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Hi Robert, Sorry for the late response. I took at peek at your campaign and couldn't spot any issues. Hopefully you're not having trouble anymore, but if you spot any irregularities please let us know! Cheers, Cyrus

A hyphen shouldn't be an issue. The best thing to do would be to send an email to help@moz.com listing which domain is having an issue, and we'll be able to look into it directly there. Thanks!

The links to sprint I am seeing are nofollowed.  There is also a tag on them that suggests that they are being automatically inserted by software as part of an advertising program. If that is correct then it is similar in nature to the way that programs like skimlinks work.  They look for particular terms and place monetised links on them.   If those links are no-followed then that would seem to be totally acceptable under Google guidelines.  What they don't like is selling links that "pass page rank", which the nofollow prevents. If you wanted to pursue that sort of approach then there are a number of programs and plugins that do this.  Personally I prefer links styled in such a way to be styled differently, so that users can understand which links are paid and which are editorial.

Hi, I'm wondering what implementation you used for the rel=canonical? I'm very surprised to hear that adding the tags negatively impacted the mobile site's ranking in the mobile SERPs; all it should have done is change the URL to the m. version. I would not recommend the workaround you suggested, as redirecting a ranking and indexed page to a noindexed page (let alone several noindexed pages) will most likely cause confusion for the crawler.

Thanks Gregory, its a tricky question.

I'd be inclined to suggest individual blogs on individual domains. Doing this will allow each blog to cater to that countries specific market and better engage your audience. Let's face it, something that is of interest to some in New Zealand is not necessarily of interest to a UK-based market. Let me know if you disagree and we can discuss further.

Nope, these are unrelated issues. The lack of meta descriptions is an error in your code.

Wow, I can say at the very least that your process shows perseverance! The advice that follows comes from a background in sales and marketing, less so in expert link-building. Your appeal to your target doesn't seem to offer a solution to a problem. You are stating that your product is 'useful,' 'beneficial,' and 'important'. Don't tell them. Show them. Does your article 'explain how to harness the wind so your community has water to drink'? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kamkwamba) Maybe your humanitarian market is not concerned about the lack of drinking water in African villages, but they do have a unique concern, and you need to connect with it. Keep in mind, more so than a target market of accountants or phlebotomists, humanitarians are moved by emotions. They are who they are and do what they do because they care. Choose your message accordingly. If I can say one last thing...less is more. Go get 'em tiger;)

One thing I forgot to mention... Your company likely services a very local area, correct? Are you including the names of the towns you service in the keyword phrases you hope to rank for? If not, perhaps that will have a positive effect on your ranking efforts. In my experience many people think they are targeting well-searched phrases, but they have done no research to back that up. Just guesswork. Or they think they are ranking well, but don't realize its for their brand, which they should rank well for! Or, they rank well for a phrase that is not worth targeting because it has minimal searches. Again, good luck;)

Using 2 SEO plugins can actually create conflicts with duplicate tags. Yoast SEO plugin does it all for you and it is highly recommended. But about your question, disabling the plugin won't delete the configuration (I think), so you can basically re-activate it later and have everything as it was. Removing/deleting the files of the plugin most likely will remove the configuration, but you if you are using another plugin, such as yoast, you should be good. Make sure to review the entire configuration of whatever plugin you use. Hope that helps!

Weird. We were having a problem where lots of our skill pages were getting our <noscript>text used as page descriptions on Google SERPS.  We added these comments, and Googlebot reverted to using our meta description as the page descriptions in SERPs.  It could have been a freak coincidence that Google stopped using our <noscript> text right after we implemented the tags, or possibly Google was (possibly accidentally) supporting them for web search awhile back when we originally did this, and now has stopped supporting it.  Anyways, our SERPS remain clean of our <noscript> text today (<a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.ixl.com/math/grade-5" target="_blank">example</a>).</p> <p>John Mueller recently commented on that Quora thread saying it won't do anything for web search, so IMO that puts this to rest.</p></noscript>

The best post/information I came across was what Geoff has written here: http://moz.com/blog/site-speed-are-you-fast-does-it-matter Under How important is Site Speed? In two words summary of Google and Matt Cutts reply is that its a factor, but a very small factor of the many factors involved in rankings. I am also interested in this question as much as you are, but in my efforts I haven't seen a noticeable change in rankings just solely related to speed, this includes TTFB and other speed improvements. Having said that. TTFB and overall speed optimization is important in conversions on your site and ultimately in providing better user experience, which is always really important. This leads to another question that you can ask, did improving TTFB improve conversions, or lower bounce rate, etc? This also is a great question, that I am curious in as well.  From my end I did not have a client that was that worried, or had a horrable TTFB that I could measure and notice a difference, but very interested if someone had this effect Hope this helps

On the dofollow vs. nofollow thing, I've written about it before: http://www.quora.com/Search-Engine-Optimization-SEO/Since-Quora-renders-all-outbound-links-with-nofollow-attribute-what-is-the-SEO-value-of-such-Quora-links-then Don't worry too much about that. I don't think it's suspicious to have 0 nofollow links, and I don't think Google could draw any valid conclusions based on that alone. Anchor text is a little trickier. Penguin initially set a pretty low bar - even at 50% high-value anchor text you were pretty much safe. They've since honed in, and will continue to do so. More importantly, they're looking at non-achor-text ways to target manipulative links. Generally speaking, if you can control the anchor text, it has a high potential to be a manipulative link. This is what happens when you "build" or "earn" links rather than trying to build an audience. Look one step down the funnel, instead: rather than looking about the perfect links individually, look at how you're going to get the perfect links. For example, rather than trying to build anchor text, build a good piece of content that will also get you relevant anchor text. Want to rank for insurance terms? Build a bunch of useful content pieces around insurance.

Replytocom is a native WordPress error that can be a bit of a headache. I actually just answered a similar question about this a few days ago. that question was partially about Disqus but is still relevant. Here's the answer from that one: Ah, Wordpress. The Replytocom parameter is an annoyance but can easily be fixed. Its not so much that removing Disqus is causing Replytocom... Disqus was just masking its presence. Replytocom exists as part of the native WordPress commenting system. Go to Webmaster Tools > Crawl > URL Parameters. Choose to Edit Replytocom, choose "Yes: Changes, reorders, or narrows page content", under How does it affect page content you can choose Other, and then choose to have Googlbot crawl No URLs with this parameter. You can also add replytocom to the Robots.txt for the blog to disallow it. And If you're using Yoast there's an option under SEO > Permalinks to remove ?replytocom variables. From Getting replytocom error when removed disqus comment system i want to remove the disqus

Can you run those searches in google and get your result to show? I've seen things where images results show in the main SERP but Webmaster Tools is counting as "organic" (not image) but it was an image with a weird/random filename. I'd try to replicate the result, see what's ranking there (image/webpage etc) and see if there's some weird occurrence of the keywords. But images would be my first guess. -Dan

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If you are changing your URL structure when you change your CMS, you should 301 redirect your important pages from the old site to the new site. If your URL structure is staying the same, you do not need to worry about implementing 301s to maintain your authority/rank. Your authorship should not be affected as long as your are staying on the same domain. Changing code (in your case a new CMS) and design can have an affect on your rankings. Having a responsive design is great for users and that is what you should be concerned most about. 301s are perfectly fine and are encouraged if you are changing your URL structure. Your other option would be to maintain your current URL structure with the site redesign. Someone asked about a Website Redesign SEO Checklist a couple of months ago and Thomas Zickell provided some good resources. Hope this helps. Mike

The way you are doing it is the actual/perfect way to do it. There is no automated way to do it, and if at any time a tool appears allowing you to make the exact same research and outreach, then you can forget about guest blogging as being helpful for SEO. Advise: keep doing it your way.

Bing cares a lot about errors, where Google is not as concerned as long as it can crawl your site. As Trenton suggests, use Bing Webmaster Tools and then use the Bing SEO Analyzer to get some insight into how Bing is crawling your site. I would also recommend reading 27 Things That Help and Hurt SEO on the Bing blogs - as this lets you know what to pay attention to and what to skip when doing SEO for Bing. Hope this helps. Mike