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I was going to suggest CallRail.

Might also look at these folks: https://www.plivo.com/voice/ . I think they count CallRail as a customer. Not sure about NAP though.

I saw it this morning. Sometimes they will split test some users in order to get fresh data on how certain product features work/don't work. This could be what you're experiencing.

I don't think the issue is from your domain or the notifications. I received a similar notification but I looked into it and realized my site had gone offline for a little bit of time.

The site looks pretty new. I suspect a lack of links and the fact that Google actually lives in several different data centers (that update their index at different times) is the factor... just my guess though.

Hmm... I think you can have an inbound link report run at certain intervals and emailed out. Then you can do a comparison over time. You might also look into something like MajesticSEO which has a historic backlink tool. Very helpful and very credible.

Yes, Google has a number of penalties that actively hurt or de-indexes websites with shady links.

Just focus on getting backlinks that would be useful to people actually visiting those websites. If a human found your link, would they respect you for it? That's the question you should ask when you build links.

Infinitely greater than 0. The range is a percentage. Any number greater than 0 is, percentage-wise, infinitely greater than 0.

Forgetting the keyword report for a second, an increase from 1 to 2 is a 100% increase. But an increase from 0 to 1 is an infinite percentage because 0 is nothing where 1 is something. Something is infinitely more than nothing.

I always point people to Yahoo's style guide at http://styleguide.yahoo.com. It gives great advice for writing online and includes some pointers about good SEO that sounds natural and helps users.

This means that you were basically invisible or non-existent with that keyword prior, but now you have some visibility which is mathematically infinitely greater than zero.

It can constitute a link scheme. When a search engine finds out, they could determine that the links you've received aren't legitimate and may subject you and the sites linking to you to a penalty.

It also technically counts as buying a link. You are essentially trading something that has value for a link to your site. Absent following one of these suggestions you run the risk of being flagged for buying links.

If you use Apache, reference the SEOmoz article cited above.

If you use Nginx, reference this article.

Another "fix" is to use a canonical tag to suggest to search engines which version to index. SEOmoz will still detect a problem, but you'll be fine from a search engine perspective.

I've always used Amazon as an example (Zappos is good too). What's especially interesting is how Amazon's affiliate program gets them unique and natural backlinks that point to deep product pages.

You can look at the domain and page authority of individual pages for some idea. Because of some of the delays in how SEOmoz updates its index, you might not get as an accurate picture for newer posts.

Links near the top of the page tend to hold more weight than ones in sidebars, footers, and traditional author bios at the end of posts. Also search engines will only follow the first link to a page that it finds. For instance, if you have three links to example.com/homes, each with different (or the same) anchor texts, the search engine will only follow the first one that has a Do Follow attribute. Though you can have multiple links to different pages on the site - if the first link goes to example.com/home and the second goes to example.com/home2 then the search engine will follow both.

Further, the more posts you have on one site with links pointing to your website, the less power each individual link has. It's not going to hurt you, but the individual gains each link brings will be smaller and smaller.

So the short answer is, no there's no real way to see which sites pass "the most" link juice to your site. You can get an idea for which ones might be helping more, but it's only going to be an estimate.

I'm of the opinion that No Follow links help show that you have a natural link portfolio since having none implies that you could be spamming, but by themselves they won't do anything to influence your rankings.

If they're just domain names, it doesn't matter one way or the other. If the domain names have penalties, then sure there'd be a risk of passing a penalty on with the redirect.

I worked on a project once where the customer had purchased several hundred domain names. Some were microsites that had little value but a couple of links, some had mask redirects to their main site, others were just empty. I created individual pages on their main website to reflect the microsite content, then redirected the microsite domains there. I 301 redirected every masked and every floating domain name they owned just in case there was type in traffic.

The consolidation was done alongside other SEO efforts and the site in question has been consistently near the top of the SERP's for their target market. You have to look at your motives for doing something... if you're not working to be manipulative and have legitimate business reasons for doing something, then chances are it's ok. A lot of SEO is just about common sense.

I appreciate the kind words, thank you

Link exchanges are ok as long as there's a legitimate reason why the link would be on that particular page. No-following the links isn't all that important, but making sure that the links are relevant to your users (they might not be relevant to your "sector" but could be useful to your audience) is important.

If the link page that they want to place you on, or that you want to place them on are a list of valuable resources, the page itself could carry a lot of weight as a reference point for other sites. If the page just exists for search engines, you may as well forget it.

Agree with the suggestion about doing keyword research. Assuming that checks out for you, why not categorize according to both ideas? Have the largest volume categories at the top, say thought A, and do the thought B categories in a sidebar?

I actually spent quite a bit of time last night looking this up because I thought I had read about this happening. To be honest, I can't find anything. I have found some posts, such as this one, where canonical errors were picked up and adversely affected a site's results. But I can't find a specific example of a site that copied something like manufacturer descriptions and referenced the original source in a canonical tag, then being deindexed. Perhaps I mispoke.

That said, you're right, things are pretty confusing sometimes. A lot of people are in positions like Paul and rewriting product pages to be entirely unique is very costly. If I were Paul, I'd eat the costs of hiring a copywriter to push out new product descriptions rather than take a chance with the algorithm. It would be painful, but if e-commerce revenue is a significant portion of his business it might be worth it in the long run.

You might avoid penalties, but you risk getting the page de-indexed altogether because Google thinks that the "canonical" page is on the manufacturer's site. Assuming this is a product page, de-indexation would probably suck.

MozTrust is something SEOmoz calculates and, while it's based on what could be expected to help you rank, it doesn't always correlate with what Google does. A website could have a high MozTrust rank but could be penalized for other issues.

Danny Dover actually suggests that you use metrics like MozTrust and Page Authority and compare them to Google metrics like SERP positioning and PageRank to discover if you're being penalized. A page that SEOmoz categorizes as having a high Page Authority but that has zero PageRank can sometimes be an indication that Google is penalizing the page or website.

I would add a slight caveat and say that if the copied content is a majority of what appears on those pages, you might be fine.