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The best way to do this is to make sure, that you have a postal adress (i.e. an office) in all cities. If you do, create local business pages on you domain:

domain.tld/computer-fixing-new-york.html
domain.tld/computer-fixing-san-francisco.html

Make a little page about your office and your services, use schema.org to mark the adresses (-> http://schema.org/LocalBusiness ) Use pictures etc.
Next: create corresponding Business Profiles with google and link to your local pages.

Get local links and reviews for your corresponding pages.

There are business related keywords that google doesn't recognize as local businesses. These are usually very easy to rank for (very few, but there are some): For those phrases a simple optimized page "Keyword New York" etc. will suffice (use the seomoz "perfect cupcake" as an example. To test whether a keyword is considered local just see if there are the 7 or 10 local results in the SERP. If not, you might have found one.

I would give it a try. Having a 4 year old domain (probably registerd to your name) with existing backlinks and a natural link profile is worth a lot. The worst thing that could happen is that your exixting links will be devalued a little bit b/c they are no longer relevant for the topic.

Make sure to 301 incoming links to / or another reasonable page, thus getting the linkjiuce. If you use wordpress as cms this is pretty easy: just add this to your header.php and test if it works (with life http headers or so)

Get a local profile with google, bing etc and start from there.

Nofollow links usually don't contribute to your ranking, although getting a few links from wikipedia certainly helps.

The thing about nofollow links is that they belong to a "natural" linkprofile. If all your links are followed and from very good sources, google might consider these links unatural (aka. bought). if all your links are nofollowed this might be considered spammy (not for new websites, though).

So get a natural mix of followed and nofollowed links. Also get some pages with you websites URL but not as link, just as text. Best thing would be to analyze the linkprofile of the sites in your industrie, erspectively your keywords. You will probably find a low percentage (5-25%) nofollowed. This would be a good target ratio to begin with. A new website usually starts very slow in link growth and usually starts with a higher percentage of nofollowed ones.

EDIT: Best source for natural nofollowed links are blogs / comments in your industriy

Assuming that you fear that Google might see this as potential DC: don't worry. I know plenty of sites that have this problem due to their CMS. Google can almost certainly figure that these are the same pages. domain.tld/ domain.tld/index.html domain.tld/index.cfm etc. What you might want to do is to use rel canonical to point index.cfm to / (or vice versa, i would use / though.)

Two things come to mind:

a) are you searching in- and outsinde of Anytown with completely different computers from different IPs etc? Personalization could skew your results.

b) I know, that the datacenter you are queriyng plays a role. For example: I have 2 different webbased services tracking keywords for a local service: seomoz and a german based company called keywordmonitor.de. Both have discrepancies for certain "Service in Anytown" results, stemming from the fact that there are 2 different datacenters involved. You said "500 miles away" so this might be the reason.

PM me if you want to talk about it without divulging your client.

BTW, the ultimate seo advice applies: you need more and/or better links

Yes, excluding certain pages can be a benefit to your rankings: if the excluded pages could be considered duplicate content with your marketing pages or with it each other.

This is usually the case for blogs (think wordpress categories) or webshops (pagination, as well as single product pages reachable by different paths (and thus having different urls). As Ryan pointed out: controll that on the page level via noindex,follow to allow PR to flow. Use noindex,nofollow for "internal" pages you dont want to see crawled.

I am not sure, but having 9950 pages indexed, but considered duplicate content might hurt rankings for other pages on that domain. Google might consider the Domain spammy.

If you need a specific hint for your domain, send me a PM and I have a look if time permits.

Hey Sam,

by using noindex you wont show up in the serps at all, so this might not be the best idea. Assuming that there aren't any duplicate pages on your domain I'd say try it with a few pages and see if they rank. Worst thing happening is that google attributes the text to amazon and thus not rank you very high.
What you could do is wirte a small unique text (300 words) for each page and use the amazon product data. use a SEO plugin and set archives / categories / tags pages to noindex though..

Hey Bob,

some points:

• I'd suggest you make your phone number more visible, maybe in a different color or as graphical button.
• I would add the social buttons above your newsletter sign-up and make it "fixed" so it stays in the top right corner if s.o. scrolls down.
• I would change to color of the signup-button to orange. It is your CTA, so it should be visible.
• Make your testimonials stand out (example from my site: www.waescherei-suche.de/referenzen.html)
• Most commonly used buttons are: Google+, Twitter, Facebook, linked in, stumbled upon. Check out these wordpress plug-ins: Social Media Counters or Slick Social Share Buttons

Also:

• Enable gzip for .css and .js files
• remove <meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.9.1" />  so nobody can see the version you are running (exploits etc.)

If the robots.txt can not be read by google or bing they assume that they can crawl as much as they want to. Check out the google webmaster tool to see whether google can "see" and access your robots.txt.

Assuming that the offered service of this store has a strong regional focus I's say you need more local links (Links google can attribute to Anytown).

Potential sources could be:

• Businesspartners in Anytown
• Customers in Anytown
• If they do charity / support a club -> their pages
• Local portals (i.e. Anytown-news.tld)
• Local exposure in the media
• Local Bloggers

Also check your Google business page, see if the store is in pages like yelp / qype etc. Get local ratings and so on.

Hi Peter,

pages blocked by robots.txt would be considered to be not there, thus not flowing pagerank. You might want to use "noindex, follow" on these pages: pages are crawled and links on the page would be followed, by that any recieved linkjuice would flow from these pages to others. Noindex would mean that these pages wouldn't dilute PR (and ranking).

Furthermore is "noindex,follow" on a page to page basis faster and more secure keeping pages nonindexed than by robots.txt (which is only crawled every 12 hours or so).

You might want to use noindex,follow on all non-important pages such as legal etc.

Sebastian

Quiet the contrary..it is certainly a somewhat theoretical question and has nothing to do with css or coding.
One reason is to get an opinion on what is considered cloaking, another reason is a to assess whether giving out more information (such as microtagged content) would be detrimental not to your rankings but to your whole business.

Hey Peggy,

Just to clarify: These pages are on your main domain, but not linked to by any other page? Do these pages link to other pages on the domain?

If you fear that there might be a DC issue, then better not list these pages in your sitemap.xml and make them noindex (and follow, so if someone links to it you get the linkpower to your indexed pages). It's hard to answer whether 30% variation would be sufficient, but you could try to get a few indexed and see how they rank (if at all).

If you dont index them, you might want to optimise for conversion and not so much for SEO purposes.

Sebastian

Would it be considered cloaking if I only show schema.or tagged content to searchengine bots and not to regular visitors. Mind you, no other change on the page, design or content. So instead of

Googlebot would be served:

41 Main Street

Regular visitors:

41 Main Street

My best guess would be to read the great article on copywriting by cyrus shepard: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-super-easy-seo-copywriting-tips-for-link-building . The following principles could be used for writing a good description:

2. Why Headline Formulas Work
3. Get 20% More with Numbers
4. Free and Easy Power Words
10. Be Honest

The page targeted keywords should be in the title.

Hi Cesar,

there is no drawback. technically www.simodal.com and www.simodal.com/ are different pages just like www.simodal.com/randompage and www.simodal.com/randompage/ would be considered different. Most people would consider /randompage a page and /randompage/ a directory. But from a SEO perspective .com and .com/ are equally good.

What you should do is to decide whether you want to use a trailing slash or not and stick to it. if you dedide not to use / on your sites root page use it consistently everywhere.

Generally speaking there are 3 often seen ways: use .html for pages and / for directorys vs.  no suffix for pages (domain.tld/page ) and / for directorys vs. / for all pages and directories (wordpress uses / AFAIK). It doesnt realy matter much, take one and stick to it.

Hey Paul,

here is the explanation:

www.simodal.com and www.simodal.com/index.htm are considered separate pages by google, although both are your sites "starting point". Some Content Management Systems (CMS) make thiis mistake, i.e. delivering the same page and not distinguishing between simodal.com/ and simodal.com/index.htm.

As said before, you should decide whether all your pages should be www.simodal oder just simodal.com. There is a great Whiteboard-Friday Video by Rand on this toppic. Then you should rewrite your URLs to either version.

Additionally you might want to add a rel canonical to your page, maybe just to your starting page. a

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.simodal.com/" />

on your starting page would tell google to ignore the /index.htm and use /

But watch out, rel canonical is somewhat tricky...but there are good tutorials here.

To be honest: I know quiet a lot of pages, that make this mistake. Google should be able to correct this, so dont qorry about rankings. You should however do the redirect www. (or the opposite) as this will trigger googles DC filter. Also: if you plan to use SSL (https:// ) make sure that these pages are also not indexed, best by using rel canonical.

Hey Steve,

if you are searching for a good CMS take a look at contao (www.contao.org) a german open source CMS. I run it on a couple of sites such as (www.waescherei-suche.de). It's site-based and has everything out of the box (newsletter, calendar-entries, user management etc.) There are tons of plugins and upgrades for nearly all kind of purposes. If you run a small site with a few pages this might be the thing you are looking for.

Sebastian

EDIT: it's in English..

I would not worry too much about that info. You rank well for a term like "austin tx martial arts" so everything seems good.

On a sitenode: If you ever want to reuse content and check how similar two pages are you could use a service like http://utext.rikuz.com/en/ to test it algorythmically.

Hope this answers your questions.

A site:pmaaustin.com showed 19 pages indexed. All of which with www.

Calling a non www. version of a page returned
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Mon, 04 Jul 2011 05:16:49 GMT
Server: Apache
Location: http://www.pmaaustin.com/index.php?q=node/18

So everythings looks good....