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Hi there, There isn't a definitive answer regarding the number of links that you should add. The way I'd suggest thinking about this is what would make sense for users - do they need to have links on every single page? Does it make sense for them to be able to click to different subdomains from anywhere or could you list them all on your homepage or another page? It's pretty common practice to cross link between subdomains that are related to each other, but you do want to be careful not to do it if it doesn't make sense i.e. if you're doing it just for SEO benefit, it's worth considering if it's the right thing to do. It's also worth avoiding a focus on keyword driven anchor text, because that could definitely be seen as manipulative if you overdo it. I hope that helps! Paddy

Hi Jay, I was going to direct you to the SEOChat forum but I think you may have posted there very recently. There is a sticky post on there regarding SEO tools that will have some good suggestions for you. Sadly, that post wasn't sticky enough that I could locate it just now. I think it was somewhere within this section: http://forums.seochat.com/guide-90/ I saw this answer in response to a similar question on SEO Chat and I've got to say, it's rather amusing: "The SEO software that is worth using is the one between your ears .... and yes that works with all browsers." Good luck in your quest!

Thanks everyone.  I really appreciate the time and effort each of you spent helping a newbie.  I will stop using them completely.

The legal wrangling aside (as this isn't something to concern ourselves with from a technical standpoint) I'd say this boils down to: If I redirect all of the established equity for one site well-established, authority site between two newly-established domains, will the new sites do as well, pro rata, as the original site? Short answer, no. The purpose of a 301 is to tell Search engines that the original content has been moved elsewhere. on a permanent basis. Between 2013 and early 2016, it was the case that approx 15% of PageRank was lost when using a 301. However, that is (thankfully) no longer the case *BUT **just because Google no longer imposes a penalty for 301 redirects, PageRank is only of hundreds of signals that Google uses when ranking web pages. In a perfect world, if you create a 301 redirect from one page to another where the content remains exactly the same AND  only the URL changes, then you should see no fall off in traffic. See: https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo Even if we assume that you have evenly (and successfully) divided 100% of the links between the two sites, with each page redirect passing over 100% of the link equity (and, in this hypothetical world, each page is carrying the same level of authority), you're still dividing the overall domain authority between two sites, so, even if everything goes perfectly when you create all of the redirects, you still end up with two sites which are weaker than the original. In reality, of course, you are unlikely to manage to pass on every drop of 'link juice' from each of the original pages, and not all pages will carry the same weight as the others (you could compare page authority in Moz and divide by overall "value" rather than number of pages but that's never going to be precise - or easy). And this is before all of the other  ranking signals come into play. I'd suggest the best you can do here is to carefully plan and execute the separation but both parties are going to lose out here - it's now a matter of trying to lose least. (*I like big buts and I cannot lie.)

Hi Rick, sorry for the hiatus, I have a couple other questions for you. 1. Have you set up conversion tracking? Has there been an increase in conversions? 2. Do you have any campaigns running? Print, broadcast, radio, etc.? Many offline campaigns cause a boost in organic searches for my clients.

Hey there! It's less an issue of a bug in our system and more a factor of how the index was formed this time around. We expect data to normalize and stabilize after our next index update.

Yep. Spot on advice from John. I always like to keep in mind how your page content would sound if you read it out loud. If you're not sure, do exactly that, preferably to a friend and get them to tell you when it sounds like you're labouring the point. Always, ALWAYS make the user experience your primary focus. If you can clearly explain to the user what it is you're offering - without repeating yourself endlessly- then the search engines will be smart enough to pick this up. Now there's no harm in using your keyphrase (and synonyms) a couple of times throughout your content but only when it's needed for clarity. I understand how Yoast's SEO plugin can give you green light fever, but as is often the case, less is more.

Thanks just what i wanted to know.

Sometimes it's easy to be blinded by the technical aspects of SEO and overlook the most basic things. Put it this way, my troubleshooting started from the links down, rather than the site up, so don't feel too bad - there's a lesson there for all of us, I'd say. P.S. I think I preferred Toast Good luck and happy snapping!

As part of the normal backlink profile you would absolutely expect to see some nofollow links (In many cases, you can expect to see more nofollow than follow (Moz's inbound links have a ratio of something close to 40% follow to 60% nofollow). Of course, if you only have a few inbound links there's every chance that 100% of them could be passing equity. However, as your site grows, you'd definitely expect to see that percentage drop off. Being honest, I can only see this ratio being something to concern yourself with if you are trying to make your backlink profile "look natural", rather than allowing to develop naturally. Often, the kind of places that allow you to "get" dofollow links (i.e. paid links/directories etc.) are of lower quality and Google will have a pretty good understanding what they're up to and simply discount the links, which could see you investing a lot of effort and gaining nothing of any worth at the end. So, in summary, there is no optimal ratio of follow/nofollow links, only good links (natural/relevant) and bad links (paid/spammy). Concentrate your efforts on building great contents, satisfying your visitors (by giving them what they want) and building relationships within your vertical and you'll gain far more from fewer links. It may seem counter-intuitive, especially if you see your competitors gaming the system, but their success will likely be short-lived. I know that the "build great content" and "putting the user first" messages can seem a little trite, but you hear it a lot because it's true. Good luck with your project!

As long as each page has useful, unique content, shouldn't be an issue. e.g. I create a page for each town that a restaurant delivers to. I include some random facts about the town (large companies, population, etc - stuff you can grab from city-data.com), directions from that town to the restaurant, some popular dishes and a paragraph of unique text tailored for visitors from that town. Google has an issue with you scraping a database of every city in USA, templating out some content and tweaking your same keyword across all of those pages.

Thank you Paul! I guess it patience is what is needed. But also, I would like to be prepared and help google to decide on which menu-items to display as sitelinks. As I understand it, the reason for the confusion between the site-links from the old and the new site on the domain is that google does not see the new site as a completely new site. It just see change. It has kept some of the old information and registered some of the new. So I guess the follow up question is this. Is it right that the search engine robots are quick to register new content (say posts and pages) and slower to register changes in the architecture of a site? plovsky

Here is the official suggested markup: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6340290?hl=en On any non-AMP page, reference the AMP version of the page to let Google and other platforms know about it: On the AMP page, add the following text to reference its non-AMP canonical version:

Thanks, Oleg. Appreciate your response.

You should remove it if possible. No reason to link to a dead link (poor ux, waste crawler time) or call a non-existent resource (slow site down). However, I don't think it will make any noticeable effect on your rankings.

This list might give you some structure to your planning (https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015) If you're ranking well already and are just freshening up, rather than changing the direction of your business, don't throw the baby out with the bath water - your old content may be a little dusty but it's why you have the rankings you do now. Ditching old content would see your rankings plummet. You can move it elsewhere within your site by all means but ensure it remains accessible and create 301 redirects for every page. If the passage of time has left some of your content a little outdated, you'd be better to add visible updates with links to updated articles. Best practice is to use 301 where the content has moved but not changed substantially (if at all). You can create redirects to any page, of course but expect to lose some value if the content doesn't closely match the original. Check out https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection and https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo. Good Luck!

it just dropped for 1 keyword and others are stable and when I search brand its appear in SERP

Hi Sam, First of all, congrats on the lovely site DON'T PANIC! OSE does not represent live results as it is linked to the Mozscape Index, which updates about once a month (There was on update on Jan 26th and the next one is due around Feb 28th). Discussed here: https://moz.com/help/guides/research-tools/open-site-explorer/updates For latest and pending update information, go here: https://moz.com/products/api/updates If you want to do a quick check to see whether your site is showing for both www and non-www variants, do a search for: **site:sassandgrace.co.uk **(with no spaces) and you'll see what Google has indexed. Interestingly, there is one reference within Google's results  for the www. version: **www.sassandgrace.co.uk/blog-detail.html **which is a remnant from development as it contains lorem ipsum text. If the redirects have been created manually it's easy to see why this would be overlooked. Best practice would be to create a global redirect rule from the www to non-www. version of your site. Read this for some solid best practices when dealing with redirects: https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection You can also indicate that non-www. version is your preferred version of the site in Google Search Console. That stray page aside, I'd have no concerns. Check back in OSE after the next update and see if everything hasn't settled down. Good Luck!