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Thanks for the response but I have some remaining concerns. I know from past experience that the local search ecosystem is different in Canada, with primary influencers (aside from Google) being Yellow Pages and Industry Canada. When I look at the overview page (https://moz.com/local/overview) the verification partners are the same for both Canada and US, and different  (specific) for the UK. Are the same  verification partners being used for both US and CDN or has someone just forgotten to change the graphic?

I'm in Canada and it's been a while since I checked but I just went on the Moz Local page and saw the CDN flag. Does that mean the service is now available for Canada?

Thanks for the response Andrew. Will a "dry cleaning" link from Oregon help your customer?

Thanks for the help. I Cant use Moz Local because Im in Canada.

Hi Mozzers,

In the best situation links for a local business should be relevant and come from a local organization, but this is not always possible. In cases where you have to choose between relevance and proximity which is more important?

A client of mine is in a field that Google (correctly) recognizes as international, and does get traffic and leads for this but they are bound by sales covenants to sell only in regional geographic territories in their country,

Other than PPC is there a strategy I can use to increase regional traffic? As mentioned, Google does not recognize this business as local.

This may be an issue. Because these are extremely technical sites I have never done anything with Google+ but it might be time to revisit that.

Thanks Federico, I think this is pointing in the right direction. Both sites are very technical and as such barely have a social presence. I think it's time for another look at Google +.

If that's the case I'm wondering what the criteria must be, as these aren't spam sites.

Yes, real people.

Interesting. I did change the pictures — good quality head shots on cropped white background. After this they (briefly) reappeared, and then disappeared again.

I have a couple of established sites where the Authorship picture has suddenly disappeared and been gone for about a week now. Everything looks OK when I check, and the rich snippet tool displays the pictures when I check using that.

I'm interested to see if anyone else is experiencing a similar issue.

That's pretty much what I thought. After being steady for a couple of years, traffic from organic search has started to fluctuate within the last month or so from day to day and I wondered if we were being penalized.

My client is a manufacturers representative for highly technical controls. The manufacturers do not sell their products directly, relying on manufacturers reps to sell and service them. Most but not all of them publish their specs on their sites, usually in PDF only.

As a service to our customers and with permission of the manufacturers we publish the manufacturers specs on our site for our customers in HTML with images and downloadable PDF's — this constitutes our catalogue. The pages are lengthy and technical, and are pretty much the opposite of thin content.

The URLS for these (technical) queries rank well,  so Google doesn't seem to mind. Does this constitute duplicate content and can we be penalized for it?

Hi Mozzers,

A client paid to publish a white paper, thinking that the link to the web site is beneficial. The link does redirect back to the web site, but is in a format that I've never seen:

http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001YdyyLrzOQJxM87SJZkJYVbQKSdCmFpwqg1fuX3yqVqpGboUjdSaHv9IdW5HsQpgmvwOrg5N4T3DNHYV8e1UVe_YCua_XQCFykoSJvu1HzDyb-3x-aFcPU-ER-vwWxq4-

Does this link have any value?

My Google author picture, which had been in place for a couple of years, disappeared from all SERP results recently. I checked, and rel=author attribution is valid on every post, as is the link to to the Google + authorship page (which contains a link back to the web site).

When I test URL's in the structured data testing tool the picture appears.

I'm out of troubleshooting ideas. Any suggestions welcome.

Thanks Miriam. I understand that all of this is dependant on the amount of competition, domain authority, and  links to specific pages, as it is with any page. The is and does stuff I think falls under the category of including as many variations of the related phrase as possible, which I also try to do with any page.

Since the service categories I'm using are chosen from pre-sets in the new dashboard, these are what Google thinks my client is.

If the other categories are closely linked and are also services they offer and are highly relevant, what would I risk in adding them? We're only taking about 5 additional categories and pages. Isn't this simply a common sense way to inform Google about the complete range of services the customer offers?

Hi Miriam,

All my questions are about local pack results. I'm quite familiar with organic.

1. Yes, local pack, not organic. Ranking well for primary keyword, which is also a Google pre-set category in new dashboard.

2. Yes, they want local pack results for other keywords.

3. Exist in pre-set categories in the new dashboard

4. Yes, they exist for Google's pre-set categories, but don't have really equivalents from places where I can build citations.

If I build out the services category pages on site to match Google pre-set categories, will this be enough to cause them to appear in local pack results?

Hi Mozzers,

My client is prominent in local search for their primary activity,  but I would also like them to appear for other service categories they offer. Assuming I add these other service categories  in +Local and build corresponding service pages on the site, will this be enough to cause them to appear for these other services?

The additional pre set service categories offered in +Local don't  match those offered in local citations, so I can't really support these that way.