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you are fine, as long as there is a genuine reason for the link. If you think that link is useful for the user of that site then do it otherwise do not.

No problem, happy to help. If you actually sell the various types of shoes as well and the repairs/cleaning are almost a side-service then yes, your original example is ok since the "dress shoes" nav item would presumably take you to a landing page about dress shoes. Unless you're getting a large volume of targetted searches for things like "dress shoe repairs", I'd probably just have "Repairs" and "Cleaning" as their own top-level nav items that lead to a single landing page each that covers all 3 types of shoes. This would be sufficient for the more general terms like "shoe repairs". The nav would look more like: Shoes   |   Boots   |   Sandals   |   Shoe Cleaning   |   Repairs With the relevant drop-downs under the first 3 items only.

This is a good answer, but the pages that the bigcommerce tags appear on with the blog posts, isn't editable , it's just aggregating the blog posts based on tags like you said, not sure how to place that nofollow tag on just those tag pages. Almost seems like they shouldn't be an issue but are because of how bigcommerce is handling this tag process. I don't want to put the nofollow tag on the blog posts themselves, since I want that content index so it can rank, so still kinda stuck between a tag and a hard place.

Read Jennifer Slegg's article on the Google Search Quality Raters Guidelines.  Very important. https://moz.com/blog/google-search-quality-raters-guidelines

If this is such a niche market then competition is probably low.  In that case I would start producing good informative content that attacks each of the valuable keywords in the niche.  If you can't build up, then build out.

I don't see any problem with your approach. By combining all of these resources into one blog post, you're essentially curating content from your own site. As long as the post provides unique value to the user, then you're golden. In my mind, the value comes with packaging all these different resources into one post, making it easier for the reader to find all the info they need. I would recommend rewriting the content with this angle in mind. And like Michael said, link to the old blog posts as a way of expanding on certain topics.

Thanks for responding, I know that it's a bit of wishful thinking on the part of a time frame things will take place. It's just such a blackeye to see these linkfarms helping competitors rank when they aren't being relevant or useful. As well seeing places like BBB do some follow backlinking while telling new customers they're " phasing " it out, while keeping the follow links where they are for who knows how long is very frustrating, specially since competitors are sucking that precious link life blood. In niche markets, backlinks are more valuable than gold.

Hi there! It's very possible that this is due to our last couple of indexes being smaller than previously, which is an issue that we're hoping to resolve with our next release. You can read more about what happened here: https://moz.com/community/q/september-s-mozscape-update-broke-we-re-building-a-new-index

Hi, This won't give you any issues as long as there is not two different visions of the same page e.g https and http. Some sites have different parts of their site in https and other parts in http. You just need to see if there is two different visions showing up. If there is than you need to look at cleaning this up. I won't lie it is hard doing this in bigcommerce because it's a closed system not like wordpress or another open source system. In saying that I personally like having it one way or the other but to go back to your question. It is fine as long as there is only one vision.

Hi, I often see the same myself and the recent Moz ranking factors survey (and all previous ones) show that general opinion is that links are still the strongest signal when it comes to organic rankings. As others in the thread have mentioned, your content can be great but if no one ever sees it, then it's a bit wasted. One of the ways people can see / discover your content is via links and Google see links as vote of confidence in your website or content. The one thing that hasn't been mentioned is that it's often the high quality links that can differentiate websites in the long-term. Lower quality links can boost a site for a short period but will often not work long-term anymore. So you're right in that things often come down to backlinks, but it's usually high quality backlinks that make the difference. Having said all of that, I wouldn't bet against Google bringing in more signals that could become as strong as links. Social signals may become stronger for example, as may user signals or brand / offline signals. Machine learning also plays a huge part in rankings which are largely driven by user behaviour. I hope that helps! Paddy