Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Gaurav,

Moz's domain authority is designed as an effort to mimic Google's pagerank.  So if  your pagerank goes up, things are working for you.  Pagerank gets adjusted every few months. In the mean time, your rankings can go up based on the work you've done whether you see your pagerank move or not.

Your competitors are never finished adding content and optimizing their sites, which means you're never finished either.  You can't afford to sit and wait for the next google PR update, you have to keep working on your site.

Keep in mind Registrar, that domain metrics and page metrics are different. Moz is less likely to crawl deep into lower quality pages (even on a higher DA site) than Majestic or WMT.  The goal/purpose of that is to hopefully give you a better idea of the links that may actually be helping you rank in Google.  Not every link that shows in every link-tool actually is a benefit to your ranking.  If you're links are not showing up in Moz tools consider their quality somewhat suspect and work on building link relationships with sites who can demonstrate that relationship on higher quality pages.

It takes so much work to make domain / web pages rankable that many don't have enough time or energy to spend doing it for two domains so you might as well put your efforts into your money domain.  As far as "dominating the front page of Google" for your branded keywords, what do you get out of that that you don't get by keeping the domain on your domain?  One additional listing?  You could get that and more just by working your social media profiles and or an inexpensive adwords campaign.

Cleanedison,

Give it a day or so and see what happens.  The changes you mentioned aren't uncommon in typical SERP fluxuations and could change right back.  If you haven't done any low quality link building and your back link profile is pretty clean, it may not be penguin at all.

Deborah,

As you're just starting out, thinking about one keyword per page is a good way to begin wrapping your arms around the keyword subject.  It is true that a page can rank for multiple terms (typically they'd be similar terms) but if you think about the keyword as being the key concept for a page and then create your content around that concept, you'll be in good shape as you learn more about SEO.  The more you keywords you try to get a page to rank for, the more difficult it is to get any one of them to rank.

Ask yourself what makes the leaders in your niche "important"?  What is "importance" in your niche? The answer is going to revolve around "discussion".  What is it about leaders in your niche that makes your target audience discuss them/their product/their brand and how do others learn about those discussions?  That answer is going to revolve around "content".

Important sites are what populate the top of the search results and they didn't become important without discussion and content. You need to create some of that for your site/brand/product.  The way to start is to figure out what they're doing to create it and do the same for yourself.

Links contribute to importance and are evidence of discussion. You can check on who and where those discussion are taking place using open site explorer - its free.  What's happening on those pages with links and why was the link created? Can you come up with a similar reason for people to link to you?  Type the name of your top competitors into google and use the results to see who's mentioning them. Follow their twitter feeds and facebook pages and see what they'e doing there.  Follow the people who are following them and work on creating something that your new followers will discuss.

In the end, it all comes down to "know your competitors well and your audience even better". Work on making that ring true for yourself and an understanding of the content you need to create will come naturally.

Success often takes a long time.

Bob,

Real reviews will happen as a  result of people's interaction your company and they will inevitably put them where they think best. Note that, in order to write a review on a company's Google+ page, the reviewing customer must also have a G+ account - just having a gmail account isn't enough anymore.  Those without a G+ account will have to writer their reviews elsewhere.

Reviews aren't the same as citations. Citations typically refer to your name, address, and phone number and those you really need to get from a wide variety of sources to strengthen your G+ Local business page visibility.  You can started finding out about and populating those sources  at getlisted.org.

Here's a good article by Mike Blumenthal on encouraging customer reviews and for good measure, here's what Google says about making sure your reviews on G+ are useful, honest, and written by real people.

I think it depends on what your goals are with the site.  If it's a relatively static site and these content pages are the sum total of what will be posted on the site, then I'd say throw it all up there.  On the other hand, if you are looking  to jump start a blog and in addition to the 100 page already on hand, you're going to have additional content being created on a regular basis, I'd take a different approach. Assuming it's really good stuff that your target audience is clamoring for, I think I'd start with dropping 50% of it on the blog right off the bat and the remaining I'd diminishingly drip in over a period of several months as you're also writing and adding your new content.

Remember, the whole point of content is that it generate engagement.  It's true that on it's own, it can provide some relevancy and attract some search traffic, but what you really want is for people to talk about it and share it.  Is that the kind of content you're talking about?

By my count, that's an additional 677 characters "with spaces" and all but 34 of them are worthless to you.  It doesn't matter how many words you want to use in your title, only about 70 characters count.  The title is just not the place for a paragraph worth of words-save it for the body of your html page.

Useful words: rear panel mens underwear, briefs & tangas

Useless words: These are possibly the most common and long established style of , yet they still come in a variety of cuts and styles. The common feature amongst all is that they have a full  that partly or entirely covers the bottom. They will have cut away legs, a pouch at the front and are supported with an elasticated waistband. Briefs and can vary in the amount coverage in the side panels around the hips and top of the legs and the rear. The more revealing and skimpier style usually consists of only a pouch at the front that is supported with an elasticated waistband and a minimalist rear, with no side panels that exposes the hips.

Will you get penalized? Not per se. Is such a long title hurting you? Yes--what do the first 70 words tell someone about your product?  Keep it short and simple.

As Matt said, "the client can want whatever the client wants" but it doesn't mean anything unless they have the budget to make it a reality.  Off hand, I'd say a project entailing a super-substantial  investment in content and publicity and a minimal time frame expectation of at 24 months should be what the client is being told to expect.

If they're your client already, your job would be to give them some sort of estimate of the cost to achieve their goal.  Run a OSE report for the client that compares his site with those of the top competitors for one of the keywords, then do the same for each of the keywords.  Cut and past the reports into a document and lay them out in front of the client and show them the investment his/her competitors have made in their sites. Then explain that he's probably going to have to exceed their investments if he's going to move above them in the search results.

Alan,

I have feeling that if you have to ask that question and your thinking starts off in the under $500 range, you may have a hard time understanding or recognizing why the actual cost for what you're looking for is going to be so much higher--and what you will actually be getting for your money. In any case, you should be prepared to sign a year agreement that binds you to pay a  total yearly sum and that stipulates exactly what your contractor is going to achieve for you.  Absent that, one or both parties is very likely back out early because of misunderstandings of what is being provided and/or what is required.

Linkbuilding is by no means a causal engagement--the future of your company/website is at stake. Just as you would educate yourself for any major investment by your company, you should be very, very well educated on the topic of linkbuilding before investing your company's money in it.

Catherine,

Moz's local expert, Miriam Ellis, gave the following answer to a similar question a while ago and it goes straight to the point.  If the client can't sincerely answer yes to the following questions then they would be putting their existing local listing in jeopardy of being penalized or merged with another listing.

1) Does the business have a unique, dedicated physical address (not a virtual address, P.O. Box or shared address)?

2) Does the business have a unique, dedicated local phone number in the city of location (not an 800 number, not a call tracking number, not a shared number)

3) Does the business have in-person transactions with its customers, either at its own location (like a restaurant) or at the customers' locations (like a plumber)?

If the business does not meet any one of these 3 criteria, it does not qualify for local inclusion. I don't know where your client is at on points 2 and 3, but if they can't say yes to point one, Local SEO will be nothing but problematic for them. Here's why:

If 2 or more businesses share an address, suite address or phone number (or even if their names are too similar), Google will frequently merge the business details of the listings. This means that Joe the Barber can end up with Jim the Plumber's business name, phone number or reviews showing up on his listing. Merging is one of the most difficult issues to deal with in Local, and one to be avoided at all costs.

Here is a Google help file on this issue: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=175290

It's such a subtle difference SEO wise (if, in fact, there is a difference at all) that it really works out to what's best in terms of the user experience (internally or externally).  I wouldn't waste much time considering it--just pick the one that seems to work best for your architecture/visitors and go with it.

Rasmus,

You've got to build the value of the review pages in the eyes of your target audience.  If Google's not ranking them highly enough, it's because Google's not thinking they're important enough.  You have to take a really hard look at those pages as compared to those of the competitors that rank at the top of page one and come to terms with what's helping those pages rank well--it's probably links but could be discussion and engagement socially.

Today's SEO is less about the words you use on the page and more about how many people are showing that it's useful to them.  When you construct your reviews, you need to keep a laser focus on who the target audience member who will share your content and you have to give them a reason to share yours over the competitors'. It's like concept research, instead of the old fashioned keyword research--you have to conceive of content that has an audience --an audience you can reach out to socially---and which doesn't have so many competitors that you can't get a foothold in the mindshare of your intended audience.

I say that because to me, your review page appears kind of run-of-the-mill (though I can't read it) and that there might not be much there that gives the audience a reason to chose it over someone else's review.  It's time to beef up the content and then hit the social networks and bloggers to promote it.

I think that equally important as what Adam says is to have a clear understanding of what you want your blog to accomplish.  If its successful adsense monetization , you first have to define what "successful" is and then you have to go about making and measuring the value of the choices you make pertaining to your content.

All too often, I come in contact with potential clients with ecommerce sites, for example, who have errantly believed that if they weren't making enough money with the 3,000 products they had on their site, that they had best increase the number of products they were selling.  The problem with  that strategy is that it gave them even less time to concentrate on who the customer was for any one particular product or how to effectively position the product in front of that customer.

A narrower scope is better if your resources are stretched and you are not currently efficient at reaching the audience your products/content targets. At the same time you are filtering the list of potential keywords your blog could/should target, you have to balance  the objectives of your blog, the resources you have at your disposal that you can use towards achieving those goals (content writers/producers), as well as what audience has been defined as being most most likely to help you achieve "success".  The narrower the scope, the easier it is to be authoritative, the easier it is to create consistently authoritative content, the easier it is to find and reach out to your audience socially, and the more likely your ads are going to target your specific audience, and the more likely your blog will be successful.

Alex,

Google Alerts - good for web resources google frequently crawls and results are sent automatically to your email--free

HootSuite will keep a running list of mentions/searches on facebook, twitter, linkedin, G+, Foursquare --free

And here's a good roundup of Google Alert alternatives

The thing about Fresh Web Explorer is that you can't set up ongoing alerts.

They lower the visitor's perception of the quality of the site and the value they may get out of it.

I've always found that dealing with the verification phone call is something that has to be done in a coordinated fashion with the client.  I schedule a time with the client to initiate the verification calls (during business hours) and at that time, I first set everything up on the search engine control panel, get codes if needed, then contact the client at the number the search engine will use for verification and make sure they are ready, give code as necessary, hang up and initiate the verification call to the client, then call the client back to get code as necessary,  enter code at search engine control panel.  I've never found a more efficient way of doing it.

Sales calls from sites has never been an issue clients have brought up to me.

Greg,

While you're in the learning stages, it can be easiest to think of one keyword--one page. You also have to consider how competitive the keyword is and how strong your competitors are for each keyword.  With that in mind, newer sites will often choose keywords that don't have the most activity because it can be very difficult to rank for those.   Also, the keyword meta tag is essentially obsolete for google ranking purposes so you'll have to go deeper to optimize for the terms you want to rank for. I recommend you read through  The SEO Guide From Moz to get thing rolling for your site.

Jarrod,

First you'll want to determine what penalty you were hit with.  You can match up your google analytics with this  http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/  or this http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change and then you'll need to start taking steps to recover from the penalty--here's a starting point for that: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2276498/Pure-Spam-What-Are-Google-Penalties-What-to-Do-to-Recover