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Let's say Moz links to your site 5 times. That's 5 links but 1 "root domain" (moz.com)

Now, NY Times links to you ... 1000 times. That's 1005 links and 2 "root domains" - moz.com and nytimes.com

A root domain is just a domain that links to you - the first link from each domain seems to count more so the more root domains you have is better (rather than the number of backlinks total.)

To put it another way, you'd rather have 20 backlinks from 20 separate root domains than you would to have a sitewide link from 1 domain even though that may be thousands of backlinks.

Rand covers this all just a little here: https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites

Given that the word "update" is such a specific word, they should probably use another term such as "data adjustment" or "data change" or ... something. Pretty much ANY word other than "update" would be a good option.

Is it related to a time-of-day query? I see what I can only describe as QDF fluctuations sometimes.

We have run the same keyword rankings every hour for 48 hours before. All 48 were unique sets of results ... the top "100" ended up including almost 300 different URLs. A lot of the fluctuation was on page 1. We saw that a search that "deserves freshness" ended up fluctuating MUCH more. Say "restaurants near Melbourne."  In the morning we often saw different results to dinner-time.Over a couple days it's hard to say but especially on mobile, those things are changing fast.

(It's the old context question. If you type "who is the President" you get info about Obama. If you type "who is his wife" you get random info. But if you say those two questions in Google mobile, it returns Michelle Obama info.)

I do think your exact issue may be some testing, though. We have an idea that the newest/last release Penguin is coming soon. Testing makes just as much sense in your case. (The results often shift, go back, shift, go back.) I would start checking links & cleaning up in any case.

I always find these discussions interesting mainly because of the "nobody knows" factor.

What I want to point out more than any one particular thing is that there are a limited number of 'ranking factors.' Whether that number is 200, 50, 3, or 3000, it's limited. Whenever one tactic loses its effectiveness simple math says that other factors increased in importance.

Google is very, very good at messing with SEOs.

If keyword density is limited or removed, something took its place. Something that isn't "create quality content."  Most serious competitors are creating high quality, relevant content. If you think the difference in ranking one bank over another is "quality content" on a target page for "home loan" you're lying to yourself. Backlinks, age of the page, age of the site, internal links, anchor text, and some level of "keyword density" (though I think it's much more sophisticated than that" definitely helps. H1s still matter, as do H2s and H3s, tbh.

I have competitive keywords ranking with NO on-page content AND no backlinks. The page literally has a title, H1 tag and the surrounding menus & sidebars. It ranks for gambling-related keyphrases in a supposedly hard to rank niche and has ranked for months (with zero on-page text.)

SEMRush shows that same site rank for over 1200 keyphrases. It has ONE backlink to the homepage. That's it.

I wish that was the only example. But I am ranking semi-competitive marketing & SEO related keyphrases on a site with about 8 links and virtually no content. If content + links = SEO, these would never rank. So again, it's beyond that. Age of the domain? No, one is brand new. One is older. One is registered for more than a year, one for less. One is an EMD, one is not.

We've had new clients struggle & struggle to rank for really easy keyphrases with no backlink spam, technical on-site looks good and titles/content/links are all in line with other (ranking) clients. We put all their content on a new domain & it ranks just fine. NO links.

SEO is just weird. Let's face it - we're all attempting to do the best we can for clients but at the end of the day, none of it truly makes that much sense.

I would definitely argue in favor of this. Cleaning up broken links, changing the copyright date on websites, adding new content - it all sends signals to Google that the site is maintained regularly and has active management. A site that is regularly updated is more valuable than one that is created and then left to rot.

While Matt Cutts said in 2013 (eons ago in SEO) that broken links weren't a ranking factor, the Google Search Quality Raters Handbook says they are a factor for manual review.

They actually say:

Webmasters need to make sure their websites function well for users as web browsers change. How can you tell that a website is being maintained and cared for? Poke around: Links should work, images should load, content should be added and updated over time, etc. Exercise caution relying on dates: Some webpages automatically display the current date. Rather than just looking for a recent date, search for evidence that effort is being made to keep the website up to date and running smoothly.

When the Raters Handbook says that, I fix broken links.

There really isn't a typical amount of time as it depends on links to your site, crawl frequency of your current page, and how many resources they choose to use on you at that time.

There are, however, ways to speed up the process.

1. Claim your site in Search Console (Webmaster Tools)

2. Submit a sitemap

3. Use the "Fetch" tool in Search Console.

4. Build/earn some new links to the pages you care about.

All of those will help your pages be reindexed more quickly. Also, if you want the "very fast, slightly cheap" way of doing it, post the links on Google+, ping them with Indexkings and build internal links from new blog posts. All of those definitely help with index status.

Like Deacyde I use the content in quotes in Google itself "to test if this is duplicate." But I also use a couple tools:

• http://www.copyscape.com/
• http://www.siteliner.com/
• http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php
• http://www.plagspotter.com/ (undergoing a bit of renovation currently)

If you wanted to build this into your own tool, PlagTracker has an API

http://www.plagtracker.com/api.html

(As do a few of the ones above.)

Moz has a recommended provider list though I believe it doesn't change a lot over the years.

My advice on this is typically the same every time - browse through Q&A, find people others agree with a lot and who seem to know a lot more than you about SEO, look into their profiles and hire from there.

There aren't a lot of great, reliable ways to test how much someone knows or what they can do for your business so a lot of this is based on trust and results. Just be careful in your selection and be reasonable in expectations for the budgets provided.

Could you be looking at the wrong (www vs non) version of the site?

Did the dev block robots.txt from all bots (or Mozbot) before transfer?

Are you still cached & indexed in Google?

There's also an ongoing issue with some sites as seen here.

Google will do this somewhat in the search but I wouldn't do it on your site. You won't be telling Google what the page is about, you'll be asking Google what the page should be about. That's a very weak position to come at things from.

With the very little amount that Google actually passes you the search query, it's probably not very useful to attempt to implement this on pages.

On your Adwords, for sure. But not on your actual website, imho.

We've tested this a few ways.

1. Add map to the footer - seems to help somewhat.  Not a big jump but definitely a boost.

2. Add map to the contact page along with the address - this helped the most in our testing.

3. Add map to any other page - no effect in our tests.

We tested 2 controls and 4 sites set each way = 14 total.

Of the 14, the 2 controls and the 2 "any other page" had very little improvement.  The 8 on #1 and #2 had definite moves and so it does seem to affect the results. Putting the address on the page, along with an embedded G map was by far the best for us.

Hi James,

I (and others) have answered this a number of times recently so I'm mainly going to link you in.

http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-does-this-site-rank-higher-than-a-seemingly-better-one

http://www.seomoz.org/q/can-t-for-the-life-of-me-figure-out-how-this-is-possible-any-ideas

http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-would-a-site-with-virtually-no-external-links-and-low-authority-rank-very-high

The basics of it are you are looking at maybe 3 or 4 metrics of maybe 200 that affect SEO.  DA and PA matter but they are heavily influenced by other factors such as domain age, page loading speed, time left on registration (surprisingly!), number and quality of anchor text vs branded text, follow vs. nofollow (not in the ways you'd necessarily expect), and again, like 175 other factors.  There are always a million "could be" answers.

Let's say the other site had a PR7 SEO site before and it is now offline.  Maybe they used it for the "black hat" version of their business.  They've seen the light, black hat works less than ever, and they've gone all white hat.  Now they 301 that domain over to the new one.  You can't "see" the 301 but the effect would be massive.  Maybe they have one big client who they managed to ask for and get a big link that isn't on the Moz index but it's showing up in WMT.  Maybe their average visitor visits 3 times as many pages as on your site or stays for 10 minutes longer per visit.  Those type of metrics make a huge difference in SEO.

I hope that helps answer your question!  A huge amount of factors control SEO - social, possibly, the platform of the site, +1s on Google, local citations that may not include a live link so they aren't picked up by Moz.... see the issue in figuring this out?

~Matt

According to the https://plus.google.com/authorship page,

1. Make sure that you have a profile photo with a recognisable headshot.
2. Make sure that a byline containing your name appears on each page of your content (for example, "By Steven Levy").
3. Make sure that your byline name matches the name on your Google+ profile.
4. Verify that you have an email address (such as [email protected]) on the same domain as your content. (Don't have an email address on the same domain?

A brand is rarely an "author" - someone did the writing.  Google wants that person tied to the work they created. Now, there may be ways "around" this but getting "around" stuff in SEO is why so many people scrambled so badly this year.

This page dissects it further: http://www.optimum7.com/internet-marketing/google-optimization/pros-and-cons-of-google-authorship-for-businesses.html

Most notably:

A company or brand’s Google+ page cannot be designated as the author of any web content. Therefore your company and brand name will not come up as the author in the web results.

**Warning:**If you’ve considered creating a company persona under the guise of a real person in order to have all authorship attributed to that particular Google+… Don’t do it! This really undermines AuthorRank and defeats the whole point of authorship. Google may also penalize you for trying to cheat their system… just as they’ve done for poor SEO practices through Google’s Panda-Penguin algorithm updates.

That's what I would follow.  I would not suggest trying to game Authorship at all.

I don't mean to be obvious about this but yeah, your link profile has issues, starting with your own link network:

• http://driveway-alarm.com/
• http://boat-alarm.com/
• http://freezealarms.com/
• http://entry-alarm.com/
• http://sensaphone-alarm.com/
• http://drivewayalarmreview.com/

According to Majestic Historic links your backlink profile is a disaster. They show over 90,000 links from nearly 2000 different domains. The site has been online for 15 years so I'm sure that a) there are worse links that have not been picked up and b) it's had old school 2002 SEO.

To be honest, you have a 15+ year old site and it shows. The backlink profile is a disaster and your info has been copied around the web from pretty much every page of your site. Put the two together and yeah, you wouldn't/shouldn't rank very highly with the current situation.

Hope the analysis helps some! It's going to be quite a lot of work to get you where you want to be from where you are today.

Well, he seems to be made of both bone and metal.

http://www.mythicmarketer.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/The-TAGFEE-Tenets-SEOmoz.png

He can change size:

http://mozcationportsmouth.com/wp-content/uploads/MozCation-2012-Roger1.jpg

He can plug himself into other machines:

http://designwisecustomgraphics.com/Rev%203/slices/slices/Roger-Moz-Bot-illustrations(2).png

And most importantly, he can self-heal.

https://seomoz.zendesk.com/attachments/token/zvrbz74z9b3jy51/?name=broken-roger.png

The post that drew me into Moz and kept me here was Wil Reynolds classic "How Google Makes Liars out of the Good Guys in SEO"

As far back as 2012 Wil was concerned he was doing the right stuff and being beaten by cheaters, much like your post above. Spam won in 2012. It won in 2013. It can still win in 2015. But it's a LOT better. Penguin & Panda have cleaned up a great deal of spam.

I suppose the question is like buying a property that has a lake in the middle of your 4 acres. You start to dry up the lake and you make great progress.  One day 6 years from now you step in a bit of a puddle, your shoe gets ruined and you think "should I just move?!"  Don't move yet.

You have to do what makes your business successful within the bounds of what you feel is ethical & morally right. If you're asking for our permission, go for it. Do whatever you wish.

Ha, it happens. Every once in awhile I do a full audit on our thousands of clients. I find the strangest things - meta robots blocked, robots.txt blocked, client releases new site, doesn't tel us, no onsite done at all, homepage titles set to "Home."  It happens - things get lost in the mix.

Plus, most people deal with robots.txt and meta robots (at least more frequently).

The simplest thing for future reference is just to drop it in Screaming Frog (even the trial) and just see what you see.

Some of the data can be exported to Excel, some can't (as far as I can see.)

To get the data out that can be exported, it's almost always an option ON the chart itself.

I've attached a couple screenshots that show where you can find the exportable data.

Does that help?

y0PAAMva3.jpg mFBmU10JM.jpg Wtjbj6u.jpg

A lot of the links you have from .edu sites are linking to the https version of your site. You link to the http version in your profile. When you're looking in search console, which version are you looking at?

I was able to find the links in both Majestic and Ahrefs but many are https ... they may not show up in your link profile if you've only claimed the non-S versions. (I've seen stranger things in Search Console.)

I doubt Google is ignoring them but it may not be displaying all. They don't always show you everything they have and I always take SC links to be more of a representative example than a full collection.

First of all, I agree with everyone else but let me answer the question you asked.

Dofollow blogs often set themselves as dofollow to get links from being listed on dofollow blog lists, like the one you must've found. Once they get listed, they change back to nofollow so they don't leak their juice.

So after they were added to the list they simply changed their blog back. That would be my guess (without looking at the actual link.)

And no, there's no real benefit to doing blog comments simply for the sake of SEO. There are LOTS of reasons to leave comments though, so just do it naturally.