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Hey Ash,

The thing about longer page lengths is not so much that they have more words per se, as much as it is that a 1000 word page may contain a _broader vocabulary _as compared to a shorter page.  However, I can give you countless examples where a 300 word page outranks a 2000 word page simply by virtue of the quality of the writing. So, even though everyone seems to be all hung up on "more words are better" you're better off thinking about how well do you understand your audience's questions and how thoroughly have you answered them.

Ultimately, however, ranking is not just about the words on the page, but about your audience's experience with your content--are they clicking through, are they spending time, are they sharing.  In order to push you up in the rankings, Google wants to see that your content is important to your audience and its vocabulary is only part of that equation.  I might recommend Rand's  content manifesto for some inspiration on how to move forward with your site's content.  I think what you've described so far is a good start but there is an entire universe of directions you can take it and now may be a good time to start looking at the bigger picture.

You just have to wait it out. I'm assuming that yours is a new site, which means you'll need a degree of patience when it comes to waiting for google to index changes. I'm guessing that you're already linking to those pages from your home page via the site's navigation, but that would only be a guess.

If you are, the next thing to work on is getting out into the social networks and develop a following of the audience members your site's content targets.  Be sure the content you're creating for your site is worthy of engagement by those folks because you're going to want those people to be liking, sharing and linking to those new pages you've created--that's what's going to be the most help for them in the search results.

For question #1: You don't have that many direct competitors for those search terms and the overall strength of the homepage isn't bad, compared to those that you do have.

For question #2: If you weren't already being overwhelmed by traffic for keywords like "online grocery shopping Dallas" you may look to branch out and try to get traffic for terms like "online grocery shopping", "buy pistachio and cherry tart online", "online gourmet foods", etc. Someone in that scenario might look to eliminate all possible hurdles that stand in the way of ranking for those terms. Such a person might add some additional content to those pages, as well.  But, if you're happy with how things are going for you now, then there's probably no reason to worry about any of those things.

You may be asking about the installation of Google Analytics, which syncs with Moz tools to provide additional insight into your visitor traffic.  If that's what you mean, here's a tutorial on getting them installed.

http://searchengineland.com/google-analytics-installation-for-novices-and-beginners-133384 

Try disallowing the user agent in your robots.txt file and pinning down the IP address of the scraper so you can deny it in your .htaccess file

If it's a copy of an existing page and it is on a different URL it's duplicate content and google will only rank one of the pages/sites.  The duplicate will not receive any traffic from google and it is possible that your main site takes some sort of hit, as well, because of it.

First thing I'd do is look at their traffic history if possible.  Look as far back as you can and see if there are significant drops in traffic. It would be a good sign if there were not any significant drops.  If the terms they're getting their most traffic for now were the same terms they were getting their most traffic for two or three years ago--and they rank down on page 2 or 3,  it could be a sign of fixable under optimization.

If, however, you don't see any significant drops and you examine a page (maybe their homepage) and it looks appropriately optimized for appropriately competitive terms but the page is not showing up anywhere in the results, I'd hesitate.  There could be a penalty far back in it's history that you're not able to see.

Take a look at the wayback machine and see what the site looked like prior to the analytics history you're able  to view.  Was it the same site? Maybe the people you're buying it from bought it from someone else who'd spammed and jammed it. If that were the case, maybe a simple reinclusion request could fix the problem--if there is one.

There are a lot of possibilities and they're all worth looking into.  Of course, the smart buyer might do exhaustive research, keep the results close to their vest, and push the seller hard on the lack of traffic issue to suppress the price.

I don't think that's possible, Epameinondas, but you can slow rogerbot down when it comes to crawl your site by adding a crawl delay directive to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: rogerbotCrawl-delay: 1

More info on the crawl delay directive:

http://www.bing.com/blogs/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2009/08/10/crawl-delay-and-the-bing-crawler-msnbot.aspx

Studio, here's a great post on wordpress SEO.  Yoast makes a very useful plugin too.

Ionut, what specifically does the link go to and from originally and how often do members come back?

Have you made any changes to the site recently.  I see that about this time last year the home page was a very different looking.  It didn't have all that scrunched up text at the bottom like it's there for search engine reasons, not for visitor reasons.  It didn't have all those slow loading images on it that kill the load time.  It didn't have 75+ instances of  variations of "photograph" on the home page.  It looks like the homepage  title tag at that time  was only about 2x longer than it should be vs. the current one  that's about 4x too long.

There's probably a lot more issues than those, as well but I didn't go to any interior pages for fear they'd take as long as the home page to load.  Sorry, but it looks like someone had their way with your site who still had a few things to learn about SEO.

Joshua,

The rankings report will show you which results show up in the local results and you can find out more about that here: http://moz.com/help/pro/rankings .  However, in order for the report to find your site in the local results, you'll have to include the city name as a part of the keyword being tracked such as "electronic cigarettes Charleston".

John,

Promoting a single blog post via 20 bookmark sites with or without duplicate descriptions isn't going to do anything for the post or your site's authority site, one way or the other.  At scale however, if this is the only method being used, it's going to hurt you.  I would recommend taking a closer look at the other ways your vendor is promoting your site and I'd start first with examining the quality of the content.  If it's not of the quality you would be proud to show your college English teacher, put before a peer review, or frame on the wall of your store, I'd be thinking of looking for another vendor.

Fisher,

Google deals with both with / and without / as though they are the same thing so I wouldn't worry about redirecting those.  If visitors normally get a trailing slash, canonicalize that, if they don't canonicalize on the URL without the slash.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/

If that were the case, I'd certainly apply for white listing.  I could charge my clients for getting them white listing too.  I might even start a poker site and see if I could get that white listed!

No, really, I've never heard of such a thing. It's all algorithmic.

Optimize,

According to Moz staff, it's not gone, just not implemented yet.  The exact date hasn't been provided as far as I can tell.

http://moz.com/community/q/moz-analytics-reports

Shailendra,

I think you'll find these interesting:

• http://moz.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-content-planning
• http://appropriateinc.com/downloads/ContentStrategyAtWork_Chapter2Sample.pdf
• http://www.congility.com/images/downloads/eventslides/2011conference/T1/Lucie_Hyde_Nikki_Tiedtke_Congility2011.pdf

Here's another way to look it it Ian--if, after just two months from launch, you're already considering re-purposing your  content, you might already be running out of steam on the project. If that's the case, you need to make your next step a  motivation-building step, in order to come up with a way to keep your momentum going  for the year + more of work that you're likely going to have to put into it before it gains traction.

To me, it seems obvious to leave the category content where it is and write new content for the blog--and for the product pages themselves. In creating that content, you want to keep in mind that "authority" isn't  about the content, the number of words in it, or whether the content is on the category pages, the blog, or the project pages, it's about who's reading, sharing, tweeting, commenting, +1ing, and linking to it.  Today's successful website is about knowing who your audience is, reaching out and engaging them with the kind of content they enjoy consuming, and giving them a reason and an opportunity to express their opinion on your content (and/or product).

The tree you should be barking up is the engagement tree and this video is a good place to start to get an idea what that tree looks like.  A Manifesto of Content Marketing - Moz

Dana,

When you say "inherits about 72% of Page A's pagerank if no other links are on the page", I think that's where your understanding goes off  track....either that, or it's where mine goes off track, because my understanding is that the percentage of PR that is passed from one page to another page is based on an unknown "X amount", not on the linking page's toolbar pagerank.   I think is better to say ...inherits about 72% of the pagerank that page A is able to pass...---not 72% of Page A's pagrerank.  Does that make sense?

Gavin,

As per Moz'z Crawl Dagnostics page under the Frequently Asked Questions heading, Moz crawls your site once per week on the same day of the week as you first set up your campaign and they try to keep it to the same time of day for each crawl.  Check your server logs to see when Roger Mozbot last crawled your site to determine it's next crawl.