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Assuming there's a logical business reason to link them I would do it but I would take the following precautions:

1. Don't over optimize the anchor text. Use branded anchor text or something like that.

2. Make sure each property has a distinctly different link profile. In other words getting a Forbes link to each of the properties doesn't make much sense and it definitely doesn't signal natural link acquisition to Google.

3. Monitor the rankings and GWT metrics for the properties for the first few months after linking them and see if you see any noticeable decline in traffic or rankings. If so, I would take the links down.

I've been doing Local SEO for 9 years and have never had an issue that frustrated me as much as this one. I have a client who I can't get past the 15th page of Google's SERPS for their #1 KW. Here are the details:

• The domain is 4 months old
• In that 4 month span the site has gone from a DA 1 to a DA 24
• Spam score is a 0. I know this doesn't mean a ton but I can tell you from closely reviewing their AHrefs report, there's no influx of spammy links or anything like that.
• The design is a custom wordpress design
• The content is 100% unique and professionally written content
• The backlink profile (in my opinion) is full of high DA and PA sites from authority sites with high trust flow ... in my opinion their backlinks are superior to all but maybe a handful of competitors.
• I was not expecting 1st page results by now but I would have expected top 50 results a the very least. But to not crack the top 15 tells me there's some major issue here.

I really need some insight as to what could be holding me back here ... I don't want to share the domain publicly but but I will PM you it if you're interested in taking a crack at it. I will seriously pay someone a small fortune if they can help me figure this out.

Thank you Miriam. Those are awesome resources all of which I am familiar with

There are some obvious issues with the backlink profile on this particular site. I've pointed it out to the client as something hazardous and their current SEO is framing it as a difference of opinion when in reality he is putting the client at great risk (in my opinion).

My hope was get a third party to look at this and offer an honest assessment to the client.

Btw, I'm not opposed to paying someone for their time here.

Thanks again!

I have a business i'm working with right now who wants to improve their rankings in a very competitive legal niche.

Are there any Local SEO gurus out there that would be willing to explain in a paragraph or two what's going wrong?

Let me know if you'd like to help and I'll PM you the domain.

Cool site.

I agree, with Egols comment, I think Google is treating these pages as being low quality because there isn't much content on the pages. If you're familiar with worpdress, Google often does the same thing with all the hundreds of pages that WP makes for blog categories, tags, etc.

I would test this theory by picking a few of the random pages and adding some content that is well optimized and see how it performs.

Yes exactly, in that case I would expand my radius to include the nearest metropolitan area. I would maybe not try to encompass the entire city of a city like say Denver, but a portion of it.

In my experience, if you get overly ambitious with your service area, you end up with very poor results.

I would ask yourself this question, how big is the radius around your office, where if you were to rank #1, would give you enough business to earn a living and grow your business, but not too much business where you're overwhelmed? That's where I would I would "cast my net" so to speak. Get rankings in a smaller radius and then you can expand a little from there if you're not getting leads or exposure from there.

Have you done a scan of your website to confirm that you don't have any malware or malicious code? That would be the first thing I would do. I have had this issue a few times with hacked sites. The first thing we do is scan the site, clean it, test it and even relocate it to a new host if the server we're on is compromised.

While technically you can configure Google My Business exactly how you have done it, you are highly unlikely to get rankings across the state of Colorado because of the competition. If you were in a highly uncompetitive niche, it might work, but not for something highly competitive like internet marketing.

If you want to see results, I would cast a much more narrow net with the hopes of getting rankings in one of those cities you menation. I also would pick the city closest to my address to increase the likelihood of ranking.

So David was kind enough to look at the site and found some potential issues. In short, the home page had 57 heading tags which is excessive, there are some heading tags missing from some interior pages and there's a few pages that should be no indexed that aren't

I'm going to fix all of these, give it some time and see if this fixes the issues. I'll keep this thread updated.

Thanks David for your time!

Thanks David - I PM'd you the info

What has helped me a great deal in creating social media strategies for clients is when I get questions like 'We want 2000 twitter followers' or 'We want 1000 fans', I ask them very basic questions like, 'What are you hoping will result from having 1000 fans?' Questions like that get them thinking strategically. I always throw it out there that if their looking to get to a certain number of fans, there's sites out there like fiverr that allow you to buy thousands of fans or twitter followers that are mostly bots - and that they don't need me to do that.

Having that conversation will get the client focusing on the proper long term strategy.

In my experience you really have to get the client out of caveman mode ("ME WANT MORE FANS!") and once you do that you can position social media services with the proper expectations.

Obviously you know that the costs for fans will be all over the place depending on your CPC. In my experience for traffic I send to the clients FB Page (most of this data is pre-timeline though) the rate of clicks to 'fan conversion' is in the 15% neighborhood. So once you identify your CPC, you can use that number to give a ball park idea of what a cost per fan acquisition is going to look like.

If they balk, you can share articles like this:

Understanding the Value of a Facebook Fan

Which will help you show your clients how facebook and twitter can be a platform to drive conversions rather than simply a way of collecting fans and followers.

Yep, I agree with both of these posts. I looked at the site on your profile and if that's the site you are thinking about hiring a writer for, I really don't see the need to pay that much for something like that unless you KNEW for a fact that it was going to be UBER compelling. In my experience, compelling content for local businesses is usually written by someone who is a) an expert in that industry and b) has an extremely unique voice. So unless this individual checks both of these boxes, I wouldn't pay anywhere near that personally.

Agree with John. That link is pure, unadulterated 24k SEO gold. It's dofollow, it comes from a 92 DA web site ... it will pay SEO dividends for years to come. Also it's much better than a typical press release because all credible press release platforms have changed their links to "nofollow" at the urging of Google in the last year or two. Kudos to you for putting in the effort to get that.

I do a lot of local SEO and some national/traditional ecommerce SEO and In my experience, you are absolutely limiting your "national" reach by having geo-tags in your titles. While no one can say with 1000% absolute certainty that Google is devaluing your 'National' search engine results due to your local geo tags, you're at the very least reducing your KW density for your page titles, which undoubtedly will affect your rankings nationally.

What I have found to be a solid strategy for eCommerce sites seeking local and 'national' customers, is to build landing pages that are city based subdomains that are optimized for a particular city. Then have links within those geo landing pages to the main ecommerce site.

example:

Tulsa.Widgets.com

Page Title: Tulsa Widgets | BarnDoors.com

Notice I'll usually keep the root domain in the geo subdomain for branding purposes and to avoid consumer confusion when they are looking at the SERPs. The good part for these local subdomains, is you can typically achieve quick rankings in these mid-size and sometimes larger markets. Most importantly though, this frees up your root domain to try to rank for your highest trafficked keyword at a higher kw density.

This strategy has worked well for my clients who are doing the brick and mortar + eCommerce thing but feel free to shoot holes in it - I'm always looking for better ways to handle the whole local & national seo issue.

Lastly, I would also add the caveat that if you're already ranking 'nationally' with your geo infused titles, (for example, if "Tulsa OK Widget | WIdgets.com" is ranking for the keyword "Widget") I wouldn't change a thing until there are signs that you're slipping.

Long answer: see above.

Short answer: not worth it.

As far as your page title; It depends what specific keyword you're trying to rank for. What is your kw goal for this page?

You could ask 5 people this question and get 5 different answers. My strategy for most of the brands that I manage is exactly what yours is with one exception: we are now linking to our Google+ pages but not prominently.

The only exception is clients who are trying to rank locally (google maps) because now that reviews on Google Places must be done with a Google+ account, and reviews are critical to ranking locally in the maps, it's necessary and logical to send users to our Google+ Places with the hope they leave a review.

In fact, there's considerably more value in a Google+ review for my Local SEO clients than say a Facebook Like or a Retweet.

If that link comes from a Wall St. Journal Property that doesn't allow just anyone to create pages with followed links (i.e. blogspot), I would anticipate that link yielding terrific long term results for your site's page and domain authority. Most small businesses have a very hard time getting those types of links so you should be very proud.

At the same time though, when it comes to linkbuilding always remember to play the long game. Every once in awhile that unicorn link that makes an instant impact comes along but generally speaking that's a result of click through traffic as a result of people clicking on that link when the page goes live ... it sounds like that's NOT the case here if I understand your post correctly so I would just keep doing what you're doing that got you that link in the first place

Also, I'm sure you've already done this but it's always a good idea to share links about your business from other sites on your social media for the bragging rights and of course, it won't hurt the value of that link to have good social signals going to it.

I would direct submit to all the biggies and then submit through LocalEZE (now Nuestar (sp?)) for the lesser directories. Chris ^ is exactly right, there's diminishing returns on spending the 5-10 min to claim your listings on every directory and if you look at the David Mihm infographic that Chris shared you'll see that LocalEZE feeds most of the lesser known directories. That's what I've been doing for my clients for years and it works well.

Perhaps I'm the squeaky wheel here, and I understand that's not the culture on these forums (which I'm ALL for 99.9999% of the time) ... but to me, if the DA's are going to go back up, why drop them?  For us, DA is something we educate our clients on, we preach it's credibility/accuracy, and we ask our clients to hold us accountable to it. But now, I'm going to have to essentially undermine its credibility to explain to my clients that this is a large scale drop and it should go back up again soon.

I'm done being the squeaky wheel now. I am a big believer in DA and Moz in general ... these forums have the sharpest people in the industry. I just felt compelled to express some frustration.

When you say, you've been affected, what exactly do you mean? When did you see the impact and what % was the drop in traffic?

Have you logged into Google Places for each business and checked the analytics/impressions/clicks for each? Is the dropoff happening their too?

One thing I noticed that I believe is hurting you is that these two pages appear to be for the same business:

http://www.fairfieldinnhotelaurora.com

http://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/denas-fairfield-inn-and-suites-denver-aurora-southlands/

This is a big problem because although your web site is legitimate, can you blame google for perhaps seeing it as an imposter when Marriott.com (in all it's authoitative glory) has the same business? If this is happening on every one of your domains (all of which appear to be franchises of bigger corporations) then my money is Marriott.com page is what's causing your domain to be flagged. I would re-submit your site to Google and explain the situation...hopefully once a human eye sees the scenario, they will fix the issue.

In Google's defense though, it's easy to see why they would flag your domains...imagine if you bought a domain name like chicagounitedairlines.com and Google didn't flag it?