities to help determine the quality of sites through the 1 + button, and the move to recognize social media signals ( and the Chrome browser changes).

I think that Google would like to reflect a non capitalistic, democratic  ranking system, with safe guards for the new and smaller pages.  Like our government was set up to do. And I think they are moving that direction.

The problems with this goes to the human condition.  There are many who will always try and take advantage of a system (because we are capitalists at heart and that brings out the best and the worst in entities) and that Google is trying to find the balance between a capitalistic approach and a democratic approach. I don't think they can.

Ultimately the rankings are, in general today, controlled by money. Those entities that have money to spend on SEO and Internet Marketing are rewarded based on how wisely they spend that money.  The results are not all that different than the old world Yellow page model. Big money, big advertisement,. first page. Limited budget,and you better find other ways to promote your service/product.

Even with the new changes, the 1+ and all that, lots of smart people will still be looking for ways to take advantage of them, and will undoubtedly find a few ways.

So all we can do, is decide what we are individually, and what tactics we will use to

to represent the side of the fence we choose to stand on.

( Bring in theme music here)

Simple answer, Yes.

We have found doing it in house is more cost effective, and can be very productive.

Spend the money on a well written piece of content to add to your site. Much better investment.

Ditto Bevelwise. We see Page Authority as gaining much more rank this year. Link's from pages with low page authority seem to have very little effect.