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Thanks Drew

Thanks Chris!  One clarification ... when you say that you would be looking at "more than just written content", what specifically do you mean?  What other type of content would you employ?

Thanks

Suppose I create a cornerstone page with the targeted keyword "Dog Collars".  I write a dozen articles on various dog collars and point a link from each article to my cornerstone page.  Should the anchor text  for the links from each of those articles to the cornerstone page be "Dog Collars" or should they vary, but still be relevant to "Dog Collars" for best SEO?  Should half of them be "Dog Collars" and the other half various?  Also, if I have 12 articles and all of the anchor text is already "Dog Collars", should I go back and change them so that they all don't say the same thing?

If hope my question makes sense ... thanks in advance.  I will give thumbs up for helpful responses and suggestions

Many of my tags rank higher than my actual articles for particular keywords ... some even rank #1.  Not sure what to do about that ...

Are you asking me out on a date?

Great question.  I, too, thought that setting up Google authorship was supposed to prevent this from happening.  I have the same problem with both legitimate republishing and with scrapers who sometimes get ranked higher even when posting just part of my articles.  Also, my Google plus blurbs and links to my articles get ranked in the #1 spot and my original article will end up on page 10.  Google is whacky ...

I have a gadget site and have MANY links to my site from sites that offer web analysis or SEO tools.  For example, the site chkme.com has over 1,000 links to my home page.  I don't know who they are, why they are linking to my site, and their site is irrelevant to my industry.  Should I disavow links from sites like these?  My site seems to be linked to from a lot of "website worth" type sites as well.  I think I may have been hit with an unnatural site penalty but I do NO blackhat or any type of link building whatsoever.

Thanks in advance

Excellent ... thanks for your suggestion.  I had been placing a link in the new article back to the old and all of my old articles outrank the new.  Should I remove the links to the old articles one I have placed links from the old to the new?

What is the best way to pass rank to a follow-up article?  For example, we write an article "Product A Rumors" that ends up ranking #1.  When Product A is released, we write an article called "Product A Review".  What is the best way to pass rank from the first pre-release article to the second  post-release article?  We don't want to do a simple 301 redirect as we want readers to be able to go back to the first article to see the progression of the Product A life-cycle.

Also, should we go back and edit the old article to add a link to the new?  Should we add a link in the new article to the old?

Thanks in advance

Yes ... I need to get better at schema implementation.  Reading up on that now

Well, I like wordpress ... I just need to get better at implementing it appropriately and that is what I am trying to learn here.  If a url was changed, i put in the required 301s.  And you are correct, I do not have the skills or money to build a site from scratch ... maybe some day

I streamlined the categories and tags.  For example, I had a category named Sony ... I also had a tag named Sony and a tag named Sony Smartwatch.  I would condense all three into a single tag named Sony Smartwatch and delete the other two (placing appropriate 301 redirects as I deleted).  I had hundreds of tags and categories like that so I streamlined everything from several hundred categories and tags into less than 100 total.  I did this hoping to address my obvious internal duplicates problem and increase my ranking even further.  However, immediately after I streamlined my categories and tags, my ranking plummeted.  I still think that it was a good idea, I just got hit with some other issues at the same time which is making it difficult to pinpoint the cause of my dramatic drop.

Marcus:

Thank you SOOOOO much for your amazing response.  Everything you said sounds completely logical to me.  I have set up a Moz Campaign pursuant to your suggestion and will start figuring out how to use it properly.  In addition, I will begin working on the duplicate content issue.  I had put 301s in place for the other site, but it still shows up on Google.

Again, thanks so much ... I am going to reread your response a couple of more times to make sure that I don't miss a thing.

My organic Google traffic just completely died and it is not Panda related.  I really need someone to offer some suggestions because I am about to give up.  This is going to be a bit complex ..

Here is the skinny:  I have several relatively new sites.  My main site for the purposes of this discussion is smartwatchnews[dot]org and I host my sites on wpengine.com.  My traffic was was slowly building and I was averaging 2000+ unique visitors per day on 8,000 highly ranked Google impressions.  In addition, Google was indexing my new posts about an hour after they were made.  After reading seoMoz in its entirety and subscribing to Moz PRO, I decided to streamline my site, and focus my content to provide a better user experience.  Here are the changes I made:

1. For ease of administration, I converted all of my sites into a single multisite wordpress installation.  For some reason, Google now has half of my pages listed on the master site smartwatch.smartfamily.wpengine.com, and not on smartwatchnews.org.  I have implemented 301 redirects for the pages at issue hoping to fix this problem.

2. At the same time, I also streamlined my categories and tags and used 301 redirects to route users to the right pages.

3. Finally, I subscribed to Moz Pro, analyzed my sight, and reduced usage of my keywords to around 3%. I had not stuffed, but the focus of my site necessarily resulted in me using certain words frequently.

Within one week of implementing the above-listed three tweaks, I went from getting 2,000+ visitors per day to ~200 and my Google impressions went from around 8,000 highly ranked per day to approximately 150 poorly ranked.  In addition, Google went from indexing my site hourly to indexing about once per week now.  I do absolutely no blackhat, link-building or marketing of any kind.

Other interesting things I have noticed:

1. Several SEO companies have linked to my site recently ... for example, all of a sudden, chkme.com just showed up in Webmaser Tools with over 1,000 links to my site.  I have no idea who they are.

2. Google Analytics shows that my site has an average page load time of 33 seconds!  It has never taken me more than 2 or 3 to load one of my pages and I have Google PageSpeed scores in the 90s.

I guess what I really want to know is, can I just create a bunch of quality content over the next few months and the problem will remedy itself, or is there an obvious problem that I need to fix?

I am at my wits end ... can anyone offer any suggestions before I simply chuck the whole thing?  Thanks in advance for ANY assistance, ideas, or simply "hang in there's" ;-(