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Vernon Am a little unclear, but in short believe social is a way of distributing your content and engaging & connecting on a deeper level with customers.  However every piece of content for your site will in some ways be unique hence your statement:- In order to get the most SEO benefit from your content, you should host it on your site and distribute via your social channels. Right? 50% + this would be correct, but the nuances of various social displays methods ie instagram, facebook, or twitter etc. mean there will be variances. It really depends on your customer, what they are responding to.  So responding to your queries. What are best practices? It depends on your customer - moz has alot of UGC which often come up in search and brings people to site.  Yourtea.com uses instagram, a babysitting website, effectively emailing out blog posts. Keep creating your content on your site, distribute it and aggregate it along with UGC for display on your site? Yes, if it is creating a deeper connection with customers and they and responding to it. If so, what are the SEO implications of using these tools?  Again not a straight answer, but it will be positive if the customer reaction was positive. Except for google + - where you don't need a positive response.. google gives you a leg up anyway! Not sure if that helps, as there are so many outcomes available, even in same categories there will be differences. Especially for pulling in the UGC - anything?

**"Some people will argue that Google penalizes keyword domains, but I know that isn't true. " ** I think that a lot of people in the SEO world are confused about this. When the EMD algo first came out I studied a large number of sites that had taken drops. Google confused everyone because they made a big deal of announcing the EMD update and then sneakily pushed out a Panda refresh a couple of days later. A LOT of sites were affected by this Panda refresh. At that time I had asked anyone who thought that they were hit by EMD to share their domain with me. A large number of these ended up being sites that, IMO were hit by Panda. The sites that were affected by the EMD update were ones that truly did not deserve to rank, and only previously ranked well because they were EMDs. There is no penalty for having an EMD. Now, back to the original question. I'm unclear as to whether OP is saying that there is a single EMD that is ranking well, or perhaps you are saying that this company has a whole bunch of service+location EMD's that are ranking well. If this is the case, then whether or not they deserve to rank depend on what kind of unique value they are offering. For example, if this was a plumbing site and every single location had almost the same content on it describing their overall plumbing business then Google wouldn't like that. But, let's say it's a real estate brokerage and the brand has worked really hard to provide helpful, unique content for each city they service. I could see this working. Google still would prefer that a realtor ran just one site, but if these individual sites were helpful enough to users then they still could do well.

Hey Mike, I do not think Google will consider this as "Keyword Stuffing" as the ability of understanding keywords and the context has been quite matured over time. If you think "Roho" has to be present in your content, keep it and see how thing goes.. I'd also like to see the effect this practice has made so far.. Hope this helps! Umar

I assumed I'd be able to deal with it easier too.

It isn't like we have no traffic, we still get thousands in organic traffic a day. It just isn't as much as it used to be. We are the largest in our industry, not near the size of Amazon or Ebay, but still pretty large. So we have customers who exclusively sell through us. Most of our sellers are small business and don't have in house technical teams, so it is easier working with us. I understand content marketing and we are starting to do that but if we have been hit with Panda I don't know if it matters.

This won't hurt you as it's a common organic happening. Lots of sites do this, and you shouldn't worry about it.

It's best practice to only have one home page variation. Google won't be able to tell which is your main page and you will also get duplicate content issues etc. If you haven't already I would redirect the /default.asp pages to the root domain. As for your original question it does seem a bit odd that they are different scores but I would imagine it's because your main root domain would have more backlinks to it compared to your /default.asp pages.

I have an additional question, that I haven't been able to find an answer for elsewhere. How does Google determine which version is the right one to show for each user? Is it by IP? I mean, in my example we could have an american user that is on vacation in UK. Would he see the .com or .uk result? It could also be a norwegian user on vacation in Denmark, would he see the .no or .dk results? (danish and norwegian is fairly similar and has a lot of common spellings).

If that is the only line in your robots.txt file then it really shouldn't accomplish anything. It's like saying, "Hey...all search engines...take note of this....oh forget it, there's nothing to see here." I agree with Dave...try to fetch the page in Webmaster tools (Google Search Console). You can also use the Webmaster Tools robots.txt tester which often will tell you if there are issues. Hi this is what we thought but Google has not indexed any pages How old is the site? It can take weeks for a new site to get indexed and then to get ranked as well. Do you see any pages on a site: search for your domain? (i.e. site:example.com). This might sound silly, but are you sure that there is no noindex tag on the page?

Thanks! Glad to hear my thought process was correct.

Hi Falguni, This is a very broad question. To get started, though, I would recommend 1) studying Moz's free beginner's guide to SEO; and 2) installing Yoast's SEO plugin (as you have a Wordpress site). I hope that helps! Christy

Do you know what the redirect type is (301 or 302)? If it is a 301, I wouldn't worry about it. If it is a 302, I'd try and get that changed. Either way, it is unlikely to make a big impact on your site.

Ah, got it. Google calls those "Live Answers", I think. Short answer is: no, it's not structured data. Sports, weather, stock prices, and other highly specialized data comes from private partnerships with Google, generally, and each one is unique (and not particularly publicly discussed). Unfortunately, I don't even know what team at Google handles that or who you might talk to about a partnership. They aren't very transparent about it. In some cases, they list sources, but not for sports (not sure why).

To continue this discussion, here is an interesting thing that happened today. It might be a little egotistical but I have a Google Alert set up for my name. I was thrilled to get an alert today that I was mentioned in Forbes. Woohooo. The article mentions my name and an article I wrote and then links to: https://moz.com/ugc/what-is-an-unnatural-link-an-in-depth-look-at-the-google-quality-guidelines So, if I had published that content on my own site I could have had a link from Forbes. But...is that true? Most likely if I had published that content on my own site it wouldn't have had the authority to rise to the top of the SERPS and it wouldn't have had nearly as much exposure as it got on the Moz blog. So, I am guessing that I would not have gotten a link from Forbes and I would not have been mentioned by them either. I think that as I get more authority there are some articles that I want to publish on my own site, but there are others that I want to publish elsewhere for the exposure. One thing that I find does well on my own site is if I do a study with unique information, or if I write an article on a very specific topic. But, if I am writing about a broad subject, at this point an article on my own site is not likely to outrank Moz and SEW.

Thanks for the mention Rebecca. I wanted to point out that link removal is likely not as important to Google when it comes to Penguin rather than a manual penalty. I wrote more about this here: http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2374406/penguin-recovery-should-you-be-removing-links-or-just-disavowing Also, the comments in your disavow file are not read by Google. The file is processed automatically so lines starting with "#" are just skipped. They're mostly for your own records. It's confusing because the documentation Google gives makes it look like you should be including info about whether or not you've tried to remove a link in your disavow file. But really, this is only information that is necessary in a reconsideration request which would be for a manual penalty.

Matt has summed it up, but my question is..why don't you get a wildcard certificate? It will make it much easier and if you ever move your website to a CDN network, an HTTPS website with a wildcard certificate makes the process smooth!

Yes, it would be lost. Yes, you should keep it active.