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If you get 100 links from nyt.com is much probably very good, either it's to the same page, different pages, or whatever.

If you get to buy 100 articles with links from the same clumsy/poor-seo-metrics website is bad, no matter what.

Everything in between has its shades of good or bad.

There's a old use case, but I can't seems to be able to find it googling right now. I remember reading it before to switch few websites to ssl, at least two years ago.

Anyhow they examined few websites before and after switching to standard ssl (some) and ev ssl (some others), and they found out the conversion rate didn't change with standard ssl, and it decrease with ev ssl.

Why could it be? Not clear. Probably because no one noticed the change to ssl, while ev ssl being so prominent lead some to notice it. And as it often happen if a buyer is not concerned of something and you rise the topic to him you feed a doubt, and when you feed a doubt you delay a purchase, and when a purchase is delayed is potentially lost.

You can set it up to have the subdomain completely hidden behind the reverse proxy, if you do so, google won't notice any difference. If the subdomain is in the same local network you can just disconnect it from the internet, if you can't you can still set the subdomain robots.txt to reject crawlers. Just be carefull to do not serve the robots txt under the subfolder.

I doubt so. Can you share a link?

Did you publish an updated sitemap?

Do you see a spike in "Pages crawled per day" in "Google WMT/Search Console", in Crawl->Crawl Stats?

400k is a lot, it may take some time to crawl all of them

Did you structure your sitemap as a tree? if you did, adding the 400k new pages to a sub node of the sitemap, you can check in Crawl->Sitemaps how many of those pages are already indexed, and if the figure is growing or not on a day/week basis.

What's the attribution rules you set up in FB business manager? google analytics counts only last click as a click, by default facebook counts any click as a click,

if your site is on http and the user is browsing facebook on https (which most likely is) the referrer header is lost on the click, and you will see the visit as coming from direct traffic, you can fix that just adding analytics tracking parameters to the url you publish on facebook

How do you find out what are the emotional triggers of your audience?

Is there a prevalent methodology?

I am familiar with, and I practice persona building, and logic deduction of what may trigger and what may represent a barrier for that persona.

But sometimes it's hard, for certain products which have no sex appeal it's hard to figure out. Let's say you are in the business of selling heaters/boilers online, it's tough to find any emotional factor in boiler product/vendor selection.

A well defined methodology would help, I just don't find any.

I regret I have not understood the question, what do you mean with "unique urls"? Can you post a link to show that website?

For which keywords are you seeing a fluctuation?

Anyway fluctuations are normal. Particularly during or after a spike in link acquisition, which you are undergoing according to both ahref and majestic.

And let's assume you are referring to keywords like "virginia beach va", it's a rather generic keyword, and even if competition doesn't seems high, in my experience it's hard to get a stable ranking for generic keywords.

Yes it may be beneficial to have more than 1 article with link from the same domain.

As a rule of thumb, do it only if the articles on that domain are getting some internal juice.

And do it only with article targeting different keywords, and linking to different pages of your website.

TTFB is server time, spent processing the http request. So you have more than a load of things to look after, in order to improve response time, it largely depends on the technology stack you are using. You may need to review your server side code, your sql queries, your infrastructure.

Anyway more often than not is a matter of poor backend coding.

Based on my experience asking customer for reviews using an external authority like TrustPilot have a higher redemption than just sending out a review request using your own brand. For the best results (again in terms of redemption) the review request should be sent out using a sender email address from your organization, and be personalized, but it should be clear at all stages it's an external authority who is collecting it and giving the customer the guarantee it's managed objectively.

Said that, I don't particularly like TrustPilot, I don't know if they changed things, but when they approached me:

• there was no option to import existing reviews
• you was not the owner of the reviews and you could not download them (to keep them if you decide to cancel the contract with TrustPilot)
• there was an upfront fee while competitors had not,
• the sales guy was pretending their widget would have magically made star rating appear on SERP, which is not true.

Once you sign with them, and they set up your business page on their website you get a do-follow backlink from a DA69 website, which is nice, but that's the only SEO benefit you get.

The SERP star rating depends on the schema org markup, if you markup your pages appropriately, it may show up, TrustPilot reviews has no influence on google decision to show star rating for your pages in SERP.

Different story for seller ratings in AdWords, in this case TrustPilot or any other review platform who has a partnership with google will influence your seller rating, and star rating will appear if your adwords account and review match AdWords requirements for seller rating.

As for Conversion Rate, in my experience, showing TrustPilot badge improved CR between 1.5% and 2.5% (depending on website), tests where run changing nothing else, just adding the badge and the review widget, quite far from what they promise.

So I would suggest to choose a review platform and use it in place of an inhouse solution, for the purpose of maximizing redemption. Again, in my experience, using an external provider improved redemption by 3X factor.

But I would look elsewhere for some other platform than TrustPilot.

Change the name of the login page, I mean in addition to having a strong password of course.

Those automated scripts look first for the known wp login page if they don't find it the will give up, if they do they will keep trying forever and ever, an unecessary load for your servers.

I agree it's dull, and I hate it myself. But it surprisingly works.

As far as I can tell from my experience:

• creating alerts, like google news alert, moz fresh web explorer alerts, etc...
• writing some nice personal email, or personalizable template, to authors of the post discovered...
• offering some quality content for a guest post.

Can get to some decent results.

So far I have not been able to find other ways of doing it.

We tried building some great unique quality content, complex expensive infographics with original analysis, we built some backlinks to that content, did the on-page SEO homework and got to position 1 of SERP, we emailed the exciting news to hundreds of journalists and news agency by email, with zero (repeat zero) natural backlinks.

While the dull, boring, and time expensive mailing to bloggers usually result in 2 out of 10 free guest posts, 3 out of 10 money request to publish the content, and 5 out of 10 ignoring us.

In theory a spam report should be the thing to do, but usually it doesn't change anything.

I remember seeing a video of either Cutts or Muller saying that a spam report is not going to produce any direct effect, they just use the information to improve their algo on next update.

I know for sure that in certain cases they take immediate action, because months ago a news site with DA90+ here in Italy started selling do-follow links in their articles (by the way for a small fee of 15k euro per month!), I reported that, and few others did, and within one month they got a manual action in their gwt account and they stopped doing it.

But in many other cases where both I and colleagues in the business did spam report for much smaller sites, nothing happen, and after years I can say they are still happily enjoying good ranking for very obvious black hat tricks.

SEO and democracy doesn't seems to get along well.

No it's not possible.

Let's say you have http://foo.com/a and http://bar.com/b and both have the exact same content, google will choose one, index it, and forget about the other.

Let's say you have 1000 pages on both foo.com and bar.com exactly the same 1000 pages, google will analyze each page one by one, and choose one version for the index, and forget about the other, depending on a variety of factors (like the domain itself and backlink profile) will pick some pages from foo.com and some from bar.com, but you will still have only 1000 pages in the index.

How much of the content of each page you need to change to differentiate is unknown since no one knows the code of google algo.

You can try with guess and test, you change something and you see what happen monitoring changes in the indexing of the edited pages.

What's the attribution rules you set up in FB business manager? google analytics counts only last click as a click, by default facebook counts any click as a click,

if your site is on http and the user is browsing facebook on https (which most likely is) the referrer header is lost on the click, and you will see the visit as coming from direct traffic, you can fix that just adding analytics tracking parameters to the url you publish on facebook

Yes, google is saying that all paid links should be no-follow, They are saying paid links are a plague. And I believe they mean it. But I am not sure they are able to enforce that policy.

By my experience paid links are so widespread google is going to find that battle hard to fight. They code their algo, and they are google, but the rest of the world is selling do-follow links.

In all backlink profiles I analyzed, all of them, paid links are probably 80/90% of the total. And I am not talking about spammy blog networks. I can give you a list of hundreds of sites with DA50-60 and PR5/6, including major worldwide news agency and leading national newspaper in all G7 countries... who sell sponsored content with do-follow links.

You may be big, strong, motivated and just, but when everyone else is doing the opposite of what you want I think it's tough to impose your will. And to date seems google is very far from reaching his objective of exterminating that plague.

Am I suggesting to buy a do-follow link from a website with (let's say) DA20 and PR2? No, stay away.

Am I suggesting you should go on a buying spree? No.

Am I telling if you buy links you take no risk? No, rap genius or bmw are good example of big names being it by google axe (but not for paid links). But I don't see google starting tomorrow to penalize 90% of the web. As for all things maybe in few years paid links will be a thing of the past, but today they are not.

I am saying everybody is doing it, and as far as you buy the links from reputable websites, so far, seems you are going to get juice without running much risk.

And yes everybody will tell you should not do it.

In my opinion is just a matter of waiting for google crawler to visit each page individually and update serp. In the past when I had similar issues with bad redirect was just a matter of fix it and wait for google to notice the change. Check last time google crawler visited each url, if you have historical data on google crawler visit and you know on average how often it does visit each page you also know how long you have to wait.

i don't see any reason, in your exposition, to choose any different route than first option

check the domain authority of the second level domain your client is currently using and evaluate how much time and money you need to replicate the same DA to a new domain, then ask yourself and your client if it's worth it. Don't forget to mention all that work to rank for the new domain is not going to help the old one, and when same DA is reached you will still have to face duplicate effort to improve DA of both.

of course there are other factors which could still weight in favor of the separate domain, like banaly if she want to take distance from her main practice, if the existing domain suffered from penalization, etc...

but without knowing much I don't see a reason to go that way

As far as I know this is still the industry standard to evaluate keyword traffic volume: http://moz.com/blog/keyword-volume-tools

Google trends can tell you if a keyword is searched more than another and give you a rough estimate of how much more, but I don't think it's a reliable source for estimating keyword traffic volume. If you try to do the math, checking one keyword volume in Google Keyword planner, checking the 1:N ration in Trends, and multiplying... You often find odd numbers.

You may check http://semrush.com which does also provide traffic volume estimation for keywords in their reports. I am sure there are other tools out there trying to figure out traffic volume as well, but the accuracy of those tools is disputed.