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DA will shift up or down depending on the size of OSE's lastest index. A bigger index = DA goes up, a smaller index = DA goes down.

DA can fluctuate with OSE updates depending on the size of the index. If the size goes down, DA may go down. If it goes up, DA may go up.

If you have access to a developer, it'd be relatively simple to make a program that crawls sites and looks for outbound links to a specific domain.

Use backlink checkers of your choice to pull competitor's backlinks, filter by domain authority high to low, look for blogs. Yes, it really is that simple. And that's only one of multiple ways to do it.

If you're going through with link removal and building a disavow list, you might as well log all the outreach efforts and results - it really doesn't take that long. Just note when you sent emails, when they replied, what they said, and if the link was removed.

I'd upload that to Google Docs and include the link in the disavow file so on the off chance a real person looks into your site, they'll know you did the work.

One should never rely on Googlebot for anything - we've all seen it change title tags, change meta descriptions, disobey rel=canonical, etc.

I'm checking out this new Link Opportunities feature for one of our sites and what I'm seeing right now is pretty disappointing.

For Reclaim Links, everything listed is an internal link on our site. It's got tons of URLs from our old Iciniti structure (replatformed to Magento mid-March). It's crawling tons of stuff that's blocked in robots. There are no links from external domains in the first 5 pages.

For Unlinked Mentions, it's showing tons of mentions - 33,566 to be exact, a ridiculous number - mostly from news sites like Forbes, WSJ, Guardian, CNN, etc. These sites are not mentioning us. It's set up to look only for our brand name or domain name, so I don't know how it's thinking there are all these nonexistent mentions.

What's going on with Link Opportunities?

If your competitors are ranking with those tactics and have been for years, then try those tactics!

There is no white hat or black hat in SEO. There is only risk tolerance. Think of it like investing. Decide how much you're willing to risk, then make those bets.

Regardless of how much the sheep say "create good content, the rest will take care of itself", it's very misleading. Links are the most important factor for ranking well. If you want to beat these guys at their own game, you have to play their game.

Google smart enough to recognize what it is, it won't get you penalized for duplicate content.

Backlinks are what's hurting you. According to AHREFs, you've got 52 backlinks coming from paces like article directories, Russian comment spam, etc.

Get as many bad backlinks removed as you can, disavow what you can't get removed. But make sure you're building new links - quality links - at the same time. You need new links to improve rankings, getting rid of the bad links isn't enough.

While you're going through the disavow process, make sure you're building new quality links. You won't get your rankings back just by disavowing, you need new links to improve.

Drop them as a client. They're paying you for SEO help but they obviously don't trust/like it. Not worth your time.

OSE doesn't have the resources to crawl as deeply as AHREFs, Majestic, etc., so the index is smaller. Get your backlinks from multiple sources for the best picture.

It's totally fine. Optimize for the term and have the landing page be a page on your site explaining the difference between and benefits of your league vs. Pop Warner.

Zappos does a similar thing with coupons - http://www.zappos.com/truth-about-zappos-coupons

OSE doesn't have the resources to crawl as much of the web as other services. For a complete backlink picture, check as many sources as you can - OSE, Majestic, AHREFs, Webmaster Tools, etc.

Duplicate content isn't that big of a deal for ecommerce sites, especially the kind you're talking about. Backlinks are likely why the pages rank so poorly.

Moz's rank tracker just isn't accurate all the time. I've repeatedly had it tell me keywords had massive shifts up or down, even out of the top 50, when a manual review showed no change in rank. Once it had all my keywords out of the top 50 for Yahoo and Bing. The rank tracker is a good estimate, but manually check if you want to know the real ranking.

It's absolutely ridiculous that our industry lays down and accepts stuff like this from Google. It is unacceptable for them to not be able to determine who originally created the content. They have the data to do it.

Highly unlikely to get you penalized. Google understands the nature of ecommerce sites and that products go out of stock regularly, hence the need for proper merchandising.

They should be indexed next time the page is crawled. I don't know that they're very effective anymore. Obviously they're worth doing since they're pretty easy to set up, but Google continues to be highly selective about showing them.