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No, it won't be of that much use no. Homepage PageRank ought not to be focused on too much, I've seen domains with homepage PR that are just complete garbage anyhow. Again, the same with 'dofollow' links, there's far more 'weightier' metrics to be attracted to than whether a link is followed or not. At the end of the day, it's just yet another business directory probably serving little purpose... Is anyone going to use it? Probably not. Will you get any traffic via the link? Probably not. Will you see a return on the cost? Probably not. In my view, definitely not worth looking into. Ask yourself this, what would make this website a good link prospect - if all you come up with homepage PR4 and dofollow. Then you're going about it all wrong.

I think you have to consider the scale of the enterprise; it's easy to think of Google as being some kind of video game that responds to your input as soon as you make it (note to self: make Video Game about SEO. Possible titles: Link Awakening, The Adventure of Link, A Link to the Past). Also consider the number of links you're talking about; I'm surprised you saw any movement for just five links. To me, Google's response (including time it takes them to notice) to a link is kind of ineffable. Charles' advice is pretty good. If you're solely concentrating on number of links and what affect they'll have you might be doing the wrong kind of SEO.

YES!  Especially from your homepage.  Tell everybody that visits your site! YES!  Every quality links helps the authority of your entire domain. If you have superb linkbait then share it will other people by tweeting to your friends, posting on facebook, ask your mum to tell visitors to her blog, share it with reddit, put a sign on your dog.....  but I don't think that I would buy any stumbles... because if your link bait is really good it should get tons of stumbles without paying for them.

When the new SEOmoz list of directories came out, Cyrus did a post about best practices when building links for directories. You might want to check it out at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-link-directory-best-practices.

It's important to look at Twitter as a way to engage with your fans and get your content out there rather than solely as a way to increase your rankings. If you're not there to interact with people, you'll find that they get uninterested quickly. The same goes for Facebook, Google+, etc. I love the idea that Aran mentioned about having a Youtube channel. You can do a lot with that and even could post the videos on your site and tweet those links. One of the greatest things I've found though is to simply ask! Ask your Twitter followers what they'd like to see from you on Twitter. People LOVE giving their opinions so I'm sure you'll get some feedback. You could try that on Facebook and Google+ as well. The idea really is to get a group of fans who are interested in what you're writing about or posting on your site as well. Maybe it's tour dates, or posts about your concerts, but something that gets people interested enough to tweet and retweet. Hope this helps a bit! Jen

Not only did the doorway page lose it's ranking for its keyword, but so did the main site. This sounds like cloaking. About those doorway domains and microsites.   I used to run a lot of hotdog stand websites.  I thought that was the way to go.  Then I learned that a big kickass site was a lot easier to run, a lot easier to rank and performed better with visitors.  So, now the company that I own works actively on just three websites - each in a different niche. If I had a company like you describe.  I would start putting all future work into a single site in each topic area.   And work on that site until it defeats all of the doorways.  Stop competing with yourself and diluting your brand.

Hi Ron, I'm the Local SEO Associate here in Q&A. The response Robert has given you is correct. Google's guidelines would not allow the procedure you are describing. The requirements in order to qualify for a Google Place Page are that you have: 1. A legal business name 2. A local area code phone number 3. A physical street address (not a P.O. box or virtual office) to which customers either come to do business with you or from which your employees depart in order to serve customers at their locations (think chimney sweep, landscaper, etc.) I think your situation is rather interesting, in that I do detect some grey area. What follows is not my suggested advice, but it does point out some of the lack of clarity and potential loopholes in the guidelines. I present this only for educational and hypothetical purposes. Let's say your band is actually a company with a registered, legal business name. Let's say your main headquarters are your home in San Francisco. Let us further say that you appoint 3 band members as franchise owners. These franchise owners have their headquarters in Berkeley, Oakland and San Jose. Let's say that each franchise owner has a distinct local area code phone number and street address (all under the company's legal business name) and each franchise owner is empowered to take bookings over the phone, hold practices at their facility and that the band heads out from these franchise headquarters to do a gig in each of the respective 3 cities, as well as from your main office in San Francisco. In a situation like this, one could almost reason that it would be logical for each of the franchises to have their own Place Page. But in reality, I would call this an extreme long shot, and I believe Google could well consider an abuse of their intended use of the system, hence my warning that this is not my advice. It's interesting to consider, though. Situations like yours are why I would like to see more minutely detailed guidelines published by Google. In all honesty, I believe your most above board move is to get a very clean, violation-free Place Page in place for your business in the city in which it is located, and then do what other go-to-client business models do: depend on your organic efforts for additional visibility in the cities in which you serve. When I work with a client like, for instance, a mobile notary public, my process is to get her site well-optimized for her city of location, get her local business profiles created and claimed and then put a plan in place for creating very strong content on her website for the additional cities in which she serves. Of course, both she and I would love for her to be able to have a Place Page for all of the cities in her service area, but this simply isn't how Places works. I would recommend that you read the Google Places Quality Guidelines yourself in case anything I've written isn't clear: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528 Good luck with the band! Sounds fun!

Thanks everyone for your info.  Most of you seemed concerned about my onsite SEO and i had a professional SEO guy build my entire site from scratch using only html and no flash, etc.  The page is hand built and optimized for the key phrases far better than the competitor's page that is outranking me.  Here is my theory:  Google always gives you a boost about a month or so later after you build about 10 or 15 links to your site and then after a few months of no links you start falling again until you get new links. I think this flurry of new links has temporarily boosted my competitor and they will start falling again unless they start building new links.  I think Joe Ant and the other directories are well respected enough that Google will count these links but the pages in the directories are low enough page rank that they won't keep my competitor high in the rankings for very long.  Do any of you agree with me or have any opinnions based on your experience with this? I'd love to hear your experiences.  Thanks again for your input! Ron

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?

How does Google knows looking at analytics code that both the sites are owned by one person ?

Ron, When you are performing an activity like this for your website, ask yourself "how do readers benefit from my actions?". If you are struggling to find an answer, then you probably should consider trying another activity. As Storwell suggested, natural links between your sites that help users find information are always a good thing. Google will recognize your sites are hosted together and you wont receive much, if any, actual benefit with respect to having your results rank higher. Directory links are a poor use of time and effort. If you spend that same amount of time writing one great article, you will receive better results. Figure out who the best past band was who played at one of your venues and write a great article about their visit. Include pictures, videos of their session at your place (if it's not a copyright violation), etc. Make the article something that all their fans would want to read. Readers should get the feeling "wow, I missed out on a great show! I wish I was there and I'll make it the next time they play there". Ideally that same band will be scheduled again and you can provide a link to a page that has their next appearance dates and info. You need to generate content others WANT to read. Content that people want to tell their friends about and link to. The payoff for a fantastic article that is well promoted will be more quality links then the rest of your efforts.

Thank you!

Ron, Whatever EGOL is saying - just do it! He knows his stuff, and after reading his answers here, and my own questions he has answered, you can be sure that he is giving you excellent SEO advice.

But his actual mind never allow you to build links from websites having zero value. Teginder