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In most cases, no. I would still add language tags to your site, but Google tends to view different language sites as localized to that language.

The answer here is not one that I often advocate but you're going to to need to grease the wheels a bit

Buy his website out. Make certain this includes his domain and control of the social media he's running. Have him sign a legal agreement as well. Once you own it, 301 redirect it to your main resort page.

If he balks, or tries to run the price up, my bet is he has a contract with the owners of the building and they might have some things they can do that will make his life uncomfortable (consult a lawyer first so you know what your legal options are). You might be able to use that as a stick to encourage him to take the carrot of a buyout. Try the carrot first, tho, and save the stick for any serious negotiations.

Next, you need to harden the contracts with your private owners. Make it clear that, for a small sum of money, they agree not to try to represent themselves as the resort. Again, consult a lawyer and get this written properly. Make any future private buyers sign this agreement as well.

At the end of the day, I would chalk this up as an expensive marketing lesson. If you can get him to sell, you don't have to jump through any hoops. Otherwise, you're competing with what Google sees as the legitimate business (which is a much more difficult path to walk).

As long as you're not using JS to draw the new links (i.e. CSS hides them until an appropriate hover event) you should be just fine. Google will still spider the links from the source code.

I don't know if you admin your own server, but if you do, you should be able to easily tell it to redirect HTTP to HTTPS. I do this with Apache (it's much easier and faster than .htaccess) and it works really well.

Not really. As big as this site sounds, attempting to do so would probably pose a security risk to your website (as an IT professional I can think of a few ways this could work, but all involve exposing the main server in ways I would cringe at). The subdomain has the fewest questions overall.

It depends a bit. In order to host on a different site you'll have to have a different domain or subdomain. That will let it live under a different IP. The IP thing isn't an issue but the different domain might be. I would try to get it under a subdomain of your main domain (i.e. blog.domain.com) so bots can at least see there's a relationship there. The catch here is that your subdomain is not going to pass as much juice to your main site as if it lived under domain.com/blog (where it's part of the same domain).

You don't have to host your own blog incidentally. Check out wordpress.com where, for a fee, they will map a domain to your blog. It's the safest way to host Wordpress, since they update it and secure the servers.

The only reason to use a fragment (the hashtag part of a URL is called a fragment) as your anchor, is that you're adding that link solely for the purpose of tying it to a DOM event (like an onclick event). There's better ways to do this in modern web programming, but it's still possible to see some old school sites doing

link

By definition, fragments exist solely for the client. Your web server will not log them. Google Analytics does not natively track them. So clicking on an empty fragment like that will just take you back to the top of your page (provided the JS doesn't stop the event). There's nothing to track. But there's something interesting to note here

link

Google can actually do some basic JS and it will recognize this bad attempt at link obfuscation as an actual link. So if you have links similar to this (which is not recommended) then those links will be counted as links. Be aware of this if you're worried about backlinks.

Remember that Moz's index is not a complete index of the Internet. They freely note that https://moz.com/blog/mozscape-index-2015

You'll notice this index is a bit smaller than much of what we've released this year. That's intentional on our part, in order to get fresher, higher-quality stuff and cut out a lot of the junk you may have seen in older indices. DA and PA scores should be more accurate in this index (accurate meaning more representative of how a domain or page will perform in Google based on link equity factors), and that accuracy should continue to climb in the next few indices. We'll keep a close eye on it and, as always, report the metrics transparently on our index update release page.

Moz is aiming towards accurate representation, not completeness. I don't think that anyone but a complete spider like Google or Bing could tell you how many links you actually have.

The only TLDs that get any known different treatment is the ccTLD (which sends a geolocation signal).

The reason non-"standard" TLDs don't show up very often is that most people buy the common TLDs. Most people still associate the ".com" with websites because they are the oldest TLD. I personally own a ".info" for my email (not a new TLD either) and I typically have to spell it out to people (I occasionally get some strange looks handing it out verbally). I can only imagine the looks if I had a more exotic TLD ("Yes, my email is ralph@crazy.ninja... no that's really it"). So other TLDs are basically less popular and less well understood, which explains why they aren't used very often.

The arguments over the years that I've seen that Google is flat out lying about the TLDs being treated equally have never really withstood scrutiny. There has never been anyone who has made a given TLD rank higher solely because of the TLD. The cases I've seen had other factors that could just as easily explain a ranking difference. And an objective test would be very difficult to create, as you would need two identical sites, and from an SEO perspective that's super hard to pull off.

Ultimately, tho, why would Google lie about this? What's there to be gained in telling people it's not a ranking factor when it is?

Give the SSL Labs tool a try. If you have a misconfiguration it should help you identify it

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/

Danny is right. You can't geolocate a site to a continent. Goelocation assumes you're targeting a country or language.

I wouldn't bother with a site.asia domain either if all you're worried about is latency. Instead, what I would do is work on geolocating your site. For instance, Amazon offers geolocation in their Route 53 product (country or latency). So you could host your site in the US and a copy in one of their Asian datacenters. This way, your visitors (and robots) will always go to site.com, but be served the fastest instance of your site. This avoids the duplicate content problem entirely. There are some other services and hosting out there that could probably help you do this as well.

It's not over, it's just changing. Whenever a business model changes (i.e. selling newspapers) you'll have people who try to hold onto the old ways. In the US (where the government won't step into that fight) the news publishers have either gone to a paywall/loginwall or they try to track how many visits you've made (i.e. You've read X of X free articles, please pay to read more). Google requires some content to be free so it's becoming a crap shoot as to whether or not you can read an article for free. The place that's suffered the most is social linking, where I'll see a link on a blog or in social media and click it, only to hit a pay/loginwall.

The EU is going a different route with government regulation. I remember when Germany tried to make Google pay for linking to news content and Google opted to drop them from the SERPs if they didn't opt in. The publishers couldn't opt in fast enough. Google shut down their news feed in Spain rather than pay for linking to content. There are rumblings of trying to make Google expand "right to be forgotten" takedowns to all Google sites (which has pushed Google to force users to use only localized search). How far they get remains to be seen. If they declare Google a public utility there will be legal wrangling and if Google loses they may pull out of those markets.

So where does that leave you as an EU SEO? It depends on what you're trying to do. News outlets don't need a lot of SEO because they are high quality content generators, which is what Google feeds on naturally. I wouldn't worry about Google dropping markets anytime soon (legal stuff will take years and we're not to that point yet). If you could elaborate on what you do I could comment better on that last part of your question.

You're actually pretty close to the box of swag reward. I got mine a couple of months ago and it was filled with lots of really neat stuff (I got both a vinyl AND plushie Roger).

The rewards are handed out manually so it's not some automatic process. I'd get your 2k and wait a month or so. You should get an email asking where to send your swag.

Depends on what rankings you're going up for. Have you done a keyword analysis on the keywords you're ranking better for? Ranking well for the term "blue kangaroo widgets" might sound awesome... until you realize nobody searches that term.

You might want to spend a little money on Adwords and play around with keywords to see what brings in actual traffic. More importantly, Google has been showing more ads above organic, so even if you rank #1, you might be #4 in the actual list behind ads. While the Keyword Estimator is good, real data is better. Moz also has the Keyword Difficulty Tool which can help you find keywords that are actually worth ranking for.

Lastly, are you tracking conversions? You need to be. Figure out what that incoming traffic is doing. Even if you bring them to your site, are they doing what you want them to?

Moz doesn't crawl everything, nor do they crawl as often as Google.You're getting a subset.

You should never take OSE as the sole source of your links. Cross reference with other tools (WMT, Ahrefs, etc). OSE is designed to give you a subsection but to make sure that subsection is as data-rich as possible (note that OSE ranks your links as well).

Sorry for the late response.

What SSL Labs is telling you to do is disable SSLv3. You should be using only the more secure Transport Layer Security(TLS) 1.0 or higher (if you're running credit cards then PCI compliance will force you to use only 1.2 soon). I would also disable RC4 if you can (only affects IE6 users)

Have you looked at the docs? They have an article about how to migrate from 1.5 to 3.x

https://docs.joomla.org/Joomla_1.5_to_3.x_Step_by_Step_Migration

If you've not done it before I would suggest using a migration service (just Google for Joomla migration). You're less likely to run into showstopping issues. For a long lived website I'd pay for the service just to have peace of mind.

I would highly recommend you run your site through SSL Labs tool. It should help you identify any problems with your SSL install.

Also, make sure that you're loading GA in a secure manner. If it's not loaded securely and someone says not to load insecure assets then it won't show up.

Have you journeyed to Seattle and tried meditating in the Moz break room while holding a Roger plushie until security escorts you out? (sorry, I couldn't resist)

First off, you need to better organize your site. It's not horrible, but the URLs are all over the place. Blogs are smashed together onto single pages. Content is disjointed.

Second... pervy quest? What? You need people to take your site seriously and dangling the prospect of NSFW imagery isn't going to help that (and might get you added to some domain filter lists). Don't play up the "naked" part. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to use that word.

Third... what is the site about? It's not obvious from a quick glance at the front page. Theory of Everything? That's cool but... what was I doing here again? You need a better design (too many stock images and cut out the rotating images as it distracts from the page) and you need some focus. All the content needs to pull in the same direction. What is it they want visitors to leave with? (besides a crystal bauble)

Is your brand name trademarked? If so, you can use that trademark to remove ads that contain your trademark in their ad copy (here's the Google form for Trademark complaints in ads).

Generally speaking, it's a good idea to bid on your own name. Case in point: we started TV ads this year and while we rank #1 for our brand, when the TV spots started we saw an enormous surge in people searching our brand name. Also, remember that some searches (especially on mobile) do not show any organic results above the fold. Bidding on your own brand name should be an integral part of your marketing strategy. Don't worry about making it more expensive for your competitors.