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Well if half my citations aren't recognized then there's a good chance that is hurting the ranking correct?

I was saying when I google the company name "Photojennette" because I'm trying to correct NAP for this company to Photojennette Photography instead of just Photojennette, I see a ton of listings on Google SERP with " Photo Jennette McCurdy "

What your saying is that you think Google ignores a citation in regards to local ranking so long as NAP is not present.  So if it isn't a full citation with Name, Address, Phone, then they likely don't take it into account.

So my clients business name is "Photojennette Photography" and while researching citations to correct I have found a completely random issue.  There's an actress named Jennette McCardy that apparently has a ton of photos on the internet and with that are page titles like "Brand New Photo : Jennette McCardy" and "Look at this Photo Jennette McCardy"

My question is, would Google be sending my listing down because of this?  It's completely random and has nothing to do with the business.  Thanks in advance.

In my research I have found multiple citations that were both lowercase and uppercase.  Does this inconsistency effect ranking?

Because I'm still not seeing a #1-3 ranking for some of my main target keywords and the people who are have higher DA and PA by 5-10 points and I teach SEO and I want to be able to explain everything involved.

Thanks for the heads up. Didn't realize that would make much of a difference but I corrected the problem.  Also, without me doing anything, the Canonical Error is fixed...

I've put off asking this question for a long time because I know what the short answer is, but I've been working the SEO on http://www.photojennette.com for almost a year now pretty constantly and all of the measurements are positives except for authority.  Traffic has more than doubled, links sending visits has doubled, external followed links is 500% up, keywords sending is way up, pages within the site have way more links and are more diverse in their own SEO, but no matter what I can't get PA and DA to budge. In fact at one point DA dropped a point or two. (although OSE and Moz Analytics shown that competitors lost a point or two at the same time so I didn't think much of it.)  I feel like I had a good grasp on what helps DA but I'm starting to question that.  Anyone have any ideas?

I came to post the exact same thing.  Feb 6 2014 was my last update on all 9 of the sites I manage.  Any word on whats going on?

The link is a front page of a website though.

http://stellyweddings.com

I understand what Canonical is for, but this isn't a duplicated page, its the front page.  Im not sure why I would get the above error in On-Page grading.  Basically saying the page is grading  a B instead of an A because of the above error.

I have a wordpress site that On-Page Grader is saying I don't have Canonical done correctly.  Here is the comment.

Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical

If the canonical tag is pointing to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. Make sure you're targeting the right page (if this isn't it, you can reset the target above) and then change the canonical tag to reference that URL.

Recommendation: We check to make sure that IF you use canonical URL tags, it points to the right page. If the canonical tag points to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. If you've not made this page the rel=canonical target, change the reference to this URL. NOTE: For pages not employing canonical URL tags, this factor does not apply.

I have quite a few sites and have never had an issue with this.  Can anyone help?  I tried installing a plugin but that seems to have made it worse.  This is the front page of the site btw.

You're speaking of the difference between Page Authority and Domain Authority.  In my experience in regards to SEO, you should treat each page as though its a separate website, that needs good solid keyword targeting, rich content, links on social media, and links from other creditable sources.  Building a ton of links to your front page will give you slightly better Domain Authority but this doesn't help your interior pages rank as quickly (unless you have a Yelp like site with extremely high +90 DA).  If each of your interior pages is treated as important as your home page, you will see better PA and DA for each of those pages and almost certainly end up with higher SERP results.

On a side note, beware of directories.  Unless you are specifically campaigning for Local results, directories could be spammy, non-creditable links that actually hurt your sites authority.

Hope this helps.

One problem I see is that you have 250 referring domains from only 151 referring IP's (as seen on Majestic SEO)  That right there tells me you have about 100 or so domains that are likely owned by the same people all referring to you.  In general that usually leads to blackhat SEO.

Also, if you use OpenSiteExplorer, you will see that your Page Authority and Domain Authority are both fairly low for the competitive, global market you are targeting.  This likely comes from dead end links that dont have anything to do with furniture, your local area, or your products specifically.

Duplicate meta data and page titles will cause major issues.  OSE says you have 283 new links in the last 32 days.  That seems like quite a few for a furniture company.  Do you have a new SEO working for you?

Do you have a strong social media following?  Are the followers real, viral followers or were they purchased? (I only ask because you seem unsure of your previous SEO team.)  Do you sell globally or would Local help you gain some of that traffic back?

Unfortunately, undoing bad SEO is much harder than just starting from scratch.  First things first, learn about Canonical links, 301 redirects, and get rid of any duplicate page titles and meta descriptions.  Remember, each page should be about a specific keyword set.

Good luck!

Webmaster Tools isn't telling you that it thinks your website is about Dollars, its telling you that it sees that mentioned often on your site.  You really don't need to fix anything, but perhaps adding more content about your target keyword will help push that down a bit.  Are you saying something costs "88 Dollars" all over your website or actually using a $?

If its the latter, that would be very interesting.  If its the former, remove dollar and use $ instead.  Cheers!

I have always found it is much better to buy the URL that has the name of your company in it.  I once created a website for a friend who had a carpet cleaning company and at the time knew nothing about SEO.  I registered the keywords.com which happen to be "austincarpetclean.com" and the major problem I found with that is that people never knew who they hired to clean their carpets, and sometimes left my friends company bad reviews when my friend hadn't even done the job.  The word "confusing" is a major issue when it comes to the post 2012 Google.  NOW if I had registered the name of his business say it was "Jones Carpet Cleaning" at www.jonescarpetcleaning.com I would still have had some keywords, and would have branded it correctly.  Hope this helps.

thanks for the responses, i just started this campaign last week and was already seeing progress as of this week and then the report came back without the results I wanted.  I know it will take time and Google will better reward natural progression. I guess I just wanted to vent!  I'm went through a page report and fixed some critical keyword placement and will continue what I'm doing because I know based on research here that what I'm doing is right It will just take some time for everything to be recognized.

By my definition, dead end links are any links that don't help.  These would include links to pages that no longer exist on your site, that perhaps need a 301 redirect, links from websites that have nothing to do with your keyword topics, or links from websites that have really bad DA on pages with bad PA.

Webmaster Tools within Google is probably a great place to start.  You can see where Google is finding errors by looking under Crawl > Crawl Errors.  There you will find pages that might have been deleted without a redirect and are therefore showing a 400 Error.  Also you can see who is linking to your website under Search Traffic > Links To Your Site.  That's probably a really strong place to start.

OSE only gives you a sample of the pages that are pointing links to your site, but you could find those domains there as well.  Majestic SEO offers a free account with some Referring Domain information as well.

As far as fixing the issues, well if ts a link on a website you don't want to be linked from, you can start by emailing them and asking for it removed.  If its a link to a page that has been deleted or renamed, just 301 redirect that page to a live, working page so that when its clicked through, the user ends up on a working page.

Google's number one goal is user experience.  If their users click on a link from Google that ends up on a page that doesn't exist, it works against you.  If Google sees a link on a referring domain that is pointing to a page that doesn't exist, its a similar situation.  If Google sees two pages with the same content, that's another notch against your site.  That's where Canonical links come into play.

It's a long process so just hang in there and make sure the powers at be know how important it is because its going to take a large amount of man hours to fix this issue.  Can you check Webmaster Tools and tell me how many errors it finds under Crawl Errors and how many links are under Total Links and under "Who links the most" check domains that have a ton of links to your site that might not be helpful to your site.

so my motto for SEO is if its too easy, Google wont like it... Meaning, if buying your-target-keywords.com used to mean you would be ranked first, thats not the case anymore.

is there anyone here that disagrees with the below example.

commercial-construction-company.com with great content and links (meaning SEO)  = samscontractors.com with great content and links (meaning SEO)

basically the name doesnt matter so long as its an honest website with great content.  On the flipside, your missing out ob a branding opp and when was the last time you saw "keywords.com" at the top of page 1?

I find Domain Authority to typically be a much stronger candidate for results.  Installing the "mozbar" to your browser and using it (make sure you are logged into Moz) will really help show you what I am speaking of.  Many times, websites like Yelp will list on the first page for a business with a page that has a Page Authority of 1, but the DA of the site is so strong that it outranks other pages with a much higher PA.

The way I see it, PA will help get a certain page to rank, but DA will get all your pages to rank (which will help diversify your SEO thus bringing way more traffic to your site for different sets of keywords.)  Remember, each page should be for a different topic, so if your front page is for your main target keyword strand, and you have a high PA but a low DA, your site is likely to rank for that one term, but all the interior pages wont.  Whereas, if you have a higher DA, you can rank higher for every page on your site with different keywords.  The best way to do this is to link multiple pages from your site.  For instance if you are guest blogging, don't just include a link to your front page.  Try to include a few links to interior pages as well for relative topics.  Also, I have actually seen Google Adwords give stronger DA.  I know many will argue this, but when campaigning on adwords, you can send different keywords to different pages.  Users entering your site through interior pages is a good thing, as Google seeing everyone come to your site from the front page can sometimes lower your DA.

Hope this helped!

In your Moz Anaylitics under Search > Crawl Diagnostics - are there errors there?

Also, on many of your paid links, you are using img's without alt text.  Anchor text is becoming more and more important in today's SEO.  If you have 50,000 links with no correct anchor text that alone can be hurting you.

Yes but i would strongly suggest just having one website and then 301 redirecting the other.

I got caught a year ago with 4 different websites all with the same content and links between them and that is straight negative SEO.  Brand that baby, and then light it up with SEOmoz tactics : )