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Hey there. I'm Darren Shaw, the founder of Whitespark. I do most of the planning and design of features for our software. I think I'm a decently seasoned local SEO, but I'm embarrassed to say that I hadn't considered what you are saying in this post. You're absolutely right that we should report ranking movements in the way you propose, and I will get my dev team working on it right away. We'll have this change implemented within the next couple of weeks. Thank you for the excellent suggestion! You can contact me anytime at [email protected] if you have any other thoughts, questions, or suggestions.

Hey Stephen,

You might find our top 30 UK list helpful: http://www.whitespark.ca/top-local-citation-sources-by-country

It's sorted by priority, with the top sources having the widest distribution.

Hey  William,

First, I'd like to mention that I am Nyagoslav (of Whitespark), and not Darren, but I am using his account to reply I know that my comment would be biased, no matter how hard I try for it not to be, and it is important that you view it as such. Here is an answer I recently gave to a very similar question (advantages/disadavantages of Yext, Moz Local, and Whitespark Citation Audit & Clean-up):

here are some general notes and Q&As that might help in your decision making. Of course all the decision making should also be made on case-by-case basis, but I will base my notes on the case(s) you described in your original post.

1. Will each of these services take care of all of your duplicate listings, or listings that feature incorrect, outdated, or fake information that should be removed?

Both Moz Local and Yext are uni-linear, automation-based systems. This means that they will, in general, find and fix one listing per website (with the note that they cover only the websites that are part of their networks). They offer different types of add-ons that could deal with duplicates, but additional manual work on your end would be required, i.e. you would need to help them find the duplicates. I have personally had negative experience specifically with the duplicate suppression process of Yext. A few of our clients have had active Yext subscriptions at the time they signed up for our citation clean-up or general local <acronym title="Search Engine Optimization">SEO</acronym> services. That is why I seeked the help of Yext's support to try and get rid of some of the duplicate listings on the sites that are part of their network (note: some of the subscriptions had been active for more than 2 years, but there were still tens of duplicate listings on the sites part of Yext's network). Unfortunately, in almost all of the cases I had absolutely no success going through Yext's support and that is why I did the duplicate clean-ups manually.

2. Will each of these services cover all of the important bases that would need to be covered in terms of citation auditing and clean-up?

The important bases could tentatively be divided in the following categories:

• Data aggregators (ExpressUpdate, Acxiom, Localeze, Factual)
• Important top-level search platforms (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Apple Maps)
• Most important citation sources (the likes of YP, Yelp, Citysearch, Superpages)
• Most important secondary citation sources (the likes of MerchantCircle, MojoPages, Kudzu)

Yext cover:

• Factual + they do have some relationship with ExpressUpdate, but as far as I understand it is available only for some users
• Bing + Yahoo
• Some of the most important citation sources
• Some of the most important secondary citation sources

Moz Local cover:

• All the data aggregators
• Google + Bing + Yahoo
• Some of the most important citation sources
• Basically none of the secondary citation sources

Our service covers:

• All the data aggregators
• All the important top-level search platforms
• All the most important citation sources (except for WhitePages and their network, which is monopolized by Yext)
• All the most important secondary citation sources

3. What is the cost and sustainability of the service?

Moz Local: $84/year
Yext: $500 to $1,000/year
Our service: $750 (one time)

I have previously done a case study on what happens when one cancels their Yext subscription. You could find it here.

4. What would be your time involvement and time until work is done?

With Yext, the information should be distributed instantly or near-instantly across their network. With Moz Local, as far as I know, it takes a few hours. With our service it takes about 1 month, as it is a manual process.

It would take you approximately 15 minutes to get set up on Yext or Moz Local. Your involvement would be about 30 minutes overall with our service.

Regarding your second question - historically web design firms have had problems getting local presence on Google (Google Maps/Places/Plus Local). However, this changed a few months ago. Please check this article for reference.

I hope this helps!

Nyagoslav

I completely agree. That's pretty much the exact answer I would have written. We will be coming out with a service to submit to key data aggregators soon, but for now, yeah, what Donna said!

Omid,

You could experiment with your own business. Build citations with varied descriptions to start, let it simmer for 4 months and record your local rankings. Then, go through and edit all those descriptions on the different sites to be the exact same. Let that simmer for another four months, and then check rankings again.

This will also be flawed because there are hundreds of other variables that you're not controlling for, but it might give some insight if there is a significant change in rankings.

Hey guys, thanks for your responses. Running a comparison and looking at Page Authority and Subdomain Mozrank gives me exactly what I need. I just want to be able to see which is stronger, and this does a good job of telling me.

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/comparisons?site=www.storage-mart.com&comparisons%5B0%5D=us.storage-mart.com

Thanks!

For example, www.storage-mart.com and us.storage-mart.com both show the same DA in OSE. I believe it's the DA of the root domain. How can I compare the DA of the 'www' and 'us' subdomains?

The drop in traffic isn't because Google prefers hyphens, it's because all your page URLs changed. You had a bunch of web pages that Google knew about, were in its index, and now they're gone. You now have a  bunch of new pages that have to start building trust and authority from scratch.

I'd change them back to dashes, then set up 301 redirects for all the underscore versions.

I think he meant to say QDF. Quality Deserves Freshness.

See: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-query-deserves-freshness

If the content pages are identical, then my guess is that it's based on Google's discovery date of the pages. Google sees the pages as duplicate content, and tries to rank the original source above the duplicate. So, in those cases where the .ca page is outranking .com page, Google's crawler just happened to pick up that page and add it to the index before it came across the same page on the .com site.

You could try adjusting the crawl speed in webmaster tools. Make the .ca site slower and the .com site faster. Not sure how much Google abides by these settings though. A better solution would be to stagger the publishing of new product pages. Have them appear on the .com site first and let them simmer a few days, then publish on the .ca site.

This is just a theory, but hope it helps!

Darren

Hey  William,

First, I'd like to mention that I am Nyagoslav (of Whitespark), and not Darren, but I am using his account to reply I know that my comment would be biased, no matter how hard I try for it not to be, and it is important that you view it as such. Here is an answer I recently gave to a very similar question (advantages/disadavantages of Yext, Moz Local, and Whitespark Citation Audit & Clean-up):

here are some general notes and Q&As that might help in your decision making. Of course all the decision making should also be made on case-by-case basis, but I will base my notes on the case(s) you described in your original post.

1. Will each of these services take care of all of your duplicate listings, or listings that feature incorrect, outdated, or fake information that should be removed?

Both Moz Local and Yext are uni-linear, automation-based systems. This means that they will, in general, find and fix one listing per website (with the note that they cover only the websites that are part of their networks). They offer different types of add-ons that could deal with duplicates, but additional manual work on your end would be required, i.e. you would need to help them find the duplicates. I have personally had negative experience specifically with the duplicate suppression process of Yext. A few of our clients have had active Yext subscriptions at the time they signed up for our citation clean-up or general local <acronym title="Search Engine Optimization">SEO</acronym> services. That is why I seeked the help of Yext's support to try and get rid of some of the duplicate listings on the sites that are part of their network (note: some of the subscriptions had been active for more than 2 years, but there were still tens of duplicate listings on the sites part of Yext's network). Unfortunately, in almost all of the cases I had absolutely no success going through Yext's support and that is why I did the duplicate clean-ups manually.

2. Will each of these services cover all of the important bases that would need to be covered in terms of citation auditing and clean-up?

The important bases could tentatively be divided in the following categories:

• Data aggregators (ExpressUpdate, Acxiom, Localeze, Factual)
• Important top-level search platforms (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Apple Maps)
• Most important citation sources (the likes of YP, Yelp, Citysearch, Superpages)
• Most important secondary citation sources (the likes of MerchantCircle, MojoPages, Kudzu)

Yext cover:

• Factual + they do have some relationship with ExpressUpdate, but as far as I understand it is available only for some users
• Bing + Yahoo
• Some of the most important citation sources
• Some of the most important secondary citation sources

Moz Local cover:

• All the data aggregators
• Google + Bing + Yahoo
• Some of the most important citation sources
• Basically none of the secondary citation sources

Our service covers:

• All the data aggregators
• All the important top-level search platforms
• All the most important citation sources (except for WhitePages and their network, which is monopolized by Yext)
• All the most important secondary citation sources

3. What is the cost and sustainability of the service?

Moz Local: $84/year
Yext: $500 to $1,000/year
Our service: $750 (one time)

I have previously done a case study on what happens when one cancels their Yext subscription. You could find it here.

4. What would be your time involvement and time until work is done?

With Yext, the information should be distributed instantly or near-instantly across their network. With Moz Local, as far as I know, it takes a few hours. With our service it takes about 1 month, as it is a manual process.

It would take you approximately 15 minutes to get set up on Yext or Moz Local. Your involvement would be about 30 minutes overall with our service.

Regarding your second question - historically web design firms have had problems getting local presence on Google (Google Maps/Places/Plus Local). However, this changed a few months ago. Please check this article for reference.

I hope this helps!

Nyagoslav

You can't do any better than this guide for optimization of a single page:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization

Hi Ilya,

It's a common misconception that the only citations that "count" (or stick) are the ones that Google lists on the Place Page. All the local SEOs I know, myself included, consider the citation listing in the Places page to be about as useless as Google's lame link: command. Google doesn't show you all the citations for your business. Doesn't have anything to do with them getting indexed or not.

Search for your business phone number plus the name of the directory in Google. If you see results, your citation is indexed, and you can move on to the rest of your citation building list.

Completely agree with EGOL. You want this on the main domain for the most benefit.

I'm not sure about this, and it's complete speculation, but I would suspect that a subdomain that has the DNS A record pointed at a different server would be identified by Google as belonging to the hosted knowledgebase solution. That's the way those hosted solutions work. So, while you would get some credit from a subdomain on the same server as your main domain, you might not get much from a hosted solution setup like this.

Unfortunately, this means you'll have to build your own knowledgebase system, or use an open source or paid solution. It means more time to setup, but will definitely be worthwhile, especially if the point of the knowledgebase is for SEO.

Omid,

You could experiment with your own business. Build citations with varied descriptions to start, let it simmer for 4 months and record your local rankings. Then, go through and edit all those descriptions on the different sites to be the exact same. Let that simmer for another four months, and then check rankings again.

This will also be flawed because there are hundreds of other variables that you're not controlling for, but it might give some insight if there is a significant change in rankings.

The drop in traffic isn't because Google prefers hyphens, it's because all your page URLs changed. You had a bunch of web pages that Google knew about, were in its index, and now they're gone. You now have a  bunch of new pages that have to start building trust and authority from scratch.

I'd change them back to dashes, then set up 301 redirects for all the underscore versions.

You can totally get some juice! Just not through the iframe code. Example:

<iframe><br />blah blah code booking blah code<br /></iframe>
booking provided by cool dude, craig spencer

Just give that code to your partners. Some will remove the link, but other will leave it. How do you think AddThis got to be a PR10?

I completely agree. That's pretty much the exact answer I would have written. We will be coming out with a service to submit to key data aggregators soon, but for now, yeah, what Donna said!

We do that all the time in our web development. Like Alan pointed out, it all depends on intent. If you were trying to hide some keyword stuffing or anchor text links in an display:none div, well that could get you in trouble, but what you are doing is a normal and common use of display:none on the web. You have nothing to worry about.

Hey there. I'm Darren Shaw, the founder of Whitespark. I do most of the planning and design of features for our software. I think I'm a decently seasoned local SEO, but I'm embarrassed to say that I hadn't considered what you are saying in this post. You're absolutely right that we should report ranking movements in the way you propose, and I will get my dev team working on it right away. We'll have this change implemented within the next couple of weeks. Thank you for the excellent suggestion! You can contact me anytime at [email protected] if you have any other thoughts, questions, or suggestions.