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In my opinion, a good blog post would cover all four of those formats. Maybe even in that order.

I'd personally recommend subdirectory. Google tends to see subdomains as being separate websites so, as you said, it's harder to build up authority to a subdomain blog.

Miriam Ellis recently wrote a blog post about this on Moz, which I would definitely recommend checking out:

https://moz.com/blog/local-seo-client-discovery-questionnaire

Within it, she provides quite an awesome template or "Client Discovery Questionnaire" of questions that she recommends sending to new clients to get a better understanding of the client's history including other consultants that they have worked or are working with. This is available to download as a Google Doc too! It's a great resource.

If you don't want your tags and categories to be showing up in Google (which is usually the case if they're just there for easy user navigation on-site), then I would recommend noindexing those bad boys completely. If you're using Wordpress, there's a plugin called Yoast SEO that will allow you to do that easily if you don't want to mess around with code.

This is extremely common. Are your competitors' titles in the search results displayed the same way? e.g. "Website: Page Title". If so, I'd bet that if you checked their source, Google would have changed it for them too. In which case, not sure if there's anything you could do about it. Google just seems to have preference for brand name first when it comes to some search queries where they deem the brand name more important to the user than the page title for that particular query.

I'd rather have as much control as possible over how my result is displayed in the SERPs. I think if you make your meta description relevant enough to your page that Google doesn't consider it not as good as theirs (at least for the more obvious queries. Can't please all those longtails), then you can use the description to really sell the page to the searcher.

I think Matt's saying though that it's better to specify no meta description at all than use duplicate descriptions across multiple pages.

According to https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/ it has already been updated on 15th October, with next update due 15th November.

EDIT: Though the OSE homepage and Mozscape Updates log (https://moz.com/products/api/updates) says that it has been updated, I'm finding now too that all my campaigns' DAs are unchanged and still displaying same +/- stats as before. Testing different URLs on OSE too, doesn't seem as if any DA or PA has changed since August update.

Would be great for a Mozzer to let us know what's actually going on here...

There are two or more different URLs on the same website competing against each other for that search query. If you hover over them or scroll down you can see which of the URLs they are. Trouble is, since they are competing against each other, it may be harder to climb the ranks as Google is getting confused and doesn't know which one to rank.

Better to have one single URL with content optimised to target the search topic and keywords, as it relieves Google of having to make the choice and ultimately... screwing it up.

There are many factors to it, but I've personally found the main influencers to be:

• citations, citations, citations.... consistent across all local directories
• reviews... I find sometimes that a client won't be ranking in the local pack, and then they get a couple of reviews on Google and are included.
• good presence or mentions on local websites (local news, local blogs, local businesses, etc)
• PROXIMITY! Local pack is all about proximity these days. Not something that can be easily helped, but it's good to bear in mind.

The greatest content spinner tool is your brain.

Instead of spinning content, if you're looking to share the same message across three different platforms, just bullet point the message of your landing page and craft unique content for each one around the main messages you're trying to get across.

Good luck!

"two pages that I've managed to get ranking have ranked between 20 and 23 for the specific term. However, today on the email one of the pages for one search term has bombed out of the top 50 while the other page has remained unaffected."

Sometimes, if you have two pages that are ranking for the same search query it's not uncommon for Google to decide that only one of the pages needs to be presented to the user. If both are serving the same user intent then essentially Google may consider it (semantically) duplicate content, despite the fact that both pages may be worded differently, etc.

From my experience of having multiple pages ranking for the same keyword, the pages will keep battling it out in the SERPs bouncing up and down. One week, there'll be a cluster of 3 ranking terribly. The next week one will shoot up, while the other is nowhere to be seen. Personally I've found that Google seems to prefer it if there's only one page ranking for the term (it's an easier decision for Google to make and it won't get so confused which one to rank as more relevant to the query). By merging similar pages, I find that it ends up being stronger in Google as it's not having to compete in the SERPs with similar pages on your website.

I hope that helps at all, even if it's only from anecdotal evidence.

Check out Rand's explanation of the huge fluctuations in DA/PA this month (https://moz.com/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scores). He explains it rather nicely.

Always best to compare your DA score against your competitors', rather than against your historical scores alone. Causes less panic too! But yeah, it seems many websites are reporting huge drops in DA. Doesn't necessarily mean that your website quality/authority has decreased since last update.

Usually with paginated pages, you will want to include rel="next/prev" in the link to tell Google that the link is going to the next page or previous page, but the content shown is part of the same group and not "different".

In Webmaster Tools, if you use URL parameters for pagination, you can also tell Google that the URL parameter is used for pagination and tell them what to do with that information. e.g. Let them decide what to do with it or just don't crawl it or whatever.

When an ecommerce site has 200 product pages, this is fine. It's time consuming, but I can write 200 unique paragraphs describing the product and it's not an insane amount of work for one person. But when there are 10,000+ product pages... what is the best way for one person to go about this? Risk the page being thin and just bullet point a couple of "need-to-know" info bits, or take the time to prioritise what products could benefit the most from the unique content and get cracking with a paragraph for each?

Or do you just forego having truly unique copy on each product page and just aim to optimise the category pages for the longtail?

Just wondering how you guys deal with thousands of product pages really. Starting to feel as if I should re-evaluate my strategy and wanted to get some idea on what others are doing...

Notes:

• Product pages already have reviews, helps with adding more unique user-generated content to each page.
• There's dynamic content e.g. "You may be interested in...", "Related products", etc.

In terms of a Google penalty, you have nothing to worry about.

However if you are providing false information about the competitor or writing negatively about them, I'd be more concerned about their response rather than Google's. If not, no worries!

Just when you start automatically expecting Mozscape update to be delayed... The new index gets released early! Thanks, guys!

I would  recommend www.website.com/shop being the easier URL to rank, as subdomains tend to rank a bit more like a brand new website than a new section of an existing website.

If you noindex a page, you are telling Google that you don't want the page to be indexed and it will disappear from Google Search. Are you sure that this is what you want to do? Maybe you are thinking of index, nofollow on Recommended Products instead to reduce the number of links that Google will follow?

Ah, this makes so much more sense now! I hadn't read this announcement and have been wondering why Firefox Mozbar was acting all screwy the past few weeks. Finally decided to just try re-installing it this morning, but after I uninstalled I couldn't find it in Firefox's Extensions library!

Looking forward to being able to use it in Firefox again. Unfortunate though that it'll be the current Chrome flavour one. Always seemed to work a lot faster in Firefox than in Chrome, so I tried to push all my Mozbar usage to my "Firefox monitor" rather than my Chrome one when working.

@Moz has tweeted back on the matter saying "The update is live, but it has not rolled out across all campaigns yet. That process takes hours."