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I've been told that Google will rank a page higher for a local query if the address on the page has the city in it that was typed into the search bar.  If the address on the bottom of the page is  an Austin address, then a search phrase with Houston in it should cause the Austin addressed page to rank lower.  The Google Local page that i was going point the social icon to on our Houston page is our home office in Austin.  I wasn't sure if Google would see that their Local Page was an Austin address and cause my Houston page to rank lower for Houston searches.  That's kind of hard to explain, do you follow me?

Yes, exactly, this would be an example:

<a href="http://www.facebook.com/SEOmoz" class="facebook">Facebooka>

It would be hard to imagine enciting any robot confusion so long as the branch office link was in an A tag...

When you say "tag" you mean the social icon button taking you to my Austin local page right?

I have a business that works in many cities across Texas.  Our home base is in Austin and i have a Google Places page set up for Austin.  I have a page dedicated to each major city in Texas talking about clients we've worked with in each city, etc..  I am placing social icons on each page and Google Places is one of the Icons and i was concerned that if Google sees a link to our Austin places page on our Houston page that the Houston page might be considered less relevant for a Houston search being as Google takes note of addresses on pages to consider relevance.  Will my page suffer in the serps if i link to our Austin local page on our other city pages in the google places icon?

Second question:  What are the best social icons to put on my web pages for the best traffic?

Take care,
Ron

Good point, Google also is a registrar so they can get behind the scenes to see who has bought domains and even if the whois is different, if the domains were bought with the same credit card, google will take note of this.

Thanks for your input!

Ron

I have two separate websites on different servers and was wondering that since reciprocal links effectively eliminate each other, I'm curious if this link strategy will keep the links counting.  Here's the strategy:  I will have someone link to my site A and if i link to their site from my site B in a three way link strategy, will the links count even though both my site A and B have me listed as the Whois so Google knows that both sites are owned by me?  Or will the links be discounted as reciprocal?

Thanks in advance for your feedback!

Take care,

Ron

I have three new sites all hosted on the same server in the same public html folder and each site is in a different folder inside the public html folder.  These sites are a listing of live music venues in different cities in Texas.  Should I link these sites together to increase page rank to each other and also put key search phrases in the anchor text and place these links in the text in the center of each page of each site to make the links more effective?

Also, because the sites are about a year old they don't have many inlinks yet.  If i submit them to about 50 directories will Google not like this because there are way more directory links than natural links?  I've been told that it is trouble to have more than about 50% directory links compared to natural links.

Thanks in advance for your answers!

Take care,
Ron

They have no other outside links other than the links from the domains that they own. Are you sure about this?

Yes, or at least there are no other links that the mozbar seomoz link analysis shows, but they don't show all links.  Many times it will show no links to a page and then you look up links through the Yahoo links report and will find 20 or 30 links that the mozbar didn't show.  Does the mozbar not crawl as deeply as the Yahoo spider does?

There are several of my competitors who have built multiple sites with keywords in their domain names such as localaustinplumber.com, houstonplumbers.com, Dallasplumbers.com, localdallasplumbingservices.com...you get the picture.  (These are just made up examples to illustrate what they are doing) They put unique content on each page and use alias whois using a different credit card to set up each domain to hide the fact from Google that they are the same entity and then link back and forth to each of the domains with appropriate keywords in the anchor text.  They are outranking me on a lot of key search phrases due to the fact that they have the keywords in the domain name. They have no other outside links other than the links from the domains that they own.   Is this a good idea?  is it black hat?  are they going to get slapped if someone reports them as a link farm?  It's frustrating for me staying white hat and getting legitimate links and then these competitors come in and out rank me after only a few months with this scheme.  Is this a common practice to rank highly for certain key phrases?

Thanks in advance for your opinions!

Ron10

I have a band website and was thinking of making some link bait pages specifically designed to get links from high page rank music colleges and then funnel that page rank to my landing pages on my band site.  I am planning on finding out what these colleges link to and create great information on pages on my site that the high page rank college websites will link to thereby boosting my trust and authority.  How much will the trust and authority boost my site in the search engines?  Because the colleges will be music colleges they should be relevant to my band site.  Does this sound like a good strategy?

Take care,

Ron

I saw some test results of no follow links from some years back and it seemed to indicate that Google still counts the anchor text in no follow links provided the page is already indexed and has do follow links pointing to it.  The test results seemed to indicate that Google does count the links and uses the anchor text to cause the page to rank higher in the serps for those key words.  any truth to this?  If i don't expect any traffic whatsoever from a no follow link should i not build it?

Take care,

Ron