Disclaimer: Tax rates can be changed by legislative bodies. While this information is based on current data (April 2025), it’s recommended to verify directly with the Ohio Department of Taxation or the specific municipality for the absolute latest official rates, especially for financial planning or compliance purposes.

Questions from our Clients

1. Do Google core updates often lower a sites rankings?

Core updates have various impacts on SEO, site rankings, volatility, and even an emotional impact as this recent update shows.

Users were upset about Google’s use of scraping content from websites for AI overviews gain with limited credit to the authors. This impacted Google’s PR and brand overall as the community erupted in ill contempt.

Volatility occurs prior and during updates resulting in site ranking changes. This is due to the algorithm adjusting inputs and due to content changes when reviewing and ranking sites shifts can occur.

Sites can have lower rankings during these volatile periods and in some cases rankings could stay lowered. This occurs when Google re-analyzes a site’s content and finds that other sites “score higher” on a variety of ranking factors which contribute to ranking. Google does not say all their ranking factors but a recent leak opened the black box a little providing insight into Google’s secret algorithm.

2. Can I remove a negative Google review? We served the person prior but they are saying false stuff about our company.

This is a tough question, generally there is no guaranteed way of removing Google reviews from your account. However there are a couple of options and do and don’ts, when dealing with false reviews. The first step that we always explain to clients, is to not respond to the review. Responding to the review tells Google that the review is real and your chances of having it removed after responding drops significantly. The best plan of action is to not respond to the review and have multiple high authority Google accounts report the review. We have seen that this works in past cases, though it’s never guaranteed. In the case you are unable to remove the review, it can be helpful to respond, explaining the situation and offering for them to reach out to resolve any issues. This helps to give your customers confidence that your business will handle and help resolve any issues new customers may have.

3. Should I keep putting eBooks on my website? Does this help or hurt my SEO? 

This is a tricky question, as the answer varies. If the eBooks are relevant to your site and your customers, and they are written well and provide a high level of value then they can help your SEO by providing you with fresh linkable content. If the eBooks aren’t well written and don’t offer a high level of value or relate strongly to your website and customers, then they can be negative for SEO. So keep these things in mind when choosing to do eBooks onsite. If you are going to use eBooks onsite, make sure they are well written, provide a high level of value, and are strongly related to your website content.

PS: For better SEO ranking with eBooks try adding a summary in HTML for indexability, and encourage backlinks. Meaning, provide strong content and knowledge so other sites want to link to your eBook.

4. What is authority score and how is it used by Google?

Authority score is a name coined by third party SEO metric companies, such as Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz and more. Authority score estimates a website’s trustworthiness and ranking potential based on different factors such as the quality of the content and the number of backlinks (these aren’t the only metrics used to decide authority score, just a few). Google doesn’t actually use these scores, as it has its own algorithm for accessing site authority or page rank. These third party scores (authority score) however is often the closest we can get to seeing what Google thinks of a site’s ranking ability. It’s also important to note that a strong third party authority score typically correlates heavily with better visibility in Google’s search results.