Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Keith! Did Oleg's and/or Michael's response help, and if so, would you mind marking one or both as a Good Answer?

Well, this is the place for 'em. Feel free to post a thread whenever you need to! Welcome to the Moz community. ^_^

(One tip: If a response answers your question, click the "Good Answer" link in the lower-right. It marks your question as "answered," and it gives the responder a few extra MozPoints. I work here, so I'm not too concerned, but it's a good thing to do.)

If you're sure you want to use a new URL, I'd go with the second one (LakeNameBoating.com/boat-rentals). The name of the lake being in the domain would make using it again feel redundant.

That's pretty much just personal preference, though.

Hi Allie! Did you work this out? We'd love an update.

Oh! Sorry, I was looking at the wrong link. Yeah, that looks fine. Personally, my preference would be to put the link around the words "a study" or "a study by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners," because only having the link around "National Association of Insurance Commissioners" may lead readers to think the link goes to the NAIC homepage rather than the study. What you've done, though, is entirely acceptable.

Hi Lewis! Did Matthew answer your question? If so, mind marking one or both of his replies as a "Good Answer?" It'll get him a couple bonus MozPoints, and it helps us keep track of things.

Hi Leszek!

To answer your question directly—no, having the exact match keyword in the domain name will not, on its own, result in a first-page ranking. It certainly doesn't hurt (unless it's part of a pattern of spammy keyword stuffing), but the impact it will have is vanishingly small.

Hahaha, yeah, not my personal choice of reading material, either.

Actually, I'll PM you. It's hard to say what I'm actually trying to ask without giving away your keywords (I can see 'em 'cause I'm an admin).

Hi Patrick!

Google looks at a lot of factors when determining whether a page is mobile friendly. According to a post on their Webmaster Central Blog, for a site to pass the test it needs to:

• Avoid software that is not common on mobile devices, like Flash
• Use text that is readable without zooming
• Size content to the screen so users don't have to scroll horizontally or zoom
• Place links far enough apart so that the correct one can be easily tapped

As you can see, it's more than a matter of implementing a particular bit of code. In addition to the blog post linked above, I recommend going through Google's guide to mobile-friendly design.

Good luck!

Hi Alex!

Honestly, this sounds like something you'd need to contact Instructables about. Unless someone here has pretty deep knowledge of their services, they're probably the only ones who'd know for sure.

And we worked it out! In case anyone else has a similar question:

When you pair a keyword to a page in the Page Grader tool—such as the page /laptop-bag/leather-shoulder/ paired with the keyword "leather shoulder laptop bag"—the tool will scan the page for exact instances of the phrase. So, even though the words "laptop," "bag," "leather," and "shoulder" are in the URL, the tool doesn't recognize the phrase "leather shoulder laptop bag," and so suggests adding it to the URL. If the URL is /laptop-bags/leather-shoulder-laptop-bags/, though, the tool _does _see the exact term, so it bumps up the score and removes the suggestion.

In this case, though, Deacyde is totally right—/laptop-bags/leather-shoulder-laptop-bags/ is, well, kind of terrible. The thing to keep in mind is that a score of 100 in the tool means that the keyword for which it's evaluating the page is in _absolutely every _keyword optimization position. That doesn't always make sense, especially for a longer-tail term like "leather shoulder laptop bag."

So in this instance, 95 is better than 99.

Hi John! Did loganr answer your question? If so, please mark one of his responses with "Good Answer." Otherwise, mind defining U-NAP (versus NAP) for Miriam so she can help?

I have to back Gaston on this. The tactics you're considering are EXTREMELY likely to result in penalties. Definitely start with the guides he provided.

I just want to add a point of clarification to #1 there:

It could actually be several months before PA and DA update to reflect changes. This is because PA and DA are link metrics based on our Mozscape index (the index that also powers Open Site Explorer). Index update times vary, but it's fair to say they take an average of 4 weeks or so to compile. So, link metrics update approximately once per month.

But!

Say your site acquires a new backlink, which may have an affect on its authority metrics. If Mozscape is still in the process of crawling and indexing the web and hasn't yet crawled your site, then provided your site gets does get crawled you'll see the changes in the next index release.

If, however, Mozscape is still in the process of crawling and indexing the web and has already crawled your site, you won't see any update for 2 or more index cycles. This is because your site has already been crawled in that cycle and won't be recrawled until the index is released and we start on a new one.

You can see the date of the last release and the expected date of the next on the Open Site Explorer homepage, or here.

Does that make sense?

Hi J.P.!

I'm glad Matt is helping you; he knows his stuff. There's actually a Moz tool that could provide some insight, too—the Keyword Difficulty tool. It can give you an analysis of all the sites ranking 1-10 for any given keyword, including which factors are most likely to be helping them. You may be able to glean what's helping them pull ahead.

I'd recommend Cyrus's video on the tool.

Good luck!

I would say probably, but it'll take a fair amount of reading and work. As Eric said, the Beginner's Guide is a great place to start. I'd also recommend checking out "How to Rank" after you've finished it.

Hi Marcus!

What I'm getting from your question in that a high-authority site has a roughly two-week-old page featuring a piece of content of yours. Is that correct?

Generally, a PA or DA of 1 simply means that we don't yet have information on that URL. As I explained in my response to John, we gather that information through our crawl of the web as documented in our Mozscape index. That crawl takes ~1 month.

PA and DA are based on pretty much the same factors, and those factors are almost entirely based on the strength of the backlink profile. According to the Open Site Explorer home page, the last index was released March 2, and the next index is expected to be released March 30. That makes March 30 the earliest you can expect to see information about that page. It's quite possible that you still won't see it until the following update.

PA and DA are both based on pretty much the same factors, and those factors are based almost entirely on the strength of the backlink profile. The difference is that DA is based on the backlink profile for the entire domain, while PA is based on the backlink profile for just that page. PA can be raised by building links to the page. If it doesn't gain links, PA won't improve (though I'd expect it to me higher than 1 once it's been crawled and indexed).

Now, lastly, you ask about your boost in the SERPs. I assume you mean you're expecting a bump for your site, since the high-authority site links to you through the content it's picked up, yes? In that case, you may see some benefit on the SERPs well before the change is reflected in PA (Google crawls a lot faster than we do). The amount of a boost you get will depend on a lot, including your competitors' link profiles and whether the content that got picked up also appears on your site (if it does, I hope the high-authority site is pointing to the original content on your site with rel=canonical, or you could find yourself competing with them).

I really hope that makes sense. Let me know if you need more clarification, or if I'm just totally misunderstanding your question!

It's extremely unlikely that you'd rank two pages for one term, so I personally wouldn't recommend optimizing two pages for the same keyword. I also suggest you be very careful about optimizing for an exact match keyword like that, as it could make your copy sound stilted and unnatural ("We're the best dog walkers NYC around!"). If it's very clear that your service is dog walking and that your located in NYC—perhaps use schema markup to establish the location, and make sure to have a presence on the relevant directories—I'd think you'd be fine.

Plus, since BarkBud only offers dog walking, and only in NYC, a page like barkbud.com/dog-walkers-nyc/ is redundant at best, and spammy at worst.

You should also attend (or watch a recording of) our twice-weekly walkthrough webinar.