Welcome to the Q&A Forum

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93713?hl=en

Watch the Whiteboard Friday video on Why Guest Posting and Blogging is a Slippery Slope

To Moz, where else

If you've not already done so read these, from left to right.

The white board Friday video's a really good too, they are a little advanced, but as a beginner you can pick bits and pieces that can benefit you early on. Also the Moz blog, Rand's blog and member blogs.

Also ask as much as you like here, are some amazing people, willing to help you out

Have the willingness to learn and you'll learn lots here, in my opinion a lot more than at college or uni - what you learn on a course is usually outdated by the time you leave.

As to education and paricular courses, I'll leave that upto one of the seo pro's to advise.

Cheers and good luck Lee

Yes that's a crucial point you made there Monica.

Site content contains very little "about the business" and more content "about the line of business." Your goal is to attract as many visitors as you can with content that they find helpful, that will establish you as an expert and through these pages, funnel them to your business pages.

Hope that makes sense, its classic marketing really, using content to prove expertise and establish trust.

Have you added your competitor to Moz analytics and then compared the metrics, that should give you a better idea as to the why's?

Had a quick look and you're right it's terrible, the blog is a list of testimonials (that link no where), and from what I can see it's only a three page site? You've not given a url to campare or said when the new competititor site was launched, but if its a recent addition, personally I'd not worry, Google is never fooled for long and it is usual in some circumstances for google to add new sites to the top to test them, but its generally slippery slope, especially for sites that don't provide good quality content.

Don't consider using similar tactics yourself, just write better content (lets face it that won't be hard) and beat them the right way, I think what they're doing speaks volumes about their marketing knowledge, sound like an easy win for you.

Also when viewing the search results do you see this in Moz or Google as if you're logged into google, personalised search will show the sites you visit the most first, rather than they're true position.

Cheers, Lee

Awesome answer, I used https://ahrefs.com and most of my links are contained in there, that's a relief thanks a bunch.

Good share, thx Dean

I get this problem too, been puzzling over it for a while, like you I posted on this concern, but I didn't get a satisfactory answer, is probably worse that you think, by my calculation about half of my inbounds are missing, not very reassuring, but maybe given your expereincing it too, it might be a moz issue.

Hi Martijn,

was thinking that if the site was going to use the short phrase why not also try for the long tail;

i.e. "business analysis training courses" and "business analysis"

Perhaps you could explain?

Also the comment I made "It matters, yes, but it matters a lot less than it use to" was a Rand quote, from one of his wbf videos in which he was talking about the effects or keywords in the  url. He also said that this now only contributes to rankings in 3% of cases.

Cheers, Lee

Instead of

www.site.com/training/courses/business-analysis

use;

www.site.com/training/courses/business-analysis-training-courses

It matters, yes, but it matters a lot less than it use to.

I might be talking out of line here (as I'm no expert on seo) but I'm sure Google gives a lot less authority for backlinks that occupy the same server (assuming the other sites do occupy the same server) to stop the multiple site tactic? No doubt someone will corraborate or discount.

Personally I feel very uneasy about these types of tactics, rather perhaps concentrate all of your efforts on your main domain but increase the quality of the content, also look into using long tails, I've found these result in lots of better targetted traffic.

I'm not sure but this might even be classified as web spam?

Are you saying then that I don't have to be engaged in social media personally, that its enough to simply allow visitors, customers and members to share my content and news and that each time my site or content pages are liked this contributes to trust? Ah I think I follow what you mean by social signals now.

I think maybe I misunderstood the purpose of social networking, it takes a shift of perception from posting as an individual, to posting as an organisation, will definitely look at posting content relevant to my brand without getting too involved in the small talk from now on

You've been great by the way, thank you for your patience, I'm still a lost when it comes to social media, but now atleast I can see its purpose and value.

best Lee

To Moz, where else

If you've not already done so read these, from left to right.

The white board Friday video's a really good too, they are a little advanced, but as a beginner you can pick bits and pieces that can benefit you early on. Also the Moz blog, Rand's blog and member blogs.

Also ask as much as you like here, are some amazing people, willing to help you out

Have the willingness to learn and you'll learn lots here, in my opinion a lot more than at college or uni - what you learn on a course is usually outdated by the time you leave.

As to education and paricular courses, I'll leave that upto one of the seo pro's to advise.

Cheers and good luck Lee

Hey,

I don't know about the benefits, but I do know that when ever I'm looking for a product I like to see the price.

A genuine recent example;

In November I wanted to purchase some calor gas for heating , I searched locally for a supplier and none of them listed a price, you had to call for a price - in hindsight this is probably to do with fluctuating gas prices. Anyhow I didn't buy from any of them. I asked a neighbour who they bought from and how much they charged and I purchased from their supplier. For all I knew the other suppliers were cheaper, but I didn't buy because I didn't know!

Its a matter of understanding modern internet users, my experience is that people have a low patience thresh hold and if they can't find what they want, they'll move on and search elsewhere, its a lot easier to click back than pick up the phone, I also think that seeing the price is an important piece of information, but that's just me,

Sorry I know this isn't the technical answer you were looking for, but I saw your question and was reminded of searching for gas last month.

Cheers, Lee

Awesome answer, I used https://ahrefs.com and most of my links are contained in there, that's a relief thanks a bunch.

Watch the Whiteboard Friday video on Why Guest Posting and Blogging is a Slippery Slope

Hi Marijn,

thanks for responding, I guess I got the wrong impression of the Moz functionality, thought that the weekly updates were instantanious and provide a "as it is now" perspective of authority, so its handy to know, so thanks for the share

I have a query about updates, (in relation to the Google index) that you might be able to help me with? Only if you have the time of course.

I provide software that displays a footer link, I know for sure which sites are using my software and that a little under half retain the footer link.

A best case guess of the amount of links that are pointing to my main are in the order of 400k (maybe even double this amount), because it varies per site dependant on the amount of pages, one site, has 10k pages (which is probably the largest) but the others range from 100 to a couple of thousand pages (all of which contain a link back).

The problem is that my domain authority doesn't seem to reflect this amount of links. One would think even new sites would pass a little link juice, or is it possible that Google is discounting most or a selection of them?

I was thinking of compiling a list of sites that use my software, with links so that Google will crawl the sites, but I read that this can affect authority negatively?

fyi - Moz says that there are only 35k, which is less than a 10th (at best) of what's out there.

Best wishes, Lee

Instead of

www.site.com/training/courses/business-analysis

use;

www.site.com/training/courses/business-analysis-training-courses

It matters, yes, but it matters a lot less than it use to.

I get this problem too, been puzzling over it for a while, like you I posted on this concern, but I didn't get a satisfactory answer, is probably worse that you think, by my calculation about half of my inbounds are missing, not very reassuring, but maybe given your expereincing it too, it might be a moz issue.

Yes that's a crucial point you made there Monica.

Site content contains very little "about the business" and more content "about the line of business." Your goal is to attract as many visitors as you can with content that they find helpful, that will establish you as an expert and through these pages, funnel them to your business pages.

Hope that makes sense, its classic marketing really, using content to prove expertise and establish trust.