Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hiya, no it's fine to keep the global nav on all pages... you should do anyway. What I mean is, trim the number of links in that global nav down by placing some of them only within their category areas instead, in a secondary menu maybe. But... you can still use flyouts in the main menu so that the menu items are listed and then a hover-over of a category brings out more items, and again for a sub-category, etc... in which you could use a technology which isn't crawl-able/followed. That way users can still access all menu items from the main nav but Google will only see the top level links, with further links not followed (without using NoFollow) and bypassed. Not sure the best way to do it though since JS and Ajax are by all accounts a lot more crawl-able now.

There's tonnes of research out there on the purchasing/buying process/cycle.

Here's a good one: http://www.searchengineguide.com/jennifer-laycock/understanding-t.php

For me, one large .com everytime... hands down!

The benefits of the combined link juice, and authority, etc,... gained will far outweigh geo tld benefits.

Plus more usage data

Dejan's answer on this thread will help you with this question: http://www.seomoz.org/q/any-recent-discoveries-or-observations-on-the-official-line-of-incoming-link-penalization

Ah, I think I follow you now.

You're always going to have to deal with a little keyword cannibalization with a blog about the stuff on your site. Otherwise you'd be restricted to using hardly any words at all, and certainly no words of relevance.

The solution is simple, write it however you want, targeting users and forget about cannibalization whilst you write it (just for the moment). Then, at the end... turn the keywords into anchor text links pointing to the pages you're using the keywords on. There, you have transformed a potential cannibalization issue into something positive for the pages in question

You'll probably get some complaints by blog owners, and it really doesn't do a lot anymore anyway. Most of the links will be either removed fast, the ones that stay will be on blogs that aren't maintained and are therefore full of thousands of other spammy links for Ugg boots and viagra, and the rest will be on blogs that are both irrelevant and practically worthless in terms of what it will give you.

You could always just find a few decent blogs that are dofollow, give a good response and add the link yourself More likely it will stay that way.

Yeah they're just not top level TLD's. I don't think it's a huge no-no as I've got those TLD's to rank before but there's certainly some disadvantage due to the amount of spam sites that use them. If your content is good enough though then it shouldn't matter

Okay yeah I see what you mean. I guess it really comes down to how much of your objectives are based on the local advertising then. If it's a huge portion of your revenue then maybe the separate sites. Although I still wouldn't. I would have assumed the benefits of one site would outweigh the advertising issue, as I would have thought it wouldn't make that much difference, but then I don't know enough about the market and what advertisers might want.

I'd check others' opinions too, but mine is option 1 without dupe service keywords for the win... why must every page have that same keyword at the end, are they all landing pages you're optimizing?

Anyway, if option 1 without doing that then it's not spammy as far as I see and do, it's descriptive, allows link architecture to map site architecture... and you've got your keywords in there. Gets my vote, but yeah I'd wait for clarification or disagreement from others on that before taking any action

And forget about the Meta Keywords tag, it's useless

And that's not to mention the automated software that creates profiles and then spams signature links in forums everywhere with generic posts.

I'm with EGOL, no need to add an inventive for that stuff in here.

Having said that, I think it would be cool if Authority ranks, or Guru ranks or something were given the ability to have sig links. It's not like any spammer would stick around that long to get there.

Just personal preference for me but I like the ones that come out of the side, like the feedback tab on here

See sidereel.com to see what I mean.

Yes definitely!

I assume if they're all landing pages then you wouldn't be targeting each page with the same keywords anyway, as that would be massive canibalization. You want to just assign 2 or 3 keywords to each page, then have one of them in the URL (the main one).

Aside from the Twitter feed factor, as far as I'm aware there is some issue where only some shorteners pass link juice while others don't. I can't remember where I got that from so I did a search to see and found this (not sure of its credibility though): http://www.kensfi.com/how-url-shorteners-pass-link-juice/

There's some links from SE Land here though which seem to be saying all is well  http://searchengineland.com/twitter-gets-its-own-url-shortener-to-stop-scams-37676

http://searchengineland.com/analysis-which-url-shortening-service-should-you-use-17204

That only really half answers the Q, but interesting none the less I think

Directory submissions are not black hat... and they needn't cost you anywhere near that. There's a bunch of good directories out there, free ones that are fairly decent too. The only ones you should pay for in my opinion are BOTW, Yahoo Dir, and JoeAnt. But I wouldn't even bother with them, I never do... just go for some very relevant free ones that aren't spammy

What did you do for your link bait, and how did you promote it?

Well I'm pretty sure, in fact I know, that I've answered questions before with an answer I thought was correct and then found out through others on here that it was in fact incorrect. I'd like to think that happens every time I'm wrong but possibly not (partially so the person who asked the question gets the right answer, but mainly because I like to know if I'm wrong about something).

So yeah, certainly I've given wrong answers accidentally but then there are people on here who are far more experienced than I am who I'm sure wouldn't make that same mistake. From spending time on here you get to know who the people are who really know their stuff and so I would trust their answers a lot. Also, I think most of us will be able to intuitively tell if something "seems wrong" and would question it.

How many is too many? I mean you don't want a directory per page or anything.

Easy, for something like that you don't link build at all, you just publish, publicize and promote. I assume that it's original and news-worthy content if it's a newspaper, so interesting stories, etc... In which case all you need to do is get it out there in front of people and the links will come naturally.

I hope they're good links then. $50 is cheap for a great link, expensive for a worthless one... do they not provide anything so you can see the value of the links?

It's because of abuse of local search. There's a range of possibilities that it could be.

• Your IP submitting too many
• Too many of the same email address or phone number between them
• etc, etc...

Do the agents have actual locations in each of the places? Are you putting in one national phone number and email address or are they getting their own individual ones?

Did they get rejected seemingly randomly or did all the rejections start after a certain point?