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amielsosa

Your exact match volume (for bing) should show up on the page that shows that lists all the terms you've run reports for https://moz.com/researchtools/keyword-difficulty (and I think it shows up in the full report--but not sure about that)

If you have a landing page other than your homepage ranking for a term for which most of the competitors' results are their homepages, then I'd say your page is quite well zeroed in. Be sure to analyze and document specifically what you're doing on that page before making changes so you can go back to it if necessary.  At this point, it's probably authority that's that's going to push you higher in the rankings.  Even one or two links to that landing page from good resources will pay high dividends for you.

Hey Alan

It sounds like you are  saying that you have some old pages/urls from a website that you own and they have some external links pointing to them and you would like your site to be able to make use of any link juice coming from them.  (Makes me think of old websites/domains I bought back in the day.)

The way this is usually done is via a 301 redirect from the old page (that the external links are pointing to) to the current live page on your site that you would like to be the recipient of said link juice. Most hosts have an easy way to do this on their dashboard. Just wondering--why can't you see in your analytics if your site already is getting traffic from those pages/links?

Caveats: If the content of the pages that contain those external links is not relevant to the pages on your site that the links will be 301'd to, the link juice will be of little or no value to your page's organic ranking.  Also, Google, being a domain registrar itself, will be able to see if you are the owner of a site or network of  sites with a bunch of links going between them.  I'd definitely recommend spending some time with  Moz's beginners guide to SEO so to get a good lay of the land SEO-wise-speaking.

Properly implemented, curated, and maintained, there's not really a risk of problems with Google. It's just that for 99% of them there's so little-if any-ranking benefit to it, why bother.  It's not necessarily great for your brand, either.

Another way is to simply view what they've inserted into their keyword meta tag.  Although that tag has not been used by Google for some time, many websites still populate the tag with the terms they would like the page to rank well for.  To view the keywords meta tag, right click (if you're using windows) on the web page you're investigating and select "view source" or "view page source" and look near the top of the html page. There you'll see some code that looks like this:

name="keywords" content="keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 3, etc."/>

While you're looking at the page source, you can also look at the title tag (usually just above the keyword tag by a few lines).  It looks like this:

<title>...this is the page title....</span><span></title>

If you see overlap between words and or phrases in the title and the keywords tags, you can be pretty sure they are trying to rank for those terms--maybe successfully, maybe not.

As Matt said, boilerplate stuff is a tossup but your about page should be rankable for some unique facet of your business and for that reason, I'd be sure to 301 (if the pages are different) or canonicalize (if the page content is the same) to your preferred version.

That doesn't seem like it would be the problem. Has that site always been that clean?

How about content quality? Good?

Have you considered just whitewashing the current URL that's been optimized for your main keyword and starting over with a new URL? Even if it is your homepage. Like, just  re-optimize that current page with a bland/ non-cannibalizing keyword and start fresh with a new URL, new copy, new images. No 301s, no rel=canonical, no  nothing. Could be worth a try. You  can always revert back to the originals if nothing shakes free after a few months, right?

Shannon,

I can't answer exactly what's going on behind the scenes that causes the two different numbers to get spit out but I can tell you that the difference between 18 and 21 is so little as to be negligible.  When you get down to long tail keywords like that, things can get a little wonky, as far as exactness.  I wouldn't worry about that, if it were me.

Anja,

Have you  looked at your google analytics to see if those resources are bringing in any traffic?

Generally, yes, you should redirect those resources.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-changing-image-urls-will-affect-rankings-in-image-search/286163/#close

I'd say as a testament to how well is was put together, it is still a very good guide for SEOs to follow, even 4 years later (a long time in our field). There may be additional information that's useful today but you won't go wrong following what's on that page.

Mission,

I know, if only there was an interwebs where Moz was in control of the search engine, we could just run our lives based on domain authority : )

But...  Moz gives you an approximation of how well your on-page is optimized but there are a gazillion factors that go into google's algorithm, such as, maybe if your site has another page that ranks for the same or very similar target keyword, for example,  of which you have a couple.  Some people call that keyword cannibalization.  Maybe go after a different keyword?

Do remember these numbers are for approximate guideline use, there's nothing absolute about them. Use the  results to give you an idea that one term is more or less competitive than another by a little bit or by a lot.

Having been a Moz member since before they invented such a thing as "domain authority" I've had quite a bit of time to digest its relevance to our job as SEOs. I would answer your question like this:

Domain authority is some accumulation of all the authority built up by all the pages (PA) on the site.  PA is determined by taking into account numerous on-PAGE and off-PAGEe factors. DA is determined by taking into account the accumulated on-SITE and off-SITE factors of all the pages.

So, back links to internal pages will help the page authority of the linked-to page and help the overall domain authority. It won't help (nearly as much) the PA of other individual pages on the site.

That's my simplified approach to understanding it.

For example, social sharing links and authorship markup are good additions to a well-created landing page. While they may not technically be on-page factors, they are things that you implement on-page that can have a big impact on the overall strength of the page.

Sam,

Unless that paragraph is a large portion of the copy on both pages and/or is prominent at the top of your page, the impact on rankings will be nil for one page and maybe just a tiny bit for the other page.

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.

Yeah, that's not good.  You have your redirect set up improperly in your .htaccess file?  Take a look at this info to figure out what you may need to adjust.

<cite>http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection</cite>

Webjobz,

The crawl diagnostics summary warning for too many links occurs at 100 links on the page and is based on this info: http://moz.com/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many.  You're not likely to be penalized but there is science behind the number so you should look to be more frugal with the number of followed links on your page.

Sam,

You've got it backwards. Ranking for 1000 keywords doesn't help you rank for 100 in the top 10. It's ranking well for 100  in the top 10 that helps you rank for 1000.

You get yourself ranked for those 100 by doing your homework, not asking people in a forum to spoon feed you detailed answers when those answers have already been published all over the web, including here in Moz's Learning Center. You're not going to get anywhere with that.

I'd say you  want to come up  to speed on your understanding of backlinks  and keywords, first of all.

I think you may be looking at your topics too broadly and perhaps without enough creativity.  Who's never heard of the teenybopper who wanted to grow up to be a fashion model in high heel designer shoes? What shoe designer hasn't had a model who's little sister didn't want to grow up to be just like her? How many different ways can a teeny bopper save her dollars to buy those shoes she saw in the magazine at the grocery store?  What teeny bopper doesn't have an opinion on the shoes her mom has in her closet or on the shoes her aunt bought her for her birthday? And what writer, worth their salt, couldn't write a tear-jerking, funny, or uplifting piece on any of those topics that that target audience that they wouldn't share among themselves?

This is the best part about Google freeing us from the oppression of the "keyword" and letting relevance be more categorical and thematic. Google's listening less intently on what we have to say about ourselves through our content and more so on what those in the social world are saying about us.  This frees us to be more creative in the content that we create for our clients and lets us think more about creating content that our audience will engage with.

I think you're better off today writing about topics that are tangentially related to your niche and about ways your audience relates to those topics.  I think audiences today are becoming dead tired of copy that has any scent of SEO and that they are more likely to click through to and engage with that which is fresh in it's perspective. Learn your audience, write stuff that they're going to like, and don't forget your back channels to algorithmic visibility--like structured data, authorship, co-citation, UGC, and, oh yeah, links.