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From a UX perspective, having an interstitial like that can turn off many visitors, especially if it's coming off a search result. They're expecting to get to an article about whatever they just searched, and instead they see a thought of the day plus an ad. While it generates revenue for the domain, it can have a longer term effect of diminishing return or regular visitors.

There was a great article here a couple years ago, identifying customer satisfaction as a primary SEO factor. http://moz.com/blog/seo-satisfaction

We've had the same issue. Many phone calls and hours later Google had to manually do it...it seems to be a glitch that they don't care to fix.

I think industry partner links are fair game. These are also probably your heavy hitters meaning removing them will probably be the most hurtful.

Its not a bad idea, but it might not be the best idea. By doing so you're limiting your product description to a short one, and if that's the only thing describing the product it might not be enough to attract the attention from the search engines. As for the technical answer, the meta description and short description won't count against each other.

If you want a page or url not crawled then you should use the robots.txt file and robots meta tags. Then, in WMT, make sure those same pages are actually not being crawled

Hope that answers your question

Check this guy out, he's one of the leading experts

http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/

http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/definitive-local-search-citations/

Proximity will get your business more targeted in a local sense, and that's still a hard case to make because the site you're getting the link from has to be set up in a way where they've geo tagrgeted as well. Don't forget to get the business listed on the well known places https://moz.com/local/search.

Hope that helps

Take a peek at this

http://moz.com/blog/the-international-seo-checklist

It probably has to do with their language and geo tags. I'm not too familiar with international SEO but that would be my take on it.

Yes, high quality links will be what easily makes and breaks any SEO attempt. You're onto something when you say local chamber links, getting links from places like that is usually doable and should be something that you explore.

It has to do with cookies, and serving dynamic content. Returning visitors get identified as returning and then a certain message is displayed. Hubspot has a produc that deals with this, there are a few others which don't come to mind right away.

If you're very technical you can use PHP to ID a returning visitor and then spit out targeted messaging.

Local results usually get trumped by sites like Yelp, Lawyers.com and even Facebook. There are so many factors at play that it's hard to say what exactly would be affecting it. It does seem like you've done your work with on site SEO. If your competitors have better back link profiles that's still the number one factor in Google's rankings.

Hope that helps

The only real reason I would avoid setting it up in a clients account is to protect myself from antsy clients that like to tweak stuff without knowing what they're doing.

When we set accounts up for clients we use their acounts and manage everything from our MCC, but there might be something we're missing in the sense of reasons to not use an MCC.

Yes, in the great world of marketing we all know that a negative experience gets amplified far more often and to a greater extent than positive ones. I guess we'll take this one as a win and see how the rankings hold. Thanks for your responses!

We took on a small construction client and have been building up their site slowly for the past 6 months, doing no manual link building. We did however do a comprehensive clean up of their local SEO listing stuff, and best practices on site markup as well as adding content.

This month we noticed a huge jump in SERPs, page one to be exact and all within the top 5 for 30 high value KW/phrases. They dominate their market which is awesome, however we're trying to see if its something others are experienceing as well. Is Google playng catch up in the local markets? Or did we just do a kick ass job and now we can pat ourselves on the back?

Here's a really recent video of Matt Cutts explaining what's considered paid links.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zupIbMyMfBI

Google is always running tests in their SERPs. This is one of their tests and being to quick to follow might not be the appropriate step. I for one will wait for the dust to settle before tweaking anything.

Because the title lengths have changed there must be more happening within their search algo as well so just changing a title might not be helpfully.

Depends. In their case it makes sense because they have too many links to have a typical drop down. Here's more content to read from Distilled which explains the dos and donts

https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/site-navigation-for-seo/

The word(s) might not be showing due to the report not being the latest. Ranking reports are run weekly and the latest addition you had done might have not been included in this weeks report.

This might seem like a super simplified answer but just google the terms you're concerned about and that should answer your question as to how google is treating certain KWs. Use an incognito window to do so or read up more technical ways http://moz.com/blog/face-off-4-ways-to-de-personalize-google. De personalizing will allow you to see a better picture of how the terms get treated.