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Ok. Thanks for the support !

Hey all, Joe here from the marketing team at Intercom. Unrelated: we're a Moz customer and I'm a huge Rand fan and Seattle native. Until today, it wasn't possible to use Intercom truly as a live chat tool for anonymous, logged out visitors to your website or app. You would need to have an existing account or login already to enable the chat-like functionality. But thankfully, no more. Voila: https://www.intercom.io/live-chat Intercom's vision is to build a central platform for all your customer communication. Having a CRM, email marketing tool, marketing automation system, live chat tool, helpdesk, etc. as separate entities provides lots of difficulties, notably in integration of them technically and functionally. We're hoping to change that. If anyone has questions about Intercom, I'd be happy to help or put you in touch with someone who knows more than me. I'm joe at intercom dot io.

No problem! Glad I could help.

Hi there, I am in a very similar situation with multiple manufacturers on my EComm site. You are absolutely correct in adding uniquely valuable content to the category pages. You can use the category pages to target key terms and engage users. Content on category pages is especially useful for targeting branded and long tailed key terms. In this case, the Canonical tags will not help you, because the duplicate content is not on pages within your domain. If you had the same product description on two products on your site, then the canonical tag would be appropriate. However, when you use that tag you are telling the engines that the authoritative page should be the page that ranks, which means there is a chance the other pages won't rank. If you use the "no follow" tag, your pages will not be crawled by bots, which means you have 0 chance of that page actually showing in search results. I would also suggest getting some user generated content on the product pages. Customer reviews and comments will eventually leverage the duplicate content. Aside from that, reviews are uniquely valuable to searchers, in my opinion, they are the holy grail of content. What consumer doesn't value an actual person's opinion of a product above a carbon copied description?

Even in the last crawl report the bug is still there, any idea when it will be fixed?

Indeed you have, thanks a lot EGOL, much appreciated!

Hi Stephen! Responses from each service's API can fluctuate. When searching for the business information we do rely on the information being available in their API. With Bing we have seen issues where some listing appear/disappear. Each time you load the listing report it does generate a live query. If your listing does not appear at all for a while, I would recommend reaching out to Bing to make sure your listing is updated in their API and is searchable. Hope this helps!

Everyone has great suggestions! It's also important to look at how that publication does links and make sure that you aren't pushing them to do something they won't do for anyone. Recently, I was working with a publication that was happy to link to how-to or further information articles, but did not want to link directly to any brand mentions.

Well said - engagement > page views. Google's smart enough to understand that on more complex sites and with more complex technology/JS/etc, those aren't always perfect corollaries for one another.

Hi guys, Thanks so much for your input. The strange thing is that we are doing so many of those things you have already mentioned. I guess I am just confused as to where to go next to show increases for words that we aren't ranking for but want to rank for AND to raise words that we currently rank for. (To my company it is more important to rank for the other keywords at this point) We use social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, YouTube) - we make one post a day so we aren't spamming it. The keywords are within the recommendation standards on the website. We have a huge presence in our industry. I guess I am just looking for other suggestions on how to get those other keywords up.

Hi Dr. Meyers, Thanks again for the thoughtful answers. I wanted to share our final findings about this matter with the rest of the community.  It turns out that our client did face a pretty brutal N-SEO attack.  They were targeted with over 300 bad links (and still counting) in a period of 3.5 months. The links were targeted at sections of the brand name in an effort to confuse Google, and cause damage to brand name in search results.  As a result several pages of the website are still gone from the search results (in relation to brand name searches).  And this causes a fake ROR report to continue showing at the top of the search results when you search for our client's brand name (and someone also has built positive links to this ROR report). The final question to be answered was this:  what should be done about it?  Dr. Meyers was right that this is not a war that our client could win.  The only thing the client could try was to "build up the positive link profile to counter the bad links." Unfortunately, our client does not believe in chasing Google's algo changes around.  Therefore they won't spend money on link building strategies (and I don't disagree with this). During this process I learned a lot about N-SEO and the various types of people involved in it.  And it is not "very rare" like Google or the "just keep creating quality content" crowd want everyone to believe.  Here is very good (and I believe well researched) article about what is actually going on: web master world. com/ google/4677866. htm  And while we did not experience this N-SEO technique, here was a very good article on link injection: site olytics. com / black-hat-seo-technique-demystified/ Bottom line:  your average local small plumbing business, tire store, landscape company, etc., can be easily decimated in the search rankings in 2-4 weeks. And do most small companies like that have the resources to pay someone to start building positive link profiles to try and counter the attack?  The answer for most small businesses is No. Our client seems to think that the only way to really counter this garbage is force Google to do the right thing, via legislation. By the "right thing" he means this:  giving all companies on the Internet a "Bill of Rights" for their virtual storefront.  One of the Rights should be that the small business can determine what geography can be allowed to impact their search results.  99% of small businesses in the United States don't sell anything internationally.  Why should they then be penalized because someone posts garbage links on penalized servers in Europe, China, Mexico, etc.?  If they set their Webmaster Tools geo-target to "Illinois" or the "United States" then only links from servers in those areas should be allowed to affect their rankings (positive or negative).  Furthermore, if someone does find a way to institute a N-SEO attack from within the United States against your brand you would then have legal recourse to immediately do something about it.  It would not even require most small businesses to file a TRO/lawsuit/injunction. Most of it could be handled directly with the handful of U.S. hosting companies.  Would this idea stop all N-Seo attacks?  Of course not. But the situation would at least be manageable in your own country.  Furthermore, I think it would take the wind out of the sails of many N-SEO people if much of their cheap foreign labor was rendered useless (as U.S. hosting companies could be required to block foreign IPs that are caught posting garbage more than 1 time).  I think the reason a lot of people employee N-SEO people now is because it is easy, and they can't get caught. Make it more difficult and only the hardened criminals are going to continue with it. Our client has no resolution, but hopefully something in here helps a small business out there. Jake

Many thanks Ryan , Much appreciated Pete

Was researching this same topic and the video you shared answered my question. Thanks for including the link.

As per David, the current limit is 3, but you can get a look at up to 5 multiple competitors side-by-side using the Competitive Link Finder: http://moz.com/labs/link-finder.  Running this twice gets you up to ten fairly quickly.

Okay so you need to use the root to verify the domain first. Just stop the redirect to /index.php long enough for you to insert Google's verification code. Then turn back on the redirect. What google is trying to accomplish is to verify you actually do own the new domain. Since some domains share directories this is the only way for them to know you do own the domain since you can verify you control it at root. Hope that helps, Don

I would try to use a Mod Re-Write with 301 to handle the new url with the ? attached. That way your old domain points to the new domain with 301 taking into account the ? at the end. This may do it... <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On   RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain.com$ [OR]   RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain.com$   RewriteRule (.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1? [R=301,L]</ifmodule> I'm not a pro at Apache re-writes but when I get stuck on coding unfamiliar things I love Stackoverflow just don't get offended by the Elite snobs