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I'm doing some competitive link analysis for a new client in the food industry right now and I've come across one of their competitors using this tactic quite extensively, and it seems to be working very well. They crush their competitors as far as domain authority. Most of the anchor text is branded (company name) but you can quickly tell that there are one or two keyword phrases that they have targeted. I can only assume that they were getting some of the bloggers to include the custom anchor text. It's definitely not overdone, so the overall link profile still looks natural.

The bloggers that they're targeted all seem to have relatively authoritative sites which I can only assume means their brand is getting a lot of quality exposure on these sites as well as referral traffic. I'd hazard a guess that the direct referral traffic and overall exposure is worth as much or more than the increase in organic rankings that they would see because of these links. None of these links were nofollow or affiliate links.

The general rule of thumb I've always espoused (with a few exceptions) is that anything that you are doing for SEO purposes should have an equal or greater benefit to you for _non-SEO _reasons. I guess that's sort of my test to see if something can be considered a legitimate white hat technique. But there's obviously still some grey area with this.

Whenever you're dealing with a large company a la Reach Local, you just really need to know what you're getting into. You should also research your alternatives. The more information you have, the better, more informed decision you can ultimately make.

As some of those commenting here have said (who have more experience with Reach Local than me), they're not exactly laying out all of the raw data in front of you for your inspection. However, in my personal experience, I have had clients who have dealt with companies as large, or larger than Reach Local who seem to have violated some very basic Google Third Party Policies. The first point is that third parties should provide a monthly report containing AdWords click costs, total clicks and total impressions. In the past, I instructed prospective clients (who later became clients) to ask for this information from a very large AdWords Certified Partner. Even after repeated requests, the client was not provided with this basic information for which they were asking.

Now, if you really want to play 'lawyer', the wording in the policy does say that third parties should provide this information. They're not technically required to provide this information.

The way that many companies structure an SEM program for clients (I believe this is how Reach Local does it), is that the client pays the 3rd party directly for everything, i.e, you, as the client, are not paying the search engines directly for advertising. But if the 3rd party is not required to tell you how much they are spending on your behalf on search advertising, you don't know how much money is going to the search engines and how much money is going into their pockets. In my opinion, that's not right. If you agree with me, make sure you know this information before signing anything with a large SEM firm.

Thanks. That's not the one I had in mind, but I'll check it out.

I've often wondered the same thing.

I don't know what USPS standards are (maybe because I'm not American).

As far as the legal name. Search engines don't necessarily know what your legal business name is. In Canada at least, as an incorporated business, your legal name can be a number. Google obviously isn't expecting you to list yourself as a number. It's important that the name is consistent.

When manually submitting/correcting client's information on directory sites, I try to keep the address the same in terms of whether or not I'm writing the street name as 'Road' or 'Rd'. (Maybe that's what you're referring to). It seems silly that Google would penalize you if 75% of your citations have 'Road' and the other 25% have 'Rd.'

As far as the phone numbers go, from my experience, you don't necessarily have control over that. You can input the phone number one way, but then the way that it's actually displayed online may show up differently, i.e, dashes vs. no dashes, or including the '1' vs. excluding the '1'. You can't control that, so don't worry about it.

If you refer to David Mihm's Local Ranking Factors  both the quantity and quality of citations are more important factors than the consistency of those citations.

In what sense? This isn't 'directory submission' in the classic sense where it's a service that submits your site to low quality web directories. This is a Local SEO service, so it's not so much about submitting a website as it is about building a citation.

Maybe I'm not reading between the lines enough with what they're actually offering, but I'd just like to hear any specific concerns about this service.

I'll elaborate on what Nakul has said (all great points)...

If you have something that is truly newsworthy, it will get picked up and generate quality in-bound links, and also generate some qualified traffic. (The idea of traffic is all-too-often lost when we talk about link building). Those links will build up your domain authority. Then, you let your on-page SEO do the work for you. You can have perfect, by-the-book on-page SEO, but if you don't have any links/domain authority, search engines aren't going to give you a sniff. In your case, you're dealing with a relatively competitive vertical, and I would think, the businesses in that vertical are all vying for some choice 'trophy' keywords, and thus, the on-page SEO from some of the top businesses who have invested some money in their site/internet marketing is going to be similar. What's going to separate one from the other in the eyes' of the search engines is the quantity and quality of in-bound links that you have. And press releases are definitely one way of earning (I stress that word) good links.

You're also going to want to make sure that the full address in your Google Places/Google+ Local listing is the same as the address used in your online citations. I.e, you don't want to have Floor/Unit number in the Google Places profile, and then just the plain old address in the rest of your online citations.

So Twitter announced today Twitter Certified Products. There were 12 products that have been given this designation, and I was surprised that I didn't see Followerwonk on the list. Any ideas why Followerwonk was not part of the 12 charter members of this little club? I'd be curious to see any thoughts from SEOMoz employees on this...