Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Matt-Pop has some good data on using Ping tools to help accelerate changes that he discusses here: http://moz.com/community/q/new-site-pages-are-indexed-but-not-ranking-for-anything and here: http://moz.com/blog/can-you-disavow-out-of-penguin-whiteboard-friday#comment-315319

In general though Google knows about the link if the page linking to you is showing up in their index. Just run a search on the page URL itself to find if that's the case. GWT is very slow at reporting links in comparison to how quickly the search index operates. Cheers!

As an example, the New York Times does this via tracking of how many full articles a user reads while allowing Googlebot full access to its articles.  Sites that use this method employ "no cache" on Google so articles can't be read there and then various forms of tracking to ensure users are being counted correctly.  Here are some thoughts on this and more from Google's side that might help you out: https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40543. Cheers!

Hi Christopher. There are quite a few of these depending on what it is you're selling. Things like SaaS providers who are providing a managed service for an entire enterprise typically have a very robust sales process but within analytics they'll do things like associating goal values with watching a video, downloading a PDF, attending a webinar, number of pages on the site visited, and so on. All these actions get tallied into a score that is associated with the lead and best case recorded into the CRM so that sales has an understanding of which leads are closer to purchase than others or how qualified a new lead might be.

Avinash Kaushik also goes into great detail on this in several places on his blog. Here's one such example: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/web-analytics-tips-identify-website-goal-values/  You'll hear these called goal values, micro conversions, lead attribution (in the context of valuing multi-channel work), and so on. Basically it's everything that isn't a sale in the classic sense, but could be associated with a value in terms of "free" marketing, engagement, life-time-value, and so on. Sales are often included in the full model as well, but nearly any business starts out tracking those. Hope this helps your study further. Cheers!

Very cool Sean. Makes my screen grabs a little redundant just now. Ha. Very handy though for users to have the difficulty right in context of the search results as well. Cheers!

I saw this too, although my version has the "Get Keyword Difficulty" button in green to the right of Google Search. Were you typing in the nav bar?

keyword-difficulty1.png keyword-difficulty2.png

I'd put this in the worthwhile column. Google is trending towards standardization of things somewhat like this: mobile, pagespeed, facts -- so having outside data that universally agrees about a company's site, location, etc would further their standing in my opinion.

Another factor is that reviews and social presence might be not connecting up as well as possible if the associations above aren't being made.

If you're in Moz Analytics look at your settings. What you'll want to do is check the 'Website' portion and make sure that you have "tracking all sites at this domain" selected. If the /ep/ portion is a folder on this domain it will be tracked once it's crawled.

If it's a third level domain, i.e. ep.yourdomain.com, you might consider making a new campaign to track it specifically as you're going to be working with a completely different set of words / language. Cheers!

Not really no. I only use it per instance versus as a more constant change tool. If you have a dev in-house though they could probably setup something that runs on a virtual machine and sends reports on changes.  Or you could run it after getting a change report from one of the other, more standard types of page change tools to see if the site is now making different HTTP requests as well.

Ah, great! The multiple physical locations part is key for the multiple listings. You should be good to go in listing each.  Cheers!

I think Moz Local is still on a weekly update schedule at this time.

For something code based, you might have to setup an instance of Fiddler to do that as most page change monitoring tools are just looking at the readable text versus the code. Plus server side code changes that are executed prior to the page being displayed will get missed by either type.  Here's some more that might suit your needs...

• http://onwebchange.com
• http://www.changedetect.com
• http://visualping.io
• https://versionista.com

Google's guideline is here: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177 with the most applicable portion  being in the address section:

• Make sure that your page is created at your actual, real-world location.

• Use the precise address for the business rather than broad city names or cross-streets. P.O. Boxes are not considered accurate physical locations.

• If you need to specify a mailbox or suite number within your physical location, please list your physical address in Address Line 1, and put your mailbox or suite number in Address Line 2.

• If your business rents a temporary, "virtual" office at a different address from your primary business, do not create a page for that location unless it is staffed during your normal business hours.

So his locations need to be staffed, open to the public, office based locations. If he's serving clients in 4 different cities, but only has one office in one city it's not the same thing as the requirements above. That would be, "Service-area businesses--business that serve customers at their locations--should have one page for the central office or location and designate a service area from that point. If you wish to display your complete business address while setting your service area(s), your business location should be staffed and able to receive customers during its stated hours. Google will determine how best to display your business address based on your business information as well as information from other sources. Learn more about service-area businesses."

The document as a whole is worth the read. Cheers!

Quite a few GAs hang out at http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/.  Plus there are the recommended companies here: http://moz.com/community/recommended.

I'd be pretty hesitant to redirect that site without disavowing each and every spammy link beforehand. Added to that, if it's currently a very low traffic site, and you can quickly reach those levels by emailing current clients directly announcing the new site, I'd just abandon it all together. Better to start fresh on the right foot than to carry the old baggage along with it.

Hi Rosalia. Keywords are typically determined at will, meaning, if you want to rank for a the keyword "lizards" you make the best page you can about "lizards". Keywords also can be determined via the search engines, meaning some people arrive to your site in with terms that might surprise you. Ideally you're trying to find a sweet spot where you're getting a decent amount of targeted visits from people that are interested in what your site has to offer.  As a working example, visit Wikipedia. Basically each page of their site relates to a keyword that is the topic of their page.  Make sense?  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!

You're welcome. If your goal is to maintain and grow the rankings associated with the desktop version of your site in mobile, one of the best ways to do so currently is by using a responsive frame work. From a user perspective that sort of site is serving mobile, tablet, and desktop all from the same URLs. Something like Layers would be an example for Wordpress (http://www.layerswp.com) while Squarespace (http://www.squarespace.com/) is a common example in the smaller site realm. If you're thinking of transitioning over a larger site it'd definitely be more of a dev-based commitment. Currently Google houses the bulk of its guides on this here: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/.

Hi Andrew. That would be Rank Tracker: https://moz.com/researchtools/rank-tracker.  It's also incorporated into Moz Analytics if you host campaigns here.  Cheers!

You can also test the m.mysite.com version of your site in Google's PageSpeed Insights here: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ and then scroll to the bottom of the mobile portion of the score and see your usability score there as well. This is handy for breaking out a score from GWT. Is the m.mysite.com domain also listed in GWT?

Ideally you'd be able to have a 1 to 1 relationship from desktop pages to your mobile site as that would be the clearest signal that the two are tied together closely and only separated for usability purposes. The video Chris linked to also has quite a few additional insights from Matt Cutts, so worth the watch.  Cheers!

Hi Nik. A component of Google's algo is Query Deserves Freshness and searcher side, people only looking for recent content, both of which could be at play when you're producing new content related to recent events.  There's an older whiteboard Friday that discusses the general concept here: http://moz.com/blog/whiteboard-friday-query-deserves-freshness, and that still applies today.

An interesting examination of how QDF can affect rankings was done by Doctor Pete in a blog post from 2013 (as a portion of the rest of it here: http://moz.com/blog/whiteboard-friday-query-deserves-freshnesshttp://moz.com/blog/was-there-a-november-14th-google-update), but here are some of the main points quoted:

Google was viewing a search for "kaufman" as informational and generic, returning results for Andy Kaufman, Charlie Kaufman, cities named Kaufman, etc. A disambiguation box on the SERP even makes it clear that Google has trouble interpreting the query.

After the story about Andy Kaufman broke, the SERP changed dramatically:

• CNN
• IMDB (Charlie Kaufman)
• CNN
• Wikipedia (Kaufman, TX)
• Fox News
• KaufmanCounty.net
• RobertKaufman.com
• KaufmanCo.com
• US Today
• NY Daily News

Where there were no news-related organic results before, news articles now accounted for half of the top ten, including the #1 and #3 spots. You may have heard the term "QDF" (Query Deserve Freshness) in the SEO world. What's interesting here is that QDF is not something that's just on or off for any particular query. A query that was relatively static transformed overnight because of new information. In other words, Google decided in real-time that this informational query was now a news query, simply based on new data and content.

Regular blogging can trigger this, and several other factors. Cheers!