If it helps when speaking to your boss, know that I'm a Moz employee and do no consulting, and we do not have any type of lead compensation for when we recommend people on the recommended companies, and EGOL does not accept consulting gigs either. Neither of us are saying what we are saying to try to make any money off of you or your company, but rather to try to honestly help your company get the information it needs.

Right now, we still just have the three competitors, though we are looking at the possibility of adding more in the future.

You might want to give a little more information about your site, budget, and scope. Do you have a ten-page site that you want to rank in a rural area of Colorado, or do you have 20,000 ecommerce items that you ship worldwide? Are you selling escort services that will help you in your poker game and weight loss endeavors, or are you selling landscape mulch? Are you looking to redesign your website, or only want SEO services? Do you need content too? Do you want someone local to you, or are you fine with working remotely?

As I mentioned in my Inside YouMoz post, there are even some posts that I would have turned down if they didn't have links. I try to treat links as scholarly citations rather than votes. There's a post right now in the queue that I need to respond to and tell the author that they need to back up some of their statements with links to the source of what they are claiming.

So the traffic seems to be coming from search. I'd do a query in Bing and Google like:

site:mysite.com badkeyword

and see if you can find what pages are indexed with that bad keyword.

We would like to expand Moz Local, but don't have any dates yet. We will be sure to let everyone know when it comes time to add more countries!

This blog post applies to regular Google Analytics, but some of it might be applicable to the real-time version as well, or may be helpful to you in general. It's "7 Essential Google Intelligence Custom Alerts That Keep Me Sane" and looks at traffic increases, drops, etc.

7 Essential Google Intelligence Custom Alerts That Keep Me Sane

It's happening to staff too, so we're all well aware of the problem. I'll contact that team when I'm in the office today (on the bus at the moment) and see if I can get an update for when this might be fixed.

Hi Dirk,

I'm not with Moz anymore, so I can't speak to how things are at this very moment, but there was a good conversation in the comments of the following post earlier this year that talked about some of the tensions in the review process and factors that affected the timeline. https://moz.com/blog/moz-community-managers#comment-318875. I imagine many of them still hold true.

I'd still want to ask why? Why put the work into two sites, and divide your effort between them? If the time from the new site was instead allocated to the existing site, could that make it the leader in its field?

Yahoo is using Bing's algorithm, but still retains the right to put their own front end on things is how I understand it. I'll get an SEOmoz engineer to chime in here with some more information about why there may be differences in the campaigns.

The campaigns can take a few hours to a couple of days to migrate. If you're still not seeing them there in a couple of days, please email help@moz.com and we'll investigate for you.

What questions do people have when they contact you? That's a content idea. What questions do people ask on Quora? Trip Advisor? bicycling forums? What FAQs do your competitors have? Take that FAQ content as an idea, then write a whole blog post (if there's enough content) and start to outrank them.

For Reddit, was it really reddit, or was it a site pretending to be reddit but using a foreign character for one of the Rs? https://www.billhartzer.com/pages/how-to-stop-lifehacker-com-and-reddit-com-fake-google-analytics-referral-traffic/

You'll find that EGOL's very content-heavy in his responses. He makes some good points, and I'll add a couple of thoughts as well.

Not everyone is going to come from your blog to this site, ideally many are going to come straight to this site from a search engine or a referral. They're not going to know the backstory about Noah, or that on a particular day he used this toy and had a great result, or that it's a good lower-cost version of what they use in the OT clinic.

If you have a beautiful design but it's just a copy of what Amazon has, even if you have it in nice categories, that's really not going to be of much use to your customer. You need a point of difference beyond just a nice design. You need to make sure that what you have to offer doesn't look like it was thrown together in about five minutes.

I don't have experience with any shopping themes, so I'm afraid I can't answer you from that perspective. What I can say is think about making your site THE place to go to for people looking to buy toys for children with Down Syndrome. Your blog can be for your personal story, and this site can be the go-to place for finding toys and everything relating to play.

Have you run across Rae Hoffman yet? She goes by Sugarrae online. She got into online marketing when her first child had an undiagnosed stroke at a few weeks of age in the mid 1990s, and has become a very successful affiliate marketer. One of her affiliate sites is BBgeeks, where they review everything related to the Blackberry phone. She has a post about how she formed the site. She has a different perspective on things than you I'm sure, but I think you can still pick up some interesting things from what she has to say even if you aren't a fan of her particular style.

When I was deciding between a blackberry and an iPhone three years ago, I sent a tweet to BBgeeks. They responded right away, and we had an email conversation where one of her employees answered a lot of my questions, and actually recommended that the iPhone might better meet my needs.

edit: editor problems, this got cut off before finishing.

They haven't made any money directly off of me, but anytime I know of someone who just got a blackberry, I refer them to BBgeeks for help and reviews.

That's also something you can consider for this site is helping people pick out toys. Look on Twitter with a search like [anyone know down syndrome toy] to help find people asking about Down Syndrome and toys, then offer to provide help.

Rae writes about how for a review of BB games they spent a week downloading and playing every single game they reviewed. They didn't just copy the description off the manufacturer's page, but instead went and got to know each game they reviewed and wrote REAL content about it. I think that's what EGOL is going for. Spend your time and effort on writing the best information out there about each toy and how it relates specifically to an individual with Down Syndrome.

They've just been released!

http://moz.com/blog/the-2013-mozcon-video-bundle-is-live

I've already flagged this question for her attention, via our secret admin-only system.

Take a look at http://www.seobythesea.com/ for nitty-gritty about patents and how they might affect search. I also read http://searchengineland.com/ for their detailed articles and http://www.seroundtable.com/ for breaking news about what people in the forums (especially webmaster help forums) are saying and new features the search engines are implementing.

If you're available in an hour this morning (at 10:30 am Pacific time) we're running a Pro webinar on reputation management with Rhea of Outspoken Media. Information at http://www.seomoz.org/webinars. We also record this so you can watch it later.

It isn't exactly on this subject, but on the larger subject of online reputation management and might be useful.

Does anybody come to Sydney to purchase coffee pods in person?