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Thanks for the insight. If that's the case, we're covered as a result of having all of our locations (with unique phone numbers) on Google Maps/Places... which evolved into Google+. Thanks again, Erik

Hey Simon, If you're referring to the Link Intersect/Competitive Link Finder tool, you can check my recently published competitive link analysis guide for Excel, right here on Moz! Hope that helps!

Hi, I only use the CSE (Custom Search Engine) and have used the Maps API (free version) for a DB reference for a search. But it sounds like you would need the premium API access since you are actually needing to display locations as places does, which on cost or use I am not sure. But below is the google page where you can begin your research. http://maps.google.com/help/maps/getmaps/compare.html Hope this helps

I'm looking into doing this as well. The best way is to have the content translated by a professional, I would suggest using Odesk, this way you're getting an accurate translation. The only issue I can think of with doing this is that if you're targeting certain keywords they might not be what people are searching for in the language that you translate to. Also, the cost of doing it this way can add up. The Alternative would be to use a translation program/plug in to do this for you. I suggest getting it translated by a professional as this way you know that your articles aren't going to insult anyone.

Give it a Google.. More than anything you just need to make the email sound personalised, follow up the emails asking did you get my last email etc?.. So they know you’re not just some robot sending out hundreds of links. Make sure the links are relative to their content and also make sure that you can offer them something, they are not likely going to link up to your website if there is nothing in it for them. Hope this helps. -h

Great - thanks for the advice guys, much appreciated

Just use the other seomoz tools to find links. http://www.seomoz.org/labs/link-finder/index.php http://www.seomoz.org/labs/link-intersect Its really easy to find links your competitors are already using that are working, once you have the list of links to go after the best ones by using the seomoz toolbar to find out which sites have the best authority. Hope that helps.

Brilliant, thanks guys - much appreciated Simon

Hi Simon, If you're looking for really good link building opportunities (obviously you should be) I wouldn't look any further than the Link Moses service offered by Eric Ward. It's a paid service but for $8/month it's ridiculous value. Joost de Valk wrote a great review/recommendation of his services. I think it's fair to say that Eric's site looks pretty awful but his link building experience is second to none. I signed up just over a week ago and already have some great tips. Hope that helps, Brendan.

Hi Steven Thanks for taking the time to respond. I would be very keen to read up on your powerpoint slides - will you be able to post the slides on seomoz/blog? Good luck with the pres! Simon

You can also add a canonical tag on the old page, using the new preferred page URL in that tag.  This could help speed up the Google indexing issue as some have been testing this actually works faster than waiting for Google to change it out based on the 301 redirect. Also, if there are any links pointing to that page, within your own site, or coming from 3rd party sites, it's a best practice to change them - the ones on your site you can take care of - the off-site inbound links can be more challenging - requiring reaching out to other site owners, who are not always responsive.  Yet if you can do this, it helps provide more authority to the new page sooner.

That's about right. Organic does get more than PPC from the stuff I've seen/read and it probably averages at about 80/20. I'd take the search volumes with a pinch of salt anyway though, from any keyword tool

Whilst we don't have syndicated content on site, we do syndicate out with success. In November last year, google released some new tags for syndicated content although as usual did not go into a great deal of depth as to how it would all work as such.When syndicating out - there are occasions where other sites will outrank us for the same piece, but usually only for about 24 hours or so - and then they tend to pretty rapidly fall by the wayside. Although this is speculation - I would suggest if you have syndicated content on your site, if you cite source and leave the content intact, and include the tags mentioned - you shouldn't see any problems. If you whole site is nothing but syndicated content, you might rank from time to time for a day or so at best for the odd popular piece - but as google crawls it will inevitably detect who published first and credit them accordingly, leaving syndicated content to drop in ranking.

You can also check out Google Trends: http://www.google.com/trends This will give you data from the past three years or so, but should be viewable in a monthly format.  Insights should also work well (like Aran suggested).

Thanks for the responses guys... The specific location based weather pages have been optimised within the page titles. As you suggest, I've been targeting high authority local websites that provide specific local content (sport, lifestyle, events, news etc). This seems to be the only solution to the problem in trying to increase our ranking for these pages, any other suggestions would be much appreciated