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Have you reached out to the newspaper and asked them to no follow/no index the page? This is an extremely high authority kind of link that is usually best handled directly with the webmaster of the other site. They should be able to take the page down for you no problem. I wouldn't recommend removing it completely as the brand mention is good for your SEO, but if you can ask them to remove the indexation it will stop out ranking your branded searches.

This might seem like a silly question, but are you searching for this while you are signed it? Your search results might be a little off if you are. Try using the keyword analysis tool here to see if that article truly outranks your branded search. I would make sure of that before I remove the link completely.

If you cannot get in touch with anyone at the newspaper to remove the link the other thing you might be able to try is sending feedback to Google. You can do that at the bottom of the page. It will allow you to send a message to Google and show them exactly which SERP you want moved/ removed.

I haven't experienced a home page outranking a product page for anything other than a branded search. Most often a home page is not optimized for a particular key term. It is optimized as an outline for the site and to display promotions or other important things about the site.

Cole, just FYI, If by Phone owns Mongoose Metrics now. I used If by Phone for about a year. I get the same data from Google AdWords for free as I did from If By Phone for upwards of 1k a month.

The only program I have come across that actually offers more than AdWords is called Invoca. They actually monitor calls, track offline conversions at the key word level and implement conversion optimizing tools to your AdWords account. I think you are in good hands with Google. I wouldn't start paying for data unless you are ready to move to the next level of call analytics.

Your domain authority is not influenced by NAP alone. How long ago did you update these directories? Can you be sure that Google has indexed the links? I say you need anywhere from 3-6 weeks for the newly established links to be indexed by Google.

If you want to increase your domain authority you need quality links to high authority sites and great social signals. This is proven to be effective, but it takes time. Anything that works overnight is sure to bring you a penalty or two. Give it some time. Build your links the natural, organic way and build a social presence. These methods will keep you out of trouble and build your DA.

Fluctuation in DA are quite normal. It isn't unusual to go up a point one month, go down a point another month. The same links are not crawled every month. Sometimes it is the difference in rounding up and rounding down. For example, last month my DA was 28.8, so 29. This month my DA is 29.3, which is also 29. Fluctuations are normal and should only concern you if it is a dramatic increase or decrease.

No, it will not register as a click. It will register as a conversion. If you aren't seeing that column in your interface, go to customize columns - conversions and add that to your interface.

Anytime

Moz has a great section called Learn. I started with blogs like that, and then used Google to look up other forums or topics related to what they had in this section. So, if I read the section on URL formats, I would go to Google and search "best url format for SEO" and read whatever else came up. There are a lot of places that are like Moz, and I think I learned the most from the sites that disagreed with what I found here. It gave me the opportunity to see two sides of the argument and then make an educated decision as to which practice actually was the best practice. 99.9% of the time, what I found in the Learn section of Moz was completely accurate.

I became interested in SEO when I was working for a company that completely got hosed by a firm. Taking what they told us, I just started looking to verify what they were doing because we couldn't see any results.

Take things one step at a time. Start at the beginning with on page optimization and content. Once you feel like you are comfortable with the basics look into off page optimization and social media. Keeping an open mind is essential, this industry is fluid. You will always be able to find more than one way to do something. Learn to trust your gut and always ask yourself if what you are doing is natural and organic. If you are keeping things natural and organic more often than not you are using best practices.

Reading the Q&A forum here is really beneficial as well. I have been working in SEO and PPC for 6 years, and I still learn something new from community members everyday. There is always a new method or GA or GWT update that can change how you use your data, or restricts your data. The people in the community are very much on top of changes in the industry and can give you insight to methodology and best practices.

There are many other community forums, like searchengineland.com. Use every resource you can. I think of Moz as my ground. If I find something out there in cyber space that I find interesting or new, I validate it here.

Welcome to the community and good luck to you!

I think you are mixing the two up. Call extensions are different from the call tracking Google does with a dynamic number.

Call extensions are on your ads. They appear in the search results. This are tracked in call extensions.

The google conversion tracking using the dynamically generated numbers on your site are tracked in your AdWords interface. You can see them on the campaign and the key word level.

If you are using dynamically generated numbers for call extensions, which appear on your ads, you will track those in call extensions. You will see phone impressions and phone calls for these in your AdWords interface. - See the example from my AdWords account here. You will see two columns labeled phone impressions and phone calls. That is data from the call extensions on my ads.

The dynamically generated numbers that Google generates on you site will appear as conversions in the AdWords interface. Here is an example of how the data for the call conversions will appear. You will see a column that says "converted clicks". Those are phone calls that came from the dynamically generated number on the site.

The dynamically generated number on your site is set up through conversion tools and is not tracked in call extensions. Those calls can be tracked in your interface or through tools - conversions - and then the conversion tool you set up.

The size of your site is important. The value these pages have as far as bulking your site up is important. If you no index them, you will significantly reduce the size of your site, which can effect your ability to rank on other pages as well. No indexing them is not best practice, and will cause more harm than good.

These pages aren't hurting your site by not ranking. They might rank for terms you aren't tracking also. The pages probably have some authority and links, getting rid of that will definitely be detrimental.

On such a generic term you are going to need to strategically target and build your site around that topic.

Your home page generally tends to rank better because it brings a lot of traffic from people searching for your brand name and your domain name.

As far as URL structure. You want to have a structure that will really target your key term as naturally as possible. For ecomm sites you would use domain.com/category/product. That would be the best way to accomplish a strong keyword targeted URL.

So - johnnyslaptops.com/dell-laptops/dell-inspiron-5500-laptop

If you no index the pages they will never rank. The bots will not be able to crawl them so they will essentially be useless.

Are these product pages? The best way to get content on these pages is through user generated reviews. That is the best way to accomplish adding content without spending a ton of time writing copy.

I think you should stay above 90% unique.

I would strongly encourage you to make sure you add user generated content to the pages. Even rewriting the content to be exactly unique will not be enough to guarantee your pages can rank. The content is going to be written in unique words, but it will essentially be the same thing. You will need something that is uniquely valuable to the user.

No you won't necessarily be penalized, but, it will become harder to rank in branded searches.

Don is spot on here. Content and Link Building are the top of the SEO priority list. I strongly encourage you to do more research and ignore anyone who tells you that blog posts and any other form of content back linking is out dated. There are so many ways to build links, and the most important thing to remember is that they need to be organic and to quality sites.

Just because someone is ranking well and they appear to have really spammy links doesn't mean that 1. they aren't going down the road of punishment and 2. their link profile is why they are ranking well. There are 200 ranking factors, and about 17% of them are link related.

To touch on social media. It is growing in importance everyday. Social signals are extremely important and anyone who advises against social marketing is way outside of the best practice loop. Be very careful.

You don't want to build no follow links, they carry absolutely 0 link juice If you are building them in places where you will get referral traffic from them, then by all means, build away. Link building was originally devised as a way to drive traffic. It lost it's purpose because it became so manipulated, and now, with the help of penguin, it is starting to get back to its roots. Links have always been the highways and byways bringing traffic to your site, and if your links are driving traffic, they are doing their job. Whether it is from social, blogs or forums.

I have seen a couple of cases where an H tag shows up instead of the meta description because it matches the query better. Google will pick snippets out of content they feel is relevant to the query. Without seeing the page or the query, that is my best guess.

I use this to track phone calls on the keyword level. Each call = a conversion. Not in call extensions however. The call extension conversions are only the numbers that appear on your ads. Calls that don't require a click to get to a number.

This tool is helpful because it can help track offline conversions. I find it useful because there are keywords that don't generate revenue online, but they generate calls. Before I implemented this system I would have gotten rid of all of the key words that weren't performing. The calls are just as valuable as the clicks in my business, so that information is important.

Did any of those clicks convert? I would think on a broad term like that, you would have a very low conversion rate.

Let's say of the 40 clicks you scheduled 20 appointments. The average Ecomm conversion rate is 2%. At the lowest 10,000 per conversion, you would earn 10,000. 2% of 20 = .4. That isn't even 1 conversion.

Now if you scheduled all 40 appointments and converted at a higher rate, you would have a higher ROI.

I think that it highly depends on your key terms. I don't think that anyone could give you an idea of your ROI without looking at your setup. Your key terms, search volume, average sale and many other things factor into the ROI. Will return only consist of revenue or is your conversion level setting an appointment? Or gaining a phone call?

Fortunately there are tools inside of Adwords that can help you track conversions, like phone calls, or contact us form submissions. Without delving into your data it will be pretty hard for anyone to be able to give you any kind of ball park ROI figure.

Do you have the ability to set "Search Keywords" on a product level? not the meta keywords, just plain Search keywords? That would help the problem.

How about a search and filter plug in?

I recommend using a program like Moz Local or Yext to help clean up your name, address and phone number all around the web. Your NAP is extremely important for ranking.

Your URL structure should include your key words, absolutely.

Ideally your URL string would contain as much information as possible without stuffing it with key terms. It should also build as people navigate.

domain.com/category/page

debtstop.com/debt-settlement/monthly-settlement-plans

Does that make sense?