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Hi,

We have experienced similar and in my experience if the 7 locals slot in between say 3 and 4, these effectively become 3-{4,5,6,7,8,9,10}-11 so the natural rank 4 is really 11th.

The reason I say this is I have noticed results moving up out of the local listings, into the top few and then back down into the local. This has been across several companies in the past 6 months, mind you just for one industry.

In my experience the only additional pages which you can rank in addition to having a local listing, is a sub-page. Although we have seen a local listing and also organic homepage listing ranking as high as middle of the second page.

I hope this has been of some assistance, just my observations from our listings.

The thing about having so many links, is it will dilute the authority you distribute to your pages. This is great if you are trying to have an evenly distributed PR across all pages, but the reality from an SEO perspective is you generally want to push your link juice into key areas.

Food for thought.

No problems Stewart happy to help.

Yes that would be the case, as long as they aren't "SPAMMY" websites or those blogs selling links then of course it is safe to do so. That is link-building!

Also be sure to not over target anchor phrasing, make it as valuable for the people reading the information as possible and you have a sustainable SEO strategy.

Hi Stewart,

Completely depends on the way the blog is setup. Some post your entire article on the homepage, some just a snippet. If as you say it is the entire homepage, you will have the PR4 backlink for "x" amount of time.

From there it will be archived and you can check the PR of individual archive pages to get an idea of what PR they are, the domain and page authority for an indication of what you are getting in the long run.

A decent free tool for internal site duplication is siteliner.com it is made by Copyscape I believe, but quite helpful for any duplicate content concerns.

Also you can run URLs B and C through Open Site Explorer to see where they are linked from, go and update those links to the new link and then the 301 redirect is just a safety net for any that have been missed.

I'd recommend making at least some of your posts sticky to the homepage on the topic you are trying to rank as without some consistency you will be constantly changing the picture Google has of your website content wise.

Other options would be to add an additional section below the top slider with text, in my profile you will see how we have stuck our front post to the homepage as we previously had blog snippets from new posts and it was making our rankings far more volatile.

A good place to start is identifying the search volume you are looking at targeting with the Google Adwords tool.

From there you can identify the competition of the sites currently ranking and put together an optimisation strategy for your content.

The point is you need to identify what you want to rank for first, then it is the age-old; good quality engaging content and building backlinks from authority sources.

You can do so in the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, just put the company name in exact search.

This will give you the monthly search volume averaged over the last 12 months, will take you two minutes and won't cost a cent!