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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.

My,

These days, it's about as hard to accomplish negative SEO as it is to do regular SEO, so I wouldn't think that's what caused your problem.  What happened back at the end of March when you dropped and then came back up?

If you're talking about how your business shows up with a map and specific business details on the right hand side of the serps, that's GMB. Google maps complements GMB but consider them separately, as far as I'm concerned. GMB has an entire interface for including your business details, location, reviews, etc. and if you haven't claimed your biz you need to go ahead and do that. Here's a bunch of info on it for you here at Moz.

You're barking up  the wrong tree.  It is an incorrect way to measure. It's a little tiny piece of the puzzle but you're thinking it is the whole puzzle.

Ryan,

Google search and Google My Business employ very different algorithms. They weigh different factors when deciding which results to show at the top. For example, only businesses within a specific geographic area will show up in the GMB results for a query but a wide variety of content, including businesses, video, documents,  blogs, etc, for the whole country can show up in google search.  With that being the case, it wouldn't be possible for the two to provide the same results in the same order.

Rosie,

Targeting low competition keywords is the generally accepted strategy for new marketers starting out with new websites and blogs. However, that doesn't mean it is necessarily easy to rank for those terms, especially if you're new and have little experience with optimization.

Generally speaking, terms with the lowest competition are that way because there are few people using them in their searches for your product, so it doesn't make much sense for the big guns to spend their time trying to rank for every longtail term out there.

Optimizing for longtail terms is a good way to learn your craft, though.  When you're good enough to rank well for any longtail terms you want, you'll automatically start wanting to try for more competitive terms because you are going to want more traffic than you've been getting. BUT, you really need to start way down there in order to learn your craft. Otherwise, you'll get frustrated and burn yourself out trying to rank for the competitive terms before you're ready.

Sam,

Link equity or, "link juice" is about sooo much more than domain / page strength and number of links on a page.  Did I say sooo much more? I meant sooooo much more.

There's textual relevance, page relevance, domain relevance, age, purpose,  status, location, and no doubt, a bunch of other factors.

Doing SEO by the numbers will only get you so  far.  You have to learn how to feel it.

Remember, correlation does not equal causation.

What about:

• having a good business model?
• knowing you audience?
• having the right people for the job?
• setting proper expectations?

All those things come after the 3 things you mentioned?

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.