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It's not a problem, it's just a little bit of a wasted effort. First, EMD's have less of an impact as they once had - so rather than trying to game the SERP's with the micro-sites - you can just kill it with local content on things to do once you rent the car. Think of these other sites as opportunities to create an umbrella of related terms to your main keywords - with links back to your money site. Also would 100% differentiate the layouts for each site - the more unique each site - the more value your links will have within your network of websites.

Long story short, if you can host your sub-domain in a sub-folder, it'll be better. However, a lot of times for security issues and hosting constraints, companies end up hosting blogs on separate domains or sub-domains. I'd suggest you look into reverse proxy. That can make your blog URL look like yourdomain.com/blog I hope that helps

Hi There 1. It could still be in the index because they are 302 redirect and not 301. 302 is temporary, and therefore Google may not de-index those URLs. It also takes time. I've seen Google take months to noindex redirecting URLs. Also, make sure you are not blocking crawling of the dev site, or Google will not see the redirects. 2. I am not sure how they got there to begin with. I pretty much always can find some sort of error - maybe someone tweeted a staging URL, maybe crawling wasn't blocked, maybe there was one link to staging from the live site etc etc. Regardless - somehow Google crawled it To prevent this in the future always block crawling of staging servers well before you ever put anything on them. 3. Usually Google tries to sort this out. They won't give you a penalty for "technical" duplicate content (penalties are more for "malicious" duplicate content ie: stealing people's content). So you won't get penalized, but the more you can help Google out by sorting it out, the more time Google can spend crawling the correct site etc. What I would do now is, if you do want the staging URLs to redirect (which might not be the best solution if you want to ever go back and work on the staging server again) - but if you do, use 301 redirects and make sure you are allowing crawling of the staging site. Keep it registered in webmaster tools and this way you can monitor the indexation levels.

Hello! I'm afraid in Moz Analytics we can only show a smaller timeframe at once and the best way to maintain historical data is to setup custom reports, which will automatically generate and store a PDF copy under the custom reports section. You can do this for any module you want to track and there is no limit to how many reports you can create. Hope this helps and I apologize for any inconvenience.

Yeah, practically every site out there gets those so I would look at the other reasons for the traffic drop. If it's really bothering you then just domain:askives.com each of those and submit them.

Hi there, Thanks for your feedback! We don't currently have a way for you to add additional emails on an account, but this is actually something is currently in development. Right now, the only place where you can have reports sent to alternate email addresses is through your Custom Reports - but that doesn't include options for the CSVs that you can request in other areas of the tools. We don't have an ETA of when this feature of additional emails on the account will be released, but hold tight - we're working on it!

ps - any idea how to add schema for the regions served ? for example my clients business address is in are A but their customer and regions they serve are in areas B, C & D if you see what i mean and really want to target local search (in part by applying region specific schema) for these regions not just the company address address Any advice much appreciated ? all best dan

What Tim said. And be sure to add it again on Webmaster tools

Buzzsumo is another good source of trending information. It's a hubspot product that allows you to search for what's being shared (popular) by domain or key phrase. There are free and paid versions of the tool. The free one is probably good enough for your purposes.

Hey Juice, I had the same thing happen on a very well optimized site with great backlinks. I found that I had 2046 links from m(dot)biz linking to me that did not show in any tools but did show in GWT inbound links. These were all do-follow with the title tag as the anchor text. and about a third of them popped up right before the algo change. I have disavowed them, and waiting to see if I get the change in rankings back like before. I wanted to see if you have found a different issue or if you might have also been link spammed by a similar site. Dogfish

Hey, Just wanted to pass along an update that this should be fixed now and I do apologize for any issues you might have had during this period. The data should be restored and back to normal. If there is anything else we can do reach us at help@moz.com Have a great day.

The shortest and simple answer to that is forget website B and stick to website A combining or 301ing both website will hurt the reputation of website A as well. Hope this helps!

Moosa, the post you have written is a good one, out of curiosity though, what are your thoughts on the positioning of the link in the body of a webpage? It has been said that a link at the top of the body content vs. down the bottom is more favourable? Is that something you agree with? Samafaq, I'm a great believer that the best way to get links is through great content that is well marketed and publicised. This is not easy to achieve, but if it can be mastered and done effectively, it is usually what will produce natural links that best indicate to Google an authoritative site. See this article for more info: http://www.lunametrics.com/website-traffic/seo/link-bait/#sr=g&m=o&cp=or&ct=-tmc&st=(opu qspwjefe)&ts=1413991327

Thank you Tim, Your response certainly makes much sense and I have noted it in my strategy for this clients. Much appreciated! Meaghan

I'll just add that make sure you don't overlook t.co referrals. This is Twitter's link shortener that can appear in your referral reports instead of social traffic.

From an SEO perspective, duplicate content and how it is handled is important.  There are two ways to handle it.  The first is to determine which page you identify as the "original".  In this case, I'm guessing that would be the testimonials page.  The next step is to add a canonical tag to any page that uses the same content.  (In your case that would be "our work/project" page).  The canonical tag will point to the orignal page. One thing to keep in mind is that you should only use canonical tags if both pages have the exact same (or almost the exact same content).  If the "our work/project" page has multiple testimonials on it, then that page would actually have content that a search engine would deem unique, even thought it consists of a compilation of content that appears elsewhere. This moz post provides a pretty good overview of how to use canonicals.  http://moz.com/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not

Depending on how often (how little) you update the blog it could technically been seen as duplicate content. Pagination (rel=next/prev) doesn't apply to those category pages, but you definitely do want them indexed so don't noindex or rel=canonical them. Your archive pages are that important, but you don't really need to noindex them also. If you end up finding that the archive pages are duplicating some of your regular blog pages or category pages, then throw a noindex,follow on them. Hope this helps!

Hi Ryan, That's a difficult situation! Usually, what I've found in this situation is that you have to spend an hour or two backtracking to discover where the name of one business is being conflated with the address/phone/website of the other. This might exist on the company's website or website, or it might exist in citations, or elsewhere. In many cases, this type of conflation is what has caused the confusion on Google's part. It's really important when you have a franchise that you've done everything you possibly can to differentiate the various branches, including different addresses, phone numbers, landing page URLs or websites, content, citations, etc. Even then, Google can sometimes become confused about this scenario and begin merging down details. So, if you can backtrack to a source for this confusion and correct it, that may resolve the issue. You can also try to contact Google directly about this (go here and click the contact us button https://support.google.com/business/?hl=en&rd=1#topic=4539639) but you may very well get the answer, "That result is generate algorithmically and we can't do anything about it." Might be worth a try anyway.

I presume everyone here has seen the news about UK Moz local now available but just letting you know here just in case not since at least 3 of you have expressed interest on this thread: https://moz.com/local/overview All Best Dan

Thanks for the responses. Looks like bit of a tough road ahead, but long term will be much for the better in cleaning up the (off)site. The disavow exercise has been interesting in getting to review links in placed. There have been some strange links placed and very difficult to contact some websites to get them removed, but will try. All the very best