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You generally don't need to take any action on these types of links (you don't need to remove or disavow). Google can see they are just scraped duplicates or a real article and ignore them.

But let's say they were harmful bad links (maybe paid links or irrelevant placed sneakily by you - ie: a link to iphones from a page about dogs), then when you remove links it's always a good stop-gap to also disavow. Because Google might not immediately crawl the URLs with bad links right away, but the disavow they will in theory pick up on more quickly.

Hello!

You can likely just ignore them, as Google is most likely just ignoring them (they are not helping nor hurting).

If you are nervous though, just keep a close on the rankings and search traffic for your site, and specifically the pages the links are pointing to. If you don't see a huge ranking/traffic change the links are for sure not affecting you.

If you really want to be extra careful, you can simply just disavow the domain with the disavow tool. if for some weird reason the links are helping you, you might notice a drop in ranking, which you can just undo by removing the domain from your disavow file.

Hello!

I usually follow this process (bear in mind it's very simplified for this example):

1. Determine the "top target keyword" the page is about - this is your page topic, and also the keyword with the highest volume but also specific enough it's not too general - your term "Alsace bike tour " seems like a good example.

2. Then, I be sure to put this "top target keyword" in the Title tag and URL - as close to the exact phrase as possible.

3. Then, from there it's really about creating the best page content-wise to match the topic, intent, etc of the user searching your top target keyword - and to know this you should study what ranks in Google for it and try to reverse engineer what elements are good/bad etc.

There could be a lot more advanced stuff, but those are the basics you'll want to nail first - and it's the only basic area in which I really worry about where/how the exact phrases occur.

Hi Simon!

As John said, a link to your site or a little more detail would be helpful here.

There's a lot of reasons a site's visibility could be low (a technical issue, low-quality content, poor keyword/page alignment, high competition etc). I know you're saying these things check out, but it's better to be able to take a direct look at things.

It could also just be a metrics/data issue or misinterpretation. For example, visibility percentage can be impacted artificially by the keywords added to a rank tracker.

A better way to look at it might be - have you seen a major change/drop in clicks in search console? If so, can you narrow it down to a specific date or segment it out to find specific keywords or pages that lost visibility?

Awesome!

The big issue I see here is that you don't actually have a page targeting JUST "fascinators" - it would be something like https://www.prettycool.co.uk/fascinators.html - kind of like you have all wedding accessories - https://www.prettycool.co.uk/wedding-accessories.html

The reason is, the homepage is not the best page to rank for just fascinators since you sell other things, it's not the best relevance match.

So create a page for All Fascinators

Hi Julie

So in terms of pure accessibility from a technical standpoint, I think you're good. The content from inside the plugin appears to be showing in the HTML of source code, so this means it's perfectly accessible to Google. And to Google, it's part of the page just like other content (even though to you, on the backend, it comes from a widget).

What Roman is referring to, which is a good idea, may be this Top Places schema - https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/top-places-list - which is in Beta, so you have to click "express interest" to see if you can be accepted to try it.

Hi Chuck

As Donna also mentioned, there was a small update which was finally just confirmed by Danny Sullivan of Google: https://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-small-search-ranking-algorithm-update-this-past-week-306103#.W7AVMNe0y5g.twitter

So that is the most likely reason for the drop you saw.

As with any traffic change, I would recommend segmenting your traffic data by both queries and landing pages (this can both be done in search console) - to isolate which/if specific pages and keywords saw drops. If so, you can then determine if it was a site-wide drop, or specific to a set of pages and keywords. If site-wide, perhaps it is more technical related, but if keyword/page specific it could be more closely tied to the algo changes.

Hello

If you are a single product or single service website, you can definitely use the homepage to present that single product or service.

However, if you sell even just two products or services, you're better off using inner pages for that. It's not that you'd get a penalty for using the homepage, it's just that it's much better site architecture to break the many products/services you may have into separate pages.

Hello!

You probably don't need to do anything, Google will likely know the difference. You can disavow them if you'd like just to be safe.

Unless you see traffic drop and rankings drop (for no other known reason) they are likely not affecting the site.

Hi

If you have not checked out these few resources, highly recommended for local;

Local Search Ranking Factors

Local SEO Guide

Advanced Local SEO Tricks

Your plan sounds pretty good, although I am not familiar with "Build My Rank".

The one thing I am curious about is, how is his website?  Is it technically sound (crawlable, indexable)?  Does the navigation/architecture (albeit small) make sense?  Is it optimized for on page keywords?  Does it have a great design, and is it full of useful information that's easily digestible?

That's just my general sense, that you have a good focus on off-site seo, but just don't forget about on-site, especially when it comes to users arriving at the page and taking that action; calling, emailing, sharing or whatever it may be.

Hope that helps! Its exciting, and good luck!

-Dan

This tool is a great extension for Chrome

Check My Links

Hi

You have to go by "phrase" or "exact" in the keyword tool, as broad could entail any search with the word "hire" even if it doesn't have "jet".

See image

-Dan

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Hi

Did you 301 Redirect the old pages to the matching new pages?  Anytime you change URLs you have to do this, it redirects your link juice as well as anyone trying to access an old page with a link or bookmark - they'll arrive at the new page instead of getting a 404 (page not found).

You do 301 redirects in your .htaccess file (insert them after the wordpress info) in this format;

Redirect 301 /oldpage/  http://www.mydomain.com/newpage/

One line for every page you're redirecting.  If you are using the new Yoast WP SEO plugin, you can edit your .htaccess file directly from WordPress, otherwise you have to edit it via FTP

BONUS: An easy way to get your old and new URLs so you do not have to type them all out, is run something like Screaming Frog SEO Spider or Xenu Link Sleuth on your site, and export the URLs into excel.

-Dan

You should DEFINITELY use the info in Rand's recent post:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-best-kept-secret-in-the-seomoz-toolset

It tells you how to put the search term in the keyword competitiveness tool, and do a detailed SERP analysis for all the ranking factors.  You might get some answers there.

-Dan

Hi

The difference to understand about pages vs posts has to do with how they are organized

• Pages are organized by nesting (into folders or levels)
• Posts are organized by categories, tags, date, authors, etc.

or another way to think of it...

• Pages are for when you want the content to be organized in a traditional format; root/sub-1/sub-2/ etc. which is more or less static or linear
• Posts are for when you want content to be organized in a dynamic format; in other words, you could access the same post multiple ways; through a tag, a category, a date, or the 'blog' page.

So, use pages when you have more or less static pages, organized in a folder type format like described above.  Use posts anytime you have content that you want organized dynamically; ie blogs, news, product catalogs.

Some of the themes you can get make this more confusing than it needs to be too.

Hope it helps!

-Dan

OSE is showing shares of your homepage (118 shares / 57 likes) - you need to enter each individual page URL to get shares/likes for that page. Running your first page "Post 1" URL in OSE shows 35 shares / 13 likes.

However, more importantly, its good to know what actually counts as a "share". To capture the most from the actual "share" buttons on your site, you need to install the facebook open graph meta tags on your site. This treats your site "like a facebook page" and will thus count of of the shares from people clicking the share button.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

Hey Derek

First, check this out to be sure of your understanding of broad, phrase and exact match: google documentation

I almost always use exact match to gauge search volume.  A search for "how to be a freelance" counts as a broad match.  Even "freelance" or "writer" counts as a broad match.  These aren't relevant at all, so thus a very bad assessment of search volume.

Even phrase match is misleading. "Hire a freelance writer" could count as a phrase search, totally not relevant and therefore shouldn't count.

It is therefore, I ONLY want to know how many people are searching, exactly for "how to become a freelance writer".  Its guarenteed to be that exact search, which guarentees relevance.

If you optimize and rank for "how to become a freelance writer" you may also rank for similar or related phrases, like "how to be a freelance writer" or "be a freelance writer".

Exact match is your best bet when judging search volume, because phrase and broad are way too unpredictable, as to whether the search variations are going to at all relevant.

So choose a good phrase with a decent amount of exact search volume, optimize for that, and you may also naturally rank for related long-tail more specific phrases as well - like "how to become a freelance writer from home", etc.

-Dan

Hi Maria

While I can't say I know of the best theme for SEO, here are some considerations;

I would purchase from a trusted vendor like woothemes or themeforest  If from themeforest, look for a theme with a 4-star rating or higher, a decent amount of purchases, and look to see that the developers actively provide support and respond to questions.

I'd say more importantly, is what you do with wordpress, no matter what theme you use.  I have been trying Yoat's seo plugin for wordpress and am very happy with it.

-Dan

Justin

I personally prefer lowercase because to me it looks better.  And I prefer hyphens for the same reason, and it seems like these days everyone from WordPress right to the SEOmoz site does it that way.

-Dan