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Thank you for the thoughtful and thorough response, Miriam! I really appreciate it. I am looking forward to seeing the annual Local Search Ranking Factors 2017 study once that is released—I will keep an eye out for it! Thanks again!

It's always my pleasure! I appreciate the good question you asked.

To answer your question directly before I explain, I believe it's a combination of Google not really caring about the exact words you use and the strongest sites in this vertical using "flooring". The easiest way to think about keywords these days is in terms of "themes" rather than individual words. I just tried this in Google AU and the result is actually quite an interesting demonstration of search themes because I've got results ranging from Wood Floor Solutions to Timber Flooring and even Hardwood Floor. Here's my understanding of what we're seeing here: Google isn't all that interested in exact-match these days and instead tries to determine your intent and offer what it believes to be the most qualified results for that intent. For this particular search phrase, it's assuming that rather than wanting to see pictures of a wood floor, you're likely actually looking for information on some kind of wooden flooring options. So, that's what you've been given; the strongest websites in your local area that offer various forms of wooden flooring, paying no attention to the phrasing of the topic. Much like the clips from College Humour, If Google Was a Guy, if you were to walk up to someone on the street and ask for "wood floor", they're going to point you to the closest flooring expert(s) they know. This is basically how Google connects the dots these days too, albeit a grossly oversimplified explanation.

I'm not understanding. Is the URL Alias a canonical or a redirect? If it is canonical, then Google should not redirect but stay on the URL you've entered into the address bar. It may or may not show up in search results. The canonical is telling Google that your preference is to have only the Alias indexed but it's okay to have visitors land and stay on the original URL. Google treats it as a preference, not a directive, meaning it may or may not respect your wishes. If the alias is a redirect, then when you enter the first URL into the address bar you should be automatically redirected to the second. Only the 2nd will be indexed and show up in search results. If Google is finding those, perhaps they were indexed at one time and still haven't fallen out. I'd also check the sitemap to see if they're listed there. Hope that helps.

I'm not aware of any recent updates to Bing's algo (sometimes they are documented on their blog). Since Yahoo is largely powered by Bing, it is reasonable to expect that you would see both drop in performance. Are there any similar features across all your sites which may have become devalued? Are you using Bing Webmaster Tools (which are great BTW)?

I totally agree with you that affiliate links should not help rankings and many mention that they should always be nofollowed, though a lot of people don't (I probably have some followed affiliate links out there somewhere on the Internet). Philosophically I am opposed to affiliate links helping the target site rank. I've also seen some sites get into trouble for having affiliates link with followed links, so I'd be careful of it myself if i was running an affiliate program.

Google started clamping down on PBNs a long time ago... http://searchengineland.com/google-targets-sites-using-private-blog-networks-manual-action-ranking-penalties-204000

While Page Authority is a primary factor in measuring Keyword Difficulty, the scales are not 1:1 such that you could simply compare PA to KD and know your likelihood of ranking. However, the speaker is certainly heading in the right direction with the thought process. What I would recommend is finding what keywords the page, or pages like it, on your site already rank in the top 3 for. Create a list in Keyword Explorer of those keywords and then look at the Average Keyword Difficulty which is shown on the Keyword Explorer Lists Dashboard. You can then use that number to determine if a keyword is worth going after because you know that your page is capable of (or not capable of) ranking for terms that difficulty. I made a video of the process using Google Search Console to find the keywords here... Good Luck!

Google is more interesting in the information you present users with and whether or not you can answer their query. Highlighting keywords may, to those not in the know, show that a website is more likely to answer a query, but in reality it may not be the case. It's falls under the same method of Google attributing actual meaning, for example "wood floor" could be perceived as "wooden floor" or "wood flooring" and so on, where those websites might help the user more so than the one which contains the exact keyword in the URL.

Hi! Jo from the Moz support team here. Unfortunately, you can't add more than 3 competitors per campaign. However, you do have the option to create a new campaign for the same website using another set of different competitors, if you wanted to do that. If you were looking for extra competitive link data, Open Site Explorer would give you the ability to compare up to 5 sites within the 'Compare Link Metrics' tab, here is the guide. I hope that helps! Best, Jo

Hi, You answered your question yourself if link is natural then no need to worry. Thanks

Hi James, Thanks for the answer. Let me elaborate the question: Generally homepage will be optimised and expected to rank for "primary keyword". And the other landing pages are optimised and expected for "secondary keywords". So, now let's take homepage is ranking well for "primary keyword"; does this impact on improving rankings of other landing pages for "secondary keywords"? And vice versa....if couple of landing pages are ranking well for "secondary keywords"; does this impact on improving ranking of homepage? I am just wondering about it. Because I doubt if website (homepage) is not ranking well, will this push other ranking pages little down?

I have the simplest way to think about this. If the link is pointing out to the website you trust and you think your audience will find it useful, keep it followed. However, if the links are not trustworthy, atleast put a no-follow the link. Other then that there are Googe guidelines as you mentioned in your question. I think no following social media and wiki-pages is up to you as it will not make much of a difference in my opinion.

Moderator's Note: A response to this question was deleted on April 6, 2017, at 2:11 pm (as noted above) because it violates the Moz Community's code of conduct.

Excellent to hear. Ruling that possibility out, then, here are some additional questions in regards to Indexation, Accessibility, and Content taken directly form the Moz Site Audit Bootcamp: Is the load speed acceptable? Are any page errors inhibiting visitors? Are crawlers accidentally being disallowed? Has the page been affected by any search engine algorithm updates? Has the site been checked for duplicate page content, 5XX errors, 4XX errors, and crawl attempt errors? Does the page use any non-crawlable items such as iframes, flash, java, etc.? Are any other pages on the website internally linking to this page to indicate it's importance? Could the page be receiving a content penalty due to bad user experience, low quality content, irrelevance to topic, thin / short page, etc.? My hope is that you'll be able to use this as a checklist to further troubleshoot via the process of elimination. Also, if these aren't helpful, would you be up for sharing the URLs mentioned in your original question? Best, Zack

In a word, yes. However, if these links are new, I'd get the pages re-fetched. Give it a few days and check again.