Welcome to the Q&A Forum

M,

You have thrown out such a vague question here and hope you aren't spamming the Moz forum as I see this is your first and only post.

That being said, I'll try to answer in short if you are looking for serious help... Can you provide more information in order for a Moz member to provide guidance. How long has the page been online? What keywords are you optimizing for? What SEO tactics are you doing specifically for this page? Let's start with that.

Hope this helps and we look forward to your responses. - Patrick

Vince,

I agree with Federico on this one. Yahoo is a paid link directory, so they may provide some traffic and help your site out in their search engine, however, directories are and have been for a while a problem in ranking sites. Because many of them are designed and built poorly it ruins any value the good, reputable ones may offer, unfortunately. We could start a new directory site tomorrow in WordPress site with a WordPress plugin and scraping other directories for content to pump in. It's just too easy and there's no value.

Here's another thread from Mar 2011 (2 years ago) which may help you decide
http://moz.com/community/q/yahoo-directory-listing-still-relevant

Hope I was helpful! - Patrick

Google hasn't put a specific number to how many backlinks is bad or good. Just keep them diverse, spread out so you aren't doing 100 links a day or 5,000 a month like some of these crazy SEO companies tell you they can build for you. Use variations with plural versions, use commas, full state names, use variations in your URL for the anchor text link www.domain.com is different than http://domain.com and http://www.domain.com/. Keep the content relevant and high quality as we consider Google to be a human these days, so if a human has a hard time reading it, then you know Google will also. Keep your links on a steady flow and not all at once to spread them out over the weeks/months. If you think it feels or looks spammy, it most likely is in Google's eye too.

• Patrick

I couldn't agree more with what Paulha stated. We get about 5 emails a day from India based SEO and web design companies. All of them are using Gmail accounts, so we can't create rules in our Outlook Exchange to pass those to the Deleted Items folder since our clients also use Gmail. It's a pain, but we see lots of traffic from those countries and Russia as well. Hackers and spammers. They aren't going anywhere anytime soon. 

Jakub,

It seems you/your developer have done all the right steps in a migration from HTML to WP, so it's a bit odd you took that hard of a hit in the SERPs. One trick a peer taught one of our developers was to consider this plugin http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-page-extension/. It can allow you to create custom URL extensions, which may help keeping it on WP but giving you the .html like you had before with 301. Just an idea to consider. Hope this helps!

Patrick

Jesse,

The type of anchor text (keyword) used for your link building should be diverse based on some important factors.

What type of links are you going to build - Social bookmarks, Directory, Guest Post, Press Release, Citation, etc... Based on what type of link you are going to build, you should switch up the general "service" keyword with geo-specfic keywords "city + service" and "service + city". Do some keyword research also to determine variations of keywords in how a service is being searched and if state names or abbreviations are being used like "service + city + state abbrevation" (appliance repair los angeles ca).

Just remember, Google is looking at original content, diversified links and diverse anchor text when considering to build rank and authority of a domain. Local SEO loves local citations, so look into this to begin building your link strategy. Keep in mind NAP (Name, Address, Phone) as well. If you are only based in LA, then you're going to have a tough time ranking locally in Google Maps for searches in San Diego or the like. Test the waters without being spammy and analyze. Also consider blog articles on the website www.domain.com/blog/article-title-here/ which can help you target more city specific terms, content and links so you aren't creating 1 page per city if that would be too much work.

Hope this helps. - Patrick

Ennick,

It seems you're in a sticky situation. We once looked into exporting GA data for a client whose webmaster "accidentally" deleted 4+yrs of information. In looking to export all of the GA data and importing to a new one we weren't really successful, yet found this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17891113/how-to-export-complete-google-analytics-historical-data which says unless scripting your own API to Google or using Next Analytics, you can do it, but are still limited to the data you can pull though depending on how much you need/they have.

To your question though, I'm not sure of the exact solution about unlinking the GWT and GA accounts as to what mess that could create. Interested to see what other Moz users have to say!

Hope this was somewhat helpful. -Patrick

Gidon,

It may seem odd, but you are searching for 2 completely different terms, "locksmith houston" and "locksmith near houston" aren't the same. Therefore, Google will only show relevant results for what is entered and the "near" to Google could be all of the surrounding cities, towns, villages, etc where there is a locksmith. However, I just did a search for several key phrases and "houston tx locksmith" is showing a TON of results, but "houston locksmith" is only showing the same one you are seeing.

I don't think it's a matter of the competitor getting rid of any results as they do not have that power. I think it's a matter of how they optimized both their website and their G+ page combined with the poor optimization of the other locksmith websites and G+ pages.

Perform some more keyword research to see who is showing for what keywords both in the natural SERPs and the Google Maps listings. Then go after the ones which suite your/your client's goals.

Hope this was helpful! - Patrick

Prime85,

All of the previous recommendations are correct and great resources to investigate, however, the real question isn't for a list of directories. The question and my best answer for you are, not ALL directories are appropriate for ALL businesses. Martindale.com is an awesome "directory" to get listed in as a law firm, big or small, although it would not be relevant for a local dentist to be listed as Google wouldn't see the relevance. Find directories which have broken out categories to fit your business/industry/niche... then submit your listing. Use tools to look at the directory site as well to check for PageRank, DA, PA, and if it looks spammy, it may just be spammy and not worth it as a quality profile for a link.

Hope this was a good answer to push you in the direction for finding relevant directories, all local directories, and use tools to look at the site from a search engine perspective to help your link building efforts.

Cheers,
Patrick

Greg,

Great question. Because I have been asked this very same question many times by clients, the answer, to be short and sweet, is Google shows you the data per individual keyword as Exact Match. There are some other threads in this community discussing this same idea. The new keyword planner is showing exact match, as of now at least. So we don't have to go through all the "Broad" or "Phrase" data and as SEOs can focus on this new tool to help our businesses and client's businesses.

Hope this helps!
Patrick

David,

You may want to try to this (not sure if it'll work but worth a shot): Make sure your business analytics email is associated with all the profiles you need as an "Administrator". One you are the admin, then, depending on your colleague will then remove her email from each of those profiles, so you remain the sole Admin.

JUST MAKE SURE NOT TO DELETE ANY ANALYTICS PROFILES.
We took over a client's website where the previous webmaster "accidentally" deleted over 4 years of data including all PPC campaign data. Our client was livid and we essentially had to start a new as we tried recovering with letters and requests to Google without luck.

Hope this works and keep us posted on your efforts.
Patrick

Thank you both for your responses. It was one of those impulse questions since I'd just received an email "solicitation" from them, so I didn't think right away to check for previous posts. I'll go through the QA archives, and I do agree with you Robert. I thought I'd ask/investigate nonetheless.

Hey everyone, just more curious to know if any of you have heard about, know anything about or ever used the link building services from SubmitEdge? I only ask because they pop up everywhere and took a look at their website and it says they do everything under the sun, have PR6, Moz DA 71, Moz Home PA 76.

Any feedback is good feedback and thanks in advance for any discussion points! - Patrick

Vince,

We have had several clients purchase domains owned by other companies, so I'll recommend to you what I told them... Visit http://www.sedo.com/us/buy-domains/domain-brokerage/ and get them into the mix of becoming your broker, especially if the company who owns the domain is a little tough to get in touch with. Out of the 6 clients who have had to purchase domains from others, 2 went at it on their own and the others used SEDO and enjoyed the experience.

Also, check out GoDaddy's Domain Brokerage services here http://www.godaddy.com/domains/domain-broker.aspx.

Hope this was helpful. - Patrick

I always recommend WordPress to my clients for a CMS solution. Joomla in our experiences and in dealing with client's who have also used Joomla, was a headache. WP makes things easy. With that comes less time in setting up a site, uploading content, images, links, creating pages, etc... Not to mention, training the client is much more simplistic in WP. We use Screencast-O-Matic to record our monitors in order to create client site specific tutorials so they can control many aspects they want to have control of or that they know will be more dynamic than say their "About" page.

When it comes to SEO, yes, both would seem fine to use. WP has a lot of support for this and tons of plugins. We use All In One SEO and Yoast SEO most of the time. We are huge WP advocates and recommend the CMS for majority of our client projects. We are in the process of quoting a client site revamp from Joomla to Responsive WP next week Very happy about this to help us further their SEO campaign as they've been a client for over 2 years now. Can't wait to see what we can generate for them on the new WP site!

Always a great question to toss out to the community and thanks for the post! - Patrick

Deodass,

No one likes change, but it is for the better. We love the new dashboard, yet it took some getting used to. Keep clicking around in your account and just spend a couple hours playing with it and the settings. If you continue to have questions, this is a great place to post, however you can also click on the green button in the right side bar for this page to contact the Moz help team via email form http://moz.com/help/pro/phone-support.

You did the right thing by posting the question here as the community is and has been a great resource for myself and my team. Hope you found this helpful! - Patrick

Bruce,

I posed this same question a few months back as I have clients with offices in different cities and a couple who are HQ'd in one city with sub-stores in other locations, but only have 1 website. My question was along the lines of "Do we create microsites to target each of the cities or build sub-folders?"

The overall opinions were: 1) Building sub-folders for each location/store is the most effective; 2) Microsites are still websites to be managed which can be a pain; 3) Google could get confused as to which of the brands stores is the Authority Domain if using microsites and could hurt the main website; 4) Build out more content through the website's blog (get a blog on the main website if not already) to target more local keywords for SEO; 5) Build out your inner-linking for the respective store's pages; and 6) Submit local citations to the inner pages to help build Page Authority from the root domain.

Hope this was helpful and stick with getting as much attention to the main domain to build its Authority and you will see the other sub-pages climb SERPs! We are applying the above mentioned strategies currently and love it!

Patrick

Hi,

We have had direct services through them and it is exactly what they are stating, once you cancel the "service" you are essentially cancelling your mobile site. If they didn't have control over your website on their servers then they would be out of business because 1,000's of businesses would just go to them, sign up for the service, create their mobile site in 10 minutes, get it launched, then cancel service and walk away with a $10 custom mobile site.

To them, they are protecting their software and ensuring long-time, recurring paying customers, so it is like any other software service out there. They also do not sell the mobile site which their software creates for you as an exclusive buy-out either.

We really liked what they could do, but in the long term view for our clients, we decided to stay away and build individual mobile sites which our clients could own 100% of the code and host anywhere they want.

Hope this was helpful! - Patrick

Eric,

Sounds like you need Online Reputation Management (ORM) services or a company which can actually take on this project, since it will require the efforts to contact each of the websites, directories, social sites, etc to communicate with them that the Associate is no longer with the firm and may create more bad than good for the firm's website and reputation.

Unless you can get this Associate to login and remove their information from the profiles (if he actually created the profiles), then I would consult with some local companies who provide this service. We used to provide it, but it is a lot of work and not all the time beneficial and effective. Meaning, it doesn't always work as you need to get the site's owners/webmasters to get in and physically remove the links which are showing in the SERPs. It's a lot of work for you, the ORM company and the actual company who's hosting the link.

Hope this was helpful, but that's the route I'd go and recommend.

Patrick

Scott,

Frustration is something we all experience when dealing with a new software or an update. Keyword Planner is no different and we are still reading and trying to learn the ins and outs much like we were accustomed to with Keyword Tool. From what we know as Dan points out, Exact Match is the only data they show (checking the other options makes no difference).

We found this article which noted this a couple weeks ago http://www.ecommercefuel.com/google-keyword-planner-tool/.

Hope this helps as it is more useful for us SEO's now knowing only Exact is provided to us for presenting to clients or for our own records and intent to target.

Patrick