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If the agency is working on your behalf, then it depends on the agreed contract. Ultimately, you might decide that it's worth switching to an agency which isn't as protective about the accounts.
Personally as someone who runs Adwords and Youtube accounts for various clients, I tend to group them within the account for my agency simply because it means we have a bigger overall spend, so we might get a slightly better response from Google etc, and it also means that we never have access issues when we're checking them daily (and the client generally doesn't have the time or desire to monitor as closely). But I also give them top level account access as a matter of course, even if they never use it - optimising ad accounts isn't a massive secret - it's mainly long, dull and tedious optimisation!

And if a client prefers, I'm always fine with letting them maintain the account as long as I can get the access I need - the only difference really is that it doesn't then count towards the totals for Google Partner status etc, but that's not a massive issue...

Having had agencies hand over accounts in the past, I've seen good and bad examples, and I certainly wouldn't want to work with an agency that wasn't willing to let me have a quick look at negative keyword lists etc every so often, espencially if you're spending a reasonable amount...

There's no exact rule as far as I'm aware, but generally 75-80% unique is a commonly quoted threshold.

The actually amount of duplicate content on a page won't affect how Google handle a canonical tag - either the tag is there or not, just the same as a redirect etc.

So the issue is that you have sub-pages which contain a lot of the same information about cushioning, Gore-Tex etc?

If the content is reasonably unique, then it's a case of optimising each sub page for 'trainer model name cushioning' or 'trainer model name Gore-Tex' as appropriate.

Alternatively, you could create one high level glossary page for all the terms used for all the trainers, and then canonicalise each sub page to that one - then you won't risk the duplicate content filter, and provide a useful resource for people who might be looking for Gore Tex Trainers, rather than Nike Model One With Gore-Tex Trainers...

There's pretty much no-one at Google who would know every element of the ranking system, so it seems unlikely a third party would successfully replicate it all beyond what is already available via the common SEO tools.

If they really had managed to completely replicate everything to the point it worked perfectly, why wouldn't they just set up their own websites to rank highly and make money without having to do client work?

They may well have built their own internal SEO tool, which could do something similar to the Moz On Page Grader, for example.

But considering how important external SEO factors remain to be, and the fact they'd have a much more limited data set than Moz or other tools, it seems like it would be a bit pointless unless they planned to pivot to selling their own SEO tool.

So either the client ends up being saddled with a company using a tool with very little data. Or they end up being saddled with a company aiming to ditch clients and sell an SEO tool instead in the future...

Hi,

Ideally, you want everything that's important as high up the menu structure as possible without making it too unusable for actual customers.

If it's 3 levels deep, then it's starting to get to the stage where I'd either look to move the category up if it's an important one, or possible merge it with something else that's relevant to be able to get it higher in the menu structure. Ultimately it's about managing your crawl budget and if you're burying something 3+ levels down, it's less likely to be regularly crawled unless it's incredibly popular from external links etc.

Flatter, shallower navigation and menus are always best as long as they're still usable...

Yep. There's certainly nothing to stop them from ranking, and if you're already doing well with product pages, then it's an indication your category pages should also do reasonably well.

Obviously you'll want to optimise for at the category level (e.g. Ladies Leather Jackets, rather than a specific jacket name or type), and there may be more competition. But obviously by going for broader terms, there's the opportunity to attract a lot more traffic.

In general when I work with eCommerce sites, I always tend to work from individual products up where possible, so as far as I'm concerned you're doing it in the right order...

As Jordan said, it's definitely not a big factor compared to the big signals. It does seem to have a minimal effect with everything else being relatively equal, so if it's a fairly easy thing to implement it certainly doesn't hurt though.

Don't forget to set your audience target in Search Console as well....

There are a lot of common website hacks which are used to provide fake content/page titles and meta descriptions plus links back to whatever money site is being promoted.

Just checked and Tuscola Today is a WordPress site - WP has been the most common target of a number of these hacks due to the fact it's so popular, and a lot of people don't take decent security precautions/update their plugins as required.

The 'Cialis WordPress Hack' has been fairly well known about for 5+ years, but there are plenty of people out there who haven't encountered it before

Hotlinking is definitely a bad idea - it can often lead to the original site changing the images to prank anyone known to be using them for example. Or if the original site goes offline, it'll take out your site as well.

It really depends on the website ownership and also the purpose. I know you were using examples, but if the second site is a specific stock image site, for example, they may consciously want to promote that site for images...

What Igor said.

The opportunities for free article posting sites is increasingly limited - the only ones I've seen getting a decent amount of traction have been using alternatives to SEO to gain traffic (e.g. paid social, email etc), and have also targeted a particular niche.

For an SEO perspective, you're basically going to be on a losing streak, as the only people likely to use a free article posting site other than something massive like Medium will be those looking to share existing/spun articles to game their SEO.

The way to think about it is as an opportunity, rather than a cost.

Instead of having two competing brands for the same customer, you now have the opportunity to target two segments of potential customers much more effectively.

Plenty of examples exist of multiple brands under the same umbrella targetting different customer groups. For example in drinks, look at how many brands Coca Cola own - and why they'd buy brands like Innocent to get to a different market group....

In finance, you might want to target one brand at younger consumers who will then grow into the other brand.

Or one for those on a lower budget, for example.

And that will naturally lead to different and unique content. I supply a huge amount of content for businesses, and my structure, language and tone has to be different for each one to appeal to the customers they want.

Hi,
  Duplicate content issues are created when the same content appears on two different urls. So if your content appears on www.yourexample.com/brandaproduct and www.yourexample.com/brandbproduct, then that's when it's an issue.

You can do this by changing dynamic elements via personalisation, but it's not necessarily easy to do, and could well end up risking a penalty for masking/cloaking if there's an error.

Personally, I'd rethink why you're running both brands - are they targeting different audiences/locations?

If there's no differentiation between the two brands, then there's no point in having them. But if one is targeting a different demographic, then there's a reason to create unique content which will appeal specifically to their audience. The actual product and data may be the same, but the benefit of bespoke content for the right audience will be an increase in conversion rates to actually purchase your services, rather than simply avoiding any SEO penalties...

It's an approach which is done by many, many companies. For example, I worked for a major UK publisher with 5 magazines all covering the same topic area, but one was aimed at beginners, one was for advanced users, and others concentrated on specific niches within the market...

What CMS platform are you using? If you're on WordPress, for example, you can use the Redirection plugin to redirect any non-existing url to an existing relevant page.

Alternatively you can do the same with your .htaccess file.

1. I have a few sites on Godaddy and haven't seen anything unusual occurring for soft 404s.

2. It depends on the cause - are they a large percentage of the total indexed pages? By the sound of it they're only 2 or 3 from a total of how many?

The solution is usually to check why your pages aren't returning a proper 404 error code if they don't exist, or whether there is an issue with them being redirected somewhere.

In terms of Search Engine Optimisation, I haven't seen any categorical proof that active or passive tone will make a big difference.

When it comes to writing style, the use of an active voice is encouraged in journalism, copywriting etc. It's much more effective at encouraging users to take action (i.e. buying a product for example).

Whether or not that should be included in the Yoast plugin depends on personal preference. Personally I use the comprehension scores and anything grammatical as a rough guide, but nothing more than that. Especially when WP still insists on American spelling checks, and most of the subjects I write about tend to use fairly niche technical terms which will be flagged up every time they appear as a spelling mistake, and as potentially too complex for everyone.

I'd say it's always worth testing on a couple of products if you're unsure. Personally I would try and phrase as much as possible in an active voice anyway (Especially any Call To Action), but if, for example, I wanted to echo Wikipedia or a scholarly academic article, I might choose to go more passive...

Any automated checker will only ever be a reasonable guide - and I say that as a big fan of the Yoast plugin - there should always be human judgement applied to whatever is recommended...

It wasn't Open Site Explorer by any chance?

https://moz.com/researchtools/ose

Hi - it's nothing to worry about, as Thomas said.

All it means is that anyone going to nappyvalley.net is correctly redirected to the www. version. That's right, as you always want to pick one version of the url as the canonical version, and redirect the others to it.

And when you set up in Moz, you tried to track the non-www. version which is being redirected. Just select the www. version and it'll all work fine.

Hi,

Could it be the Most Engaging Posts report, which is in your Moz Campaign menu under Social?

Hi,

It's not about 'using 404 pages'. It's about removing the occurence of a 404 page when a product isn't available...

So the answer is yes. It's fine to redirect what was a product page to the main relevant category page if that product is no longer available and you don't plan on restocking in the future.

In fact it's recommended if you want to preserve a large percentage of the link equity the original page has built up, and hopefully provide a good user experience by allowing customers to find alternative products.

The only issue is if you have thousands of products being discontinued, then the amount of 301s can affect the speed of your website. But I've managed redirects for websites with 100s of thousands of products, and 10s of thousands of error pages without any issue.

I'd echo Yossi in saying that it may be worth creating a custom 404 Error Page which helps your users if they encounter it, and also improves your branding - with most eCommerce sites with large inventories, it's inevitable error pages will crop up despite your best efforts.

And I'd echo Nitin in saying that if you might get the product back again, you're better leaving the pages on the site and allowing customers to register their interest when it reappears...

Google Page Rank was deprecated and not updated since the end of 2014, and the public facing Page Rank metric was generally too broad to be able to use as a useful tool...

The only change now is that Google has killed it off completely for any third party tools to pull data, so it's completely dead...

In terms of your own site, you're better off looking at whether a page is attracting traffic via organic & paid search and social channels as a measure of success.

In terms of external sites, the various tools (Including Moz) which allow you to check metrics are generally more useful - Page Rank never supplied an equivalent to Domain Authority (As a 'site' page rank was the page rank of the individual home page), and although the crawl amount often isn't quite as wide as the resources of Google, the individual PA scores are more granular, so you can more accurately look at closer competitors if that's your thing...