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Other tools to do this also, but they aren't cheap, like SEM Rush, Searchmetrics, etc.

Tom Anthony had written a great blog post here on Moz a while back with a Google doc for doing this, but I'm not sure it's working anymore - you can check here

It's more of a site security issue - not updating your wordpress and plugins leaves you vulnerable to security flaws exploited in old wordpress installs - Google is trying to help you and encourage you to update your wordpress to maintain security and prevent the site from being hacked.

I don't believe it's a rankings issue, but more quality of website and health of the web in general issue that Google is sending out these messages.

You can refer to this blog post on State of Search for more info.

I think the name should be reflective of the nature of the blog - is this a blog published from the site, which in my mind makes sense to call it blog, or is this something going to be created by and for the community of your audience, in which case it makes sense to call it community.

If you're publishing articles, behind the scenes info, general information, etc., I would call it a blog. If you're encouraging users to publish and it's more geared towards community participation, I would call it community.

Those are my two cents - good luck!

Mark

Use Google Analytics for this - set up your conversions as goals, and then you can track via various reports the conversion process - what did they do, where did they go, how did they flow through your website from initial landing page to full conversion.

Google Analtyics is very powerful - it does multi touch attribution - multiple visits until your conversions, how they came each time to your site, etc.

It really is a wonderful tool - here is a guide to setting up goals - https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1032415?hl=en

Once the goals are set up and the data is flowing, the fun really begins, and you can make lots of actionable analysis to improve your site based on it.

Good luck,

Mark

Raven had the same thing happen to them - http://raventools.com/blog/update-google-adwords-availability-in-raven/ - for all of what they claim, taking away access to Adwords keyword data sucks - this is right up there with not provided, and is going to cause a major backlash in the industry

If you're finding these tags are missing meta descriptions, that means they are pages that don't have meta descriptions. This points to a larger issue - do you want each page being created by Wordpress for each tag you use to be indexed by the search engines? Are these high quality pages you'd want a user to land on? Do they provide value? If not, you don't want them to be indexed. You can use a Wordpress plugin to control indexation of these tag pages - Yoast's SEO plugin, http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/, besides for being awesome, will control this for you. Install and then go the indexation section, and from there, you can control what is indexed and set the tags to not be indexed.

You can do lots of other stuff with the plugin, and I definitely recommend installing it either way.

Hope this helps and let me know if you have any issues with it.

Hi Immanuel,

While I can't comment on the site in question and their backlink profile because you haIt ven't shared it, what I can tell you is a bit more information about weekendpost, the site you did share as one of the sites in this company's backlink profile. Looking at a random site with articles built for link building purposes, it is pretty rare that you find a site like this with a PR of 5 in this day and age. Many of these were smacked by Google in the various updates and penalties, with public PR often reduced as a public indication of this site's devaluation. However, the site you shared has a toolbar PR of 5 and a homepage authority of 57, clearly a stronger site than your usual hastily built article spam site.

Looking closer into the history of the site using the Wayback Machine, you can see that this site was once an actual legitimate site and source of weekend news. It started accruing links in 2011, and this is where much of the site's strength comes from. At some point the domain was likely dropped and picked up and converted to an article site for links. Whois further signifies that there was a change in registration of the site with 1 drop.

Do I think Google will eventually catch up with this site and devalue its links if they haven't already? Certainly. But in the short term, links from this site may be boosting up other sites. I don't think this is a good long term solution, but I can see the benefit from links from a strong site (according to metrics at least) like this in the short term.

Mark

I created a pivot table for you based on a kw export I did from adwords - you could play around with it a bit more, but basically, it groups the terms into groups of competition, and then sorts keywords by highest local US volume. This sounds like what you were looking for - hopefully it helps. Here is a link to the Google doc in Drive - good luck and let me know if you need help replicating it.

Thomas's recommendation of the Distilled Excel for SEO guide is spot on - I love that tool.

Mark

What you described here is the same content on multiple subdomains. If you add no index, no follow, you'll prevent the other pages from being indexed and from passing link equity. Firstly, even if you would go this route, I wound't add the no follow rule - that just means you're losing any juice that passes to the page from links, not something you necessarily want to do.

In this case, I'd recommend changing your canonical tag - the birmingham subdomain uses the canonical tag on itself, claiming that it should be credited with the content, when in truth, you said you want the credit flowing to the www version of the site. So you need to change your canonical tag on the location based subdomains to point to the www subdomain. So for http://birmingham.styleblueprint.com/food-and-entertaining/recipes/kale-salad-quick-healthy/, the canonical should be  rel="canonical" href="http://www.styleblueprint.com/food-and-entertaining/recipes/kale-salad-quick-healthy/" />

Hope this helps

searchmetrics.com can also provide you with a bunch of this data - you can usually see where a competitor ranked for a keyword historically over time - I would check them out - I find it very helpful for competitor analysis

Sounds very interesting and like a great opportunity for you.

What I don't get - why build a strategy for a site that you're going to eventually 301? Why not register the candidate's name, build up the content and the brand of the candidate over there, and then eventually just launch a site redesign/more formal look on the site once the candidacy is announced. Why the need to 301 to a new site? You don't want to lose some of your hard earned equity in 301s.

I also think in terms of social, be authentic, and let the candidate tweet about issues facing the community, etc. I think an authentic social media campaign will be more successful than a political censored one even before the candidate announces that they're running.

Following what Daniel suggested, you should check your links and mentions in Open Site Explorer and Fresh Web Explorer, and check if any anchor text that seems suspicious is popping up. I would start there.

You can also go to your analytics, and check the referring sites - do a glance at the domains, and see who is sending traffic to you, and do any of the domains sending traffic to you seem like a good target to check.

Moving further, you can also use Google advanced search operators to find out who is talking about you on the web - search for your brand name, with -site:yourbrand.com query as well. This may find someone talking about your brand but not on your site that you weren't expecting. But I would start with the backlink tools available to you and check there. It may be easier to run an export of your backlinks, and then filter for relevant anchor texts. I always prefer to do this type of analysis in Excel - much easier and quicker to do manually.

Good luck, and let us know what the culprit was in the end.

Sincerely,

Mark

Hi Adam,

As you stated, patience is a virtue, one we're especially not used to on the web. But it sounds like OSE never had reason to discover your site (no links pointing in that they would follow), so once your link building kicks off, and OSE updates, you should hopefully start to see your metrics rising.

There are tools out there you can use for rank checking, some free ones (like SEO Book's Rank Checker), which go pretty high, but not into the thousands. I'd say the easiest and quickest way you can check your rankings in Google would be to set up Webmaster Tools (if you haven't already) and check your stats in the Search Queries report. This will give you impression data, clicks, and average rankings for various search terms straight from Google. While not perfect, this is probably your easiest and cheapest (it's FREE!) way to check your rankings without doing it by hand.

Hi Justin,

Both PA & DA are based off of the links that Moz's link index detects to your site.  Do the other two domains have as many links as the .co.nz site?  If not, that's why.  If so, it probably just means that Moz's index hasn't crawled the other sites' links yet.

Hope this helps!

Ari

Hi Christoph,

In today's world, I'd be very hesitant to outsource my link building to company that will guarantee a top page 1 ranking for  a moderately difficult keyword. There are so many other factors to take into consideration.

I'd also stay away from a performance based model - this may encourage the link builder/SEO to try various methods to get quick results. If you suddenly shoot up in the rankings with the usage of dodgy tactics, I wouldn't be surprised if your site took an even bigger drop a short time later. Google is really cracking down on webspam and problematic tactics, and I think you need to be a bit patient and let things go naturally.

Currently, I'd advocate guest blogging and other forms of organic link building.

Is the site currently ranking for the term? What is the backlink status of the domain? If you pay a link builder to optimize for one term, and neglect your branded anchor text and the backlink profile of the rest of the site, you can run into serious issues with the search engines that will be harder to resolve and will take more time and money than you had originally intended to invest.

Hope this helps - just to clarify, I'm all for link building and organic growth in rankings. I just think you need to take a larger approach looking at your whole site, its onpage optimization and its backlink profile.

Nakul didn't specify, but the code he gave you is if your site is running on an apache server. Make sure to work with your developers to deal with these issues, and don't try changing your htaccess file on your own - you make major problems for your site very easily.

Hi,

As you noted, the noindex meta tag is present on the page. This tells the search engines to completely remove it from their index. You want this to tag to be on pages you want removed/excluded from the search engines, certainly not on your homepage if you care about your PR.

As you can see here, your site is no longer cached in Google - http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=cache%3Awww.pokeronlineitalia.com. Your blog, on the other hand, which has the meta robots tag of "index,follow", is still in the cache of Google - http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=cache%3Awww.pokeronlineitalia.com%2Fblog

If you want search engine traffic, you need to remove this tag immediately and wait for Google to come and crawl the site. You may want to build some links into the site and/or share it over various social networks like Google+ and Twitter to speed up the indexation process.

This is most probably why the page has no PR - it's not indexed in Google.

Hi Jonathan,

Could there be something technical hurting that page? A meta robots block? A robots.txt block? Perhaps overoptimization of the page?

If you can share the URL, that will be helpful to try and provide some ideas for how to fix the situation.

Mark

Hiring people to talk about your brand is fine - paying someone to talk about your brand and link to your site with the express purpose of influencing the search engine's algorithms is the problem. If you pay someone to talk about your brand and they nofollow the link that is perfectly fine in the engines' eyes - the link is not meant to influence your ranking - however, paying someone for a link is the problem.

That being said, bloggers are getting smarter and realize they can make money off of this, and are going to try and make money off of guest blogging just like they can make money off of inserting contextual links.

If you want to avoid these issues, try creating a relationship with the blogger first, connecting with them on twitter and other social media networks, actually reading their blog and interacting with them. As a representative of the brand, they'll recognize you and you'll have a real relationship and then approach and ask to guest blog post on their site - this should be a very different reaction.

There are also lots of other ways to build links besides guest blogging - it ain't easy, and no one is saying it is, but you should probably diversify your strategy - here is a great post with various tactics and strategies from Jon Cooper - enjoy!

Good luck,

Mark

Instead of looking at keyword density, I'd look at more important metrics and factors in on site optimization.

Use moz's on on page report card http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/new to check your onpage optimization. Also, you can use the toolbar to highlight a certain keyword. I think most people nowadays don't really take keyword density into account, unless it's extremely high and the post is very spammy looking. Go for natural text that will make sense for a reader, a real human being, to read the content. Use your keywords naturally throughout the text, and I think you'll see better results than incorporating a keyword wherever possible to increase keyword density levels.