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I have read the comments and the frustrations associated with the recent issues and would like to suggest that with any software such as this there will be glitches from time to time. We currently use roughly 30 to 40 SaaS providers of many different types and I cannot think of one that hasn't had an issue at one time or another. Having been with Moz for over 5 years I will say that the issues are few and the response is always transparent with frequent updates. (I cannot say that for most other providers).

I would suggest to anyone who is doing client work that as soon as you can afford to have more than one service provider you do so. There are two basic reasons: if there is an issue you always have back up and second, you get the benefit of being able to compare data. Personally, I find this invaluable for client work. I do not feel disloyal to Moz, I just know that every piece of software has its own limitations.

Good luck to all with the current travails.

Issac,

When you say "simplifying" can you give us an idea as to what that means? Do you mean shortening or titles are truncated, etc. or do you mean the title convention is changed? So "Hot Fresh Bagels | Bagels Dallas Texas | Bobs Big Bagels" is now what?

your question is to unclear to provide a reasonable answer.

Thanks

I appreciate your effort to answer but must say I strongly disagree with you.

First, you are saying you have done the testing and seen the data, but I don't see it here; therefore your statement is anecdotal.

While I generally agree with you that a business with 20 five star reviews and nothing in the least negative is generally viewed with a bit of skepticism, that does not mean a business with 3 or 4 reviews that are four and five star reviews should be responding to a 1 star review, written by someone who is not a customer because that makes more people believe in them. **All of the lemons to lemonade is irrelevant when a competitor is  attacking and seeking to damage you. **

As to owners responding you do not even stop for a second stop and provide a huge and necessary caveat which is this: _Don't get involved in a back and forth with a customer online. _You will make the review more current and more relevant with each and every comment. That means you give it the ability to rank over time.

Most owners are going to want to defend their businesses when they first try to be pleasant and reasonable but the customer is hell bent on damaging them instead of finding a workable solution. My experience (which is anecdotal) is that about 25% of the customers don't want to be repaid, made to feel better, etc., they want revenge for a real or imagined slight.

While it is better to deal ethically and upfront with customers, I do not agree with the generality of taking one on the chin so everyone will want to do business with you.

For any of our clients we tell them: "If you get a bad review, do not respond. Pick up your phone and call us and let us see the review, learn the specifics from your point of view, craft a response and follow through." Just to be clear, we do not offer any reputation management services. When potential clients want that we tell them our first requirement is that they make every effort to clean up all their bad press by contacting the customers and making them happy.

This is my opinion, Thanks

Thanks for this Miriam incognito in MozzerAlliance.....

Hopefully all will see this. After calls and emails and trying to post comments on the review and being told we needed to add a photo (more about the photo in a moment) I gave up. We put up a stock photo of a male head and named it my photo. Yelp accepted this... we could then comment. We put up a comment that was roughly:

_This is not a client, customer, or anyone that any of us at ______ has ever had any dealings with. We have repeatedly tried to contact this "person" through yelp via our personal accounts and our business accounts and cannot get a response from "him." We have repeatedly contacted Yelp telling them the review is not legitimate. Yelp is a media company masquerading as a public opinion website. All of their employees are in SALES. They do not care who puts up a bad review if you are not paying them money. YELP wants businesses to believe they get them quality traffic and it is not true. YELP is only concerned with SALES and will not respond in any way to correct a review that is not legitimate. YES they put out a bunch of propaganda about taking down reviews of businesses who put up FAKE GOOD REVIEWS, but they allow bad people to perpetrate lies to take down competitors. _

After all the conversation with them, flagging the review, telling them why it was not a client or customer, nothing happened. Within 24 hours of posting the above, the business was notified that Yelp had "investigated" and found the review not within their terms....

Oddly, the comment went down with the review!!!!

Thanks to Umar for asking for the domain.

I looked using a site: operator and found 13 pages and 21 pdf's that were indexed. I am not familiar with the company who handled the cleanup so I would check to make sure they have not added any robots.txt, etc. in an attempt to keep it all safe. That would be my first look. To me this is the most logical if you have submitted a new sitemap.

Let us know how it comes out,

Robert

We have a client who is getting the odd fake review from people who have not done business with them. We have gone to Yelp and cannot get a reply via their "Report a Review." When we call we are given the following normal song and dance:

We hear everyday that we are fast in responding, We are not really an advertising company/media company we are a consumer review company, People cannot put reviews up unless they have been a direct consumer, etc. When you ask to speak with someone "higher up" it is always a voice mail account. So, given we have devoted more to this than we wanted, we are going down the trail of finding who the reviewer(s) is and taking legal action.

Just wondering if any of you have done that or had a client who did?

If it is even close to a real review we have ways of working with the client or them and their customer to assist and we do not take on clients who want "reputation management." So, LMK if you have been the legal route.

From a perspective of "How niche is your niche?" I would say that is really something you would need to discover yourself or to have someone perform a market analysis for you. Typically, you would be better positioned to answer that question than most.

From the how do you get more POV, I would say that it really depends on what you want to accomplish with the business, what you are selling, etc. But, you could utilize offline to drive additional online traffic. I would suggest using dynamic numbers that do not show on your site for calls, and have specific landing pages for any offline marketing you are doing.

Keep us posted, please.

Joon,

What Patrick has here is very well done, indeed!

Joon Lee,

This is an outstanding question and I really like how you broke down the two areas that were most concerning because it shows you have put some thought into it.

1. …Would you just keep pumping in more blogs and hope that you get more clicks?

What I would say to this is you never want to just be putting out posts unless they are something that is important to your readers/customers/clients. When people look at a magazine like “People” they know the magazine is about celebrities, etc. Yet, they buy it week after week because they do not know what is going to be written or about whom.
If online, the same tenets apply. If we are writing about SEO for example, sooner or later there will be another post about a given subject. But, if the writer is showing a different slant, a more relevant picture of the problem, etc. we still read it. Look on Moz for any number of topics and you see numerous posts on the same subjects, yet we still read them if they are relevant and present the data or information in a readable or unique way. Use point of view and layout, etc. to revitalize what you are writing and people will tell others of your posts.

2. As to similar “keyword themed pages,” etc. I would tell you to read what I wrote above first. If it is a page detailing a product or service, you can “update” the page as appropriate without creating a new page. (I would resubmit the sitemap or use Fetch as Google to ensure the new info is indexed quickly.)

But the real issue is how do I get traffic to my site after I have plateaued? That is where your creativity comes in. Do you have an email list that you regularly reach out to with pertinent info? If you are not doing that, it will help bring old visitors back. If you are selling something here is a phenomenal post by Codrut Turcanu on BuildFire.com. The post is more than about Local SEO so look through it. I found it on Linda Buquet’s blog. There are a ton of tips in there.

Yes, other ideas as posted here about long tail keywords, etc. do help, but in my opinion it is about keeping your reader engaged to the point that the reader recruits other visitors for you. I cannot tell you how many times I have suggested Moz.com to someone in the last 4 to 5 years. At least in the mid hundreds I would guess.

Good luck,

Robert

Tom,

This is very well stated. Thanks

Best

Jamie,

Again I agree with Alick and I would say this regarding anything where there are suggestions to do or not to do: You have to take them in context and look at the overall picture. You can take any website that we have recently done a lot of SEO on and I will still find little things that could be changed.

An example is if you use a tool like Google Pagespeed Insights. There are going to be a lot of recommendations but once a site is within a reasonable range, you can get into total overkill. An example could be that while it is nice and helpful for sites to utilize a CDN, frankly, not every site needs to.

Hope that helps,

Robert

Jamie,

Years ago everyone put W3C compliant on every website they seemed to produce. I have never seen it have an impact in rankings and would be interested to see if anyone has any reasonable evidence it did. So, I have to agree with Alick300 and suggest you follow that moz guide as it is a really good basis for SEO and ranking.

Best

Robert

Domain and Page Authority were created by Moz (formerly SEOmoz). I would not trust anyone elses number on that. From what you have here, you have a website for a company that for all intents does not exist and it is in one of the most unscrupulous areas of the Internet... Loans. 
I think the issue is likely somewhere within that.

Best

MGordon,

This is patently untrue. We have clients who change locations and we do not change the website/content/etc. Yes, you need to make sure the NAP is clean for the new location, and make sure the website has the new info and not the old, but there is no other website change needed.

Best

Crystalline_15

You ask a very good question about marketing. Being that I run an integrated marketing firm with multiple disciplines serving our clients, I do have an opinion on this. First, get a marketing education and pay attention to discriminate when people are stating opinions as it is important to develop your own and there are fewer hard and fast rules in marketing than in just about anything.

I would suggest avoiding online education as collaboration (a big part of quality marketing IMO) is easier in a classroom type environment, but obviously we collaborate fairly well here on Moz. If you go the way of online, I would suggest trying to do the last year or two on a college or university campus. It does not matter where you go, it matters how dedicated you are to marketing as your profession to be.

In our firm, many people came to be _______, and yet today do different jobs. Our director of Bus. Dev. was hired to handle PPC for us (that lasted a few months only), our head of web development started out as our first intern, our head of local came to us without a marketing background and became a true rock star in Local over about 2 to 3 years. Our head of content and media started while still in college as a copywriter. Today she manages large branding accounts and recently produced a video for a major university.

I urge you to find work in an agency as opposed to a large corporate marketing department to begin with. The reason is that in an agency you have the opportunity to touch it all. By touching it all you come to learn what you like and what you want to do. There are a couple of cautionaries: most marketing firms work with businesses and those businesses trust you to bring them real results; marketing is their lifeblood. Their families and organizations depend on what we do and we must bring zeal to what we do and find ways to give them results that matter. Lastly, if you are not involved in a creative endeavor whether performance art, painting, sculpting, writing, etc. find something creative to do. It forces you to keep expanding your mind and that is what is needed in marketing: Creative talent that never quits learning and striving for real tangible results.

Good luck, and welcome to the ride of your life!

Hello Fabioricotta

Thanks for the well thought out answer. If we were individually coding each review that would work but we are working with a lot of searcher generated reviews and wanted something that would be recognized by the search engines as well for the review. 
I do give you credit for great thinking on this though! Thanks a ton. (Sorry, I went dark for about 10 days and did not answer back.)

Robert

We all use review markup today and we use it linearly as only a vote up or down. My question is around a site that will judge the negative impacts of given chemicals introduced into certain waterways. (Sorry, I must protect the client so I cannot give out all the info; I hope this is enough for a reasonable understanding.)

Is there anyone who has ever used or is aware of any markup that does not result in a star? So, if we use the current system, we end up where a bad chemical gets a ton of single stars. In essence what we are measuring is degrees of Positive. With four stars there is no zero positive, but 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% (Ok unless it is aggregated).

I want to be able to show degrees of negative and obviously stars would be confusing. So, have a symbol that connotes a negative (skull and crossbones, X, !!, etc.) and the more of these someone marks shows more displeasure or more danger. Are there any ideas for this or any occurrences already on the Internet you may be aware of?

Preference would be to be able to at some point have search engines show them as snippets.

Thanks to all you Mozzers,

Robert

Max,

Let me try to clear up this "deep linking" question for you. First, I do not use the term deep linking and am not sure the entire goal of it. If you are going out trying to set up links in some way and direct them to specific pages, IMO you are going to a lot more trouble than it is likely worth today.

Your content should be able to get you links. If your "deep" pages have good content they will get links, Period. Here is an example and it is one that for us was really irrelevant content. 
One of our people did a post and included something on 3-D printing. We do not own a 3-D printer, I would not know how to use one, etc. Yet, we got people linking to that. Another was about 18 months ago or so, we did it a post on responsive design. The post was done just to talk about responsive design. We did not send it out to people to get links, we did not submit it to article directories, etc. Yet, it is one of our most linked-to pages on our site. The reason seems to be due to the image and people wanting to use it. BUT, we did not set out to get links.

I would worry a lot more about ensuring you are creating content regularly and that it is not just content for content's sake. Make it readable, interesting, engaging. If you are "deeplinking" whatever that practice is, you are trying to create links to specific pages and I just think that is a waste of time 99% of the time.

Best

Cole,

I see a couple of red flags here that you may want to be aware of. You state: "I figured this would be a good way to build some page authority up for deeper pages for small businesses that can't seem to garner any attention with content / links."

From this and from your profile showing you working with an agency, this work appears to be client work. First suggestion is this: For any business you are doing SEO for, start with "While we would all like overnight results, SEO will not provide that. You must be patient or risk having your entire site disappear from the search engine results because you/we did things to expedite the process that the search engines consider negative. We understand that some of your competitors may do these "negative" things and they may get away with it for a while; but, as your agency of record we cannot put you in harm's way for the sake of having you rank quicker."

Can't seem to garner... with content/links. This is where you derail the issue in that you are trying to gain attention and I would assume that means rank improvement. You are wanting a directory to provide this "attention," and if the small business is a restaurant in Lafayette and the directory is Yelp, then you are probably going to be OK, and I would want a link to the menu page specifically.

While there is no list of bad directories per se, there are really only a few that are truly relevant to a given business IMO. The problem will arise in the number of "directories" you are using for this practice. The biggest negative will be around the link velocity for a given business. So, if your business has no links (attention) and two weeks from now you have put them on 30 directories no matter how great they are, you are creating a potential problem for them.

So, instead of "directories" I would suggest for your purposes you use some specific sources (I am only suggesting these as a substitute to what I fear may be less obvious directories.): BBB, Angie's List, YP, Yelp, CitySearch, etc.

Be very careful as well with any directories that you maintain some sense of control over the listing. There are directories that will put you in a sidebar, etc. in a paid listing and it generates a link from thousands of pages; you do not want this to happen to a client and it does.

I hope this helps you out, good luck,

Robert

While there are SEO's on Moz who can answer this question... it is to over broad. It would appear you have not done any type of project close to this in the past from how you have posted the question. If I am simply missing this due to the language difference you have my sincere apologies. 
A multi region or multi language website is a very complicated endeavor if you have not done it before and I would suggest getting assistance from an agency that handles these. The only other suggestion is to go into WMT and read on multi region/multi language sites and possibly post questions there as well.

Sorry, and I wish you the best,

Robert