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If you're all good I'd mark the question as answered, and mark any answers you found helpful as good answers - this helps all of us here in the community! Thanks, Mark

Hi Ron, Thanks for reaching out to us!  Generally the time it takes the changes to reflect on our report can take up to a updates to reflect. You can check out more information here: http://www.seomoz.org/help/on-page-reports Hope that helps, Peter SEOmoz Help Team.

1st works fine for me.... Redirect 301 /tags/xp/ http://www.test.com/tags/windows-xp/ if it is not working there must be some other problem!

If it's a quality site, relevant to your niche and the links are useful for both sites users, everything should be fine, and both sites could benefit from the exchange. If in doubt, you can always ask for an editorial link instead of site-wide links. Check out this video for more info: Whiteboard Friday - Sitewide, Reciprocal, and Directory Links

Hi Ron, Good to know your city landing pages are doing well organically. Regarding SM, yes, things like Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube could all be good ways to generate visibility for your business. You can create a local Facebook page, tweet about your local appearances in different cities, optimize your videos for different cities, etc. Regarding your trumpet player's home address, honestly, I feel if you had to defend this to Google, they might not go along with the reasoning. You might argue that this is a place your band practices and from which you all head out to engagements in that city, and I can kind of see stretching it to that, making me hesitate to say 'delete it'. Provided that the trumpet player's listing also has a unique local phone number, you could leave things as they currently are and if all stays well, then fine, but should you notice a drop in rankings for your main listing at any point, that second location might be something to view as a culprit. Now, if the second listing is sharing a phone number with the main number, then that is a different story and it is definitely putting at risk your main listing rankings.

Yes, Its count. I remember once Matt had explained about (-) and (_) in to the URL formation. It means there is something for URL formation. It's also true by logic of search engines.

In my experience the links still count. The original article should contain a canonical URL which declares it as the original. We have had several articles shared and the links show up in opensiteexplorer.

Thanks so much Ross!

Links from Ezine Articles wont help you. Check out this video from Matt Cutts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chuhSmwsL7s

Are there any businesses out there that write world class guest blog articles for subjects that match my business? World Class?  Probably not, but if you get an article of that quality you should post it on your own website.  That is the type of article that attracts a lot of attention and has the potential to rank #1. Also, i've read that doing this for links is really moot because the blog posts get archived and become pagerank "unranked" thereby offering little link value after about a month or so. This depends where you are posting.  You should be able to dig down through historic posts and see what happens to their posts after a few years. Once they get archived do they still get counted by google and does the anchor text and page rank still count? If they are being archived you don't want to do this. Honestly, it's best to post unique and valuable content on your own domain.  If you start giving it away you are feeding your competitors and creating new competitors.  Do you really want to do that.

i only have about 4 reciprocal links, the rest are one way.  I left these reciprocal links up because there is good anchor text in the incoming anchor text.  Does google penalize my site by a small amount if the site i'm linking to links to a casino site?

This is a solid explanation and really, we just have to exercise common sense. If you are exchanging links to the site as it provides value to visitors of both sites visitor then great, if you are exchanging links to somehow manipulate the search results, well, not so great. Ultimately, if you are doing this for search engines, that is definately not going to help and it could certainly hurt now or down the road if Google gets even more antsy regarding link based SERP manipulation.

Seeing if the page where your link will be placed is indexed by Google is a good thing to check, as well as the PageRank of that page.  It's probably not worth paying for a listing if you're going to end up on some deep listing with no PageRank. Probably the best directories out there are DMOZ, Yahoo, and BOTW.  Those as well as any niche specific directories and business directories. Beyond that it's probably not worth spending money or time on.

I agree with Dana Google analytics if set up correctly is an extremely powerful tool. You will get to see what is out there and so you know everything that Google ad words is showing you is wonderful information however it is most likely very hard to rank for if you do an exact match. Dana's idea of doing on tail keywords adding a word or two will not only allow you to make it more fitting to what you offer in addition it will give you a much better chance of ranking for that keyword. I also love using http://scribecontent.com/ I think it makes me a better writer. I hope I've been of some help, Thomas

yes .. it is fine as long as you are not using it for the sole purpose of giving a push to your website's visibility.. take it as an attempt to make it easier for people to navigate your website.

If you focus on getting links from high quality, relevant directories, that will not hurt you. If the directory accepts every link that is submitted to them, that's when you are going to start running into trouble.

Actually, what you need to build is more content.

Hi Ron, What you are seeing here is just Google's current choice of display. If you search for 'Austin Restaurants' you will see all of the restaurants in your area being displayed in the same manner you have cited. Don't worry about this, and don't be surprised if Google changes their display layout again soon. They are always tweaking the information they choose to display in the local listings, so we all have to roll with the punches (and try to smile while doing so ) Hope this helps to know you've not been singled out!