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The Pagerank of a page, no matter what page it is, will flow out of the page to the pages to which it is linked.  The amount of Pagerank that is passed to a specific page is determined the amount of pagerank the linking page has, the number of links on that page, and the subtraction of a certain percentage of Pagerank (because the algorithm determines that there will always be some lost). Take your first example: Let's say the homepage has 100 units of link juice (just work with me here).  And let's say the homepage has 16 links on it to 16 pages and the percentage of link juice lost off is 20% (I'm not aware they've ever told us exactly how much is lost).  After the 20% decrease, the homepage has 80 units of link juice to pass on to the linked pages.  Since there are 16 links, each page gets 5 units of link juice (80/16=5). So, in the case of your first example, where a site's homepage has a lot of links coming to it and the category and product pages don't have any, that may be alright for them.  If they have a good link structure, they may pass enough Pagerank through their internal links to the category and product pages to give them enough authority to out rank other similar product pages.  This actually works very well for sites because typically you want the homepage to rank for more general keywords which are more competitive and category and product pages to rank for more specific keywords which are less competitive.  So, the pages that have the most authority are competing for the most competitive keywords. In your second example, it works similarly, the blog pages each pass a certain amount of Pagerank to the homepage based on how many links each blog post gets (and how authoritative those links are) and how many links are on those blog post pages.  Each post may be passing only a small amount of Pagerank, but since the blog has a lot of blog posts all linking to the homepage, it starts to add up.  That builds up the Pagerank of the homepage, which can then be passed on the category and product pages.  You can also pass Pagerank directly to the product pages by linking to them in the blog posts. As to whether having a relevant keyword in the anchor text increases the amount of Pagerank passed in the link, no it doesn't.  It can, however, contribute to the linked page's link reputation.  The anchor text in the links to a page are one signal to the search engines of what that page is about and, thus, what keywords that page should rank for.  So, having relevant keywords in the anchor text, can help a page to rank better for specific keywords because it increases the page's reputation for that keyword.  This, however, I believe has been somewhat weakened lately with Google's updates.  Do to spam abuse, I think Google has lessened the signal of anchor text. I hope this to make it more clear for you. Kurt Steinbrueck OurChurch.Com

Hi, ive tried cloudflare before. Problem is that i am using SSL for some of my pages, so Cloudflare doesn't play nice unless I pay them. Also, I am using amazon cdn - does that work with cloudflare or is it a bit ott? I will take a look at your links and thanks!

I think the "avoids repetition" is in reference to anchor text or alt text to two different pages. For example, if Page A and Page B are both priority pages and both in the main navigation menu, their anchor text or alt text should be different. That way, when Google displays them as site links, they both won't display the same text in the site link.

Thank you for your response. All organic search dropped - google, bing, yahoo, etc.. Index status looks normal through that time period. Impressions and clicks carried the same pattern as usual - no change there.

Lynn, We had a few "site:" queries that we were watching as the full URLs came back replacing the truncated ones, for example: site:eventective.com/usa/Georgia/Atlanta.  When we discovered the original problem, almost every listing page in those SERPs had a truncated URL, but by the start of last week it had gradually cleared up to only 6 or 7 listings with truncated URLs while all others had the full URL.  Then suddenly we had 5 pages (50 listings) of truncated URLs and now almost 300 of them for that one query have the truncated version indexed.  It appears to be continuing. Another detail I noticed was in Webmaster Tools.  All of our listings are in our sitemap with the full URL.  When we had this problem before only about 50% of our pages listed in our sitemap were indexed, assuming that is because the truncated ones were in the index instead of the full URLs that were in the sitemap.  As the truncated URL problem cleared up that ratio improved to the point where it was pretty steady at about 96-97% of our pages in our sitemap were indexed.  Once this problem started to reappear that number dropped down to 90% and kept going down to the point where it is at 77% now. The only real change we made was an upgrade to our server hardware at our hosting company. I've considered disallowing the truncated URL pattern in the robots.txt, but I really shouldn't have to do that with the 301. I'm starting to wonder whether google is sending us a signal that they like the shorter version of the URL better. Thanks for taking the time to take a look at it. Michael

Just curious,Do you know of a way to include universal results in rank report exports? I have been unable to figure out how to do this.

Yeah any custom of the AIO custom fields you've configured will probably need to be re-entered into Yoast's custom fields. You can just copy and paste these out to a spreadsheet or something and then paste them back into the Yoast custom fields. So yes, the functionality is retained to have separate search engine titles/descriptions and blog page titles/descriptions

I'm going to guess your client got impacted b the Penguin 2.1 update.  It may well not be a case of your client getting penalized however as opposed to the other sites getting rewarded.  I've been up against Findlaw, etc ... they have good links. I have to guess that if we're honest - they have better links that your client and your clients links got devalued in the update.  So it's more a case of the client losing weight than directories being increased in value.

Omar, well the traffic from google.com.sa is landing on the root / ... and one thing that "might" be it is Siri now uses Bing and Google for its searchs. probably is affection all google including .com we trying to segmented using referral vs direct vs bing vs anything and there is no evidence yet that the traffic has been "replaced" by another channel

I'm seeing some growth starting around Oct 7th, but unlike you, I'm seeing this both for US and other countries, though all coming from the same site, so a bit different situation.

http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguintool/ offers a cool overlay of your organic traffic.. and offers a good insight to see how you were effected by each known update. Now from recovering. This will cost you money but you can recover in less then 2 weeks in my experience but its going to cost you about $600 in just tools plus about 300 or so in link removals. http://www.linkresearchtools.com/products-overview/ - you need the superhero plan. Looking here they have a October sale which saves you a little over 100 bucks. Cool so there is 400 bucks. Next: http://www.rmoov.com/ go get this for a month. Its a 100 bucks. Now what you want to do is go through and run their detox tool. Get the ones that are not indexed and the toxic ones. Open up both excel spreadsheets and copy the pages that are linking to you. Open a new excel sheet remove duplicate rows or if you want to do it quick you can just use http://textmechanic.com/Remove-Duplicate-Lines.html Next you take your list of URLs and run that through rmoov. Next it will do its thing go through the campaign settings and check Add Report Back Link to Webmaster Email & FlipFlop Emails. FlipFlop Emails basically sends one time to one email for that domain if it found more then one - it will send next time to that one. Once it finds all the contact information what you want to do next is go through and enter the campaign. There is a Show Problems checkbox. See what ones are missing contact info. Some of these are going to be tough to find so you will have to delete some of them but; please.. take your time and try to find out who it is. Sometimes its just as doing a whois again.. and you will see that they have a name or another domain you can google to dig deeper. Now what you're going to want to do is go through each one of these and make sure there are no bad links here.. just make a triple spot check and qualify them. Sometimes the most I had to remove 4 or 5 but Im glad I did. Sometimes you will find that the links it found was just a different view of the same link. So you can just go there and clean it up. Next what you want to do is send out the campaign email. What this basically does is sends out a email every single day to these guys until they remove it. I found that sometimes the webmaster doesnt even reply but just deletes them and if it goes though and sees that its a deadlink, win. You will get people asking from 3 bucks to 25.. I found that saying: if I disavow you - it doesnt help One guy just raised the price. Just pay them. I found a lot of people who have these directory networks and he found 1000s of directory links he could remove. That can get costly - I just make a note ( rmoov has a good note taker for each site ) and if they want 3000 bucks, screw them, disavow and thanks for the list. After you run that for a week. Take the clean disavow and upload that. Next - run that campaign again and while thats running you can submit your notes in your reconsideration requests. I talked to so and so, I paid this and this is when. I even add paypal transaction ids. The next thing you can do is when your replying to the web masters is use the note system in rmoov, and when they remove it, and you check, click the link thats in the email which reports back to rmoov that its removed. Now - I see that once you submit your reconsideration request it takes about 8 business days to get back. Everytime I do this ( more then once ) I get a email saying the manual action has been revoked. Now that you have a list of what links you removed. Right? Now Im sure you have a link indexing service or a tool that does it.. run that to the ones thats been removed. Im not sure how much this step helps but we all know that the disavow list that you have it takes some time for google-bot to run through this and recheck and do what it does. So to speed up a speedy recovery, I do that. At the end of the day, end your subscription with rmoov and just let it run for the rest of the month and you may get people mad and they just remove the links so you stop emailing them. So keep a eye on the email and you can get some more wins from it. This got a little too long. Im sorry. When you do something so many times its easy to talk about.

Thank you Kurt, that's exactly what I thought but I wanted to have confirmation from the experts community. Thank you again!

Hi There I am not seeing any sex titles, where exactly are these showing up, in Google search results? Are you on Google.com or a different country? I don't see an issue with the replytocom since there is a canonical tag on that page pointing back to the original URL, so you should be all set there! -Dan

They're still relevant, especially for image search. I'd change one thing in your strategy though... From "focused on primary page keyword" to "focused on describing the image" Assuming you're using images relevant to the topic you can do both, but when you have to make a choice between those two choose the latter.

Can you give some insight on creating content for a classified site (site with classified ads)?

The "good" links we disavowed earlier are ranking well on Google. Most are from high quality sites related to the same niche. The issue was, the reconsideration request got rejected the twice. The example links mentioned in the response were all created by our site visitors. We were in now way responsible for the links placed on those pages. The pages were from BlogSpot, Wordpress and some really popular forums with content created by the users. But we had to disavow those as well and similar pages to get the penalty revoked. We never checked the page quality and authority that time. We checked later when the traffic dropped and found a lot of pages to be good.

Yes it was an unatural links penalty that we solved by using the links disavow tool and reconsideration requests. I would say that we saw improvement on some keywords quite instantly but others lets say 1 month after wards. There has now been about 4 months since we had it lifted and generally speaking we have seen improvements apart from this one keywords (which the client is heavily focused on). Thoughts?

These are personal opinions... you will find lots of people who disagree... Google still gives a good bonus to exact match domains in the search results.  I own several and believe this is true.   They will not automatically rank you for highly competitive money keywords.  You must still work there - but not quite as hard. Lots of people think that EMDs get an unfair advantage in the SERPs.  These are people who purchased their domain late, want to buy cheap, or just don't understand that prime domains are just like Main Street real estate in a prosperous town.  If you are willing to pay the obscene price you will get all of the benefits.  I go after them.  I want the EMD for my important sites. Lots of people talk about the EMD penalty... they are full of beans.   What they think is a penalty is the EMDs not getting quite the full bonus that they did in the past.   Now, if you publish crap on an EMD, that EMD will not perform well - just like publishing crap on any other domain. Lots of people think that a partial match domain gives a big bonus in the SERPS... I'd say don't waste your time unless you have a brandable slogan or name. Conversion rates can be higher on exact match domains.  That is my experience. It is easier to get cooperation from other people if you own an important EMD.   The EMD can give you immediate credibility even if undeserved. Most importantly... owning the EMD gives me mental energy.  If I owned baloney.com then I would be the big baloney and build the best site around for that topic.  This mindset is more powerful than any SEO.

Hi Adnan, True local results revolve around cities, not counties, and inclusion in the local pack of results typically requires having a physical location in the city of search. Beyond this, you can develop content for additional cities where you're not physically located, and that could include content you develop for counties, too, if research indicates county terms are important in your niche, but the goal of this work would typically be organic visibility rather than visibility in Google's local pack of results. Hope this helps!