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Eric,

There are no absolutes in SEO.  Ask me any question and I can give you 5 different good answers for it.

There are no absolutes when it comes to platforms for SEO tools, either.  They've each arrived at their distinct solutions from different perspectives, although they may be trying to attain the same goals.

Experience is the answer.  Using and comparing how the tools provide the answers you're looking for is what make them shine for each of their particular qualities. You have to use them all to understand how to compare them all. There are no shortcuts to that.

Depending on  the strength of the page, Google's indexing of the noindex tag can take between weeks and months to recognized.

Dude, if you're just coming to this forum to drop links to your site, I don't think anyone is going to take your work in optimization seriously.

toti,

I assume it's not the theme that's the problem in google my business (google places) rather, it's likely their shared address. If two businesses are using the exact same address (and phone number too?)  google may have problems with it.

As  far as two website having the same theme but different content--that is not a problem.

"Can I safely asume that links between subsites on a subdirectories based multisite will be treated as internal links within a single site by Google?"

At best.

Unless they're otherwise straight-up  professional links with zero spam intention, I wouldn't use them.

Don't think of your page as a place for keywords. Think of it as a place to use words to explain what your product is, what solutions it provides and what audience it serves. Sure, you need to sprinkle your keyword(s) in there in the appropriate places but it all the other words that are going to make a difference.

By your question, it looks like you may be overly focused on the search term you want to rank for, at the expense of words that describe the concepts.

Google's algorithm is advanced. It can tell between gratuitous copy and what's been written by experts. However, many  experts don't know how to write for search engines. Scientists and academics like to save the best for last. Google rewards displays of expertise at the beginning of the page.

What you need is an expert writer and someone on  staff  who already knows the answers to the questions you're asking.

Interesting: https://twitter.com/Pechnet/status/1291459518627483649

I haven't been there in a while but doesn't Ahrefs show your historical link data?  Does it show an increase in links before the previous drop?

Scott,

Google local  aka "google my business" is a whole separate thing than  just optimizing your web page.  You should read through these results to come up to speed on it.

Paulius,

It doesn't much matter what any of us have to say about this--it has more to do with what the person who would want to link to, or share any, of those articles has to say.  That's because, before Google really gives a hoot about whether you wrote six of one or a half dozen of the other, it wants to know if anyone actually found the articles worthwhile. I'd recommend that instead of asking us, go out and research the folks who would be reading your article as well as the ones who could likely link to it and ask them.

If you did that, they may say "You know  Paulis, we really don't need another article on Rhassoul clay, there are already a bunch of them out there." Or, they may say, "You know Paulis, I've read everything out there and what I still don't know about Rhassoul clay is ........."  Or,  they may say, "If you researched and wrote an article about the ancient trade routes the clay was carried to culture outside Morocco, I would definitely link to that from my blog."

In either of those cases, It wouldn't really matter how long the article was, if it was well written and engaged the audience.  One share or one link to an article of 50 words is worth more than an unshared or unlinked article of 5000 words.  Words are cheap. Shares are what you're going for.

Arash,

Go to this really cool site that organizes every Matt Cutts video according the questions they answer it's called The Short Cutts, and match your 10 points above against the video topics  in the link building catergory. Then watch this video, and then read through these posts. Then you'll want to work on revisions to your list.  It's hard work but you can do it.

The value of a guest post depends on the quality of the content, the amount of social interaction that happens because of it, and the site it's been posted on. PageRank shouldn't be part of your decision-making, as good links are hard to come by and PR isn't a factor in what makes a good link--for most sites. Let me emphasize-- PR isn't a factor in what makes a good link--for most sites. As a matter of fact, sites with high PR and that do a lot of guest posting might be sites to stay away from, I can see a time when a bunch (or even a few) of those links could bite you in the a*s.

If the site allows guest post for topics of a wide variety of niches, it's really no better than an old style directory--Google's not going to give it any weight.  If there are lots of blog posts but nobody's commenting on the posts (or it's mostly comment spam), your guest post and the link it carries isn't going to be worth very much to the linked-to site.

Hey Magic,

Domain Authority is a measure of off-page factors such as linking root domains, number of total links, MozRank, MozTrust, etc.   It demonstrates the _potential _a site has to rank well in Google without taking into account most keyword and on-page factors. A site that ranks best for "arctic circle", for example, may be very authoritative and have great domain authority because of the strength of its back links but it may not rank above other, less authoritative domains for "snow", for example, unless it has well-optimized concepts on the site pertaining to the term.

MozTrust is the “distance” between a given page and a seeded trust source on the Internet. Think of this like six degrees of separation: The closer you are linked to a trusted website, the more trust you have, yourself.  Again, this has to do with your ranking _potential,_not how well optimized a page is around a key concept.  If you take a page on a domain that has a link to it from the above mentioned arctic circle site and you delete all the content on it, but leave the URL, it will still maintain its trust score but it wouldn't rank for anything.

Also, sometimes google penalties will leave your site with high pagerank an other ranking factors, such as those measure on OSE, yet the site is stripped of its ability to show up in the results.

Alex,

It is possible to have good on-page SEO, meaning that the site is crawalable, copy aligns with meta data, internal linking and navigation are worded correctly, and keyword research was done appropriately.  However if the keywords you've chosen to target were also targeted by competitors with sites/pages that have have back links pointing at them, it can be very difficult, if not impossible, to compete against them without sufficient back links of your own.  It boils down to the fact that links are an important ranking factor and most of the time (unless you target super-uncompetitive keywords) you need them to be competitive.

NOPE.  Stick with the one you've got.  Keywords in the domain looks spammy and isn't going to help you rank any better.

That's what happens when you code a link without the "http://", as has been done twice on the http://www.nationalpardon.org/federal-pardon-waivers-canada page.  Revise those links and it should go away.  Also on that page, (and probably throughout your site) you've got links pointing to www and non-www versions of your site, even though you have rel=canonical set to the www version.  One other thing-- it looks like you may be cutting and pasting from MS Word because you've got a lot of extra code in that page.

Ricky,

While Google's working to unify rankings for synonymous terms, synonyms can often have slightly different uses and meanings--especially regionally. At the least, be sure to investigate if that's the case with your terms in your region. You're likely to get a bit more traffic if you have separate pages ranked at the top for each term but whether the value's there for you or not is a different matter.   The more advanced Google gets, the more difficult it is to know what differences are required in the two pages in order to differentiate them and get them to rank for the separate terms. Personally, I think it's better to choose one or the other as part of your branding and just go with it.

If I knew that many of my potential customers were looking for my product by color, I would certainly have a page for each color of the product and I would write substantially different descriptions for each.  If I knew they were not searching by color, I'd think I might be reducing the visibility potential of my product by creating multiple pages for it with the only differentiation for them being color.

William, If the pages in question are linked to from external resources the robots.txt file will not prevent  the pages from appearing in the index. Per Moz's Robots.txt and Meta Robots best practices, "the robots.txt tells the engines not to crawl the given URL, but that they may keep the page in the index and display it in in results.

To prevent all robots from indexing a page on your site, place the following meta tag into the section of your page:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en