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Very good point. I usually don't post external links TO my site on G+ so I didn't think of this. I do this for discovery of my own pages but not the other way around.  Good tip!

My experience improving page copy tells me the ranking improvement is not dramatic and the exact amount depends on a variety of factors, as far as I can tell the biggest of these factors are domain authority and keyword competition, if you change content on pages of a domain with a high DA, the ranking of those pages will improve more if compared with the improvement you may get with lower DA pages. Also the improvement seems proportional to the previous SERP position, in other words it's easier to go from pos 20 to first page, but much harder to go from pos 3 to pos 2; considering all other factors the same. Of course if you have a page with a a lot of backlinks and a decent ranking despite the content being thin, or poorly related to the keywords you are targeting, improving it will gives you the biggest jump. Anyway that's just my experience, no golden rule. EDIT, now I read EGOL answer I can see I totally missed the real core question. I have never seen a page ranking improve just because a new fresh content replaced the old one. Only because new better quality content replaced old poor content. And when I heard and read about fresh content boost, they were always talking about new content in new pages, and that depends on the query being searched. If you browse old whiteboard friday from Rand you will find one on this topic which explain that. In one sentence, if you publish new fresh content about a sport event the night of that sport event you may benefit from freshness boost for query related to that sport event. For obvious reasons google believe new content about a recent event is more relevant than stale one.

It is very likely that Google does discount the weight of links passing value in the footer (or sidebar). I would say if you're only linking internal links in the footer just do so naturally and without overoptimised anchor text you should be fine. Where people get in trouble is if they're really trying to do "PR sculpting" (see: http://www.seoblog.com/2014/07/attempting-pagerank-sculpting-terrible-idea/) Do what works best for your users and your site. That should be priority #1 anyways and you will be ok from there.

If you are starting i would recommend you to focus on long tails,generic terms are generally harder to rank. Btw, another good tool for finding long tails: http://keywordshitter.com/, found it out last week, it´s really interesting ( in combination with Google keyword planner ):-)

Hi Ron, It's perfectly fine to run your business out of your home. No danger of being banned for this. Just be sure you are obeying Google's guidelines regarding how your address is displayed based on your business model: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en

Hi Ron! Thanks for letting me know you have some additional questions. Moz Local will help you get your data correct on these 7 partners: Infogroup Best of the Web Localeze Factual Foursquare Superpages Acxiom Any other platforms, you will need to manage manually. Yes, you can absolutely use the city landing for each listing - you do not have to use the homepage. Hope this helps!

If you are 301 redirecting these sites eventually the older URLs will no longer be indexed, leaving only the one site with it's unique content. You don't have to worry about duplicate content in this instance.

I can only hope that we'll see more penalties for guest posting. It's a tactic that I truly want to die because "guest posting" is just an amateur form of marketing and public relations that deserves to get penalized. It's trying to shortcut the traditional marketing process in order to get higher rankings quickly for a brand that probably doesn't deserve them in the first place. Nothing good comes quickly. Why do I mean when I say "guest posting"? As Jen Jopez wrote here on Moz, it's "trying willy-nilly to get your posts on every blog for the sole purpose of building (probably bad) links." Google, after all, doesn't want to give websites credit for links that they build themselves. In this and this post of mine here on Moz, I outline the proper process for obtaining the best links naturally through the traditional practices of public relations and publicity. Two of the parts are audience and channel research: determine the websites, blogs, and news outlets that are read by your target audience, and then aim to get news coverage from them or quality articles published on them. One of those links is better than 100 or 1,000 links on random guest-post websites that no one even reads. Just do good marketing, and the good links will come just as natural by-products without you even needing to think about it. EGOL, thanks so much for the kind mention -- you've got an upvote!

If you guys create a simple link network between one another, then no it probably won't help much and you're risking being seen as manipulating links. Instead, I suggest each writing up quality content that your site's focus on and provide a contextual link to one another. This way you are giving your users valuable content and if the article focuses on each of your own niches it then makes sense to provide a link to the site.

"Would I get more of a boost in rankings to pages of my site by placing links in the text of my articles on my site to other pages on my site?" As Spencer says, you're talking about internal linking with generally comes with a slightly different set of rules to inbound / outbound links to and from third-party websites. Feel free to link to relevant parts of your site from articles, but do so where and when it appears natural, and don't overdo it. That is, don't link to a product every time you use the product's name or mention something to do with the product's function. Imagine if Moz linked to its blog home page from every page on the website that mentioned a blog in text. It would look manipulative and spammy.

ahrefs.com is another one, I think that finds backlinks a little faster. I generally check ahrefs, majestic seo, and OSE.

John Mueller from Google has mentioned that there is no penalty or demotion for using a hyphen.  However, be careful you're not keyword stuffing.

If you are looking for directories, this is a good resource: vilesilencer.com http://info.vilesilencer.com/niche Where there is good page rank and relevance, a few directory links may not hurt, use with caution.

Authorship photos are showing up in some places, but not in others on my sites. Looks like profile page images have stayed up, while many blog author image results have disappeared. Another example: If you're logged in to Google and an author in your circles turns up in search, the image will likely be there; search the same term Incognito, and the image might be gone. Another good article I read: http://www.virante.org/blog/2013/12/19/authorshippocalypse-google-authorship-penguin-finally-appeared/

It will help drive some traffic though you need to have high quality articles that are informative and provides value to the reader.  The links are no follow but who cares your using it to gain traffic based on the article. Quit trying to game google and build useful content for the internet.

I can tell you I don't use SEO hosting. I like to stay off Google's radar completely and SEO hosting companies are sitting ducks IMO.

One tool I've begun to use more frequently is Search Queries in Webmaster Tools.  It doesn't tell me what keywords I'm not using already that others are, but it does give me insight into how people are already finding their way to our sites.  I look at the percent changes which show me trends in what people are searching for and use that information to add new content and more in depth information.

Hi Ron, I think there may be some value in building your YouTube presence for certain keywords, but you're looking at this situation all the wrong way round. Really - you should start by looking at your business goals and determining whether, for a specific keyword, you want users to go to your site, or to YouTube to watch a video. If the keyword is informational and potentially appeals to individuals high up in your conversion funnel - that is to say, they aren't already engaged influencers or members of your community - then getting them to watch a video on YouTube that helps solve a specific problem or provides decent (non sales-focused) information might be the way to go. If you're then able to create good content to fit with the user intent for that keyword - THEN you can think about optimising your YouTube videos and presence with specific keyword intent. Don't start with the form (video) or the channel (youtube) but instead start with the audience and the business goals - then work out your strategy from there. in terms of optimising for YouTube - basically, the Title should be treated like a title, the description like a meta description - then you need to drive targeted engagement (not just raw views) in order to get the video ranking. Embeds and links also help, and uploading a transcription manually will allow you to rank for longer tail phrases which match the text in the transcription itself. I hope that's useful.

I agree with Lars and would add that the links will be more helpful if they are from relevant high quality sites rather sites that don't have anything to do with your site.

Hello, I came across this question when trying to find a solution for a similar question.  One of my clients has an event coming up where they will have multiple photo galleries.  The images within the photo galleries will have titles and descriptions and one image can potentially show up in more than one photo gallery. In this case, would you recommend implementing canonical tags?  If not, anyone have any other suggestions? Thanks in advance!