Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Backlinks do not have to be clicked in order for them to count as linkjuice. Recently my org (missionquest.org) joined MOZ and it helped our backlinks and  improved our SEO.

Bing is unsteady, I don't recommend taking any action for bing until you have a serious problem with such as no indexing for a week.

Danny Dover wrote a nice post about this back in 2008, but it still applies today and is a great read here: http://moz.com/blog/the-evil-side-of-google-exploring-googles-user-data-collection The list is almost mind boggling when you add it all up... especially if you consider the different facets of Google that might not necessarily share data, but certainly could: things like Google+, Adwords, Doubleclick, Registrar Data, Server logs, mobile, Google Accounts, Gmail, Chrome, Android, and so on.. I don't want to spoil Danny's report though, it's still a great read on perspective, even after 7 years. Cheers!

I am a little surprised, because having those pages as "noindex, follow" should not bring GWT to flag them as errors. Monica is correct in addressing google flag anything than 200 as errors, but... Your page with "noindex, follow" should return a HTTP code of 200. If it is returning anything else, it's probably wrong, and you should analyze why is doing it. My religion has a law saying that GWT should return no errors, point. I have also witnessed few times a correlation between lowering GWT errors count to 0 and an improve in SERP ranking; but I have no proof one is causing the other.

I'm having trouble getting hotme.ca to rank for anything competitive - I can get it in #1 for "Toronto sex toys", but here you've got a strong local SEO impact, which could easily over-ride a lot of standard organic signals. In most cases, it's not that they're hiding anything in their link profile, but one of a few explanations: (1) Other sites have inflated PA/DA due to spammy links. We've just introduced spam scoring recently, but keep in mind that PA/DA are generally measures of overall ranking strength, and they don't account for quality/spam. In an industry where spammy is common, and especially when you've got tons of sites in the 20s and 30s, these numbers can leave out a lot. (2) We're not crawling a lot of the weaker or lower-quality links. We tend to take a quality-over-quantity approach in MozScape, but if an entire industry relies on low-quality links, Google could be seeing more than we're seeing. (3) Other factors are over-riding these link signals, as Massimiliano says. On-page is definitely one, technical issues is another, and local factors (as I mentioned above). When someone is masking a link profile, what we usually see is that they're 301-redirecting other domains to that domain (and we aren't seeing those links directly). Typically, though we'd see those 301-redirects, and I'm not seeing that for hotme.ca. Truth is, if they are doing something unethical, there's almost nothing you can do about it, unless it's flat-out illegal. In SEO, chasing your competitors bad behavior is almost always a completely waste of time - believe me, I've done it for clients (and it was a colossal waste of time and money). You have to focus on your site and what you can do.

Thanks for the advice, we will certainly implement this into our site.

Hey, Meanwhile Dan gave you quite a nice answer below. Gr., Keszi

Thank you guys for your responses, they have all been of great help. You have provided me insight into how to further my research capabilities!

Here's the definition from their glossary: LTS: The link target score (LTS) is a measurement of a domain’s overall relevance to the queries you created at the “Find Prospects” stage. We calculate a domain’s LTS based on the number and position of its occurrences within the SERPs. A higher LTS indicates that a domain has a stronger search presence for your queries, and often but not always this indicates higher quality and higher likelihood of being a converting prospect. It’s ONLY useful for comparing domains within a single prospecting report, and not for comparing prospects from one report to another. Domain PR is a better metric for comparing one domain to another across reports. Based upon that, this is just a relevance score based upon how frequently that domain showed up in your report. Use it as an indicator, but you shouldn't abandon a prospect due to a low LTS score.

Thanks for your help Ryan - much appreciated. So from a technical perspective, how would you deal with duplicate content served on both sites? Simply no-index dupe content on one site? There will be lots of this (feature articles, major events etc.) posted daily-weekly.

In addition to all the good answers you already got. Putting everything on a single page you lose opportunities to place keywords in url, <title>and <h1> or diluting <h1> value.</p></title>

Moz knows very well, it may affect bad moz itself. So, Moz has already been using nofollowed tag in all such external sources link to get rid of such fear. as above Keri said

Considering that traffic for this site is about 4,000 visitors per month and the domain authority is 23 and a page authority is only 32 would that make it easier and faster to recover traffic and ranking? The site currently has about 400 pages, what if I prepare re-writes on about 100 pages of text before the domain change and then gradually add this content after the switch. Would that speed recovery? I intend to re-write the content anyway but perhaps to do so after the new domain gets launched. On the other hand I may keep the domain as is if this switching is too much trouble. However the URL does not match my company name and I am concerned this discordance could be harming the site long term.

I'm also a big fan of changing the complete domain to HTTPS. Therefore I'm using HSTS response header to enforce this. The great advantage is that the browsers remember that site as HTTPS and skips any redirect you may have to make from HTTP to HTTPS. So might worth looking at this as well. We are using KeyCDN with force SSL feature enabled.

Really?! lol However, congratz.

Keep them or remove them, don't redirect them unless they have external links, you want to keep things simple, if you do remove them. make sure you remove all links pointing to them from your own site, you don't want broken links.

Thanks Ryan. It seems the results are already starting to reappear which is quicker than I expected. Our web development company should have definitely consulted us before making this change but at least there's no major issue now. Thanks again.