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If these domains are completely useless to you otherwise, disavowing will help remove the links from your link profile.

Disavow is no longer a last resort, it's part of the job. Sending in a disavow report isn't going to call attention to you: the spammy links and penalty are already doing a good job of that

It's good to be aware of the scrapers to see what they are trying to do with your content, and it can't hurt to ask them to remove it.

Don't ask for a link, you never want links for sites that rely on bad practices like that, it can hurt you.

This is most likely not effect you if left alone. If the scraper is grabbing from source code, then implementing a canonical tag in your content will help Google know where the content came from (but they probably already know).

Depending on the size of the company, it might be better to leave subdomains out of it. Subdomains are like brand new sites, so you'd be working a lot harder to get things ranking if you went that route. You don't have a ton of pages per category, so everything might be more manageable under the single domain with good URL structure.

Websites that aren't AT&T need all the help they can get, and keeping things in subfolders instead of subdomains will help keep all your authority under a single domain.

So, site.com/business, site.com/personal, etc.

Unless you have access to the website's Webmaster account, it's best to use a few and compare results.

Fore example, I've used Ahrefs and found links OSE didn't have, but I've also experienced it that other way around with OSE having links that Ahrefs didn't. Majestic is also good source, as mentioned.

I haven't found a completely accurate tool yet, I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist or the entire industry would know about it. Since you can't get it perfect, compare various databases and get as much information as possible.

Adding listings yourself isn't the slowest (if you don't count the time you spent doing them), since there are time delays with each entity that deals with the data.

If you have a handful of citations you want to get up faster than with a service, doing them manually is an option.

Thanks for the tip, Miriam.

Heh, I think we've been talking about the same thing, just miscommunication.

The bottom line:

• Best case is one site and one list

• Worst case is 2 websites, 2 listings

• Bad, but not worst case is have 2 sites and one listing (if you have some sort of super important reason for having 2 sites).

That's fine, in my opinion.

The phone call or postcard will get you past the automated verification, but I have seen listings sites (Google specifically), remove listings from the index due to there being too much similarity with existing locations. If you tried to add two listings with everything the same, except the domain name, it's a risk. So yes, the initial automated verification will be accepted, but that doesn't mean it will stay that way. Especially if a competitor sees that both are ranking.

Both sites can have an identical NAP on the contact page, as long as both aren't submitted as listings or aren't extremely similar.

If he didn't know what he was talking about when he said he was doing white hat, I doubt he knows when he's doing black hat-wise.

What he's referring to is most likely a blog comment or forum blast. If your website is relatively established, this isn't likely to have an effect on you.

You can monitor your links through Google Webmasters, and if you see sudden spikes in links, start actively disavowing those links or hire a more trustworthy SEO to do that job. I would recommend someone with references, examples, and local (or at least a native English speaker, it's tough to create good content in a language you don't know well).

EMDs still carry weight, more than they should IMO.

LondonFootball.com and FootballLondon.com are two different EMDs, just similar.

Is it worth paying two months of your SEO budget? Depends on the EMD and the SEO you were going to hire. Also make sure to do a lot of research on the EMD to see what it's history is. It is indexed? Does it have an acceptable backlink profile? Was it used for anything shady in the past?

There are very few domains I would drop thousands on, and even fewer that I would purchase strictly for SEO gain.

From what I've heard when I talk to these citation places, there are two different kinds.

1. A company that collection citations and then hands them off to large databases that are controlled by others, and then those people will distribute the citations through there affiliates. This is the much longer, much cheaper, kind of citation company. Moz Local does this.

2. A company that has it's own direct relationships with the citation sites, and doesn't use third-party databases or companies as a middle-man. This is more expensive (10x or so), but faster. Yext falls into this category.

So, you are correct. There is nothing you can do to speed it up, the citations are most likely in the hands of those large databases who are distributing to affiliates.

A simple way to see how Google sees your page is to use the "Fetch as Googlebot" function in Google Webmasters. This way you can see if there is anything not being crawled. The more traditional way to do this set up would be to have a search bar above the fold, and then have category pages people can click through to browse if they want. Messy drop-downs are never fun.

Let me know if that helps.

This can be an issue if you are also focusing on local SEO with Google Maps and other listings like that. An identical NAP (name, address, and phone number) spanning two sites will cause you issues with getting listings accepted and ranking properly.

You are also splitting your assets, so consider if it's really worth it to have two sites. If you have to have two sites, I would only mark up and submit one site, if they provide the same services.

Yes, and have each one direct to the proper language on the website. If I'm a social media user, why would I want to engage with an entity that only speaks my language a third of the time?

Are you in control of the Yahoo listings? If so, you would've been notified when such drastic changes took places on them. If you didn't claim them, then it is possible someone else did and changed the information. The listings places are getting better about verification methods, but it's still possible for competitors to claim unverified listings.

I would suggest creating a Yahoo Small Business account, and then contacting Yahoo about the situation. They should either give you ownership, change the URL, or delete the listing and have you create a new one.  If Yahoo is being too slow, create a new listing in the meantime, and once you get in contact with Yahoo they should be able to merge the two listings.

Yahoo is the slowest of the three in getting back to you (in my experience), so don't be afraid to get a little aggressive if it starts taking a while. Contact them through multiple channels, flag the listing, etc.

I have seen competitors take over listings in the real estate market before, and the insurance industry would seem like another clear target, since the business/agent structure can be similar.

Why block the pages in robots.txt after the redirects? That seems counter productive: you want Google to see that the pages are being redirected, but you are preventing Google from looking at the redirected page.

Remove the robots.txt block and you should be okay. Also, just for fun, confirm that they are 301 redirects and not 302s, but my money is on the robots.txt.

Four months is too long after a migration to not see a recovery.

Good idea! I think I'm going to go tequila, lemon, lime, blue curacao, and grenadine (Google colors). We'll see what happens. If I don't post next week, call an ambulance.

Gin sounds like a good start. Clean and simple. I'm thinking we need the Google colors, lemon, lime, then some sort of red and blue flavor.

The office just got some of those fancy Google Partner bottles, and I want to fill them up with a tasty cocktail that is link juice themed.

Any ideas on how to tie Google and/or SEO into a fancy cocktail?