LOC@L SEO GUIDE

I logged into Gmail today and saw the following message: Ironically a second later I got the following email from a client: So you probably already know this, but thought I would share.  I am working on an email to past customers, and in the process of testing it, I send a copy to my [...]

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Since my YP.com Post-Farmer Traffic post, site owners who lost traffic have started to send me similar charts for their sites. I think it would be kind of cool to post charts for sites that were affected so that SEOs can study the patterns and we can call some attention to those sites that need [...]

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In response to my post on how some of top local sites did in the Farmer Update, Yellowpages.com’s John Cole forwarded me the following traffic charts showing how their traffic has grown since the update. Week Over Week Comparison 2/20-2/26 v. 2/13-2/19 Week Over Week Comparison 2/23 -3/1 v. 2/16-2/22 Thanks for sharing John.  If [...]

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I thought it would be interesting to review the Quantcast data for the local-oriented sites in Quantcast’s Top 100 to see if anything has changed (of course take this data with a grain of salt) since the Google Farmer Update: Update: Some readers pointed out the non-Quantified sites I used were not showing the right [...]

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For those of you trying to figure out what’s going on with the Farmer Update, I thought it might be useful to aggregate what various search brainiacs are saying in one place. Herenow, the list: Lessons Learned at SMX West: Google’s Farmer/Panda Update, White Hat Cloaking, And Link Building – Vanessa Fox My Theory On [...]

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From Danny Sullivan’s piece on Google’s latest “Farmer Update”: We’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content. We’ll continue to explore ways to reduce spam, including new ways for users to give [...]

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Pretty great article in the NYT today on how Google busted J.C. Penney for paid links and torched a lot of their natural search rankings. The Dirty Little Secret of Search is a must-read for any company that has someone doing linkbuilding on their behalf. My favorite line of the piece from a J.C. Penney [...]

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I got a few emails about the Google Analytics part of this post on Mobile SEO that I thought it might be useful to break it out as a separate post.  So here you go: If you are a Google Analytics user I recommend setting up an Advanced Segment that filters reports by visitors who [...]

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Glenn Gabe just pinged me that he is now seeing Groupon showing up in Google Place SERPs: According to Glen, this sucks for Groupon advertisers because: All of the Groupons I came across were expired. That’s right, when you click through the link in the clustered results, you end up at the Groupon page for [...]

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Update: Matt Mcgee informs me that this is way old news.  Still interesting though. First CityGrid and now Yahoo!?  What’s Yelp up to? A reader from a daily deals site just asked me why Yelp was linking to Yahoo on the bottom right of this URL with the words “New York Burgers” in the anchor [...]

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