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I think if you try to do what you're suggesting you're going to end up with a headache for both yourself and your users. A simple and elegant solution to this would be to rewrite (or copy/paste) some of the blogs as pages, and set a canonical URL so Google knows which content it should attribute originality to. If you have a sidebar, you could also utilize a widget that recommends related blog posts to users if you'd rather maintain the structure you have, but callout related content and provide navigation.

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Hi Julie, I wouldn't predict that happening in 2017 (or any time soon). Google has simply positioned themselves too well. That being said, Facebook is definitely one of the major deterrents to Google having the whole pie, and Apple Maps has made some improvements in the past year that could lead to them taking a little bit of a larger slice

HI Martijn, I used Screaming Frog and it finds the H1.   I tried moving my content around on my page putting the H1 at the very top and the IIS tool found it.  Sadly I can't really do that in production but at least I know what IIS dislikes. I suspect this is a bug in the IIS tool as it doesn't seem to bother Google.   Its tragedy that the IIS tool seems to be dying on the vine.

Hey there Matthew! Sam from Moz's Help Team here - would you be able to pop a message over to help@moz.com so we can take a deeper look into this for you with the name of the URL and the campaign you're seeing this occur with?

After further looking at his search results I noticed that his keyword that he was number 1 for the last 3 years. Tacoma Auto Care was still showing high up in the organic results. Number 4 behind 2 yelp results and one other company. But he was still number 10 to 15 in the 3-pack results for the same keyword. This leads me to conclude that the Yellowpage links destroyed his NAP with all the different cities they added. See picture attached Also when you use the same search terms in BING there is NO LOCAL Penalty. Bing Tacoma Auto Care Bing Tacoma Auto Repair www.philsautocareinc.com shows up number 1 and number 3 respectively. Now we all know how to knock out our local competition in Google Don't We? 12192016233328.PNG

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"_Could it be dupe content from the W_ikipedia pages we imported and indexed?" That's not a good idea. I'd either point to the Wikipedia pages themselves, noindex or canonical them (back to their source). Also, agree with Clayton John. It could be any number and/or combination of factors. Glenn Gabe, president of G-Squared Interactive, watches website traffic trends and fluctuations and comments upon possible root causes. He remarked back in November that "The fall of 2016 has been one of the most volatile ones I have seen in a long time algorithm update-wise" and observed that Google is testing its new mobile-first ranking algorithm. Check out that article to get some other suggestions as to possible root causes.

Hi There, I do agree with Martijn that this does not appear to be keyword stuffing of the content, I do not think this would cause any issues. However, I did notice that the meta keywords tag is extremely over-optimized, this could be considered keyword stuffing/spamming. The meta keywords tag does not provide any value, major search engines abandoned it as a ranking factor years ago. However, it is possible this is sending spam signals. Google states that they ignore the meta keywords tag, but Bing has acknowledged that they review this tag as a spam signal. I noticed that many pages contain meta keyword tags that are fairly 'stuffed', I would recommend removing these or significantly decreasing the keyword usage in these tags. Example: Screaming Frog Screenshot

Hey, fascinating! Thanks for the link, and cool to know Google is investigating this. Thanks for the update, Jason.

Were they referencing Rank Brain in their article? The statement sounds similar to an explanation given on what Rank Brain is and how it impacts search. It does seem like a bit of hyperbole but I see their point and I agree with it to a certain extent. I believe the purpose of a machine learner is to continuously innovate without human intervention so that improvements are made while you sleep. It's my understanding that Rank Brain does this based on feedback from users. It's the perfect solution to handling the complexity of search, and would result in a continuously changing algorithm. I do see a lot of websites ranking without backlinks. Try any local home services query - they're mostly propped up by citations which is a little different than your standard backlink.

I completely agree with Clayton's response so I won't touch on that. To answer your other question though of whether or not Google will see the second site as being duplicate, the short answer is that "it shouldn't". Google will only reference the last-crawled copy of your website so the only time there could be potential for being seen as duplicate is if the new domain gets crawled before the old one is recrawled. Even then, I wouldn't expect it would have a measurable difference on the progress of a new domain. Don't forget, you can't get penalized for duplicate content. The worst that can happen is your rankings slide somewhat but being a new domain, it'd take a few weeks/months to see any real rankings anyway so it's mostly a moot point

Hello, you mentioned you have previously done this with 301 redirects. It is possible to do without penalties or losing rankings on your primary domain. However, the problem arises that you are essentially splitting page authority with the sub-domain which can potentially be treated as a separate website. I would not recommend using sub-domain for your forum to avoid the issue of competing with your primary domain. Forums can be a great source of content and traffic so I would give it the best opportunity to do so on your  domain. It would also be good to spend some time on maintenance to correct those errors and moderate poor quality / spammy / and thin content if necessary. If you do decide to use a sub-domain, you would want to make sure to provide relevant links on every page back to your primary domain. Best of luck with your forum.

Given the needs, I suspect you'll want to talk to one of the clickstream data providers about a custom deal. Jumpshot and SimilarWeb are the two I'd look at. Just be prepared to pay a lot, as their data is proprietary and they can thus charge quite a bit.

Given this situation, that's exactly what I'd be doing. John's advice does appear to be true; you won't be penalised for duplicate content but your rankings won't be great either. Theoretically, Google should have no issue determining the fact that site A was the original source of that content and so it should suffer no ranking change at all. Canonicalisation is the path I'd be taking to hedge bets there and mitigate risk as much as possible. It's still not guaranteed to be safe (Google may choose to ignore canonicalisation) but it's about as close as you're going to get. Hopefully the client doesn't drag their feet and take 2 years to get that content production started

Hey There, So, that horizontal display would be a 'carousel' of results, like Google rolled out a couple of years back. Bing rolled out their local carousel in 2014. Interestingly, the order of results in the carousel you've highlighted  does not in any way match Bing's local-finder-type results here. Nor am I seeing an immediate correlation between the carousel and what is appearing in the organic results. What you've highlighted, in the larger scheme of things, is the lack of information our industry has published regarding Bing local ranking factors. Google has gotten all the love! The last article I can recall of this sort was written 4 years ago (http://searchengineland.com/10-basic-bing-local-optimization-tips-109158) and it's pretty basic stuff. It's hypothesized that Yelp reviews may especially help you on Bing, and I've also seen it posited that Facebook likes could be a factor. The major factors are likely similar to Google's, but they may be weighted differently and there may be unique Bing factors Google doesn't consider. And that's just the purely local factors I'm referencing ... as for how they are ordering their carousel results, I'm afraid I have no resources to which I can link you. Basically, if there is a particular carousel you want to get into, you'd need to analyze the top 5-10 competitors in that pack to see what their strengths are. Is it Yelp reviews, links, on-page, citations, something else? You've reminded me how much I would love to see our industry throw a little more attention Bing's way, in terms of Local, but Google has hogged more than its share of attention, and I plead as guilty to this as anyone else in Local. It would be really neat if someone with the time/resources would do a study to pin down what is driving the various types of local results in Bing. And, if our community knows of something I've overlooked, please shout it out!