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In my view, it's not a big problem to have these sites on the same server, as long as each site has unique content, and there isn't a huge amount of inter-linking between the sites. (in which case, 30 sites would sound a lot like a link network to me, which would risk all of your sites being de-indexed)

What is potentially a problem is making sure each site is truly unique. This means having unique content (including navigation and in some cases, unique templates - although some would argue this is a bit extreme) You say that the sites employ the same link building methods - does this mean they all have links from the exact same sources? Again, you could be stumbling into link network territory again... or Google may choose to place less value on those links.

It's a murky area, and you'll have to use your own analytics and judgement to tease the answers out of Google. I'd say your not in trouble just because of the shared IP, but my suspicion tells me your in a dangerous neighborhood.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

The only long lasting way to rank for local specific pages is to offer truly unique content on those pages, and build unique links to those pages.

The two methods you mentioned here, using near duplicate sites and pages, may work for a short time or in non-competitive niches. It may also work somewhat if a very strong link profile is backing it up... but in general these sorts of tricks usually result in a drop in rankings. If not now, then during an upcoming algorythm change.

Often times, misguided webmasters think they are doing the right thing in launching these sites and pages, and no ill intent is intended. Unless the pages are obviously spam or doorway pages, then in my opinion it's probably not worth it reporting them to Google, but that decision is of course best left to each individual.

Read more about doorway pages: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66355

Consider how Yelp has 100s of pages about dentist, at least one page for every major city in America. Although the pages are similar, they are each filled with unique content and all have unique links pointing to them. Each delivers a similar message, but provides unique value based on that particular location.

Add unique value to each location specific page, and you're doing great.

Hi Hal,

Hope you don't mind me taking a stab at this question also.

Blocks of duplicate content, whether they be images or text, repeated among several pages is often known as "boilerplate" material.

Boilerplate material is okay, but if you have to much of it, without enough unique content to balance it out - that's when you get in trouble.

In general, you want to make sure you have a minimum amount of unique content on each page. My own personal rule of thumb is at least a couple hundred words - but it varies from situation to situation. if you have a lot of boilerplate, you want to make your original content front and center. This means placing it near the top of the body copy, above the fold and first in the HTML. Then place the necessary boilerplate info after this.

It's best to try to generate as much unique content for each product as possible. You can do this by including reviews, how-to videos, testimonials, or whatever value-added content you can dream up, as long as it's quality content and serves your customer.

Finally, make sure when "optimizing" the page (things like the title tag and meta description) make sure to focus these elements on the unique content of your page, and not the boilerplate material, so as to not dilute your rankings.

Best,

Cyrus

Hi Éber,

In my opinion, it's totally legitimate to nofollow those links to your login page, assuming they are showing the same 302 redirect and login page to Google. This will cut down on excessive crawling and possibly help you out with your Google Crawl "allowance."

If, on the other hand, you wanted to direct some link juice towards your login page, you could turn the 302 into a 301.

There might be other solutions, such as blocking the page with robots.txt, or using clever javascript. That said, nofollow is probably the easiest.

The OSE index is smaller than what Google reports in GWT, but then again, the links reported in GTW are famously inaccurate and often not up to date. Google often includes "junk" links that have very little chance of effecting their ranking algorithm.

Linkscape crawls approximately the top 25% of web, which is where the majority of links are found that actually influence rankings. It's not a perfect system, and sometimes links are missed, but it works well as a predictive tool and also for competitive research.

"It is interesting that the links that do show up in OSE a nearly exclusively sites that we own."

Yes, it is interesting. The links Linkscape miss tend to be either beneath layers of navigation, or on pages with few inbound links. Sometimes improving your link structure will help your links both appear in Linkscape, and improve crawling and rankings from Google as well (although I'd be careful in your case, because you own the sites in question, not to create the appearance of a link scheme)

Best of Luck!

Sounds dangerous!

Usually, these types of links may be found on high authority pages, but the placement is spammy, such as deep in the footer with 100 other links, or an out-of-context sidebar link.

Do the pages have PageRank? I only ask because a page may display both PA and DA, but if it's been de-indexed by Google then it most likely will be stripped of PageRank.

The other problem is relevance. The links may be of little value to you if they don't come from on-topic pages.

In short, I would advise you stay away from this.

But, to answer your question, you would need a ton of links to move your Domain Authority from 62 to 78. That's because both PA and DA are scaled algorithmically, meaning a ten point jump could be 100 times more difficult to achieve. At the upper ranges, the difference between scores becomes much more pronounced, so that it's much more difficult to rise from a 60 to 70, than it is to go from a 10 to a 20.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Hi Eada,

There's 2 things you want to do here to "help" Google re-crawl your site.

1. Submit a new sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools. Make sure the sitemap is up to date. If your sitemap hasn't changed, resubmit it.

2. Do a "Fetch as Googlebot" - also in Webmaster Tools. Fetch your homepage. Then chose the option that says "Submit to index and all linked pages"

An engineer at Google suggested #2 to me after my own site was hacked and I cleaned it up. It's a signal to Google to take another look at those pages.

Hi James,

Couple of points:

1. The term "highly competitive" might be a bit misleading. I'd pay more attention to the score of 53%, which I would consider only moderately competitive. If you look at the actual search results, the #1 ranking only has a Domain Authority of 19, so I would think this is a keyword you could shoot for.

2. The score takes into account how hard it would be to obtain a top ranking, but not neccessarily #1. There are some high authority domains in the top 10 for that query, including www.swedishdigitatalmarketingagency.com, which makes the overall vertical more competitive.

3. The Keyword Difficulty tool is a best guess based on comparative metrics, but it isn't always right.

4. When in doubt, I always run a full analysis report to see why URLs are ranking the way they do.

Overall, I trust the 53 score. It seems a little high, but it's within a range I would consider within reason. The good news is the Keyword Analysis tool is going through some changes soon as SEOmoz acquires new data sources and continues to improve it's scoring algorythm. In the meantime, you can always use the MozBar - with the SERP overlay turned on - to eyeball any results you'd like to examine.

Best of luck with your SEO!

To add to what Kyle said, the reason you are seeing these statistics is because you have virtually no inbound links that point to your domain.

Without inbound links, web crawlers have no way of finding your site. Search Engines such as Google also use links to determine how popular a site is. To put it (over)simply, the more links that point to your site, the better you are likely to do in search results.

The best way to improve your domain metrics like Domain Authority (and even PageRank) is to start building links. But first, I'd start by reading the Beginners Guide to SEO.

Building high quality links is difficult and rewarding, but almost nothing is more rewarding for SEO.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

Hi levelencia1,

This could have been caused by many factors. Was the robots.txt the only change you made? Other things that could have caused it could have been meta "noindex" tags, nofollow links, or broken navigation structures.

In rare instances, sometimes rogerbot has a hiccup.

Let us know if things return to normal on your next crawl. If you have any difficulties feel free to contact the help team (help@seomoz.org) and they should be able to get things straightened out.

Best of luck with your SEO!

Yes, most of the 500 will be worthless junk, and can actually hurt you.

In general, the easier it is to score a directory link, the less value it becomes. It's a completely inverse relationship.

Hi Jimmy,

Thanks for the really fun question (note: negative SEO isn't fun, but trying to figure it the algorithm is

Couple of reasons why I think this would be difficult:

1. We have very limited working knowledge of both co-citation and co-occurance. What we do know at this point is little more than theory. So working them into an actionable strategy for positive rankings would be hard enough I imagine, let alone negative SEO.

2. The signals produced by these measurements are likely to be weaker than traditional link signals, thus reducing the incentive to use them.

3. One of the reasons we believe search engines may use co-citation and co-occurance is that they are harder to game (especially when combined with authority and trust metrics) so it follows that they would also be harder to game in the negative.

That said, it's so new I barely know what I'm talking about. Really interesting area

Howdy,

Generally, it's a bad idea to target keywords not in your content. If feels spammy, you're not likely to rank for it, and it's likely to have a negative impact on user experience.

Imaging clicking on a search results about "Competitor X Keyword Keyword" - and then the landing page has virtually nothing to do with my search. Well a couple things will happen...

1. The visitor leaves and clicks another result - Search engines quickly learn your site doesn't satisfy the query
2. This probably won't even happen because search engines aren't that easily fooled. It's hard enough to rank with quality, engaging content. Putting some keywords in your title tag (or elsewhere) without all the other ranking signals to back it up - including quality content, links and more, probably isn't going to help you to rank.

I think you get my gist, but let me address your specific points.

1.) Does it hurt or help  to load up the keywords with misc. keywords

Again, it sounds spammy, and keyword stuffing is a tactic that hasn't worked well since 2007.

Lessons Learned from an Over-Optimizer

2.) Any suggestion for almost blank/generic landing pages ?

Add useful, relevant content.

Duplicate Content is a Post-Panda Word

3.) Any benefit or penalty for using fewer keywords on multiple pages ?

A general rule of thumb is optimize your page for keywords so that 80% of searchers using those keywords have the same general intent. If 70% are looking for one thing, and 30% something else, it's best to split those into 2 different pages.

It sounds like your customer should focus more on conversions instead of raw traffic. It might help to guide the client to go for quality of traffic instead of quantity, which usually pays better dividends.

Finally, a couple of more resources that might help understand on-page optimization. I recommend you take 30 minutes and read/watch them all!

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/getting-onpage-seo-right-in-2012-and-beyond-whiteboard-friday

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/4-graphics-to-help-illustrate-onpage-optimization

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-onpage-optimization-for-ecommerce-websites

This should give you plenty of ammunition for your talk with your client. Besst of luck!

Hi Sharon,

The On-page reports shouldn't distinguish between case - upper or lower. In both cases it should give you credit. Unfortunately, I am unable to replicate the error you described. If you are seeing results different from this, feel free to share the URL and keyword combo so we can test it, or if you feel the tool is in error, feel free to write the help team (help@seomoz.org)

As for variations of keywords, Adam hit the nail on the head. Here's a couple of blog posts that might help:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/advanced-onpage-optimization-whiteboard-friday

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

Hi Cgman,

There are a couple things you can try here. I assume you're using .htaccess for the redirect? I'm not an expert on these, and they can get messed up pretty quickly, but I'd start by listing the full url in the second instance, like this:

Redirect 301 /index.php/ http://www.example.com/index.php

Another easy way to solve this problem is with a canonical tag. Just make sure both pages have a duplicate canonical tag in the section that points to the same target, like this:

To be honest, although these are technically duplicates you are dealing with, Google has publicly stated that trailing slashes aren't that big of deal, so if you can't invest the time in fixing it, it probably won't hurt you that much.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Hi Matthew,

My advice on the matter has changed a lot over the past year. These days, it's still okay to build directory links, but I suggest doing it only with directories related to your niche.

General directories, in my mind, are best to stay away from altogether.

For example, if you run a nursing home site, you could probably find a dozen high quality directories of nursing homes and assisted living facilities. These would be great!

The general rule of thumb is if you build directory links, make sure you build "normal" high quality links along with them at an equal pace. Try to build one naturally given editorial link for each directory link you build.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO!

You may be interested in this Slideshare by Wil Reynolds:

http://www.slideshare.net/wilreynolds/the-10000-paid-content-paid-linking-test-that-is-100-google-safe

Wil owns a large agency and tests out services like this including nRelate and Taboola. Some are better than others. As far as Google is concerned, as long as the links are "nofollowed" the recommendation services should be perfectly fine.

In Wil's case, he used these services for link building, with mixed success.

On the other hand, any content recommendation service that places followed, non-editorial links on the web is worth approaching with caution. I'm not familiar with the Engageya platform, but this is something I'd definitely check out first.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your content.

Hi Emma,

I feel your frustration. Unfortunately, we don't know all the ways in which Google's algorythm works, although we have a pretty good idea of many pieces of the puzzle.

Even the highest correlated metric we know of, PageAuthority, only has a correlation of about 0.35 (1.00 being a perfect correlation). Pretty good for SEO, but in the real world it's not the best correlation.

So the factors in the keyword difficulty tool are known ranking influences, but it's impossible to incorporate all 200+ ranking signals (some known, some unknown) into a single tool. Instead, the best way to use the tool is to use it to try to find out exactly why a page ranks above another. Is it over-optimized? What is it about those social signals that help? Are the links from relevant sources? Has the site been penalized?

Yeah, it's conflicting and confusing. In truth, the first 80% of all SEO is pretty standard: Create good content, make sure it's accessible by Search Engines, Follow best SEO practices, market it smartly, get links, repeat. Do this well and you'll win most of your battles. The remaining 20% gets hard, and if we think about it too much, we sometimes waste our time.

Regardless, the best strategy, in my opinion, is not to go after 1 keyword, but 100s at a time using a long-tail strategy. I wrote about it in more detail here: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-rank   If you're just starting out, or even experienced, it's the best way to go.

Hi Justin,

Sometimes when rogerbot crawls a site, the servers and/or the content management system can get overwhelmed if roger is going to fast, and this causes your site to deliver error pages as roger crawls.

If the problem persists, you might consider installing a crawl delay for roger in your robots.txt file. It would look something like this:

User-agent: rogerbot
Crawl-delay: 5

This would cause the SEOmoz crawlers to wait 5 seconds before fetching each page. Then, if the problem still persists, feel free to contact the help team at help@seomoz.org

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO!

Hi Erik,

Everyone here has given you good advice, so let me just add my 2 cents.

301's using htaccess can be tricky, so if you get in over your head don't worry too much about it - the canonical tag should do the trick. Every time you use a canonical on your site, you'll see a notice in your crawl diagnostics dashboard. This is just a "notice", not a warning or an error. We just want you to know our spiders found a canonical in case you didn't intend to be there.

Best of luck with your SEO!