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I absolutely think the algorithm knows the difference between navigational content and true "body" content. If you're using

<nav>, you have nothing to worry about. Feel free to worry exclusively about the UX issues.</nav>

Getting a quick look at my competitors' high-DA inbound links is helpful to me as I assess the strengths and weaknesses of their link profile. Right now, I have to filter out a bunch of fake-high-DA wordpress, typepad, and blogspot blogs -- and meanwhile, I don't have a clue how Google actually feels about those subdomains. This annoys me. So a change like the one I am proposing would make me less annoyed.

Obviously I understand that finite resources go into developing these tools, which is why I'm not demanding that this be changed!11!1eleventy

It would make the SEOmoz data more in line with actual rankings. I would guess that treating these UGC subdomains as their own domains with their own DA would make DA correlate a bit better with rankings.

I guess my question should actually be "Why doesn't SEOmoz treat this kind of subdomain differently from other subdomains, since we're pretty sure Google does treat it differently?"

"There are specific standards which must be maintained."

I don't believe that's true. UGC companies always mention lots of things you're not supposed to do in their TOU, but that (to use another acronym) is pure CYA. They do not proactively patrol the UGC they host. They have extremely limited legal liability for that content (in the U.S., at least). Content on a wordpress.com subdomain is not particularly likely to be good or trustworthy.

I thought it was generally accepted that the search engines treat joesmith.wordpress.com and www.wordpress.com as completely different domains. In which case, a cute but obscure blog like http://monkeysalwayslook.typepad.com/ has no business having a DA of 95.

If you have a truly natural link profile, you will automatically have a diverse set of c-blocks linking to you. The only time you need to look up c-blocks is if you are trying to diagnose a poor-performing site with a lot of backlinks, or if you're trying to build a blog ring that will fly under the radar.

The EMD update should not have effected you. An EMD would be something like www.carservicemanhattan.com. You have a partial-match domain, and since it doesn't sound spammy or point to a spammy page, you aren't what Google has been targeting.

Your problem is duplicate content. You have dozens of pages with the exact same text on them, except for a find-and-replaced city name. That makes Google think your website isn't offering valuable content. Every page on your website should have unique content.

Some industries just aren't suited to Facebook or Twitter, because people aren't interested in thinking about that niche in their free time, or because your target audience isn't active on social media. You should still have a presence there and occasionally participate, but don't expect amazing results.

Have you already captured your low-hanging fruit -- inviting your most faithful repeat customers to connect with you on social media? Every employee should have a link to your Facebook page in their e-mail signature. Then social media becomes a brand loyalty tool.

I think you are being blinded by your bias, yes.

If you, the web designer, insert a link to your site into the footer of all the sites you design, that is not an editorial link. It's not a link that the site owner created of their own volition because they think it's valuable content. In fact, if a company is hiring an outside web designer, they might have no idea how to remove the link from their footer. They might not even notice it.

The search engines know all this, and it's why they don't like footer links. They are well aware that web designers, Wordpress theme developers, and so on have been using this technique for years.

The only caveat is this:

SEMrush scrapes the top 20 results. It does not, however, scrape a 10-result page 1 and a 10-result page 2. It scrapes a 20-result page 1.

If you look at 10-result SERPs and 20-result SERPs, you'll see that they're slightly different. It's much more likely that you'll see multiple results from the same domain on a 20-result SERP. So be aware that if SEMrush tells you that you own the #2, #3, and #4 spots for a given keyword, that's probably not true on the standard 10-result SERP.

If you consider the meta-description field "important as a ranking factor," you're simply incorrect, I'm afraid. It can have an extremely small effect inasmuch as it impacts click-through rate and pogosticking, but there are about 8,000 better things you could do that would make a bigger splash than optimizing meta-descriptions.

If this is what your client wants, by all means go for it, but make sure they understand that this will not change their rankings significantly.

An overview of on-page factors, the downside of using flash, and how bounce rate can influence rankings.

I encourage you to be very clear about what you mean by "link building." Do you mean hiring inexpensive folks to submit your site to directories and do low-quality article marketing for you? Or do you mean hiring a professional content-marketing team to attract valuable links?

SEMrush can help with this. Once a month, they scrape the top 20 results for something like 95 million keywords, so you can see a great number of KWs you currently rank for, including KWs you might not have intentionally targeted or even thought of. It's not perfect, but it's potentially valuable information. Plus there's good PPC data as well, if you're doing that in addition to SEO.

Can't believe I didn't think of this earlier, but are you comparing the numbers you're getting here to the numbers you're getting from Google Webmaster Tools? Did you also see a drop in backlinks there?

I just learned about vlookup this year. Super useful for cross-referencing spreadsheets.

Here's how it works. In the same Excel document, you will have two sheets. The first one will have all the data from your last OSE report, the one with 50K links. (I'm assuming you exported this.) The second sheet will have all the data from your more recent OSE report, the one with 30k links. The vlookup function will quickly check if something on the first sheet is also on the second sheet.

If it's on the first sheet but not on the second sheet, then that's one of the links that "disappeared." Look those over, check for patterns, test some of them. Maybe you had a sitewide link on a giant website, and that website just went down. But if the missing links are still online, then OSE simply didn't crawl them this time.

If you've never used vlookup before, it's worth spending a few hours reading tutorials, watching videos (tons on YouTube!), and learning the syntax. Best of luck!

How comfortable are you with Excel? Do you know how to use the vlookup function?

Do any of them have an iPhone? That should be pretty convincing.

Have you checked the disappearing URLs to see if they're still online?