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Hey,

I took a peak and it looks like most of your duplicate content is coming from /tag/ issues in Wordpress. Luckily, this is very easy to solve, especially since you have Yoast SEO  plugin in place.

1. Log into wordpress admin for your site.
2. Click on the Yoast SEO plugin in the left-hand navigation
3. Choose "Titles and Meta"
4. Choose "Taxonomies"
5. Click "noindex, follow" under "Tags"
6. Choose "Save Changes"

This will tell Google that your tags pages are useful for categorization and linking but do not contain unique content. Your other alternative is to add content to your tags pages that makes them unique. If you do a good job of creating truly useful tag pages, they can become very important parts of your SEO strategy. You need to be careful, though, so as not to create sprawling, thin-content sections of your site. Here is a decent guide on the practice.

HTH

Just to add to what Dirk said, this is often an example of a fantastic opportunity. The keyword is so non-competitive that few authoritative sites are even using the complete phrase on their site! Time to write some great content and dominate!

Focus on one site for the time being and make it, without question, objectively, the best site in your area. Blow the competition out of the water. I'm talking thousands of words of content, interviews with neighborhood HOA members, guides to neighborhood schools, recommendations of local restaurants and businesses (great backlink opportunities, syndicated content from GreatSchools or other sites, etc. Literally make it so no other website even wants to compete with yours.  Be the best. Don't divide an conquer, just conquer.

AFAIK, Google does count the links towards page rankings. Moreover, Google may start to include the anchor in a rich snippet in the search results. I would defer to what is best for the User in terms of linking, and it seems like using #anchor is going to be the right thing in the long run.

Ask and ye shall receive, Moz announces plan for Keyword Explorer. It is coming and it is going to be awesome.

You aren't going to suffer a penalty from this. There really is no such thing as a "duplicate content penalty", just the chance that you will be out-ranked. If you want to quantify the potential risk, just look at all the organic traffic to those bio pages on your site and determine what would happen were you to lose rankings for some percentage of them. My guess is that you won't lose rankings dramatically and, when you do, it will just be the 1 position supplanted by a now-even-better ranking from WebMD.

That being said, duplicate content is best if you can avoid it. If it is possible, find a way to modify the bios on-the-fly as they are syndicated. Make sure you include brand mentions in the opening paragraph (you could use a boilerplate sentence or two to start off each bio).

I'm currently seeing around 107 pages that are 404'd with inbound referring links. I looked through a number of them and there is a wide variety of linking domains (not just one or two). I would go through and simply 301 redirect them to the best possible alternative. You might want to look at just the /international/ page since it has a good number of root linking domains by itself, but the others are probably best settled with just a 301 redirect.

I think it is important here to note something that is a bit of a misnomer in the industry.

Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA) are NOT measures of how much a page or domain will benefit you were you to receive a link from it. They are machine-learned keyword-agnostic predictive metrics for rankings. That is to say, a high DA domain or high PA domain are more likely to rank, but they are not necessarily more likely to help your site rank were you to acquire a link from that site.

We know that the most important raw metric still continues to be the number of root linking domains. We also know that nearly all published link graph calculations look at metrics like the number of links per page to divide link value passed from one page to another. Subsequently, the actual value you get from a link can be wildly different than the PA or DA might suggest.

I would take a different approach altogether. If you spend even a second considering whether to get a link or not because of its PA or DA, you have wasted that second. While using PA, DA, MozTrust or MozRank to sort opportunities might be useful if automated and asynchronous, you should never stop and sweat whether it is worth going after a link. Of course it is. Get that link. Go get it now.

Happy link hunting

Luckily with the Google Hummingbird update, Google is better able to map together phrases with identical search intent. "Car Accident New York" and "Car Accident in New York" return very similar search results, and you will see this across the board for very slightly modified long tail phrases. I would use the words and phrases in a syntactically and grammatically correct fashion, rather than focus on getting every variant.

This is a touchy ethical question for SEOs. I think there are some questions you should ask yourself.

First, are you sure the company in question placed the links? Is it possible that they were the victim of negative SEO that didn't work?

Second, do you actually deserve to out rank them? Is your content truly better? Do people want your result more than theirs?

If you can answer yes to both of these, then I think you can feel comfortable in moving forward with a spam complaint. If not, you risk either kicking someone while they are down, or hurting user experience overall - neither of which are particularly ethical.

Here is a quick experiment you can run. Find a page that has the related links on it. Let's say it is...

http://domain.com/bamboo-flooring

Go to google and type in...

site:domain.com/bamboo-flooring "how to install bamboo flooring"

Does Google show the page or not? If they do, then you know Google is counting the anchor text towards the rankings of that page.

This IS a question for Search Engine Optimization. Many web services out there will not properly handle UTF-8 characters and muck up the URL, causing it not to work at all and preventing users and Google from reaching your site via the link placed on another site. You might have already experienced this when trying to sign up with your email address while using the international characters codes. It is my recommendation that you link build with the version not including the “ö” and make sure your site has the correct canonical tag pointing to the version with the “ö”.

Hi @chewythedog,

I would look at this from 2 perspectives.

First, unless you only sell sandals, or only sell birkenstocks, it makes sense to have another category level (ie /collection/{category}/{sub-category}

Second, I think you should use the common categorization of {category}/{brand}. This isn't really a search issue, it is a usability issue. Most people don't go out shopping for a brand. They don't say "today I want to buy something made by nike". They say, today I want to buy tennis shoes. Maybe they say, I want to buy nike tennis shoes, but they almost never say, today I want to buy something made by nike. While brand is important, most brands represent a broad number of products and thus it doesn't make sense to make them the primary category.

However, while people shop for product types, they search for brand+product (ie: people search for birkenstock sandals far more than they search for sandals birkenstock or sandals by birkenstock). Subsequently, while your categorization should probably be /sandals/birkenstock, the title of that page should probably be Birkenstock Sandals.

Finally, in general, link architecture is far more important than information architecture. You could have all of your URLs sitting in one directory (like wikipedia) and do great as long as you have a strong internal linking strategy. I would focuse far more attention on that than anything else.

Thanks for the answer Kevin. For those interested in learning about using the HTTP Header to establish a canonical tag, you can look here on Google's Webmaster Central Blog.

My guess is that Google is getting better and better at detecting false review data. There is a lot of academic research around this area, particularly in accounting fraud, where patterns created by humans to appear random do a poor job of actually representing standard data. A popular example of this is called Benford's Law where leading digits of certain data sets (like electricity bills) are more likely to be lower digits (starting with the number 1, for example). When people try and fake the data, they don't tend to follow this law.

Google has huge data sets on validated reviews and known-fraudulent reviews. If there is a way to detect unbelievable reviews, you got to believe Google is working on it.

That being said, this is probably the best reason not to start posting fake reviews... it's illegal.

You can test this in keyword planner by simply searching for "Nike Shoes" and "Shoes by Nike". In this case, the first is searched 368,000 times monthly, the latter is searched 40.

Thank you for your question and concerns. Moz is committed to providing high quality metrics. I wrote a piece about it prior to my joining Moz a month or two ago comparing the proportional representativeness of Moz's index to Google vs. the other major providers, which showed that Moz's crawl was more representative of Google than any other. An unfortunate side effect of monitoring index and metric quality is actually doing something about it when things don't look quite right. We would rather know we delayed an unsatisfactory release than not know if we delivered a satisfactory one.

That being said, I think you will be pleasantly surprised over the next year or so with the improvements you see coming out of the Big Data team in everything from quality to quantity and stability. They are doing some truly amazing things.

There is no best practice for naming conventions. What is the purpose of your blog? Will it provide more than news? If it will provide more than news, your best bet would be to name it /blog/ and then create a category /blog/news/ to handle your news content, and categorize other content in a different directory. If you only plan on using your blog to post news, it seems appropriate to use the /news/ directory.

You might also want to do some keyword discovery. Does anyone search for keywords related to your industry or products + news? Or are there more searches for your industry and products + blog? That might help you make a decision not only on what you should name the blog but on what type of content you ought to produce.

This is default behavior and you should keep it. It won't harm your rankings at all. I am not sure where the redirect is occurring in your install, but I wouldn't worry about it at all.

Here is a write-up on it from Google.

Reiterating the points above, it appears that the domain names...

peterblatt.com
peterblatt.org
peterblatt.net

Are all available. He could throw up a blog on the first, do some charitable work on the second, and highlight all his social stuff (bringing in twitter, instagram, etc. feeds) on the 3rd.