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A good idea is to keep track of a couple of your competitors' domain rankings, so you can see how you are doing relative to them.

Another quote from the link that keszi provided:
"It's best to use Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA) as comparative metrics when doing research in the search results and determining which sites/pages may have more powerful/important link profiles than others."

So if you see that your site went down and your competitors' went down as well, you'll know not to be too concerned.

Yes, if they were directly competing against each other, you'd expect one of them to drop out of the rankings. What are they both ranking for?

If they are both showing up in the same search, my guess would be that they are very new and Google hasn't noticed the duplication.

But if you see the ranking in different searches (like Google UK and Google India), then you are probably right, Google does not see them as duplicate since they are being shown to different audiences.

I agree with Ryan, doing it all on one page with the different number of days/itineraries sectioned out is the way I'd go.

First, a page actually can rank well for more than one search term, especially when they are so closely related.

And second, what is the point of optimizing different pages for different numbers of days and then canonicalizing them to the ten day trip? The canonical indicates that only the ten-day page should be indexed, so who cares whether the shorter trip pages are optimized or not? They won't be findable in the SERPs.

Lastly, there is no penalty as such for duplicate content. Google just decides which page is the most useful to show and the others drop out of the index. If your pages are very similar, Google may well make the decision for you and drop some of them out of the index.

Look at the source code of your page and search for "a href="--that will show you your links.

Great that you have it fixed! (Did you look in the Yoast settings to see if different post types have different settings? That could be part of your original problem...)

In the Moz Research Tools drop-down menu, you will find "keyword analysis". Choose that and you will see a box where you can enter your keywords of interest--they will then appear in the "keyword difficulty and analysis" table below. Choose one and click on "view". This will create a report for you, which will include the top ten ranked pages for your keyword. (You can run an advanced report from there to get even more information.)

As far as replicating links, for Moz tools there are the competitive link finder and the link acquisition assistant, which you can find in the left column on the research tools page, under more tools & resources. You might also be interested in the "Beginners Guide to Link Building", which you can find here.

Here is a good article on bid stacking in Adwords that might help you adjust your strategy.

Looking at the first one with Screaming Frog, there are 112 pages without descriptions.

Visually checking an example of those, http://sundancevacationsnews.com/, I see in the description, an empty description.

Checking one with a description: https://sundancevacationsblog.com/sundance-vacations-travel-advice/international/, I see

It just looks like some of them didn’t have descriptions added. Check back in Yoast again and look at the pages that Moz says have no description. Does anything look different in those than in the ones that do have descriptions?

I don't think the problem is the plug-in since both the pages with and without the descriptions are using it, and yes, Google will see the same thing.

The first question I asked in this forum was very similar to this.

It can be very difficult to optimize sales pages, especially the long-form very sales-y type. In many cases there really isn't anything you can do to the content because the sales copywriter chooses very specific language to get the message across. Additionally, these pages tend not to be the sort of thing people will link to.

What I eventually chose to do was to use the targeted, helpful information page you mentioned to draw in the organic search and not worry about the sales pages beyond title, description, and canonical.

However if you do have the option to make your helpful information page and your sales page one and the same, that is a great choice.

Just to elaborate a bit on the canonical part, people often put a canonical pointing to itself on all pages to avoid duplicate content in the case of session ids or other parameters being appended to the basic url.

This would not hurt your backlink situation, in fact it could help. If by chance there were backlinks to alternate versions of your base url, you would reclaim the link authority which would otherwise have been lost if Google dropped that page from its index seeing it as duplicate content.

When I run that page in Open Site Explorer, I do not see a redirect. (I also don't see any links.) If I switch it to look at the root domain instead, I see a bunch of links to various pages.

It seems that this root domain hosts pages for other companies, including lawyers, web design companies, and this seo company. So if you look at the links to the root domain, you will see links to the various companies on that domain.

I just checked that link in Screaming Frog and it is 200.

The main menu structure is where it would be important. Does your layout now have a menu with 100 links?

If your hundred categories can be sorted into five or ten more general categories with other categories under those, it would make navigation easier.

You can still keep all of your categories as first level under the domain in the URL, even if they are drop-downs (or however you want to do it) under an over-category.

If the point is to get away from so many links in the header, even if they are not immediately visible, then the question is how important are all the categories. Can some be consolidated?

It sounds like you have quite a lot of categories! Can any of the categories become the main categories and other categories sub-categories beneath them?

Yes, dmoz is still accepting listings. It is a large, human-edited directory and submissions can take a very long time to process, depending on your area. They also don't accept all sites. As far as value, it is certainly not the golden ticket it once was and the general consensus probably is that it has little or no impact. That being said, it's not that difficult to submit a site and it wouldn't hurt to be accepted.

Here is a good Moz article on the subject: http://moz.com/learn/seo/anchor-text . It includes examples.

"Key Points:

• If many links point to a page with the right keywords in their anchor text, that page has a very good chance of ranking well. Real examples of this include the search engine result pages for the queries, "click here" and "leave." Many of the Google results for these queries rank solely due to the anchor text of inbound links.
• People have a tendency to link to content using the anchor text of either the domain name or the title of the page. This is an advantage to SEOs who include keywords they want to rank for in these two elements.
• Too many inbound links to a page with the exact same keyword-rich anchor text may cause Google to scrutinize that site’s link profile more closely; using manipulative methods to acquire keyword–rich anchor text is not recommended."

[The emphasis is mine.]

And for outbound links: http://moz.com/learn/seo/external-link

"Optimal Format

Use descriptive keywords in anchor text that reflect the same topic or keywords the target page is trying to target. It's not necessary to use the same keyword text every time—in fact, doing so can trigger spam detectors. Instead, strive for a variety of anchor text that enhances context and usability for your users—and for search engines, as well."

Way back in 2012 Matt Cutts said:

“I read a post by someone offering new top-level domain (TLDs). They made this claim: ‘Will a new TLD web address automatically be favoured by Google over a .com equivalent? Quite simply, yes it will.’

“Sorry, but that's just not true, and as an engineer in the search quality team at Google, I feel the need to debunk this misconception. Google has a lot of experience in returning relevant web pages, regardless of the top-level domain (TLD). Google will attempt to rank new TLDs appropriately, but I don't expect a new TLD to get any kind of initial preference over .com, and I wouldn't bet on that happening in the long-term either. If you want to register an entirely new TLD for other reasons, that's your choice, but you shouldn't register a TLD in the mistaken belief that you'll get some sort of boost in search engine rankings.”

and I have not seen anything to indicate that this is no longer true.

Some people like to get the new tlds because they feel that they will be attractive to the user, that if for instance people see a .tv they would choose it over another page because they would think that a .tv provides a better video experience.

This may be true, but on the other hand, there are plenty of people who no longer think of tv when they think of the video experience...

Pages that people refer to as "SEO pages" are often not very good pages for user experience. How do the blog and SEO pages compare? I'd keep the page with the better content, or even combine them. (Though that will depend on your overall plan for the blog.)

As far as the SEM page, you wouldn't use a canonical because it will not be identical to your homepage. It is common to noindex SEM pages, which is what I would do in this case.

Yes, no hyphens in the domain name. Thanks for clarifying, Donna.

Hyphens are definitely a good idea. They make the URL easier to read and more user-friendly. (See more about it from Webmaster Tools Help here.)

"Consider using punctuation in your URLs. The URL http://www.example.com/green-dress.html is much more useful to us than http://www.example.com/greendress.html. We recommend that you use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs."