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Suppose you have a weekly blog article and sometimes your articles earn social shares (e.g. 23 +1's on Google Plus on one article but normally 3-5 social shares). One out of 10 earns an organic link from a random blog. Would you continue publishing these blog posts?

They shared some insights of their production process here: "Behind the scenes of SEOmoz's Whiteboard Friday" http://wistia.com/blog/behind-the-scenes-of-seomoz-whiteboard-friday

Awesome. Thanks so much for the help Rand and Lesley.

I was listening to an interview with Rand Fishkin on the Eventual Millionaire: http://eventualmillionaire.com/rand-fishkin/

Rand said that Google says that having an author photo increases click through rate by 15% on average.

I am trying to find the original source of this information. Has anyone know the source of this stat?

Suppose that you want to rank for two keyword phrases that mean the same thing but are slightly different in spelling.

When should you put both keyword phrases on one page versus two pages? What are the pros and cons?

Moz has their own list of recommended SEO providers who they vouch for which can be found at: http://moz.com/community/recommended. You can also look for Moz Associates, like Dan Shure of Evolving SEO, who Moz trusts to provide expert advice on the Q&A forum.

I like the idea of 301 redirecting to a new URL, especially if you are planning to drop one of the products. I think that the domains are a tossup. From my experience, EMD are still very effective in many verticals.

I agree that you should look into possible causes for the penalty.  Try the Panguin Tool (http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/) to see if your traffic drop aligns with a specific penalty. Did you receive any Unnatural Link Warnings in your Google Webmaster Tools? (if yes read this http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/06/backlinks-and-reconsideration-requests.html) If you know that you have some questionable links, try to have them removed or consider the Disavow Tool.

If you are using the Facebook social plugin on your site like ThinkGeek does for comments:

http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/ed6b/

Are there any positive social signals from people leaving comments that could impact the SEO of the page?

I searched the text of some comments in quotations in Google and it appears that the first few comments are indexed but most are not.

That's a good point. The two-way street prevents people from faking the authorship of pages on your site. Thanks!

The only issue is whether the expert would want to say they are a contributor to our site if they only have contributed one page (the interview). It may help to suggest that it would give them more authority in their subject area from Google's point of view.

We have several interviews with industry experts on our site. How do we get the benefits from Author Rank?

If I link to the interviewee's Google Plus profile, will Google recognize that they contributed to the site. Or do I need to get them to add our site to their contributor section on their Google Plus profile to receive any Author Rank benefits? (I know Author Rank is not believed to be affecting rankings yet).

Thanks!

Suppose your press release got picked up by high authority sites like Yahoo, Morningstar, PaidContent.org, etc. But they republished the press release and kept the links. Do these links pass any value since the sites are just republishing the press release?

The data that the Google Adwords tool is not very accurate, it is more of a rough estimate. If you wanted to better data you might consider buying Adwords Ads for those keywords for a limited time like a month. Then you could look at the number of impressions for your ads to get a better sense of how many people are searching for those keyword phrases.

Why would disavowing them hurt? They aren't extremely spammy but all they do is republish press releases and have very low Page Authority/Domain Authority (usually 10 or less).

Suppose a company did a press release and linked to you in it. The press release was republished on some high quality sites but also over 50 low quality press release syndication sites from all over the world. Suppose that they used a money keyword anchor text to link to you.

Would this be harmful to your site? What action would you take? Should we disavow these 50 links?

Actually, it is well documented that it does pass link juice similar to a 301 redirect.

You can't 301 redirect Blogspot blogs because you don't have access to the server files.

I received a link removal request from a site who said that they were penalized. I confirmed that they were #1 for the competitive keyword phrase that is also their domain name and now they are #10.

Here are some things I noticed about the site:

1. Over 2,500 linking domains.
2. Dozens of high quality linking domains like Huffington Post and Mashable.
3. Some off topic guest post links, e.g. on a SEO site.
4. Guest post anchor text was usually their site name which is an exact match domain.
5. Lots of top 100 resource pages that received good organic links.
6. Infographics with links using their domain name as the anchor text.
7. Relatively few spammy links according to Open Site Explorer.

Overall their site's links were engineered but using tactics that most would consider "white hat." I don't think they violated any Google Webmaster Guidelines. Why were they penalized?

What do you think?

Does anyone know how to implement a rel canonical tag on a Blogspot blog?

I am trying to pass link juice from an old Blogspot blog to a self-hosted website.

Is 100 total links for every linking domain too high? I suppose I could also look at ratios of sites that are doing well in the rankings.

I would look at two things. I would look in Google Analytics at a daily graph of overall organic traffic to the site over time and add date markers for known Google updates to see if there are any changes that align with updates. I would also look in Google Webmaster Tools at the average ranking for the top 20-100 keywords before and after the date of a known Google update.

If you are answering common questions about your industry, should you create a separate page or place it on a existing page that is related.

On one hand it may be seen as thin content on those pages. On the other hand it may be a poor user experience if someone lands on your page and has to scroll down to find the answer.