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Cindy,
Though Moz moderators and staff monitor the Q&A system, (and thus they may answer here) it's probably best if you post this question through the Moz help system to get the fastest attention from someone within the Moz team. I jump to the help system whenever I feel an issue regarding the actual Moz service (as opposed to more general industry questions) yields me the best results...
Infinite scroll is fine for SEO, as long as you include code that forces a unique URL at a certain point in the scroll, to emulate a new page.
Now - if you have that on category pages, and thus provide a crawlable, indexable group of pages with proper pagination best practices, you don't need that on the home page. The key though is you need at least one proper way for search bots to get to all your content through HTML links.
If you don't have separate categories, and if the home page links are the only way to get to that content, then having page 2, page 3 is critical - and should not be blocked from search bots for crawling or indexing.
exactly. "Tags" and "materials" are not exactly top level category stuff 
Building on what Ben suggests, there's contests, giveaways, and highly incentivized promotions - all strong paths when executed properly. And for all of these, you can cross-promote them across all social media points, as well as generate press coverage under the right circumstances.
There used to be a separate SEOMoz help forum but it looks like that's not available anymore (at least at the moment). Go to the SEOmoz help page and click on the red "Contact Our Help Team" button and ask if they can look into it or whether it's just a time issue.
I use SF religiously for all the audit work I do. I run a sample crawl (using Googlebot as the crawler) to check for all the standard stuff and go further.
My standard evaluation with SF includes:
Press release sites should have been, and should always in the future, be about sending out a press release, not "farming for links".
Having said that, a well crafted press release, with a maximum of one or two links in the content, can provide value still to this day from an SEO perspective. To the degree of previous years? No. Enough to warrant, yes, from a sustainable SEO best practices perspective, because a full arsenal of efforts is what appears to be most natural to search engines. And that's vital.
John,
Welcome to the Moz community! The more questions people ask, regardless of skill level, the better the quality of the work and the more everyone wins...
Generally speaking, high bounce rates due to people not finding what they expect is not worth the effort to get a link. The bigger the site the link comes from (and in turn, supposedly, the more clicks on that link), the more negative the impact of that bounce rate will be.
Not only do you send negative signals to search engines regarding relevance, you do so because it's a bad user experience.
This is why obtaining high quality links needs to factor in relevance and stickyness after click.
If it's just one link, it's not so critical usually, because it's not reflective of a larger pattern. However if you can get that link changed to point to more relevant content, that would help. Otherwise, move on and focus more on the quality of the site the content is on, combined with the page it's pointing to.
Screaming Frog is my go-to crawler. One of the many data points it provides is page level. Level 0 is home page, level 1 is one-click from the start, etc...
It's an invaluable tool for anyone wanting to check on a vast range of crawl efficiency and SEO factors.
In the real world most people use the least number of words when searching for something to get the most relevant results. based on the data I see (and the examples you provided), it's fairly clear more people search without using "find" in their search query.
While it is true that you can still optimize a site for "lawyers in ____" even if you include "find" in the page Title, the more precise the topical refined understanding a page has to a specific search query based on common intent, the more likely that page will be able to properly rank for that situation.
So while you can include "find" in the page Title, I wouldn't recommend it in this case.
simply moving thin content, isn't advised under any circumstance, unless you don't care about organic search for the site it's on. If that is the case, then the site its on should be a stand-alone domain, not just a subdomain.
While the impact of it being on a subdomain will be less significant than the main domain, it's all part of the root domain package. Everything on a subdomain ultimately impacts the root domain and all others in that group.
More important than Moz data is what the impact would be of getting thousands of links from one domain from an SEO perspective.
When you get a link to a site, the "natural" type would be one link, or a couple, unless all the links are coming from a site where you are an author and those links are sometimes within content but always within author bio boxes. (and those are only links to an author's site, NOT using any type of SEO keywords not specific to the author, if even THEY are going to have real value).
Getting hundreds, or worse, thousands of links from one source is typically not otherwise "natural". It instantly gives the appearance of being bought/paid for.
While some sites can get away with that under some circumstances, if you look at it from an SEO best practices perspective, it's dangerous, now more than ever. So I would SERIOUSLY consider recommending that your client turn such an offer down. The risk is probably not worth the total value even if you did get such high weight based on Moz reports.
Lou,
"I just wanted to throw a few factors out there in order to encourage a response like yours - packed full of useful next steps for me to evalaute this further."
THAT is priceless
Pagination:
Loading all content on one page and using a "more" button to "reveal" it, is not a best practice. Individual pages need to exist for individual sub-topic based content. This is especially true since it now appears that Google, while indexing content initially hidden to users, is likely giving less value to that hidden content than content immediately seen.
Pagination is important IF it is executed properly. If you have tens of thousands of results in paginated lists, is that one paginated group, or are they split out into separate groups based on similarity of content? If it's all just one massive group, that's likely another problem to look into, since pagination is meant to be used to say "these pages all contain links to other content where the entire group comprises very similar content around one primary topic".
Internal linking should always point more to main category page destinations than individual pieces of content. It would be unnatural from a usability perspective to link more to individual pieces of content, and thus it would be bad for SEO.
5,000 or so average crawl errors - what is causing those? Are they 404s? Were they previously valid pages? If so, those typically need to not generate 404 but instead be a direct 301 to a highly relevant live page (and where internal links within the site are updated accordingly).
So many more issues to consider...
Allie,
That's a great example use-case. After my audits, clients are like "you found thousands of internal redirects and 404s - where are they?"
I'm like - hold on I have a spreadsheet of that!
I only have my own experience with clients and unfortunately can not point to case studies.
One alternative would be to consider keeping it on the main site and finding a way to consolidate some or all of it so you end up with more content per page.
If you've gotten an official notice, then they are most definitely penalizing you for the links. This is an absolute certainty in light of the Penguin and related updates they rolled out this past month.
And if that's true, you cannot easily work your way out of it by building good links. That would likely need to take a lot more time and effort, and would still likely require other efforts across a more complete SEO best practices strategy. I say that because if they felt you had enough bad links to notify you, your overall best practices profile beyond the link profile is not very strong.
Use OpenSiteExplorer.org to evaluate the links and see which ones are a situation where many links come from one site - that's the sites I'd start with.
Keep a spreadsheet of all your efforts and only after you've made some progress in getting some removed, file a reconsideration request detailing the effort, however that may not be enough - you may need to wait until after you've made significant headway for the next Penguin update to then take place.
All of this info I'm providing, however, is based on only a few case studies of site losses and subsequent recovery others are relating to Penguin. Whether it's Penguin or another anchor change they made in April isn't as relevant as the fact that sites are starting to see a bounce back with those efforts.
Dave,
It's possible that it was a Panda related hit - From the moment Google implemented Panda, and they got a flood of feedback, they began making minor changes to it, all the way up to and through their global April 11th roll-out.
It could have been many other factors as well. If the site had a serious crawl problem in the days leading up to the drop, that could have triggered the drop. Or that could have triggered falling into Panda.
The end result however, is that it sounds like you're aware of a number of SEO best practices related problems, and whatever the cause, these should be addressed. Any one or more of them could have been a trigger point or added to it.
I always advocate to clients that regardless of the cause, it's important to implement SEO best practices both to help restore drop-off and to prevent future drop-off based on whatever next change search engines make.
Have you run Google's fetch and Render tool to test and see what Google actually sees through the render process? That's a quick way to often determine what's happening.
the only way to inoculate the main domain if you go with a subdomain is if the topical focus of each is very different. If they're very similar, it's much more difficult to pull off. Of course if they're different enough, that's valid reason to not interlink.
If they're totally related, and there's no interlinking, it could be perceived as attempting to stuff search results with multiple entries.
Do not rely on press releases as a source of high quality back links. I recently wrote an article at SearchEngineJournal.com breaking down the issues, explaining why releases are good for SEO, how they offer value and how they do not.
Above all else, press releases are a natural and valid aspect of an overall marketing campaign, and bring many valuable opportunities. High quality / high value links however, are rare indeed from them, and only when those releases end up on highly trusted news sites, yet the overall value is diluted because they're a form of syndicated content - just about the only legitimate form of syndicated content that exists except in rare situations.
The many other values they offer, when they're very well written, and when the original intent is for original old-school reasons, far outweighs the lack of high quality links though.
Check out my article and then if you have any follow-up questions, let me know. I'll be happy to answer them.