Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Just to second what Russ said, if it's not authentic, then there's no long-term value in it.  This is especially true for social.  If you want your use of social media to benefit you then approach it selflessly - looking to share value w/ others, or don't even waste your time.

Hi, and congrats on publishing consistently, with other business responsibilities, etc,, that alone can be a victory.  In terms of author rank (which I am no expert on) this article offers some great suggestions: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2253968/How-to-Start-Building-Your-Author-Rank-6-Best-Practices

I honestly wouldn't stress on specifics, but would look at overall G+ and social engagment.  Try to take a "cover all best practices approach" and do the research, watch analytics to gauge which posts/topics are best received, all that kind of stuff.  Best of luck and hope that helps!

Thanks for chiming in.  and this is more than a difference in quality of work we're talking about. One of 2 things is going on in these situations: honest business owners are being conned, or these SEO companies really are that incompetent.  I have trouble believing it's the latter.

Let's say I took my car into a mechanic.  He tells me I need a new transmission, blah blah - charges me 5K, and I pay it.  Then he doesn't touch my car, parks it out back for a week, and calls me back saying his guys worked extra hard, I only owe 1K more, but everything is golden.  This is criminal, and it's exactly what's happening in our industry.

Ok, I'm not gonna put anyone on blast by name, but this imgur album outta give you a better idea of the kind of nonsense we're talking about here...

wait...or did I just stumble upon the hottest new SEO secret?  Time to add some "Google pages" to my clients sites.  Ay yay yay....

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Glad to have an oracle drop in here, thanks.  and yea..dangerous is right.  I don't know much about general PR but I'm always trying to stress the fact that those types of link building methods aren't only useless, but create massive risk.

Thank you Nick, you make some really great points.  I may complain, but ultimately it just means there's a huge opportunity to provide value, which is great for guys like us. I'm not exactly having trouble finding work these days.

It' just really too bad that business owners have had it drilled into their heads that enough links pointing to their site with the right anchor text = serp domination.  I've even heard the retort from these SEO goons - "well, if that wasn't true, why does Adobe reader rank so well for "download now"?...too funny.

I think you're right, in the long run the truth will prevail, and business owners stop getting royally ripped off.  Have good weekend Nick!

This may not be the most productive Q&A discussion, but I've had some really interesting experiences this last month that have made me even more distrusting of "SEO" companies.

I can't help but think of this post (not much has changed since '09).  Even though it takes a pretty extreme stance, I agree with the core of it -

_"The problem with SEO is that the good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work, and it’s poisoning the web."   _

I didn't start doing this type of work wanting to have such a negative opinion of SEO companies, but I just keep having the same experience:

I'll get referred to someone who isnt' happy with their SEO company.  They send me their web address, I check out the site, and seriously can't believe what I find.

MISSING PAGE TITLES, EVERY CANONICAL URL ISSUE IMAGINABLE, AND 10'S OF THOUSANDS OF BOT SPAM EMAT LINKS FROM PAGES LIKE THIS...AND THIS

and just recently a company a called one of my clients and conned him into paying for this piece of spam garbage, obviously scraped from the site that I made for him. 

and what's worse, sometimes for whatever reason these companies will have all the client's FTP and CMS logins and it can be hell trying to get them to hand them over.  There's no webmaster tools set up, no analytics, nothing....

These businesses are paying a good chunk of change every month, I just can't believe stuff like this is so common...well acutally, it's what i've come to expect this point.  But I used to think most SEO companies actually had their clients best interest at heart.

Does every honest consultant out there run into this same type of stuff constantly? How common is this type of stuff really?

Now, on to the positive.  This community rocks, and I feel like it represents real, ethical, solution-oriented, boundary-less SEO.  So thank you Mozzers for all you do.  and I love using the tools here to help businesses understand why they need an honest person helping them.

If anyone has thoughts on the topic, I'd love to hear 'em...

I would go after a synonym or some long-tail terms.  If your home page targets "example apartments," you could target a phrase like "model apartments" or "types of apartments" - and of course do a little research into search volumes and related keywords.

Hi Scott - does the url on your places listing point to the same page that dropped out of the organic serps?  This is pretty normal, Google just doesn't give an organic and local spot to the same page of a website.  But the authority of that page is still helping you earn your places rank.

For phrases that have any competition at all, it's nearly impossible to appear in the local pack with an address that doesn't correspond to the city of search.  It's just kind of the way local works.

I see it as being totally dependent on the business and niche.  Depends on the the competition/cost per click, and how well targeted your campaign is.  I do organic SEO for a site that gets a lot of it's traffic from adwords...organic visits do tend to have more page views/time on site/etc.

And asking a business to pay you 30% or so of their monthly ad spend to manage the campaign just doesn't feel right.

It's not something you'll be penalized for, but you may find it naturally harder to build value for a second site.  Which one do you list on your business/directory/social profiles?  Which one would you refer customers to? or tell someone else to link to you with?  It's easy to wind up diluting your efforts.  Not saying you shouldn't do it, but just make sure you're confident it's worth your while, and obviously rewrite content and you should be fine.

Do you think it would be easier to optimize a structure where your main categories where specific types of products, and not a characteristic that multiple types of products have (high definition)?  So organize it by cameras: - HD - other - other.  recorders: - HD - other -other.  I don't really know enough about what you do, but it just seems like there'd be a more efficient way for you to organize it.

If you're concerned about sub-categories cannibalizing your main category you could always no-index them. And breadcrumbs would useful in respect to the interlinking as well - so every sub category will be linked to parent automatically.  I think if you do that and nail the category structure and navigation, then you'll have a solid internal link structure already.   Hope this helps!

I would assume it's a combination of what you mentioned, how long that listing page has existed, and how well it's linked to internally.

I am surprised what OSE doesn't pick up sometimes, but it's still the best thing out there for competitor analysis.  I'm sure it will continue to improve and it may very well pick up those links in the future.

Out of the 4 sites I help that have BBB listings not a one shows in OSE.  And the listings have existed for years.  Google Webmaster Tools shows them though, so assume they're not going unnoticed by Google.

Did you look at the anchor text distribution in open site explorer and compare yours to your competitors?  and is the phrase you want to rank for "japanese cooking lessons"?

After a quick look I would say that since a lot of the links to your home page are anchored with your name and also no-follow, you just haven't built enough authority to rank where you want for the more general terms.

If you want people to find you for more local searches "Japanese cooking classes London" and those types, then I would try putting word London somewhere in your home page's title tag and see what happens. More customized title tags across the whole site would probably help you out too.

but i did about 7 mins of investigation, so take it with a grain of salt.

Your site's really nice by the way and congrats on the book!

Honestly it would be very hard to tell just based on that screenshot.  Links are a quality over quantity thing so the numbers alone won't tell us much.  By errors do you mean on-site errors? - duplicate content, missing metainfo, etc.  Getting those taken care of should be a prerequisite, so sounds like your on the right track.

If you want to tell us the domains I might be able to be more helpful....Best of Luck!

At first glance I would not be worried about it.  I tend to think those types of links won't hurt unless they're extremely excessive/abusive.. else negative SEO could really get out of hand.  And you're website has some very strong relevant links pointing to it already.

Yea, you can search around and find little niche sites and blog listing sites that relate to cars.  But the general directories will all have categories for auto body repair or something similar.  So for any local services business I'd grab listings like places, yahoo, hotfrog, manta, kudzu, mojopages...the list is never-ending really so you can kind of use your own discretion in determining what directories are more relevant.  Did you see the local directories? Pretty much all of these will have categories for your type of business.

Another tool I've had success with is the Local Citation Finder by Whitespark.  It finds relevant citations based local search terms and does other nifty stuff.

I thought this was happening to me too when I first signed up.  If you are trying to use the page grader from "within the campaign" it will only update weekly after the initial grade.

What you do is click research tools in the very top navigation, then go to the page grader from there.  It should look identical but it lets you run reports against any keywords, not just ones from your campaign...from here your grades will update instantly, and you'll have an option to add it to your weekly on-page reports.  Hope that helps!

Hi James, don't worry everyone's gotta start somewhere.  This is normal if you 've just had a brand new site built.  You want links from other domains, and the best kind of links aren't the kind that you have any control over (someone links to you naturally because the content is useful). This stuff takes time

You may want to start by submitting to some reputable directories related to your niche.  Check out SEOmoz's directory list.

...oh and btw, open site explorer gives some great insight, but it's not as accurate as your own Google webmaster tools.

You are definitely approaching it right.  Like you said, there has to be something in it for them. It seems like a good idea to me, but also seems like some serious work.  Getting 'em designed, printed could get pricey...and since it's not digital, how would you modify the bakery listings as time goes on to reflect which bakeries link and which ones don't?  Seems like you'd almost need a monthly publication...it's a tough one.  If you can somehow digitize this idea I think it'll be a lot easier for you.