Welcome to the Q&A Forum

subdomain = www.

So what you're probably seeing is a lot of your domains are pointing to www.domain.com rather than domain.com

There are no automated link building solutions, however SEOMoz does offer lots of education on the subject:

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

http://www.seomoz.org/article/the-professional-guide-to-link-building-2011

Many good blog posts in these categories:

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/category/4

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/4

A good list here:

http://www.seomoz.org/directories

And an excellent tool for starting the process here:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org

You may also find this Labs tool useful:

http://www.seomoz.org/labs/link-intersect

If I were you, I'd schedule a call and ask questions. Like what the benefits of having your content syndicated across the network is outside of name recognition, how they handle duplicate content problems, how they ensure your content is used properly, etc, etc. Put the onus on them to alleviate your fears. Chances are it won't be that beneficial for you.

With regards to your fear of not providing a URL, this is probably a form mass-email to pre-identified targets that was just badly executed. Call nSphere directly, and ask to speak to him. See how that goes.

I'm looking for opinions on the following scenario:

SuperWidgets buys GreatWidgets. That business acquisition involves the purchase of GreatWidgets.com, a standard but well-established website with some nice backlinks. The business acquisition is communicated to previous customers of GreatWidgets through the normal channels.

What should be done with GreatWidgets.com. Re-direct to a splash page informing visitors of the acquisition? 301 page-to-page for directly relevant content? If a splash page, how long would you keep it up?

Also, any opinions on how to handle any non-claimed local listings for the now-acquired business? Claimed ones will of course be handled, but what about the non-claimed and unclaimable?

For your primary target I've got you lagging behind Yelp x 2, Yahoo Local, and a semi-heavy with a Places page. All in all not bad for a month's work!

Checking on some of your secondaries, you look like you're again fighting directories and Deep-Steam. They appear to have the local advantage, but once you get your Places page and some more citations coming in, I think you'll start to bump up.

Since it appears you're targeting locally, I suggest taking a spin over to getlisted.org, and make sure you're listed in the places they indicate. Give David Mihm's local ranking factors a good read, and put that to use as well.

All in all, you're making it happen, just keep trucking along!

Thinking it might be that I used a hyphen and you didn't, I just re-checked. Now, with hyphen I'm getting rank 19. Without, rank 9.

This is weird. :S

Quite possibly. I'm still getting a not-in-top-50, however. See attached image. :S

1eimY.png

Yes-ish. You're going to want to read this:

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/

What is telling you that you have these rankings? Rank Tracker has you NIT-50 for any page on your website.

If this is just you manually checking, there are many reasons you may be seeing your own pages. Search personalization is huge, from rank history to geography.

I'd say use it where it makes sense. Location finder? use it. Contact page? Use it. Footer of every page? Nah.

I have a feeling there is going to be a lot of diversified opinion in this thread, but here is my opinion.

First, to answer your direct question, I do think localized optimization in <title>is going to slightly affect your non-geographic rank. You've got 10oz of SEO Juice to split up amongst however many keywords you've got in your title, and pulling a geo-identifier into that is going to dilute the non-geo a bit. Maybe. Possibly. Probably.</p> <p><em style="background-color: initial;">That being said</em><span style="background-color: initial;">, you have to consider what keyword you're targeting, and whether or not they're triggering the x-pack in a SERP anyway. This speaks to question #2. If you want to rank nationally and locally, and who doesn't, consider your separate search verticals. If your target queries aren't triggering the x-pack, then take into account search volumes on those geo-specific terms.</span></p> <p>If you want to focus on local, non-map placements, I'd use the following <title> methodology:</p> <p><em>pagesubject city, stateabv | brandname</em></p> <p>e.g Oil Change Plymouth, MI | Midas</p> <p>Of course there could be a substantially more in-depth exploration of this topic, and I'm hoping one of my fellow inbound marketers will expand upon the subjects I didn't touch.</p></title>

Moving to a new domain means new link building. You can 301 all you want but it's just not the same. Close, but it's never feels as pure as your first.

I'd business-case it. Will the keyword-as-domain give you some ranking power? Probably. Will the boost be worth the $2500? Well...maybe. Also take into consideration what happens if someone else snatches that domain up. Then $2500 might not look so bad when faced with a competitor with a new full tank of SEO gas.

I think you should consider query-intention a bit here. What is a user searching for 'kitchens' looking for? It's a very general term, so you can't really tell.

If I were you I'd focus on local terms, ones that were more query-matched to content you have.

So, yeah, I'm agreeing with you

There are no automated link building solutions, however SEOMoz does offer lots of education on the subject:

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

http://www.seomoz.org/article/the-professional-guide-to-link-building-2011

Many good blog posts in these categories:

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/category/4

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/4

A good list here:

http://www.seomoz.org/directories

And an excellent tool for starting the process here:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org

You may also find this Labs tool useful:

http://www.seomoz.org/labs/link-intersect

Yes-ish. You're going to want to read this:

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/

Welcome to SEO!

First, take a step back. Breathe. Jumping to conclusions like "white hat does not really work for the smaller business" is the absolute wrong thing to do. White hat does work, and if you're in it for the long game it's the only real strategy.

It looks like you've got some decent working knowledge. Good, quality inbound links are very important when establishing rank and domain authority. With some of the basics down, I suggest you give this a read:

http://www.seomoz.org/article/the-professional-guide-to-link-building-2011

Pay particular attention to Section II, link building strategies. While I applaud you for jumping right in and worrying about nofollow vs follow, paid vs unpaid, I get a feeling you haven't really thought about strategy yet. Do that, give yourself a day to digest, then dive back in. If you're confused on what is a good link and what isn't, be sure to read the sections on link profiles.

To answer your questions a bit more directly, having links back from IPYs like Yell and Scoot are part of a good, robust link profile. Since they are part of regular ads on other sites, they don't 'count as paid links' like you think they do. In addition, external citations from IYPs can have significant advantages in the local search vertical.

While link building, don't ignore the other aspects of SEO. Rand wrote a great post here:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-responsibilities-of-seo-have-been-upgraded

That will give you an idea for every touchpoint you have in a greater SEO campaign. Also check out the posts on Ranking Factors for more information.

SEO/inbound marketing moves fast, takes no prisoners, and leaves many in the dust, but you'll do well. Just keep at it.

You need to use a rel-canonical tag. You can read a really informative post by Rand on it here:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps

This thread has some good opencart-specific advice regarding implementation:

http://forum.opencart.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=18817

I typically look at both numbers, but when making judgments I default to phrase match. I feel it better takes into account long-tail.

PA and DA are primarily based on links. It looks like your competitor is out-shining you there. I'd make your major next step a link building campaign.

To expand on Nakul, and after checking out your site, I'd say your best-case option is to use rel canonical to indicate to Google which your preferred page would be (in your case, I'd say the first page or a view-all page). This will address your duplicate content issues.

As for duplicate title, using a canonical will take care of the SEO penalty associate with that. If you just want to see a smaller number in that red box in SEOMoz, just add a variable to the end of the title tag based on the page.