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Hi, Thank you for your response. I did make some slight changes, and that may have been enough to trigger a drop. For tracking I use Moz, AHREFs, SEMRush, and also Google Incognito using a VPN (I'm overly thorough). I like your idea about maximizing the areas I'm ranking well for. In fact, that's what I started doing this past weekend. Really focused on getting every interior page on the first page. Thank you again for your detailed response. I really appreciate it.

If you want a tool that's more comprehensive & tracks a large group of your target keywords and competitors why not pay for it? Companies that put out good tools like that need to pay for server space and development time (which isn't cheap), so most will only give you a small taste of the program when you're on a free plan. Several thousand keywords means you're asking for a pretty large chunk of space to be dedicated to your project, so you'll have to pay to have meaningful data. I just looked a Rank Tracker from Link Assistant, and that looks like a pretty good tool; you're not going to get much out of the free plan though. Sure you can run ranking checks, but you won't be able to save the results to compare over time and you won't be able to export. If that's $125 for a lifetime license, I'd say that's a pretty good deal. You could also check out SERPwoo for some affordable keyword tracking plans.

Keywordshitter.com will give you the long tails that Google suggest for an specific Keyword. In a few steps, i use this to get the best keywords: 1. The bigest Brainstorming. 2. Competence Spy (search which keys are using) 3. Bind all and Make a Keyword list and filter the duplicates with textmechanic.com 4. Use de Google Adwords Keyword Planner with "Show only ideas directly related to your search terms" to get traffic and even more related keywords 5. Checking the SERPs competence, choose only 5 keywords or less.

As far as we know, the location of the domain does not have any significant impact on whether or not it can pass authority through outbound links.

Very good, I'll go with the redirect map. Thank you.

Thanks everyone this was very helpful. I think I have it straightened out now. I've set my preferred domain in Google Search Console, and have changed many of the links to match this domain as well. Thanks again.

Very good question. It is ultimately a matter for yourself. I always take the primary keyword head on - even if there is no realistic chance of ranking for it in the short term.  However I also make sure that I target keywords off the same branch that I can rank for.  I usually start with 5-7. I believe you should always have your eye on the ultimate prize. Ubersuggest is good I also like Semrush.com - as you also get to see what organic keywords your competitors are getting traffic from.  Semrush may further fine tune the keywords you target. On a nexus between primary and secondary - if you are targeting "dell computers" and words around that frame - once you get some traction with your other keywords then you may start to rank for "dell computers" but at 300 etc. . In fairness though it is impossible for anyone to suggest a true nexus as it will all depend on your seo optimization and the keywords you initially target and what you actually publish/do. Hope that assists and good luck.

Hi, I agree with Peter, just wanted to add something to your latest question on if you could add it to the noscript tags. Because I wouldn't do that, it's a signal which could show mostly a bad sign on that you would like to show the content.

Thank you for your input, Peter. I'm hoping someone from MOZ is able to disclose / confirm these stats. Do you by chance have more information as to how you came up with these percentages?

Thank you both - and sorry for not replying earlier. It sounds like we have some work to do

Hey Mike, Nope nothing to worry about. Moz Domain Authority is always jumping an and down. This is how its designed. It shouldn't be compared month to month as the previous month has no bearing on the next. Instead you should judge it on how well you are doing compared to your competitors. Rand posted an article about it this month (https://moz.com/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scores) Took me ages to find it... turns out it was pinned to the top of the forums... typical In summary The best website on the web has DA 100. This month they have 5000 links. You are DA  30 and have 1000 links If the following month the best website gains 3000 more links so its at 8000 links - the DA 100 benchmark has moved Compared to this benchmark you are not as authoritative as you were, your DA has dropped you are now DA 25 and still have 1000 links Your site hasn't change and you have no extra links. But compared to the best website you are slightly worse. As long as everyone else in your niche has done the same don't worry. If however, you drop 5 DA and your competitor gains 2 DA. They have improved their link profile much more than you have yours and you should look to act. DA is also affected by changes to the moz algorithm as they prioritise different factors to get a better reflection of how google perceives your website. So the simple rule. Compare yourselves to your competitors not to last months DA alone.

Although adding a no-index will no doubt remove the page from the index, my suggestion would be to implement a canonical tag which you can use to point to the original/best source page. This way any links from the page will still be used for internal site crawling etc. This way you are actually telling google that you have similar pages but one is the best that you want for indexation purposes. rel="canonical" href="/original-or-page-you-want-to-rank-and-be-the-source.html" />

Hi there. Well, 3 spots drop in rankings is surely not "quite dramatic drop". It can happen for many-many reasons. What I would recommend though is to check if the domain name you have purchased ever had (or still has) penalty or spam issues. Usually, if everything is clean, it wouldn't affect your rankings. As for irreversibility - nothing is irreversable. However, if that domain was in fact the reason of ranking drop due to spam issues, then it might take longer to recover. Yes, disabling would be the first thing to try if you think that was the reason. See how your rankings react, if there are any sudden changes. However, I do recommend to check other factors like your backlink profile changes, content cnahges, your competition SEO changes and so on. Hope this helps.

I write all of my own meta descriptions and spend good time on them.   Much of the time, my meta description is grabbed and shown verbatim in the SERPs.  In that meta description I can give a nice list of topics covered in my article or features of a product or value proposition on shipping.   I read lots of meta descriptions and use them to decide if the page is worth a click.  I don't think that I am the only person who does this, Why would I spend three days writing an article and then not write a nice meta description?  Or, not write a description with clever marketing for a product that I sell hundreds of per year.   Why would I not shoot finely-crafted arrows when I can? Keep in mind that Google has a mentality to do everything with an algo. And     that     can    be     a     huge      problem. How many people have their adsense accounts banned unjustly with no possible appeal?  How much adwords advice is given poorly?  How many times does google email me that my traffic has fallen off a cliff the day after Thanksgiving?   How many times does their program send adsense policy violations in error?   How many times do they give the wrong person credit for images in image search?  How many times does their parameter management in WMT not work and you fix it yourself using htaccess?   Google is even know to list wrong numbers for police stations in knowledge boxes!   (Stopping here, I could keep going but you get the idea.). Google has a philosophy that "we would rather do stuff half-ass at scale, than have a human tool do it right most of the time".   Doing stuff with algos at scale is OK much of the time and Google is quite good at it..... but my advice is do not allow google to do anything important for you that you can do for yourself. I am going to bet on me, and if you think that you are a reasonably smart person, then maybe you should bet on you.

Well, Google does have a crawl budget, they might be using that for your most popular pages. As long as your indexed pages number is going up, that means google is working its way through the backlog.

Thanks Miriam. Much appreciated.

Cheers Peter. As usual with the dark arts of SEO, no one size fits all solution That's helpful though - Thanks

Thank you for the response Marie. My main concern at the moment is seo because the content was flagged as duplicate in MOZ Crawl Diagnostics, and I want to avoid being penalized for duplicate content. Still, I appreciate the comments on performance vs. seo. Thanks again.