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Most directories are not worth your time or money for link building purposes.  Some of them are still good for Local Search.  Most of the time you're better off using a Local Search product like ExpressUpdate, Localeze, UBL, or Axiom for these, since it's not worth your time to go and manually submit to 300+ directories.

It won't give you link juice.  It might give you traffic, but probably not a lot.  There are probably other opportunities that your time/money are better spent on.

Ah, I misunderstood.  In that case, the short answer is that "painter in new york" and "painter new york" are not exactly the same.  However, as far as targeting it with your on-page SEO and your anchor text links, it makes little difference.  "painter new york" and "painter in new york" hits the same 3 keywords either way.  One does look much more natural than the other inside copy & anchor text, though.

I'm going to make a leap and assume that your business & website isn't about art.  If this assumption is correct, then the answer to your question is that it doesn't matter.  Neither of those are money keywords.  Google thinks those keywords are about art.  See the images from Google Insights.

See also the image of a universal search for "new york painters".  Google Organic Search clearly believes that it's about art.  Google Local Search believes it's about painting companies.  This isn't a keyphrase you should be targeting organically.  You should be doing some Local SEO, though.

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You can set up reports in Google Analytics for free.  You can have these reports sent to you or the client automatically every month.  It will probably take you a few hours to set up exactly what reports you want.  After that, it will take no time at all.

I suggest installing a mod for your browser that will easily identify nofollowed links for you.  These extensions don't necessarily catch redirected links, so you'll need to hover your mouse to see exactly where that link is pointing.  If it doesn't simply say the website it's pointed at, it's probably redirected somehow.

Tools here

BOOM!

Nice answer, with an authoritative source no less.

It's certainly controversial, but some studies have shown exactly what your agency is claiming.

Buying terms for your own brand is inexpensive.  ~ 10 cents per click or so.  You will see some cannibalization from this, because some users will click the ad instead of the organic link just beneath it.

Just make sure they're also doing negative targeting to avoid job searchers looking for jobs in your brand.  They should really be doing this regardless of whether or not they're buying branded terms.

Many of those listings do provide a link, but it's usually nofollowed or redirected somehow, so that it doesn't pass any juice.

They're still valuable listings to have for their citation value alone.  Local Search is critical for any business with a physical location.

I'd recommend using a Local Search product like Localeze, Axiom, ExpressUpdate, or UBL.  It's a lot less time consuming than going out there and manually updating all of your Local listings yourself.

301 redirects don't pass 100% of link juice.  It's more like 60%-80%.  That's the answer.  I'm not sure what else to tell you.

I realize this is probably not the response that you're looking for, but hiring a native of that country is your best bet.  A native who isn't trained in SEO at all is still probably better than an SEO vet who is a non-native non-fluent speaker of the language.

A native who is tech savvy is going to be able to give you insights you would never have as a foreign SEO.  You just need to make sure you hire someone who is tech savvy and teachable.

I hired a French person because I deal with quite a few places in France.  She had no SEO experience at all before, but within her first week she was able to tell me things like "This website is like the TripAdvisor of France."  She's been a fast learner and a huge addition to our team.

It is likely that your domain authority went down because the size of the index used by OSE shrank significantly.  Last month they indexed about 72 billion URLs, compared to 150 billion the month before.  This month they indexed even less, something like 68 billion URLs.

If some of your backlinks weren't indexed this time, you'll lose domain authority.  There's not a lot you can do about the index shrinking, unless you can provide a few million dollars worth of Hardware for SEOmoz to use.

That's understandable.  Just be sure to communicate the realistic chances of out ranking that glamour model on each keyword related to your CEOs name.  I don't know how popular this model is, but it's probably going to be difficult.  Once you've communicated how hard this is going to be, your CEO may be open to more creative solutions.

Unless you're in an industry that requires you to be super "family friendly", I think that your CEO will get more out of embracing the joke than out of denying any connection with the model.

Another fantastic example of the power of exact match domain name.  Nice.

That's going to be a tough one.  Beautiful people are popular on the internet.  It's just a fact.  There's probably quite a bit of anchor text links containing that last name, pointing at pictures of the glamour model.  There's probably also a large volume of searches looking for that glamour model, compared to a fairly small number of searches looking for your CEO.

My advice is to make it a joke, and become part of the joke.  Do your idea of a website with a URL containing the CEOs name, and optimize it for the CEOs name, etc.  On the site, post a pic of the glamour model.  Post some copy that says something like "Apparently, I share my last name with a glamour model.  I don't actually look like that.  If you were looking for the glamour model pictured on the right, and not a CEO with X years of experience in the X industry, click on the picture.  If you want to learn more about X CEO and my insights into the X industry, click here for my blog."

Ok, yes, that looks bad.  I wouldn't buy that.

Other Local Search solutions, like ExpressUpdate, Axiom, Localeze, etc. are not doing that kind of thing.

I don't want to seem harsh, but you should brush up on your Local Search knowledge.  It's not quite the same as SEO.  Local Search is almost entirely about having exactly the same NAP(Name, Address, Phone Number) across hundreds of websites.

Google crawls those hundreds of websites.  If your businesses' information is the same across all of them, Local Search data gets more accurate.

Google WANTS you to have uniform information across the web.  They WANT to have a high quality Local Search product(Google Maps).

Yes, it may seem more "natural" to have an invalid, year old, phone number, on some websites, but that doesn't make it a good thing, and Google doesn't want you to have that, either.

ExpressUpdate, Localeze, and Axiom simply take your data, sanitize it, and push it across the web.  In most cases, your business probably already has a listing with a nofollowed link on all of the websites they're pushing data to.  The point of Local Search products isn't to get the link.  The point is uniform data.

I don't know about the product that the OP posted, but it certainly sounds similar, although it looks like these guys will sell you other SEO services, too.

The vast majority of the sites they're submitting to use redirected or nofollowed links.  Also, the vast majority of sites they're submitting to are free to go sign up for yourself, and place a link on.  The reason you're paying them is not for the listing or the link, its for them to sanitize your data, and go get the listing for you with that sanitized data.  It's a real time saver.

I could be wrong, but I wouldn't call Local Search products like this a Link Building product.

If it's anything like ExpressUpdate or Localeze, it's not actually happening over night.  It takes about 60 days for your data to get sanitized and pushed.

This looks like just another Local Search solution, like ExpressUpdate, Localeze, or Axiom.  I think it's fine.