Welcome to the Q&A Forum

A big part of PR is the relationship--heck that's half of it.. ;^)--so reaching out to the reporter with an email like, "Thanks so much about your great story on Company B. I'm working with them in a PR capacity (ONLY IF TRUE) and am happy to help with any other inquires. Here's the company website (URL) and press kit page (page with photos, contact info, basic stats, approved quotes, etc.) which you can use at any time. If you see anything missing that you'd like on there just let me know. For example, if there's a certain company boilerplate that the LA Times likes to add to these articles, [Company Name, Employee Count, Website, Founded Date,] I can be sure to get you that.  Thanks again!"

You get the idea. You're not even asking for the link directly but instead building your relationship with them as a contact.  The more you make it as a way to make their job easier, the better.

Again though, only do this in your capacity of PR relationship with the company.  If it's beyond your scope and they have a PR person, forward along the article to them and say, "It'd be great if they linked to the company's website! (URL)" That person should already have the relationship in place.

There was an interesting blog post on this lining up well with what you're experiencing it seems (especially in the comments) here: http://moz.com/blog/1-dollar-per-day-on-facebook-ads.  The video they reference is this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag which is pretty interesting as well. You might have to employ more cross-over in your social, i.e. using twitter to drive better Facebook engagement. Ultimately though it seems to be more alignment within Facebook's walled garden approach.

Hi Ron. Yes, having a Name Address and Phone (NAP) that matches queries and listings on your landing page is part of what goes into ranking a specific page. See: http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors and, "HTML NAP Matching My Business Page NAP" You should be able to set your service area within Google, see: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038163, which shouldn't conflict with your landing page. Be sure to avoid creating something like fake business addresses though, as that and other factors are negatives. Cheers!

It could, but it's mostly a broken way to go about doing it. Per Google's guide on it: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/181708, "Because of the time Googlebot spends on non-existent pages, your unique URLs may not be discovered as quickly or visited as frequently and your site’s crawl coverage may be impacted (also, you probably don’t want your site to rank well for the search query [File not found])."  So it's best to fix them to either return a custom 404 page, redirect via 301, or correctly land on a page of content without the 404.

I would choose #1, because the most important part of the title (that it's a pet store) should come before Boston, MA. Additionally, the most common word ordering for most people in terms of local is the address format: Thing, Area, City, State.

There's a nice write up on title tags here: http://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag  Note that Moz also says:

Place Important Keywords Close to the Front of the Title Tag
According to Moz's testing and experience, the closer to the start of the title tag a keyword is, the more helpful it will be for ranking—and the more likely a user will be to click them in search results.

Cheers!

You'll come across some sites that rank well despite themselves. Still, it's hard to believe that pages like those will do anything for the users visiting them, plus their bounce rate is going to be incredibly high. Chances are you're going to be getting some--if not all--of the visitors that try their page as a #1 result, don't find anything worthwhile, then go to your page.

Matt offers you some excellent long term advice on the best path to take. I'd only add that you can emphasize your competition's lack of content all the more by offering content/services/products/usability that blows them out of the water. Cheers!

With your site being so new, you were probably getting a fresh content boost and now that it is gone your site is ranking where it most likely stacks up against the competition.  Here are few problems right off the bat though:

1: A large % of pages' title tags are duplicated - | Get Your FREE Trial NOW!!! | Shiva23
2: The title tag itself is kind of spammy with 3 exclamation points
3: Your content is all highly similar to "acne scar removal" so as you add more content, you're getting too dense around that phrase.
4: Your text is almost the same color as your background.  Old school, but still a spam penalty to have "hidden text".  It's best to stay away from styles that could cause this.

Many websites rank well that are using a CPA model.  Use the tools here and else where to see how you really measure up to your competition and you'll have a lot more insight into what you need to change.

I would recommend getting the link from their root domain(s) to the service hosted on your own domain as that wold most likely be more valuable.  This would do a few things.

1. Referral visits. You could see pretty quickly how many people are coming from the university site to your site using the link.
2. Endorsement strength. By having the link and university's explanation of your service on their site, they're providing additional trust based on people's past interactions with the university. This is partially an SEO thing, but also a conversion factor, i.e., "I trust my Uni's opinion so this is probably a worthwhile service."
3. Simpler. You'll be managing fewer domains (just you're own) and won't have to worry about technical changes on the uni's side regarding the redirection and subdomain.

There's all that, plust the newly created subdomain wouldn't carry nearly as much trust and authority as the root domain. It's why Wordpress.org doesn't get in trouble in Google if someone creates: reallyspammysite.wordpress.org.  Hope that clears it up. If someone else has compelling reasons for the other method, I'll let them expand on it.

Hi Dinesh. DA and PA tend to fluctuate after updates, but here's a blog post from a few months ago explaining why:

Every index, we get a lot of questions about why a site's/page's PA/DA goes up or down. The answer's not easy because the inputs vary quite a bit, but basically, four things can cause change in these metrics from index to index:

1. The site/page received more or fewer links or more/fewer more/less powerful links. Your site's link profile may even remain completely unchanged and still see fluctuation in DA/PA because the sites pointing to you have been recalculated to have better or worse metrics.
2. Google changed things in their ranking algorithm and thus our models for DA/PA, which measure and attempt to track to correlation with Google's rankings changed, too.
3. The web's link graph changed, and what was "0" (the lowest possible score) is now lower/higher than before and/or what was "100" (the highest possibly score) is now higher/lower than before. Essentially, think of this as the goalposts moving because the field's gotten bigger or smaller.
4. Our web index changed in size/structure as we toss our more spam/junk and crawl more/fewer webpages, potentially biasing against links we were counting or hadn't counted in prior indices.

Thus, it's very hard to know for sure whether an increase in DA/PA for a particular page is entirely tied to your efforts, Google's changes or changes to the web as a whole. This is why I strongly, strongly recommend tracking your metrics against your competition.

That last part that I bolded is key. Hopefully you're still competing well with sites similar to yours. Cheers!

The disavow tool is a the last step of a process Google outlines for dealing with spammy links. The first step being asking for the links to be removed... Since you control those sites and have deleted them you've accomplished the removal of the link, so no need to disavow. Mozscape will catch on as the index is recrawled.

For the second question, the spam score is calculated on site, so if the site where the content finds a new home has a low / non-spam score the content should lose its spammy associations.  It sounds like you're cleaning up things appropriately.

Hi Kathrine. You can find a searchable list of relevant categories for Google Local at: http://blumenthals.com/google-lbc-categories/search.php?q=&val=hl-gl%3Den-US(PfB)%26ottype%3D1 and here are a few possibilities:

• Crane Rental Agency - https://moz.com/local/categories/category/Crane Rental Agency
• Packaging Supply Store - https://moz.com/local/categories/category/Packaging Supply Store
• Shipping Company - https://moz.com/local/categories/category/Shipping Company

Within those Moz Local links you'll see how they relate to the categories on various other sites. Agreed that there's not a perfect fit at this time for what you're describing, but at least these should get you close. Also, there are people here that work directly with Google Local so this might get addressed in an upcoming update.  Cheers!

For this one particular search and context, 'cruise' and 'tour' are nearly interchangeable in English spoken in the US.  What could be happening is that Google is thinking the user intent is a branded search for Bosphorus Tours vs your brand of Zoe Yacht.

Hi Karen. Yes there was a recent update, please read about it here: http://moz.com/products/api/updates (that's the home of API update news btw).  And here's the Q&A post discussing the specifics as to why link numbers fluctuated: http://moz.com/community/q/have-questions-about-the-jan-27th-mozscape-index-update-get-answers-here. Enjoy!

Yup! That sounds like a good interaction and a lively page that will keep presenting fresh, meaningful content each time it's updated. The only comments I'd worry about are spam (which you've screened) and really off-topic comments, but neither of those seem to be a problem. Since people are commenting under the same topic(s) as the article, it just adds to the page as a whole.

Why not change the file name to 'red-for-truck.jpg'? That would probably have a more positive effect. Much of what dictates image optimization is the same as on page factors, as described here: http://moz.com/blog/is-optimizing-photos-more-important-than-you-think. (On page factors: http://moz.com/learn/seo/on-page-factors) Plus Google has its own guide for image sitemaps here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/178636.  Cheers!

Hi Chenzo. You'll know for certain if you plug this site into Google Webmaster Tools, or run it through their pagespeed test and view the report under mobile and usability. Go here to try it out: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/.  (The answer... 100 / 100 User Experience Congratulations! No issues found.)

If you're planning on doing this with a non-disposable, branded website it's a bad idea as there are can be lots of negative effects.

If you're planning on being black hat, having a network of disposable sites, and are going to be masking (or trying to mask) everything you do, it's just another tool in your toolbox.

Like people already mentioned here, it's better to make worthwhile comments that can be traced back to a reputable looking source as those could even have the added benefit of bringing you additional business, not just a boost in the rankings.

I wouldn't NOINDEX a page that accounts for 60% of organic visits as that would be a major blow to your site overall. Are the other full-text pages not receiving any organic visits currently?

While the content is duplicate in the sense that it's pulling snippets from the full-text pages, the combinations on the listing pages are unique.

I would look into ways to enhance the full-text pages if they're currently not receiving visits from search before deciding to NOINDEX the listing pages.  Cheers!

Per Google, "Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar."  (from: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359)  Substantive meaning most or nearly all of the content on two pages being the same. The examples they provide bear this out.

• Discussion forums that can generate both regular and stripped-down pages targeted at mobile devices
• Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs
• Printer-only versions of web pages

In each case they're talking about URLs that would be nearly identical, not the blocks of navigation or sidebar content that are common through out a site. Your website should be ok.

You could focus group the two and see which people prefer.  Or you could buy several and test their performance via Adwords split testing before taking the plunge of transferring or creating the new site.  Really this boils down to not what has possibly worked for others, but what works best for you.