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Thanks man!

You mean aside from the fact that I've been writing web pages for 15 years, do I have an article somewhere that someone who "discovered" the internet 5 years ago wrote to "prove" the point?  No.  Don't have it.  However, I dropped a brand new, nicely optimized page on my website yesterday afternoon, and before midnight it was #4 on Google. Here's the query: "Morningside Recovery Complaints" You'll see the page sitting fat and happy at #4.

I just wanted to add to this, in SEO's presepective, if you have one big site then you will only need to build backlinks for one site.  On the other hand, if you have multiple sites, you will have to build separate links for each site which causes more work and more complicated to manage. In addition, freshness plays a role in SEO; therefore, if you have a big website, you will have more topics you can create contents for which means you can frequenly update your website. Of course, there is always some cons.  If the big site falls, all of them falls together.

YUP.

Thanks so much Ross!

You have a huge amount of high DA links, specifically from boardingarea, hyatt blogs and appsumo.  You need to build a better link profile, not focus so much on 3 sites with high DA, and get links more naturally as often as possible.  Almost every link on your OSE is a "controlled" link - blog comments, profiles, appsumo pages, etc. These links are bad by themselves - they're actually good.  But because they're such a high percentage of what you have as a whole, it can look to Google like you're not really all that popular except to 3 sites. You have 1850 links on OSE from 46 domains - about 35 links per domain, a LOT.  Also, nearly 100% of your anchor text is branded.  That tells me you're controlling it. If I can see you're controlling the anchor text, Google can see it.  Again, diversity is best. 202 of your 1850 links are nofollow, 1650 are dofollow.  As before, a high ratio of nofollow signals spam or controlled link building.  Natural nofollow profiles have 5-10% nofollow ratios, yours is 16% which is a touch high. So I would start with your actual link profile.  It's not likely AIOSEO unless you're doubling up on titles and meta, you should be ok. Also, when you pin things, don't use the non-www version of your site.  Several of your pins have "http://noobtraveler.com" instead of www-noobtraveler.com  I would be as consistent as possible on that particular issue.

Hi Jo Ann, Local is not about how many websites you have, but how many physical locations a business has. So, one business location = one local listing. If you've got 2 business locations and they each have a unique phone number, that = 2 listings. You can created these listings via the old Google Places dashboard, and that will automatically generate Google+ Local pages, but multi-location businesses cannot merge the social features of a Google+ Business Page with their Google+ Local page at this point. Hope this helps!

Currently I am using free version of ahrefs.com, will convert account into paid if required. I also use opensiteexplorer but I like anchor text distribution functionality of ahefs.com.

Wanted to add one more thing.  Grrr....Q&A is being buggy for me today...just typed a bunch and then lost it. You could go after duplicates by filing DMCA takedown requests but it is likely more hassle than it is worth. Also, to help you build content that outshines your competitors, this may help.  When my husband was buying our Rancillo he did a pile of online research.  He ended up spending most of his time on Youtube watching videos of how each machine worked.  If you can provide information that people can't get on other sites then Google will like you, visitors will stay longer and you will probably sell more machines.

No, it didn't change how the metrics were calculated, but as the index size and contents varies each time, the data that is put into the metrics changes each time. What you're doing is what we recommend -- pay more attention to how you compare to your competitors each time rather than how you compare from crawl to crawl.

Hi Eric, Are the links to your own website within the blog post followed? Is your guest blog post indexed by Google? Is the Blog that you posted your article on ranking for it's own brand terms (i.e. not penalised)? If you can answer yes to these three questions then there is a very high chance that PageRank (or link juice if you prefer) will be passed from the guest post to your site, how much that moves the needle is subjective. As Tom advises it is much better to try to aim your guest post efforts at sites that has an audience: When I am qualifying sites for guest post opportunities then I will check the following: 1. Their articles receive a large number of social shares 2. They have a large RSS subscriber base or email list 3. The blog posts receive comments There is a good post by James Agate on this topic over on the Moz blog Ideally you want to be posting on places that your customers will hang out however they maybe direct competitors and it will be impossible to secure an opportunity. For my clients I make sure the blog’s topic is relevant to the company’s (brand) readership/customers. I make sure the blog content is in line with the buyer personas outlined and their marketing journey, this does not necessarily mean that they are within the same niche but could be in a complimentary niche. These guest posting opportunities will probably be a little tougher to secure but the extra effort will be worth it in terms of links, social shares and referral traffic.

Hi, This is your answer http://www.google.com.au/insidesearch/features/search/knowledge.html

Was this for the same search phrases as before Jo Ann? Has nothing changed from the listings? No more additions etc? Edit- Actually, when I search for "Kelowna Homes For Sale", I see you at the end of the local listings. Andy

Anyone big enough is generally fine. I've nothing against hostgator, rackspace, ukfast, etc. I'd only really stay away from GoDaddy hosting. I use - http://www.5quidhost.co.uk/ - for a lot of sites. I believe these guys are pretty good and run by a bunch of goons from the SA forums - http://www.lithiumhosting.com/