Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks to both of you.  Cyrus, I took a look at those tools over the weekend and they're definitely going to help and exactly what I was looking for.

We would actually have to see the results to give a specific analysis of the situation, as well as the stats of the website/url/domain you're trying to get to rank.  If your domain is relatively new, with no stats, it may be somewhat difficult considering the domain authority of the results.  On the other side of that, you may very well be able to get some excellent quality links and boost your stats and it may not be too difficult.  It's all very hard to say without specifics.  Could you provide more information?  If not, you're more than welcome to DM in private about it.

I'm putting together a link prospecting csv (very basic/simple).  I'm doing my own manual hunting for link prospects and compiling them in a list in that excel doc.  Once I'm done with that, I want to pull OSE data on a larger scale (MozRank, PA, DA, etc.). I know Niel Bosma's SEO tools for Excel exists, but I have a Mac, and it's not available for that.  And I can't really pay for any of the big tools right now (ie BuzzStream).  Does anybody know of a good tool or way of going about pulling this data in a way that will save time?  As opposed to pulling data for each URL one by one.  ANY tips would be GREATLY appreciated.

Do Facebook Open Graph tags get spidered by Google?  I have a site I'm looking at and they've implemented these tags on the entire site, but with the same title and description on every page.  I'm assuming if you use these tags, give each page their own unique tags.  But do these have an effect on rankings at all?  Does googlebot see them and take them into account?

Local SERPS continue to confuse me.  I feel like I can tell what's going on but I'm never right.  How do these two listings rank for "best bar" in the local Chicago SERPS?  It's the same if you search for "best bar in chicago".

http://maps.google.com/maps/place?hl=en&biw=2109&bih=1218&noj=1&gs_upl=3495l4209l0l4335l8l5l0l0l0l0l0l0ll0l0&um=1&ie=UTF-8&q=best+bar&fb=1&gl=us&hq=best+bar&hnear=0x880e2c3cd0f4cbed:0xafe0a6ad09c0c000,Chicago,+IL&cid=17128325649974296516

or

http://maps.google.com/maps/place?hl=en&biw=2109&bih=1218&noj=1&gs_upl=3495l4209l0l4335l8l5l0l0l0l0l0l0ll0l0&um=1&ie=UTF-8&q=best+bar&fb=1&gl=us&hq=best+bar&hnear=0x880e2c3cd0f4cbed:0xafe0a6ad09c0c000,Chicago,+IL&cid=455944883716881589&ei=aQPqTo7mN4mIgwe4oc3fCA&sa=X&oi=local_result&ct=placepage-link&resnum=5&ved=0CFgQ4gkwBA

This has had me stumped for months.  I've analyzed everything and there aren't any good indicators as to how this was done.  The former doesn't even have a website.  The latter example has some category keyword stuffing, which I don't get why they're account hasn't been suspended because of it.  It also has a very small and not very powerful link profile.

Any insights would be much appreciated!

If you're optimizing an e-commerce site where you sell a certain brand of product, can you re-use the product descriptions from that brand's store?

For example, if I'm selling Nike's, can I use the product descriptions and info from the Nike product pages? (This is not what I'm selling).  Or should you write your own descriptions.  I understand that original content is best, but in an online store situation, how do you write up a product description that's different from the original?  It is what it is, right?

This doesn't fall into the duplicate content category.  Especially if the description is honestly describing what your site is.  All relevant and honest directories need a description of a site to accurately list them.  Also, Google does not determine if juice will pass from one site to another, it's up to the site to tell Google that.  They do this by adding rel="nofollow" to the page or link.

Straight from Google's Webmaster Tools help;

"Nofollow" provides a way for webmasters to tell search engines "Don't follow links on this page" or "Don't follow this specific link."

How does Google handle nofollowed links?

In general, we don't follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web.

That pretty much says it there.  Hope this helps!

Initially I can see that you have two of the same keyword listed.  "O-Ring" and "o-ring" are the same keyword since Google's Keyword tool doesn't differentiate between Capitalized and lower-case.  If you optimized four different pages for these keywords, it's likely that you didn't achieve the rankings you desired for the keyword I mentioned because you cannibalized it with two pages.  If two pages are heavily optimized for the same keyword, Google can't distinguish which one should rank for the term, so it tends to get held back in rankings.

As for the hyphens, I would only optimize for the keyword that has it in it and especially the correct spelling of it.  Google's autocomplete and suggestions have started to reduce the amount of searches for misspelled keywords.  It would be in your best interest to optimize grammatically (imo).  I think you'll see that it's going to help you out in the long run.

Before looking into these sites even further, I would say that they're probably not worth it.  Do they work?  That's a whole different story.  Based on the first site alone, "Build My Rank", I would already be questionable about pursuing anything through the site.

Step 2 from their "How It Works" page states, "We publish your article randomly on 1 of our high page rank, aged domains."

I would have so many questions like,  "We publish your article randomly"?  I'm sure you want to know exactly where your content is being published and the stats of the domain it's being published on.  I'd hate to find out content that I wrote is being "randomly" posted on irrelevant domains just because of their PR and age.

I feel that if you're going to utilize a link building service, find one where you get approval of link prospects and targets before submission.  There should be 100% transparency in what you're trying to accomplish, especially fro your own piece of mind and your clients best interests.  Otherwise, build links your own way and honestly.

What kind of research tactics are the best for finding great ideas for content or articles?  What tools are the most helpful?

We've tried multiple management systems, with the last one being Raven Tools (I think this is the most popular).  We've also done our own manual tracking in excel and that gets very very tedious and sometimes hard to  keep track of.  What are some other ones that people have found that have been easy to use and made their work much more efficient (link building/tracking, reporting, competitive research, social, etc.)?

I've listed an example below.  I see these all the time, where a directory pulls it's listings from DMOZ.  So you would naturally assume that if you're in DMOZ, you would get these links, but that's not the case.  This particular link was picked up by OSE so I'm wondering what the quality of these links really are and if they're legit?  Also, if you go to the main subdomain the page just says "Buy shirts".  What is the deal with these types of so-called "directories"?

http://www.searches.org/go/search/Shopping/Home_and_Garden/Furniture/

Another example:

http://www.westcairn.com/furniture.htm

"Best Bar In Chicago" - http://www.google.com/search?gcx=w&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=best+bar+in+chicago

They have only 5 Google reviews, and their local directory reviews are suspect.  One of them goes to rateclubs.com and it's not even a page for their business, while one of them doesn't have user reviews, it's just an editorial review.  The other one at superpages.com doesn't even link back to their site, it links to their restaurants.com profile.  What is going on here? I've been trying to figure this out for a while as their first place ranking has been solidified for quite some time now.  I can also tell you that a few of the bars listed below them have a MUCH higher profile and are better known.  You can see that just by the reviews.

I know that's vague, so let me specify.  I recently got a client on the second page for a relatively difficult 2 word keyword.  That is when the location is set to Chicago, Il in Google and private browsing in Chrome (so I'm not logged in).  This is great because Chicago is the more important location (the client is located there and that's what his location is when he searches in Google).  But when he goes home to the suburbs and searches, the ranking completely disappears.  Why would he rank in a much more desired location such as Chicago vs a suburb way out of the city?  Is that something you can control or target in terms of optimization?  It's difficult trying to explain why this is happening to clients.

My developer has created a navigation that has all the links in the HTML, but sublinks are "display:none" until javascript tells it other wise.  Does this a cause a problem?

Do these typically have a negative impact on SEO?  I know this is kind of a vague question, does it make it harder to spider?  Are there SEO friendly ways of coding these?  There are so many sites out there that have these, so I've got to assume it's different on a case by case basis.

What are the best ways to help influence your products rankings in Google Shopping SERPS?  Aside from the obvious factors (ie Product Title, Description, brand, etc), what are the key factors in optimizing your products?

Google is randomly displaying the alt image tag as the page title for my homepage.  It happens when you search for the brand name, but the page title appears as "BrandName Logo" (obviously not "BrandName").  Has anybody seen this happen before?

I have someone who's come to me and said that they have lost all of their organic keyword rankings.  They did launch a site redesign a few months back so that could be a reason as to why.  But after looking at the site, link profile, etc.  It doesn't look like they could have been ranking for the terms they say they were.  They have never implemented any SEO on their sites btw.  I did not build this site and have not done any SEO, they are coming to me to solve the problem.  I did notice in SEM rush that a couple months ago they were ranking organically for more terms (20 in July vs. 5 now), so they did lose some.  Is there any way to see what terms they WERE ranking for?

Why would a page title not be displayed in the SERPS?  Everything appears to be formatted correctly in the code, yet the title of the company gets displayed instead of the page title?  Any general idea why this could be happening?