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Hi Brian, Unless you are able to share the identity of the website, it's going to be shooting in the dark as to what might be going on. You've categorized this as 'local'. Could you be targeting keywords that don't actually relate to your client's geographic location? For example, a business outside city limits trying to rank for a geo+keyword term inside the city. Everything cool with Google Search Console? No warnings? How competitive is the market/keyword phrase you are targeting?

I would publish unique descriptions.  The advantage of unique descriptions is that you are not one of many with the same content in the SERPs.  Your pages will have more unique keywords for long tail reach beyond your competitors, and your pages will not be filtered from the SERPs because you arrived late with a weak site displaying the exact same content as others.  You are entering a competitive environment.  Compete or die. I wouldn't hire students.  I would hire a couple people who have university degrees in English with an emphasis in literature and who have earned excellent grades.  These are folks who know books, have bought lots of them, are familiar with their commercial descriptions and can write freely and easily with proper grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc.  The competing salaries are not as high as other employees.  They will cost more than a rocks-for-jocks sophomore who is about to drop out, but they are definitely worth the extra money for the quality and productivity that comes with them. I would tell them to start by picking books that they are already familiar with and write some sample descriptions.  Before they start writing I would have them use SEMrush on the title of the book and get some sample keywords of what people with commercial intent might include in a query. After that, I would have them focus on books that are not best sellers - too much competition there.  They would also focus on higher price books with search volume - more profit there. Don't try to save money by attacking with a rubber sword.  You know what will happen.

You can use Screaming Frog to pinpoint where your 404s are coming from. Here's a great write-up with a few different ways to use SF for this: https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/broken-link-checker/ Another option is Google Analytics. First, navigate to your All Pages report, then set primary dimension to Page Title. Next, go to your site and trigger a 404, take note of the page title, it should be something like 'Page Not Found'. Whatever that page title is on your 404 page, enter that in the inline filtering and it'll narrow the reporting down to just 404 pages. Then drill down into that result and see a full list of URLs that are throwing a 404. Set the secondary dimension to Previous Page Path to see the page that linked to the broken page. Hope that's helpful!

Yes, for the most part. Google wants to deliver the best results for visitors based on their search query. So if something is hidden from initial view this would impact ux and especially if it's poorly implemented (not intuitive). As you know, original and compelling copy is the best. Unfortunately in many situations, such as a large ecommerce site, it is resource intensive. It's best to avoid thin content. However, it does get ranked as you can grab a snippet and place in Google and look at the results. So yes, it's possible that Google will rank these pages with duplicate content in a hidden view. I would advise you to tell your client to remove any hidden content and rewrite product descriptions. Depending on resources, they may/may not want to do this. If they don't, at least you made a recommendation. Good luck!

Ok, that works too. You are most welcome to ask further questions.

Thanks, Tawny. I'll email them now

I'd invest some time in becoming a power house social media user. It has an easy to understand metric (# of followers) that can be leveraged to get people interested in you.  If I retweet your message to my 15,000 followers, I'm doing something that could benefit you a lot. You might get your potential partners reaching to you.

There was noticeable algorithmic activity in early June and again around June 27th (right in your timeline). No updates were confirmed, but Glenn Gabe did some analysis around a "Panda-like" update: http://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/june-2016-google-algorithm-update/ Glenn tracks a set of sites hit by previous penalties (including Panda and Penguin), and while he, like all of us, is forced to speculate, is data is generally pretty solid, IMO.

Hi there! Kristina from Moz's Help Team here. It looks like you have a few campaigns, so it is difficult for me to look into what may be the issue here without a bit more detail. If you don't want to share which campaign you are referring to here, as well as examples of the issues you're seeing and more information on the "Google Tags" you're referencing here, can you please email us at help@moz.com or click the blue message icon in the bottom right corner of your campaigns to send us the details of which campaign you had this issue on so that we can investigate further? I look forward to hearing from you soon. -Kristina

Hello, Thanks for asking. But, there's no need to worry! SEMrush will not share your data anyone, especially your competitors. That wouldn't be right. All of our traffic and ad spend figures are derived from publicly available sources or arrive to us from a trusted third-party. I hope this has been helpful.

Hello, The tool I would use to find a competitors new back links would be ahrefs.com. You can plug in any domain and see new and lost links from different time periods. This is not only helpful for checking a competitors links, but it's great for tracking any links your site may have lost. If you're looking for more information on comparing your site to the competition. Chris Adficient.com

I appreciate your comprehensive article, However, may I kindly point out my question was to do with Disavow in Google Search Console, Not the implementation of secure.

Hi GR, ahrefs.com toll helped in link reclamation or link building. However I have noticed that the tool is not able to find all the broken internal or external links. But I was able to find some broken links on another website. ahrefs support team responded to my query on this and agreed that tool might not be listing all links. They even said, no tool can provide all tools and its merely next to impossible. I wanna let you know my experience to keep you updated, so posting here. Thanks, Satish

Is there anybody else with some advice in this one? I realy have no idea why this page title is not the correct one. Hope somebody can help me with this! Marcel

I would say make sure to include a 'meta no index' tag and block search engines from crawling it with a robots.txt. Then you can think about creating a placeholder with information about the rebrand. No sense in having it indexed just yet. Hope that helps some.

Hi Radi, I think that is because the competitor has more accurate title tags and meta descriptions on regard the query - hand therapy Sydney - despite they do not have  inbound links pointing those pages. They answer the query accurately. It is not all about links. Content - answering the query - first and above all. On top of that, they are first in Google local listings. https://moz.com/blog/why-listing-accuracy-is-important-whiteboard-friday All the best, Mª Verónica B.

The domains in question are brand new and have no website associated with them.  As I described, they are just being used for advertising to certain audiences. Essentially instead of using subdomains (department.domain.com) or sub folders  domain.com/department, I want to use domaindepartment.com  so I can print domaindepartment.com on business cards and those recipients when they go to domaindepartment.com they will be redirect to the department section of domain.com

No problem at all - glad I could help!