Questions
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Best course of action when removing 100's of pages from your site?
Google always takes a while to update. Check a few of the 404 errors Google is reporting and see if they are still erroneous pages. If so, you may have some pages to redirect. Of course, if the page was simply removed and you don't have anything to redirect it to, then a 404 is what is supposed to be returned. If everything looks fine, the it's just the delay of Google updating its info. It should resolve itself when they get around to updating it.
Web Design | | Kurt_Steinbrueck0 -
Is it a good idea to have some backlinks point back to your business listing on the various directories?
Hello MFC, Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. If I've correctly understood your query, you are saying that you are seeing competitors doing linkbuilding to their directory listings. Is this right? While I can't see a real problem with the idea, I'm also not sure it's a very good use of time/funding. Given that Local is so Google-centric, and that it is the strength of your website which is so big a factor in your rankings, building links to your own property (your website) is likely to be a much better idea than building them to 3rd party sites. Also, of perhaps relevant interest is this recent discussion regarding building links to one's Google Place Page. I had a discussion with Mike Blumenthal about this, which he subsequently turned into a blog post. I recommend that you read it, including the great discussion below the post: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/24/google-places-myth-linking-to-your-places-page/ Hope this helps! Miriam
Link Building | | MiriamEllis0 -
Backlinks that we didnt place, killing our SERP rank and PR
Just wanted to let you know that the links that are prompting a download are a bug in OSE and not real links. Check out the post by a Linkscape engineer at http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-are-our-competitors-getting-these-inbound-linking-domains. So sorry for not catching this thread earlier, hope it helps explain some of the problems.
International Issues | | KeriMorgret0