Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Will someone who has experience chime in on these two issues below:

1. Do sub-domain links which link back to the main site count as a new link from a new site; or would they be considered more of an internal link?  Basically, would a sub-domain link to the main site be like a link from a unique website, or treated like any other internal link on the main site?  I am speaking in terms of link juice.

2. Should we 301 sub-domains to the main site internally?

Thank you, we really appreciate any input you have!

Thank you for the update, that is brutal.

For the engineers who will work a 18 hour shift, I salute you. 

I tried to submit a help ticket, but the help tickets also are not working!

OSE for at least the last 12 hours has been returning Unavailable.  Also, Rank Tracker never updates and just endlessly spins.

Can someone shed some light on the issue and when the solution will be implemented?

Thank you

Excellent, good show.

The keywords we are trying to rank for, MOZ says it has a 28% difficulty, so I do not think we will need a 79/82 horsepower to rank on page 1 in a good position.  I suspect that since DA is calculated on a log scale, the difficulty % is also probably logarithmic, so a 48% difficulty would take quite a lot more DA to rank, than just a linear interpolation would suggest for a 28% difficulty.

I wonder if you can approximate how much DA/PA it takes to rank at a given difficulty % - have you ever given thought to this?

Can I ask - what is your site's DA and PA average say for the homepage?

Thank you for your input, good job!

@William - thank you for the response.

Very interesting indeed, it seems that they ramp in slowly, like a soft-start (if anyone is familiar with what I am talking about).

In any case, thank you for your time and response!

We just released a very targeted page for a specific item about 18 hours ago.

For the main keyword as well as multiple variations, we currently are ranking around # 40 to # 50 depending on what the exact query is.

Is it normal to initially rank lower in the SERPs and then as the page ages, gain?

Thank you for your insights!

Write it just like you would a normal blog post.

Don't do it.  Create original, good content and get people to legitimately link to it because they place such a high value on it.

What are your top 3 competitors doing to accomplish the same thing that you can see in the open marketplace?

Start there, and come up with your own crafted strategy based on what you have learned about competition in your industry.

This is what canonical urls are for: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

It is because Google sees that you have tons of duplicated content and is choosing what they think is relevant and pushing back what the duplicated content which they see as not as important.

Use canonical urls to show what the most important pages are otherwise you will constantly be battling this.

It all depends on the industry, local factors and search trends.

It may be for your industry/business that that is an epic CTR.  It also may be that people searching for those items are not actually looking for what you think they are looking for.

Do you have any comparables for your top competitors?  There are copious tools out there which can estimate traffic, albeit they can not be very accurate, but still if you compare your traffic to competitor traffic using the same tools, you may get some more insight into what is "normal" for your business.

The bottom line is that every niche has its own numbers and you may be doing everything just fine.

Is it a national, regional or more local site?

Perhaps you could find a national topic or even international topic which has a track record of being linked to, write an article about that topic, then start emailing the sites who have a history of linking to past content to let them know about your new piece of content.

If you keep trying, you will get the right kind of links even in a tough niche.

Not too sure if they are indexed in the same way.

Do you know of any other sites which are also using this technology?  If yes, try doing a google site: search for that site and do some investigation to see if they get crawled similarly.

Do you use canonical URLs?

It is possible that Google is choosing for you which page they think is relevant because there are what they see as duplicated content.

In addition to what you said, I would also get:

1. unique visitors by time period x

2. possibly geographic area of visitors

3. bounce rate

4. time of day that visitors visit

I would then take all those metrics and then compare them among similar businesses, then similar businesses in similar sized markets and see what raw differences you can see.  One of the problems which you would need to overcome is the difference in markets (both in size, preferences, etc).  There are local differences which would need to be accounted for if you were to be able to have actionable items.  Another challenge would be that every site is probably targeting different keywords to different cities and targeted demographics.  That is another thing that you would need to normalize for.  Also, each site is probably running on different platforms, etc so you would need to try to think about that aspect of the data because it would introduce noise into the data.

If you had the data, you may want to look into something called Multiple discriminate analysis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discriminant_analysis due to how many variables you are going to have.  If you cannot do it yourself, there are statisticians out there who could help you set up the data in the right way.  They are not cheap though...

That is a big 10-4, thank you for pointing that out.

What would the goal be if you had all the data you wanted?

Thank you for pointing that out!

Even a UPS box? That is different than a PO box because you have people there to sign for things, etc.

We haven't had to deal with this issue because we have a physical office, but that is interesting.  Thank you for pointing that out!