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Have you done a side-by-side comparison of your client and his top competitors? Things I'd be looking for: Are his top competitors specialists in the topics you want to rank for whereas your client is more of a generalist? What is your client's online reputation relative to the competition?  Is the sentiment positive, neutral, or negative? How does their anchor text compare? Are the topics you want to rank for included in the link text? Do competitors have keywords in their domain name? I know that's not a ranking factor, but it often translates into incoming anchor text with those topics / keywords which IS a ranking factor. Is the content on your client's site organized around the key topics he wants to be known for? Is your client listed as its author? So, no tricks or hacks. Just a few things I look for when in this situation.

Thank you!

Hi there. Unfortunately, there is no way to do what you are asking.. Sorry. You already did what you should have - change all links to website in GMB, social sites etc, copied the content over. Other than that - there is nothing you can do really. The only thing which could be possibly remotely helpful is GSC address moving tool, of course, you'd still have to have access to old domain GSC - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106?hl=en Hope this helps.

We have an ad grant through Google, so it's free ad money that we'd like to use. Facebook's ad platform seems to be working fine and we use that as well.

Hi David, Happily I was able to get a hold of everyone on Friday, and it looks like they all were able to disconnect. Hooray! Thanks for the help.

Yeah, no argument there. I worry about it from an SEO standpoint, but sometimes there really isn't a lot you can do, from a business standpoint. I think it's occasionally worth a little fight, though - sometimes, when all the dealers want to have their cake and eat it, too, they all suffer (at least, post-Panda). Admittedly, that's a long, difficult argument, and you have to decide if it's worth the price.

I'm also wondering if anybody has had any experience with askives.com. There are a few sites like that and they must be pretty common among people forced to use the disavow tool... Is there a list anywhere of known sites whos links are viewed as spammy by Google? Thanks!

This is my opinion too. There was a time when this was acceptable and essentially their black hat methods have been grandfathered into the system. However if you tried to it in the present you would be held back. I have a competitor that was hit on long tail terms but still ranks for the most competitive phrases. Needless to say he upped his PPC in order to make up for frivolous phrases but his traffic is still besting me because he has the most obvious search phrases at number one.

We're looking at them from a conversion optimization perspective, while also ensuring that they're SEO-ed for the appropriate products and services. We're pretty good at onsite optimization and quality content creation, we just feel in a slight pickle sometimes with larger corporate clients when it comes to building new pages (landing pages or otherwise). Thanks for the responses.