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I am fairly certain Google does not penalize sites for watermarking images. However, losing shares of those images could potentially lose rankings.

One opportunity would be to include a section of your images free of charge with a link attribution policy. This would get you a nice link (don't manipulate the alt text, just the name of the image or your service)

Also, have you checked to see how often your images are being stolen? You can use a service like tineye.com to do this.

Hi Logan,

It is certainly possible that without actual pricing information, especially if it is an obvious ecom space, that the lack of pricing could be construed as an indicator of a gateway or affiliate site... as it would appear the transaction is unlikely to occur on that site.

The other possibility is that the lack of pricing is causing people doing research to more frequently bounce back to the SERPS and choose a competitor site for the info.... resulting in a signal to Google that while you are a strong candidate (deserving front page), you don't necessarily serve the majority of people performing the query and thus do not deserve #1-2,etc.

Have you tried adding a published price to a category/section and seeing if that has any type of impact?  Maybe you can talk the client into publishing the average retail price for the items and note that wholesale pricing is applied after logging in..  Also, Are there "add to cart" buttons despite not having pricing?

Please keep us posted as I'd love to hear how this plays out.

-Jake

If you use the "noindex,follow" tag, Google will certainly count it. Moz does the same.

It really depends. Sometimes duplicate content is created by what we call "URL Canonicalization Errors". This means that you can have multiple URLs that point to the same piece of content, thus creating the appearance of duplicate content. These problems can generally be solved quickly and easily with proper coding. Would you mind sharing the site? If not, you could always Private Message it to me.

We will get to the bottom of this

Absolutely, I'm glad you got things squared!

As far as we know, the location of the domain does not have any significant impact on whether or not it can pass authority through outbound links.

Topical relevance (LDA) has been positively correlated as one of the strongest onsite rankings factors (https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors/correlations)  and as a result has been a driving factor behind sites adding additional contextual content.   In my experience, a well ranking site likely has a higher contextual relevance because it has comprehensive content on the topic demonstrating subject matter expertise...

As SEOs, we typically mimic those strategies that we know high-ranking sites have implemented in an effort to gain higher rankings ourselves.  For business that aren't subject matter experts, and simply add contextually relevant content, the result isn't often improved rankings for the target keyword (e.g.  iphone 5 coupons), but instead is an increase in the overall traffic to the site as a result of a broader set of long-tail keywords with rankings (get discounted iphone 5, best deal on iphone 5, etc.)

Great question..

First... some of your rankings problem may be around this - "Guest Posts, Citations, Media mentions, Profile links etc."... at least 2 of those items carries some decent risk, the consequences of which would be "not ranking".   Have you checked search console to see if any manual actions exist?  Did you have rankings and they disappeared, or have you been unable to secure rankings in general?   Does the site currently get organic traffic, but just maybe on terms that you aren't targeting?

As far as the development site, this could easily be a separate issue from your rankings, and I would doubt this would cause significant rankings drops if the dev site isn't being indexed by Google.  Would you be lucky enough to have any type of access to this through a CMS login?  If so, you could easily verify the site in search console and see where things stand in terms of indexing.  Additionally, if you could access through the CMS, you might be able to change a few settings, such as canonical tags, "website" or discourage indexing (if wordpress), etc. .that would cause the site to begin redirecting to your clientwebsite.com or at least give the indication that it is a known copy..    Did you check the individual pages of the site to see if a meta tag is in place on the pages blocking robots?

Ultimately the easiest thing regarding the dev site would be to simply ask the dev company to remove the site...

Cheers,

Jake

Hi Greg,

As Moz's Open Site Explorer (like most other link indexing tools) crawls sites independently to discover links pointing back to your site, there is often disparity between the numbers reported between of them and with what Google reports in Search Console.

That being said, Moz will likely find these links eventually, they just may be in the queue for indexing, or were not present the last time Moz visited those site's pages.

Thanks,

Jake

I would consider them generally helpful - not necessarily for improving rankings, but allowing you to get more choice words into the text of a title or description that will then be read by a user in the SERP. Remember, the title tag not only helps you rank, but it is your opportunity to advertise directly to the client on Google's search results page. That savings of 2 characters can mean a lot.

Many times, you would simply noindex,follow the tag pages to prevent this.   Alternatively, you could look at conditionally noindexing the tag pages unless there is a minimum number of posts applied so as to prevent the tag pages from being indexed when they only have 1-2 blog posts associated, and therefore would be overly similar to the blog page itself.

Also, be sure to use snippets/excerpts on tag pages vs. the entire post.

-Jake

Are you looking for information aside from having the site properly associated with a Google My Business page, using the local business markup, and incorporating references/content on the page to the Geo you are targeting?

Maybe you can provide some detail as to what you have already done, and what specifically you are running into?

Have you read this - https://moz.com/blog/local-seo-checklist

Cheers,

Jake Bohall

I'll do the SEO for you if you make your company a performance based wheel chair company. People get the wheel chairs for free and if they like them then they pay you. Sound fair?

It really depends on the site's needs. Let's say that you already have acquired enough anchor text specific links but need to water down your links with greater brand and/or anchor text diversity. A sitewide link with your brand may be just what your site needs (plus it makes it look like you have a ton of links, discouraging potential competitors).

If you haven't yet acquired enough exact match anchor text, I would go with ane ditorial page with a single link to the single page that you are trying to promote. The 3 links-per-page thing is beginning to become an easy footprint for blog-review style link building.

That being said, in terms of pure PageRank / mozRank passed, a sitewide link would pass the most. Whether that correlates with rankings is a totally different question.

There is a lot that goes into this, but my first step would be to find your target link audience (fan sites of the artist, wikipedia and encylopedic listings about the artist, relevant news sources.) Build this list before you start building content.

I would take the outbound link concern with a grain of salt. The potential "PageRank Leak" caused by using outbound links on your ranking page is so minimal that it is not worth considering. Add the links that make sense, especially to other authority pages / sites that aren't necessarily competing for the same keyword. Add tons of great content and then start looking into what really matters - inbound links.

I may be wrong, but I believe the competitive analysis link report is based on the Linkscape index. Every month or so they reindex the web. Sometimes they don't visit all the same pages that they visited the previous month, so they might miss out on some links one month that they found the previous month. This "sampling" of the web is identical to what Google has to do, although their sample is much larger and is indexed more often. This is why your rankings too can dance around in Google.

The same is true for Domain Authority.

A good metric that we often use is what we call Competitor Comparison Rank. Basically, choose 5 or 10 competitors and track them along your site. Each month, find the average of their domain authorities and the average number of backlinks. Then, subtract your backlinks and authority from their backlinks and authority. Is the gap growing larger or smaller? Are you falling behind or pushing ahead? This is a safer way of doing it because if SEOMoz just crawls fewer pages in one month than they did the previous, it would appear that you lost links, when in reality they just spidered fewer of them. Your competitors would appear to have lost links as well.

It is all about comparison. After all, it is a competition.

My company, Virante, studied this question about a year and a half ago. It appears that string distance measurements like Levenshtein Distance or Jaro Winkler Distance correlate well with rankings - this means that it might be nice to have ikeyword.com or ekeyword.com, but not keyword1keyword2.com. You quickly start to lose value at that point.

My vote for them would be to build a brand in this case, unless they can get a true EMD.

Google Webmaster Tools and Open Site Explorer rely on different data. SEOMoz has their own index of the web which they use to create the link statistics you see in Open Site Explorer. Their index is substantially smaller than Google's, but represents a significant proportion of the overall web.

What really matters is proportion, though. How many root domains do you have linking vs. your competitors? You can't get that information from Google Webmaster Tools, but you can from OSE.

PageRank is content unaware - it is solely a measurement of link popularity. The PageRank remains zero for these pages because, more likely than not, Google has simply not updated the Toolbar PR. What is the MozRank for these pages?