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Thanks Andy, This is very interesting, regarding editorial earned content vs self posted content, its self posted content although its vetted by moderators prior to going live so its not an 'article submission site'. The majority of the sites range for pr7-4 and its not uncommon for the actual article or profile pages to have a pr2. Regarding finding additional link opportunities, this is only a small part of our outreach and along side this we have lots of earned editorial on our projects, although that too is often re used content as we are in fortunate position that our content is often very well received, often republished 100's of times due to a mixture of outreach and from there it going viral within the niche, which makes it hard to scale to every piece of content being unique. Is it the consensus that Google can evaluate wether a site is purely editorial or user submitted content ?

So you've got a big performance issue if you put all 20 images in img src= notation, as the browser is going to try to download those, of course. What I've done with my travel website with big hotel images (I'll have as many as 75 or more sometimes) is specify the 1st image in img src= notation, then use Javascript to update the src attribute on click or timer. The downside of this: good luck getting Google to index the other 19 images, even if you put them in an image sitemap.  In my experience, Google didn't want to index anything it couldn't verify was really on the page. You can use @media queries to point at different images for different resolutions, but only if they're background images....which most likely means they won't be indexed, and they won't be seen as content by Panda. What I've ended up doing is a bit of a hack; I use client-side Javascript to detect the screen resolution, then I can select different sized images based on that.  I use Joe Lencioni's SLIR library to take any large image and automatically create and cache the various smaller sizes I need.

That's a pretty big debate, actually. Google's Matt Cutts has said that they don't provide any SEO value, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they hurt you. In my opinion, they're still useful for their intended purpose—informing the press about newsworthy events. By my understanding, best practices include 1) make sure the links in the press release are nofollowed, and 2) avoid posting the press release verbatim on your own site. This actually came up in Q&A back in March. That thread might help clear things up for you. There are a few articles linked in the original post if you really want to get into things. Sorry that's not a more definitive answer. As I said, it's definitely something that's debated.

Hi There! This is pretty typical that Google will show different results for different search terms ... even when to our eyes the terms are so similar. Building your authority for the second term will be your best bet for being seen as a relevant answer on the 'designer' term. Changing your title tag could help, but it could also make you less relevant for the pack in which you've achieved that great #1 spot, so I wouldn't be inclined to go that route. Rather, I would do an audit of the sites that are ranking well for the 'designer' term to see what is making them strong enough to do so. I would then try to up my efforts in the areas discovered, whether this would involve tweaking SEO, publishing new content, improving social signals, earning links or what have you. In a nutshell, I wouldn't recommend taking steps that could work against the #1 ranking you've achieved for term one, but rather, would set term two as a new, separate goal and create a plan around it that could help me earn greater visibility in this second pack.

Agree with Ryan - if you want to make changes - better make the image name a descriptive one. Also, take care if you get search traffic from image search - changing the name of your images could cause a big negative impact on your traffic. In my experience the image index is updated slower than the normal index - so if 2554.jpg is indexed and you change it to 6842.jpg or even better red-ford-truck.jpg the image in the result will return a 404 and be replaced by the same image from another site (if it's a stock photo) or dropped from the results. Better to keep the old image in the initial location until the index is updated rgds Dirk

Hi Pegasus! Here are Google's instructions for handling this scenario: https://support.google.com/business/answer/160464?hl=en Hope it helps!

I too have just noticed actual traffic is about 2x greater than what SEMRush has reported. I will be more careful using these figures now! I even segmented valid hostnames in GA to make sure spam was not in there, still much higher

Mike Blumenthal posted a breakdown of a Mediative study in September that you might find useful. LOCAL HEAT MAPS – LOTS OF ATTENTION, NOT SO MUCH CLICKING

Hi Sam! It might be helpful to start with a little clarification here - in Local SEO, the term 'testimonials' tends to indicate direct-to-business owner content while the term 'reviews' typically indicates content that exists on a third party platform. In researching this topic, it would likely be better to search for 'reviews' rather than 'testimonials' as you are talking about third party reviews. Mike Blumenthal wrote a great little post about this earlier this year: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2014/04/24/using-google-reviews-on-your-website/ Hope it helps!

Hi Sam, You're getting some great feedback from the community - I have a couple of thoughts to add. While the concept of a city centroid has long existed, this has gradually given way to the concepts of: An industry centroid The user as the centroid You can read more about the industry centroid concept here: http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/google-local-important/8906-google-local-centroid-not-city-center-affects.html And I highly recommend watching the Bright Local webinar in which some expert Local SEOs weigh in on key local search ranking factors and touch on this emerging concept of the user as the new centroid: http://www.brightlocal.com/2014/11/13/insidelocal-webinar-local-ranking-factors-discussed/ I hope these are helpful tips!

As far as I know, you can always tell Google to ignore links when it's hurting you in Webmaster Tools, right?