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Hi Joe, My guess (and purely a guess) would be that perhaps it is coming from text that is commented out in your Wordpress template. You could check the code and see if you find it there. I ran the SEOmoz Term Extractor tool for a couple of individual pages and it doesn't appear in the list of targeted keywords. If you can identify exactly where it is coming from (or establish that it is definitely not included repetitively in your code) you could try asking at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters whether this is a known issue or something to be concerned about. Hope that helps, Sha

I have seen one interesting solution for this in retail/ecommerce industry. Knowing that iPhone will evolve in different versions webmasters name their pages: domain.com/iphone (not domain.com/iphone4) The version is contained in changeable elements such as title tag, meta description and content. Another thing you can do is merge various page of similar or same content into one canonical version (using rel="canonical"). When pages expire it would be a good idea to take users to the next best piece of content - to maximise SEO value you would redirect them using 301 if the change is permanent or 302 if you anticipate the job to come back at some point in time. By recycling the same URL after job re-appears you will be preventing creation of disposable URLs and runa  cleaner site. Any old links pointing to those pages will not be going to a 404 page but to the old URL thus capturing the much needed link juice in the correct place.

Hi Derek, the change of focus from pure/classic SEO to a larger Inbound Marketing vision that you have noticed both by SEOmoz and Distilled is the consequence of the evolution of Search Marketing itself. I suggest you to check out the 2011 Search Engine Ranking Survey by SEOmoz itself, which is showing how just the 42% of the ranking factors are links related (Page Level and Domain Level). Summed the links' factor still have a relative majority. And surely they lost % respect the 2009 version of the survey. Social Signals have taken a great importance and the survey shows how it is common the idea they will be even more important in the future. Just for this reason it is good to talk and dive deeper into the relation existing between SEO and Social Media. And regarding the page metrics, the survey again shows how them are considered to be important now and more in the future. The reason is quite clear: Panda. CTR, Bounce et al are probably to be considered Panda factors... as it is the duplication issue. Because of that it is overly important to talk and dive into what cause those metrics to be good or bad, and it is usually the Content. Are links neglected. I don't think so, and a lot of posts I've read both here and in the Distilled blog confirm my belief. Just that links acquisition is thought differently, "inboundly", that says: as content and expertise redistributed in any possible online channel that can lead traffic, generate social buzz and cause natural linking. Because, and that is the strength of the Inbound Marketing approach, it is now not possible anymore to rely on just one tactic to gain visibility, traffic, conversions and ROI, but a strategy that sees the integration of SEO, Content Marketing and Social Media. Ok... I hope I helped you understand why this "change".

Probably not. I would create additional pages just for Toronto.

Hi Wayne, When you choose Root Domain, you get three results DA (Domain Authority) DmR (Domain mozRank) and Dmt (Domain mozTrust) for the entire domain. When you set it to Subdomain, you get only DmR and DmT for the active subdomain. For example, if the URL in the address bar is www.yourdomain.com, then the DmR and DmT are for the www subdomain only. If the URL is another.yourdomain.com, then the DmR and DmT are for the another subdomain only etc. You can check this by setting your MozBar to "Root Domain" and going to http://googleblog.blogspot.com/. Once the page is loaded, change the MozBar setting to "Subdomain" and you will see the results change. Then, replace googleblog with www and you will actually see the results change and change again as the page redirects to yet another subdomain. kinda fun actually Hope that helps, Sha

I think your analysis and recommendations are right on target- don't second guess yourself unless your client is willing to gamble. That said, there are creative ways to get high quality links through networking. The line in the sand between black and white is in constant flux and this is a great example of where this battle continues to rage on. If those inbound links that gave your competitor a boost were industry related, I might think that you've met your match and would need to work harder.  However, the unrelated industry links may not have caught them yet, but are you willing to take that risk?  Is your client? Much of the work in SEO is articulating the opportunities, cost, and risks of chasing the dragon.  If you move too quickly, you may get burned.  Arguing the slow and consistent approach isn't always the best route for a given situation, but arguing against the easy and sly SERP climb is.

Report the link exchange system to Google and they may take action on it.I would not follow suit, you'll put your site at risk if you do black hat SEO. "The websites linking to the competitor are not related sites, or particularly well ranking sites, so shouldn't really give a boost, but it's obvious they are." Just because a site is not related or ranking well does not mean anything, they are still passing PR and they are probably using the correct anchor text.

Yes they're all very well categorised appropriately.  It's just that its a long list so i'm wondering whether this is impacting negatively on my SEO efforts.

We have already done that in  Webmaster tools but there is no change in the indexing rate. We would like to know if the hosting change from US to India is affecting us and if yes is there a way to fix it.

Hi Thomas, I think this is a question that comes up often. One way to do it is to have both types on your page like we do on our blog. You'll notice the SEOmoz page "like" in the right nav bar, and the post "like" at the bottom of the post. If you're trying to figure out the best thing to do purely for SEO purposes, then I'd say you want them to like the actual URL of the content. I say that because Google now shows social sharing in the SERPs. So if for example you're logged in and do a search, if you have a connected friend on FB who has shared content on that topic it would show their face in the SERPs. Hope this helps!

Hi! Your question is not so simple at all. The reason? Simple: it is not a matter of factors, but a matter of how the web is used, how SEOs has done SEO in their countries and the "search market" competitiveness existing in any countries To give you an example: US Search Market is surely the most competitive of all... you can see it indirectly checking the cost per keywords in Adwords. For a site in the States it is not enough to do "simple SEO", are needed more links and unique domains linking to you, you have much more "noise" (aka spam sites) to fight against, also the Social signals needed are much more than somewhere else. On the contrary, in a Market like the Italian one, that is smaller, things can be easier. You can rely more on things like old classic article marketing (I see sites ranking great just with that), really good sites aren't so many, just a minority of sites do a good SEO... On the other hand, because of the cultural gap, an American SEO probably won't be so good doing Italian SEO. Not just because of the language, but also because he doesn't know the mentality and, therefore, how Italian search things in the Internet.

Ah, good question. At the moment this project is still in planning, so I don't have a firm ETA yet. There's a good chance we will release the task list functionality in phases and I'm hoping to have a first phase out before the end of the year. I'll be sure to share some more information when the plan is better defined.

Great insight Highland!!!

If you're changing IPs, I would be sure to lower your DNS time-to-live(TTL) to 1 hour about a day before the move. This would make your DNS rollover much faster. Not an SEO thing, per se, but something that certainly helps Googlebot.