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Yes Bethany - it's data that Google organizes but you can accomplishment for someone else by using structured data like in the link Dmitril provided.

Sounds like a faulty CMS issues ... what sort of CMS is it?

Agree with John. That link is pure, unadulterated 24k SEO gold. It's dofollow, it comes from a 92 DA web site ... it will pay SEO dividends for years to come. Also it's much better than a typical press release because all credible press release platforms have changed their links to "nofollow" at the urging of Google in the last year or two. Kudos to you for putting in the effort to get that.

I think this question depends on how many products you have, how many products you eventually want to grow to and what your keyword goals are. For example, if you have 5 specific products and don't want to expand to say more than 15 in the next 5 years, in my opinion, you don't need to use all the categories. Categories are for organizing data and/or targeting category kws. If there's not much data to organize and your long tail URLs efficiently target your kws ... then I would stick with that.

What would very valuable to me is to be able to grant certain clients access to their Moz account for features that are simply not available via the PDF reports. For example, it may seem like a small matter but the competitive link metrics are easy to understand within the moz console because of how interactive the reports are. You can hover your mouse over any point to see more information ... that report in PDF format (which is all I can send a client right now) requires a phone conference to explain and give context.

Right now, as far as I can see, I can only give a client access to ALL my accounts ... which is something I don't want to do. Will we be able to add account specific access to our seats anytime soon?

Sorry, yes, adding a directory is exactly like adding a domain or a subdomain to Webmaster tools. Just add the full url, confirm ownership and you're all set

​I can't give you anything other than anecdotal evidence here but yes. I would recommend this. If for the very least, you can see that a specific directory in WMT has the proper geo kws associated with it. The driving principle here is this: Google has more data than any company on the planet and one of their biggest challenges is organizing that data to help their users. If there's anything I can do to help them organize that data in an accurate manner, that helps their users, I do it.

Perhaps I'm the squeaky wheel here, and I understand that's not the culture on these forums (which I'm ALL for 99.9999% of the time) ... but to me, if the DA's are going to go back up, why drop them?  For us, DA is something we educate our clients on, we preach it's credibility/accuracy, and we ask our clients to hold us accountable to it. But now, I'm going to have to essentially undermine its credibility to explain to my clients that this is a large scale drop and it should go back up again soon.

I'm done being the squeaky wheel now. I am a big believer in DA and Moz in general ... these forums have the sharpest people in the industry. I just felt compelled to express some frustration.

awesome, awesome answer here man. thanks for taking the time to respond. I went in and setup WMT for the old sites and things are looking a little bit better now.

Be warned, this is a complex issue that I have and will require someone who has some advanced knowledge about 301s and link penalty’s.  I have a law firm client whose site is having some issues. There are some very complex details here so I'm going to articulate them in bullet points in hopes of making the issues easy to understand.

So here's my root problem:

1. We have poor organic rankings (4th, 5th, 6th page for most terms) despite Domain Authority of 32 (avg. 1st page competitor is 28) and some very strong white hat link building the last 60 days or so.

How's their backlink profile look, you ask?

1. When you look at their backlink profile in OSE, their spam score is a 1/17 (not sure if that's credible in any way).
2. Lot's of links that score 5's on the spam score make up about 10% of their OSE links.
3. Here’s where it gets tricky; those links are not directed the client's New URL, they are links that go to some old URLs the client used to have, for which they had an SEO guy who built all those crappy links. Those URLs with the crappy links (we'll call them The Crappy URLs) were 301'd (can we all agree 301'd is a verb?) to the NEW URL for just a couple of months. Shortly after that, NEW URL dropped almost completely out of Google, so the client turned off the 301s.
4. So despite those 301s being turned off, OSE still shows all the links going to The Crappy URLs but is giving The New URL credit for them. Keep in mind, the 301s were turned off about 6 months ago so it’s a little strange that OSE still shows those 301s.
5. This has led me to the conclusion that the Domain Authority that OSE shows of 32, is not a “real” number since it is seemingly based off links inherited from 301s that no longer exist.

So now I’m trying to create an action plan for this client that will hopefully help us start to make some real progress in our rankings. This client does not have the budget to wait another 6 months for some sign of hope so time is of the essence. Here’s my theoretical action plans I’m choosing from and would like the communities input on which, if any, they feel is best (Also, if I’m missing something or you have an idea, I’m all ears): **Potential Action Plans: **

1. Do nothing, keep building quality links, creating quality content, monitor crawl reports/gwt for issues. That strategy is going to win long term.
2. #1 + Create one page sites on The Crappy URLs, setup GWT for them, submit sitemaps thus forcing Google, OSE and other web crawlers to index them, thus removing any potential residual penalties from the 301s. NOTE: Currently The Crappy URLS are just landing on GoDaddy’s default landing page which is of course not being indexed by Google or OSE.
3. #2 + Disavow all the bad links going to The Crappy URLS. Then once the bad links no longer appear in the OSE profile for each of The Crappy Sites, 301 them again, thus inheriting the good links but not the bad.
4. #1 + 301 the Crappy URLS back to the New URL, while also disavow any links going to The Crappy URLs. The logic here is that if the road back to recovery is going to be a few months away no matter what, when the 301 knocked them back 6 months ago no reputable link building was being done. I am cautiously optimistic the linkbuilding we are doing will eventually off set any penalty’s coming from the 301s. Plus now we’ll know the 32 Domain Authority OSE is giving us is real. This is the one I’m leaning towards quite frankly because I think it will reduce the recovery time and we’ll know somewhat quickly (30-60 days) if it’s actually working. 1-3 could each take 90 days before we know if it’s working.

So please, if you have any expertise with any of this, your help or advice would be appreciated. I’d rather not share The New URL for obvious reasons but if you must know, simply message me and as long as you’re legit, I’ll share it with you.

I thought you claimed the old competitor page and tried to input your client's info for their Google+ page.

If that's not the case and you've already set up a Google+ page, there's nothing that needs to be done in my opinion.

I'm not sure that I would have had them change their number prior to reading this story, so as much as I would like to say yes and sound smart, I would have probably played it the same way. Especially when you think of the benefits of old customers of the competitor calling your client looking for the same services.

Crazy, I have quite a bit of experience with this exact scenario: law firms using geo subdomains to target specific areas.
Here's my findings and suggestions based on actual results and experience:

1. SEO on domain.com benefits atlanta.domain.com. This is a fact. If Starbucks decided to create subdomains tomorrow for every location, their subdomains would benefit from 91 DA. That's how Findlaw, lawyers.com and all those guys get first page placement with high DA and low PA.
2. Digital Diameter is right, subdomains are more effective and directories are more efficient. UNLESS you have a really good multi-site CMS. Then you can be equally efficient and more effective.

I hope this answers your question, if you want some help or have any other questions, PM me.

Obviously these are not duplicate pages but I think your pages are drawing the duplicate content flags because

1. You have the same h1 for each one (man vs. world) and
2. Your content other than your actual picture is all very similar (i.e. disclaimer)
3. You have no alt image tags so the crawler has no idea what sort of image it's looking at
4. Your URLS are very similar (I'd switch to a more SEO friendly URL structure if your CMS allows)

I would fix #1-3 for sure since those are pretty easy fixes and then see if that causes the notices to cease. If not, I would fix #4 as well. Long term, you are going to want to fix #4 regardless so you might as well bite the bullet.

1. Yes, make sure description is different for each page
2. So are there two pages in two different categories or one page being crawled twice? If it's two seperate pages in different categories I would change the title tag to something like 'Product X Category 1' and then 'Product X Category 2'. I would do the same thing with the description as well. If it's one page being crawled (possibly indexed twice) I would pick a category based on potential traffic and get rid of the 2nd category.
3. Who's they? I'm not understanding this canonical question
4. It should not make a difference whether you're using a full url or short url format.

You want to create Google+ Local Page for every one of your locations, possibly one for your brand as well. Ideally, you want a unique URL for each location as well. Once you create a page for your Google+ Local page it will automatically 'merge' your Google Places page to your new Google+ Local Page, provided you selected your Google Places page when you claimed your Google+ Local Page.

I believe what's coming, is that Google is going to force Google Places users to manage their businesses on Google+ Local.

I believe your current configuration is hurting your long term SEO.

My preferences would rank as follows:

1. company name + country specific TLD (company.de, company.uk, company.com
2. subdomain on .com uk.company.com, de.company.com
3. directory on .com company.com/uk/, company.com/de/

That's my .02

So I have a couple of questions about 301 redirects:

1. Do Google penalties EVER pass through a 301? I've done 20+ domain 301s in the last year and have yet to see it happen, but the other day I read a an article (or maybe it was a QA post?) that suggested doing 302s to avoid transferring penalties. Has anyone seen any authoritative information regarding this?
2. I 301'd a domain in February that another SEO firm had built a lot of spammy links and I began building contextual links for it at a very slow rate (like 10 or so a month). Within a month, my domain authority was a 26 on the new domain and my inbound links were non existent. By month 2, my links were 70k and domain authority was 34. By month 3, down to 25k inbound links and domain authority of 29, where it has settled for the last 3 months despite some really high quality links. My question (don't worry it's coming), is does anyone have any clue why my links shot up so quickly and then dropped? I'm assuming the 301 links kicked in and then only about 45% ended up 'sticking'??

Thanks in advance

I would imagine that you would see drop n traffic if you began to receive traffic immediately a upon creating the 301. I would leave it in place unless theres a really compelling reason (that I can't think of) to remove it.

All those scenarios look good to  me. I think they are great ways to leverage offline relationships for online value. I would perhaps be careful with the last option but as long as you get a high quality, long term link I think it would be good.

I'm with you, I like having the separate content. I'm sure if you do that you will link all of content so that someone looking for a particular piece of content can quickly navigate by title or something like that. I think doing that way you can target broad keywords for each of the eight topics and if they're in depth, I would imagine the long tail opportunities will be there as well.

To me this solution satisfies the human/user experience part as well as the search engines, your eight landing pages will get some love because of how narrow in scope they.