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I haven't used monitorbacklinks but I have used cognitiveseo and I could say it's not very bad and not very good. If you can take a sample of 1000 links and then randomly check 10-20 of them manually, using your common sense, you'll see that CS is right about some and wrong about some.

For me, the only tool I can rely on is linkresearchtools (link detox) - which is right about links in about 80-90% of the cases. It's a bit expensive tho but I think they offer some sort of free trial.

All in all, more pages would definitely increase your website's authority and provide strong signal about it's topic. So yea, it would better for seo, but only if those pages are valuable to the users - coz creating pages just for the sakes of it, would mean spamming.

The only way to go is up, just make sure you keep your titles well optimized.

1. if you have a link from the 2nd level page to your home page that would help the home page rank better

2. don't use rel=canonical (and +1 to what Patrick said, I agree with everything)

3. off page seo is needed to get your keywrd in the top 10 (directory listings, citations, social media and links of all types) + optimize your home page properly (and make sure it's not content thin, Google doesn't usually rank well thin content pages).

Domain authority is the key here, now only their links get crawled but they all get ranked, usually in the top 10.

Do not rely only on tools, use your common sense as well. For example, moz's new spam rating - a blog comment link coming from a page with gibberish content, tons of ads and 2500 spammy unmoderated comments would seem like spam to me, but moz's spam rating is only 2.

By the way, which tools are you using?

Try ahrefs and majestic they have the most link data.  Webmaster tools doesn't provide all your link data and it's the same with moz, they have a smaller database of links (but have more and better features than ahrefs and majestic).

+1 to what Rene said, google is not forced to use your meta description (especially when the website is in a "complicated" niche).

Just like everyone else here responded, ssl is no major ranking factor. Implemented ssl on 8 websites during the last 4-6 months and there was no change in ranking.

Anything strange in your link profile or in your social media profile. Did the hits/bots come all at the same time or are spread evenly within 24 hrs?

Just as Chris Painter pointed out, you shouldn't worry too much about duplicate content if your site is legit (not an autoblog for example) and if you really want hide it from google, iframes are the way to go.

1. Full and correct NAP (Name, Address, Phone)

2. Local Citations with consistent NAP

3. Verified G+ Local Page - this needs to be properly set up

And your business appearing on the map is influence by the keyword competition and your competitors as well (how many reviews they have, how may relevant citations, etc).

I've done some marketing for the a few furniture sites (manufacturers and retailers) and the best kind of posts that work best (great engagement and lots of views) are lists like : 10 living room ideas, 15 kitchen designs for increased usability, 20 bedroom office designs for small spaces, etc. You don't need a lot of text for this, just images (which you can use with attribution rights). Check houzz.com for more details.

I totally agree with you, you do need unique content to rank and Martine's page (coz this discussion took off a bit) had a lot, a lot of unique content. So that's why i was considering that having keywords appearing a 15+ times on her page would not do any harm. Keyword stuffing can affect your rankings, of course, but only if you have thin content and/or if you do it to influence rankings (as an example, a client of mine had his titles on all pages like this: RV Insurance | Buy Rv Insurance | Best Rv Insurance | Rv Insurance Online | Rv Insurance Quotes - and the last paragraph  on each page was 3-4 lines of RV Insurance related keyword spam - and guess what, there was no penalty and the site still ranks well for it's keywords).

The thing about density is that it's calculated based on the entire document/page and not just one phrase. And yes you're right, nothing in your sentences is out of context, but it is still keyword stuffing because the density is way out of proportion (but hey, Matt Cutts said there's no right or wrong density, so...)

And yea, it might be keyword stuffing, but you don't see ecommerce shops get penalized because of it, so i guess it's nothing wrong with it.

Most of these resources are from 2010-2011, a lot has changed since then.

But even then , MC said that there's no right or wrong density, the only thing that matters is if your "keywords are present in your copy in a natural way". So if they keywords are present in an un-natural way, that would be keyword spamming.

Now let's take a look at an ecommerce shop, where you have the categories on a side menu and they all contain the keywords in them. Is that natural or un-natural?

Jonathan, i don't have source where you can read this, i'm talking from experience and using my common sense:

keyword stuffing by google

• in order to be stuffing it must be out of context - if you have a list of categories or related products that contain the keyword, that's not out of context, it's natural.

• also, the same keyword must be repeated over and over, in a compact form, just like in the google example "We sell custom cigar humidors. Our custom cigar humidors are handmade. If you’re thinking of buying a custom cigar humidor, please contact our custom cigar humidor specialists at custom.cigar.humidors@example.com." - this might be the case of some ecommerce and affiliate sites that have thing content, but when most of your occurrence are not coming from the main content (but are coming from the related content, menus, even html), that's not keyword stuffing.

About the keyword density, i have 3 examples, which in terms of density are exactly the same:

1. 1000 words of content and the keyword appears 20 times per throughout the content

2. 1000 words of content and keywords appear 20 times in the first 50 words on the page (density is still the same).

3. 1000 words of content and the keywords appear 10 times in the title and 10 times in the last 30 words (and just for the sake of it, the main content of the article has nothing do with the keywords).

Keyword density is exactly the same for all, but one of them is not keyword stuffing. If it was keyword stuffing in all of the above examples, you wouldn't see ranking any big retailer in the top 10.

So the key to understanding keyword stuffing is if the keywords appear natural, in context, or not. And natural for a blog / content website may be different from natural for an online shop, considering they have a different structure and purpose by default.

For a regular page (article / deep content) that's true, i agree with that. But for an ecommerce store selling products, things are different. Main content here is thinner extra content predominates : categories that may contain the keyword, related products that may contain the keyword, reviews / ratings that may contain the keyword. If you look at any amazon product page for example, you'll see that it's keyword stuffed according to moz (15 or more keyword instances). But there's nothing wrong with that, amazon still ranks high.

In my opinion, ever since co-occurrence and co-citation came out, keyword density (and keyword stuffing) are no longer that important.

If your site has enough authority and trust (site age is also a factor here), those 3k links won't hurt a bit, no matter how many links you have. I have done experiments and a domain with 50DA/50PA and less than 100 links did not move at all after getting hit with 250k spammy links (from spammy websites - using a spammy link profile). In fact the site increased in the serps for a few keywords after about 1 month and stayed there (currently in the top 3). We did the same experiment on a high DA domain with only 8 links - nothing bad happened, rankings increased in 2-3 months.

Just think about it this way, if negative seo would be that easy to pull off, all the shady Kumars out there would start doing this. Fortunately, it's not about the links, their number or quality. Unfortunately, neg seo exists and google can't do much about it (but average Kumars don't have access to neg seo that truly works).

So if you didn't see any drop in rankings, or message in GWT saying that you have a partial penalty, there's nothing to worry about.

Posted: Wednesday, April 21, 2010A lot has changed since then...