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I would recommend **not**disavowing links that have a spam score of more than 3 in Webmaster Tools.

In this video - http://moz.com/blog/understanding-and-applying-mozs-spam-score-metric-whiteboard-friday - Rand specifically says 'don't disavow links just because they have a spam score of 7 or 8'. He mentions a link disavowal issue that Cyrus Sheppard had that really hurt his site for a long time. Doing the disavowal for all links with a 3 could cause serious damage.

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.

I had never even heard of 904 errors before encountering them with Moz. The first time I ever saw it come up it coincided with a bandwidth usage issue that the client was having as well as the most significant/sudden drop off in organic rankings I've ever seen personally. Despite the fact that the client did make changes to his hosting plan to alleviate any bandwidth issues, the 904 errors continue to persist and the organic rankings continue to be less than stellar.

Can 9xx errors like have a significant negative impact on organic rankings?

Just building on Jasmine's comment, the Google Analytics URL builder is a handy tool to created tagged URLs easily. It particularly makes it easy if you want to name a campaign something like 'Campaign #1'. You can't write '?utm_campaign=Campaign #1 in the URL. If you just fill out the fields in the URL builder, it automatically builds the proper URL for you, i.e., utm_campaign=Campaign%20%231

%20 = 'space'

%23 = #

In short, don't stress about why that particular URL is constructed the way that it is. It doesn't follow best practices. There's better ways of building/tagging URLs.

I experienced a similar issue recently with a client. A few 904 errors seemed to coincide with a notice in the client's 3d cart CMS that they were short on bandwidth. We also saw a VERY significant drop in rankings across the board. We upgraded the hosting plan and the 904 errors went away temporarily, and a very modest improvement in rankings followed, but not a return to normal. It's now about 2-3 months after we first saw the 904 errors and I've just noticed another one that has come up.

I hear ya. I don't know if you're from the western NY area or not, but not living too far away from there, I know that 'Seneca' means more to people than just the tiny city in NY. The first thing that comes to mind to someone in Buffalo when they hear 'Seneca' is _not _the city.

This is turning into more of a discussion about marketing in general than a discussion about duplicate content.

This particular situation is unique. It's not a franchise. It's not a company expanding into a neighbouring city. In order to _not _change the name while expanding into this secondary market, an awful lot of money would have to be invested into branding, which just isn't worth it.

I agree with all of that, but I feel this situation is very different. If you have a company called 'Albany Plumbers', it seems kind of weird to market 'Albany Plumbers' in Buffalo. That's basically what I'm dealing with. Client has the city name in their business name. Users are not going to think the site is relevant in this secondary market they're looking to target.

I have a client that operates a local service-based business. They are thinking of expanding that business to another geographic area (a drive several hours away in an affluent summer vacation area). The name of the existing business contains the name of the city, so it would not be well-suited to market 'City X' business in 'City Y'. My initial thought was to (for the most part) 'duplicate' the existing site onto a new site (brand new root domain). Much of the content would be the exact same. We could re-word some things so there aren't entire lengthy paragraphs of identical info, but it seems pointless to completely reinvent the wheel. We'll get as creative as possible, but certain things just wouldn't change. This seems like the most pragmatic thing to do given their goals, but I'm worried about duplicate content. It doesn't feel as though this is spammy though, so I'm not sure if there's cause for concern.

Most studies/reports that you'll see point to a slightly negative _correlation. _But correlation does not equal _causation. _One that I recently remember reading pointed to a negative correlation when Google authorship markup was present. It's obviously very hard to argue that adding Google authorship markup to your site _decreases _your organic search rankings.

When working with WP sites I generally use Michael Torbert's All in One SEO Pack. I've encountered a few examples where when the homepage shows up on a Google search results page the title/title tag shows up as {Business Name:} | {Keyword/Description}. In the 'General Settings' of the plugin in the 'Home Title' field, I have it listed as {Keyword/Description} | {Business Name}

I'm not sure why the order is getting switched and where the ':' comes from. I'm not sure if this even has any adverse effect. If anyone has had experience with this, your input would be appreciated.

Note - I'm not seeing this issue reflected on Bing.

Miriam - what you're looking for - multiple G+ local pages tied to a single G+ page - makes WAY too much sense. I'd love to be able to do this for a client, but like you were saying (last year) I don't know if this is possible yet. Does anyone have any update on this?

Any information on when Moz Local will be available in CanadaÉ

I recently posted an (insightful) comment in a LinkedIn group. I can see that someone from this group has taken a look at my profile, so I'm assuming that they read my comment and they were at least a little intrigued as to who exactly I was. I would regard this person as a prospect. Maybe a slightly unlikely prospect as there's a couple thousand miles that separate us geographically.

I'm wondering what sort of etiquette/best practices there are for connecting somehow with this person/company. Initially I thought I'd follow them on Twitter, maybe like them on Facebook, but they have no such presence. I like the idea of connecting with them that way because it's a 'soft' connection - not too aggressive.

Doing something like emailing or calling and saying 'Hey, saw that you looked at my LinkedIn profile', seems creepy & desperate. Even sending an invitation to connect seems a little too forward.

I feel the only thing to do is to continue to involve myself in this group by posting thoughtful & insightful comments in order to get noticed further that way.

I know this is a little late, but I figured I'd comment on this because I just actually stumbled upon your question in a SERPs for something like 'multiple rich snippets in SERPs'.

I just posted in a Google+ community on something that I found where you've got the review markup, a recipe pic and this little mini author pic that all show up together. I had never seen this before... Check it out...

https://plus.google.com/u/0/101946888512778592728/posts/9f2Xh8jnCzA

Hi Matthew,

As you've seen from the rich snippets testing tool, the author pic is showing up for your homepage - it's not just content-oriented blog pages.

It does take time though. Seeing the author pic show up in the testing tool, and having it not show up live is the norm. It can definitely take some time, so be patient. Personally, I believe it took me about 3-4 days from the time everything was properly implemented to the time I started seeing the author pic in search results.

There's been a lot of speculation about why some people implement the markup and see the author pic show up in SERPs in a day, whereas for others it takes a couple weeks. There was a lot of speculation that it had to do with your Google+ activity and the number of people who had circled you, but I've seen enough examples of people with zero G+ activity, and next to no circle activity that have their author pic showing up in SERPs.

A great resource (where all the really smart Authorship people hangout) is Google Authorship & Author Rank G+ community. AJ Kohn (Blind Five Year Old) Bill Slawski & Mark Traphagen are some of the go-to experts on the topic who are very active in that community.

How to deal with the complaint directly is a loaded question.

CMC-SD makes valid points... Social media profiles are an easy thing to start off with if you don't already have them. Profiles on websites of professional organization that you belong to can be helpful as well. You also want to build links to these profiles to increase the chance that they show up higher in the SERPs.

Paid advertising on your own brand name can help in a small way in these sense that it will push the organic search results down (assuming your paid ad shows above the organic results), and this measure can oftentimes result in the ripoff report link being pushed below the scroll. If someone is searching on your brand name, most people won't have a need to scroll down.

If it's a really popular ripoff report, there may be links to that individual report that are allowing it to rank higher which will just fuel the fire. You might not be able to get any type of satisfaction from Ripoff Report of the author of the report, but if you use OSE to check out where the links are coming from, there may be an opportunity to contact a webmaster site/owner and convince them to remove the link to the report.

I'm assuming you're referring to ranking when someone searches on Yelp as opposed to getting your Yelp profile to rank in the SERPs.

There's not a whole lot of literature/research out their on this topic, but just from experiencing working with clients to claim/complete their Yelp listings, I feel I can speak to it to a certain extent...

One of the more obvious things is having a listing that has content on it. It's not in Yelp's best interest for people to do a search for restaurants only to find a list of restaurants with their names, addresses & phone numbers. So first thing would be claiming your profile and completing the full profile. I don't want to suggest that if you don't have a 'completely full' profile, that's going to hurt your chances, but it can't hurt. Obviously with Yelp, reviews are huge. So you want to encourage real people/real customers to write reviews for you online. However, you've gotta be mindful of the fact that Yelp does a very good job of filtering reviews. So if you tell a customer to write a review on Yelp, and they go sign up for an account, write a review right away, and then never come back to Yelp - that review's gonna disappear.

If Yelp sees a steady flow of reviews, particularly coming from active members of their community, that's most definitely going to help.

The reviews for Yelp are much more crucial than they are for Google. Yelp will sooner show the user businesses with reviews that aren't geographically relevant, than they will show geographically relevant businesses with no reviews & no info on their profiles.

One specific tool that can be useful in terms of driving users to your Yelp profile to write reviews is the Bright Local Review Biz badge. 

I use Bluehost quite a bit.

Here's a list of Wordpress-recommended hosts. Bluehost is one of them.

Contact AdWords support. They are very helpful with these kinds of issues.

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.