Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Clay,

As far as the words used in the title, those that are closest together and closest to the beginning of title will be given more weight but there is no clear delineation of what's a keyword and what's not a keyword in the title. Rather, think of your title as a lens through which  Google sees the rest of the words on your page.

When the copy on the page contains the same words in the same order as what's found in the title, such combinations will be seen by google as highly relevant to the same combination used in a search query. In your example, if your tile contains only "steel fabrication"  and your page copy contains only "steel fabrication" then the page would be far more relevant to the "steel fabrication" search query than it would be to the "structural steel fabrication" search query.

If your title used "steel fabrication" towards the beginning and "structural" towards the end and you sprinkled the terms "structural" and "steel fabrication" throughout your page copy, the page would still be highly relevant to the search query "steel fabrication", while increasing in relevance to the "structural steel fabrication"  query.

If your title began with "structural steel fabrication" and you used that combination of words throughout your copy, the page would probably become more relevant to that query than to "steel fabrication" but could possibly still rank for both.

That said, there is a fundamental difference between the concepts of "structural steel fabrication" and "structural steel " (and "steel fabrication" for that matter) and Google is recognizing that the way each is used in context gives big clues to the page concepts.  Thus, more and more, Goolge knows that just because the words "steel fabrication" are used next to each other on a page, if structural is used in front of them, then the page may be considered irrelevant to "structural steel fabrication".

So, if your page is about "structural steel", use your copy to clearly this product or service. If the page is about "steel fabrication" use the page copy to clearly describe that service to your visitors.  If the page is about "structural steel fabrication", be clear about that. Doing so will pay off more and more, as Google continues to get better at providing search results and as visitor expectations of landing pages get higher.

Alpha,

Is the domain authority the same for both sites?  How similar are their back link profiles?  Is there other interlinking going on between them and other sites? If all else is on the up and up, my feeling is that Google wouldn't be seeing them as a single site but that as the algorithm evolves, Google's understanding of the relationship between the two sites is being more clearly defined.

But then again, if you think in terms of "entity", (rather than "sites") maybe Google does see them as "conjoined twins" : ), with one being stronger than the other and a searcher finds one, it will certainly find the other.

Maybe it's time to start experimenting with redirecting things to a single domain.  You could start a single page or category and see how traffic or rankings change.  I wouldn't bet that it would bring you more traffic but maintaining a single domain vs. two interlinked ones could save time and effort.

Koki,

As says  Andy, there's noneed to nofollow internal links. Use nofollow on an external link when you can't vouch for the quality of a site, and when it's a paid link.

I agree with Sheena.  A focus on the domain name as a brand is so yesteryear.  And what's worse, having an EMD makes it almost impossible not to have it stand out as brand-like.  These days, when I see them in the search results, I'm skeptical and will often click on something else just to avoid them.  While I may not be typical, there may come a time when such is typical.  In fact, I don't preclude a future where it may be better to move to a brand domain name and 301 the EMD to that .

Absolutely focus on the brand and forget the domain. That will be helpful to you in the long run.

Mick,

Technically, if they're different addresses and they can receive mail at those different addresses, it should work. If it happens to be a shared phone number, as well, ahhhhh...there may be problems.   Just as google wants to be sure that when someone comes to a website, the business is verifiable, it wants to know that when someone goes to a physical address, that the business at that address is also verifiable. When you step outside the boundaries of one name, address, phone number per business location, you're running the risk of not getting verified.

Thomas,

Access the G+ profile under which the existing business page is set up and set up additional business page(s) from there.  The Google maps listing is tied to the business page so once you have the business page set up and verified the google maps listing will ride on its coat tails .  If you have more than ten locations however, log into you primary G+ profile and start here.

Jesus,

Did you change anything else besides just inserting the pipes?

Aiden,

Here are a few more suggestions:

• Go to Google news and do a search for your topic.  Then do searches for topics and people written about in the articles that show up in the results.
• When you go to a trade show, ask vendors about the most important happening in their industry right now.
• Review trade magazines and/or websites and see what topics their writing about.
• Internally, ask management/employees about what they think makes a specific competitor so strong
• Set up Google Alerts for industry keywords and review results on a daily/weekly basis.  Change keywords frequently.

It is very easy to run out of steam before crossing a threshold of success if you aim for keywords that are too competitive.  My advice for those that are new: Start at the bottom of the long tail and work your way up.  The thing is, when you work way down at the end of the long tail, you are going to get the opportunity to see positive search results quickly if you're sticking to the aforementioned guide.  Now, you may find that those positive results don't yield much traffic, but at least you'll find that out quickly and you can then can move up to the next level of competition--having learned a few things in the process.

When you're new to SEO and you shoot for high competition keywords, it can be hard to understand if you're making progress or how long you need to wait before you should know if you are making progress.  That leads to frustration and burnout.

I think, however, that as a blogger, your focus should be less on which keywords you're writing about and much more on the intricacies of how what you are writing relates to your audience and their needs. When I look at your blog, I feel there might be a disconnect between the audience being written for and the target audience of the product.  I could be wrong in your case, but my experience is that the app environment is still pretty geeky, as a lot of programmers are doing what they can to promote their small app ventures.  When your audience recognizes that you feel their pain, keywords will become a lot less important to you and your traffic will increase.

Caroline,

The questions to ask yourself when you set out to optimize for a keyword are "how strong are my competitors?", "Can I commit greater resources to this effort than they have/can?" and "Will committing those resources be worth it to my business?"

Remember, there are only 10 organic places on page-one and in order to you to reach one of them, Google will have to recognize that your site is more important and/or more relevant to the searcher's query than one of those are. Two more questions: Is it? and How do you know?

Passion is important because that helps get you through the long hard work of making a new site outrank an existing site.  It also takes a keen understanding of what makes you and your site/brand/company different than your competitors because that understanding is what you need to pull yourself up by the bootstraps in online (and bricks-and-mortar) business.

SEO also takes a competitive nature.  Passion may be fleeting but if you're competitive, SEO is a good place to sink your teeth.  The drive to move up to the next spot, and then the next one after that, and so on, will keep you reaching for more knowledge and a better understanding of this discipline.

Be sure to absorb Moz's guide to SEO and take this message to heart. If you do those two things, you'll have taken two big steps towards accomplishing your SEO goals.

Ruban,

Mozscape is the pool of data Moz compiles on a monthly basis via the following method:

Starting with the top 10 billion URLs with the highest MozRank obtained from the previous month's index, they crawl the web from the top down until they've crawled 90,000,000,000 pages.

In addition to the data gathered during the crawl (links and urls), Mozscape also includes "intelligent metrics" such as  MozRank,MozTrust, Domain Authority, and Page Authority that Moz calculates based on the results of its crawl.

The Mozscape API is the service that allows Moz customers access to that raw pool of data and metrics in order to subsequently customize applications that make use of it (for themselves or for their own clients).

Have you read these yet?

• http://moz.com/blog/mozscape-in-the-wild
• http://moz.com/help/guides/research-tools/open-site-explorer/updates  
• http://moz.com/products/api

Point well made.

RIch,

A lot of theory goes into link building because many aspects of it can be hard to measure consistently across the board and too many factors can come into play to even account for.  An exact answer to your question would need to take into account many factors which you have not described in your question.  What is the strength, age, authority of the domains?  Is there any relationship between those who have registered these two domains or do they own other domains together? What do their respective link profiles look like and recently, how have links been added to each domain?

When you say "If two sites (follow)link to each other, clearly that does not offer any link juice.", your "clearly" isn't necessarily so.  For example, if a high domain authority site and a low domain authority site followed-linked to each other, the one might expect that the low domain authority site would benefit most.

Don't confuse technicalities with absolutes.  Many of those who have are now battling the Penguin.

When it comes to domains that feature sponsored posts (aka paid guest posts), I  think there is a lot of FUD out there and the domains  selling sponsored space are capitalizing on that.  There  is also a fundamental difference between the value of Rand posting a single WBF post on Moz (that promoted a product), Rand posting the same single WBF post on another domain, and, for example the value of Moz, as a domain/brand regularly posting content it received money for from other parties.

I think the difference is in the measurable quality of the audience. Ongoing sponsored content:

1. Lowers the current quality of the audience (why would an expert spend time reading paid-for content--unless it is of the most high quality--when the expert could spend time reading more virtuous--and usually better--content somewhere else? ), which is to say that it plays into lower rankings for the content/domain.
2. Is a downward spiral.  If Rand were to post a single WBF that promoted a product, it would likely be a very effective promotional tool for the product and would have little impact on people's perception of Moz. But if every WBF promoted a product, such would decrease the value of WBF and the worth of the promotions themselves. And if Moz were to regularly post sponsored posts/advertisements, in the long run the quality and value perceived in the brand/domain would suffer greatly and such would be indicated by its membership numbers and its rankings.

All of that's to say that best case scenario, I see sponsored posts being of dubious short-term value and of even less value in the long term.

That may be somewhat of a hasty assumption.  Having those duplicate subdomains (and likely a number more) Google can ding it with a penalty.  Yes, it has good PR but that doesn't necessarily indicate good health. In this case, I'd look closely to verify that the home page and other interior pages are ranking well for their target terms (as they should with a PR5 domain) and if they don't, I'd disavow links on the root domain, as well.

Palmbourne, those subdomains of caughtoffside.com all appear to duplicate caughtofffside.com and I would say links on them are worthless so removing/disavowing them is the right thing to do.

Jess, It boils down to you gotta have a specific business address, for your listing.  Don't think of it like Adwords where you can designate an area, your Google My Business listing has to have a physical address where you do business and get mail, otherwise it will not be considered a legitimate listing.  Here are Google's local biz quality "guidelines" (rules).

renukishor,

If you're looking to find out which update may have impacted a site, Moz's Google Algorithm Change History is a good resource.  If a site was hit by a penalty, you can look back over a site's stats and take note of when a drop in visitors took place, then you can match that drop up with the date of an update and read more about the specifics of that update.

Matrix,  not all of the links to a site may show up in OSE.  Moz crawls pages on the web down to a rough level that have an impact on search results and if you have links on pages other than those, they'll not be reported in OSE.  Other link reporting platforms may crawl more pages and show more links, which can be useful info in a number of situations, but for many, just keeping track of those links that will help them in search engine results is sufficient.

McCaldin,

Relevancy of words in a URL is not much of a factor these days and even less so, I'd be willing to bet, is the relevancy of non keyword-type words in the URL.  Anyway, if you're creating any larger amount of content specifically around a topic, it's almost impossible to create URLs that contain high numbers of keywords and low numbers of other words without what looks/feels like duplication/cannibalization.   Just keep your titles succinct and on topic and if your CMS auto-populates the URL from the title, it'll be fine.