Jeff, in the context of very specific advertising targets, here are a few random thoughts that I hope may help.

1. Google AdWords retargeting. Give a very specific URL to person X to visit on your website. Make sure no one else knows about that URL. Then, set retargeting to show your desired ads later to anyone -- i.e., person X -- who views that specific URL on your website. Only the decision-maker, then, will see your ads so you don't waste money advertising to people who don't have a say. This same idea could be expanded to people who work for a given company. I don't remember off the top of my head, but I think you can set retargeting based on IP address. If you know your target company's IP address, then I think you can show your desired ads to anyone using that specific IP address. In case you don't know about retargeting, here is Google's general guide along with a Moz Whiteboard Friday.

2. Facebook custom audiences. You can upload a list of e-mail address, phone numbers, or Facebook user IDs as a set of specific targets in a Facebook ad campaign. Moz has more information here.

3. Twitter targeting. You can now target Twitter ads by e-mail address or user IDs.

Just three ideas to target a specific individual or group of people -- I hope that helps. Good luck!

I've got a fan website for a cult US TV show (that also sells merchandise as an affiliate). The site's design is about five years old, and I should probably revamp it at some point: http://www.btvsonline.com/

Anyway, the site's Cutline theme (http://cutline.tubetorial.com/) does not support native headers, and the header menu shows only a text list of my top-level pages. There are many subpages below these pages, but it's hard for users to find them without going to different pages to try to find things. What I'm looking for: if someone hovers above "Store" in the menu, a dropdown menu showing all the product pages would appear.

I've tried to find Wordpress plugins or PHP hacks to add dropdown menus and I have gone through Cutline's support site, but I have had no luck. Anyone in the Moz community have any advice? Perhaps I just need to revamp the site with a new and modern Wordpress theme? Thanks in advance for any thoughts!

If I understand your situation correctly, you do not sell directly on the website but give (or get?) quotes instead? Here's a simple solution.

Whenever someone gives (or gets?) a quote, have the site direct them to a "thank you" page. Set that page as a Destination URL goal in Google Analytics (or any similar platform). One arrival at that "thank you" page would be one "conversion." Then, you can track conversions to see what people from what traffic sources tend to "convert" (by giving (or getting?) quotes).

However, it is important that there be no other way to arrive at that "thank you" page except by getting (or giving?) a quote. Block the page from search engines. Have no navigation to that page at all. And so on.

I also think you are asking how to know which "conversions" turn into paying customers? Unless you sell directly on the website and use e-commerce tracking, you will need to use a CMS (customer management system) and integrate it with Google Analytics (or any similar platform). This way, you can track results from the beginning to the end of the "funnel."

I hope that helps -- good luck!

Hello, I hope the community can help! Here are just some of my thoughts. First, I'll give some page-level Mozbar data that I'm sure you've already seen. Page Authority: 27. MozRank: 4.23. There 75 links from 3 root domains. The keyword's difficulty is 44%.

Now, that being said, I personally look at the process in another way. I would ask: "Why should you rank highly?" Is your company and website new compared to competing businesses and websites in the industry in Britain? If so, then it's unreasonable to expect Google to put you on the same playing field as them quickly. If you have not built your brand among real people, then Google is increasingly smart enough to know not to reward you with higher rankings (at least not yet). (Of course, I write this not knowing anything about your business.)

For a wide variety of reasons, it's increasingly hard -- and rightly so, in my opinion -- to get a website to rank highly for anything remotely competitive quickly. In an increasingly-crowded Internet, it takes more than to optimize a website for technical SEO and "build" a few links. I would use PR and publicity to get yourselves known in the industry and among the general public in ways that also "earn" you natural backlinks from relevant and authoritative sources. This -- combining technical SEO with traditional marketing and PR -- is the best way to succeed. In fact, it's all about building a brand that deserves to rank highly.

I hope this helps!

Thanks for the question! I don't work for Moz, but I just wanted to direct you to the help guide for the Link Analysis page that you have cited. That general part of the Moz website should be able to help you with any questions on Moz Pro / Moz Analytics.

As far as the meaning of the terms you cite:

Total Links -- All external and internal links (of all types) pointing towards a given page or website as a whole.
Total Internal Links -- All links to a given page on your website or the website as a whole from pages on that website.
Internal Equity-Passing Links -- All internal links that pass "link juice," meaning that the "nofollow" attribute or other preventative methods are not being used.

I hope that helps!

A couple of things. First, a rel=canonical tag -- like many other things -- is only a suggestion to search engines. Google and others can choose to ignore it, though they rarely do. In your post above, you have "canonicall" spelled with two "l"s -- so it might be as simple as changing that!

Second, just to clarify your teminology: What you are showing is not "tracking code" but "URL paramaters." I'm curious as to why the pages with tracking paramaters are being indexed -- normally, this should not happen at all. How are you using the paramaters? Usually, it should only be used to track traffic from external websites. For example: If I run a Facebook ad campaign, I can add a parameter to the ad's destination URL to track the results of the campaign. Google, however, would not index that special URL as a separate page. I'd review Google's information and recommendations on URL paramaters and perhaps change any settings in Google Webmaster Tools.

Third, the recommended practice for paginated pages is to have a "single page" version of the article and make that canonical for search engines (have all paginated pages point to that single-page one with a rel=canonical tag). This can be done whether you want to show a single-page version for users -- though I'd recommend it because most pagination is a cheap attempt just to get more pageviews for advertising revenue, and it's annoying.

Good luck -- I hope this helps!

Here is what I use in the PHP files for pages and posts on my Wordpress sites:

class="entry-title post-title">Name of Website Page

Note: I don't think I've ever seen someone put the page title in the header file. You may want to move it to the template files for posts/pages.

In your case, though, it may work just to put an H1 tag at the beginning and end of the whole thing:

<title><br /><?php<br />// Generate Page Title dynamically<br />if (is_home()) {<br />  bloginfo('name'); ?> - <?php bloginfo('description');<br />} elseif (is_category()) {<br />  single_cat_title(); ?> - <?php bloginfo('name');<br />} elseif (is_single()) {<br />  single_post_title();<br />} elseif (is_page()) {<br />  bloginfo('name'); ?>: <?php single_post_title();<br />} elseif (is_404()) {<br />  bloginfo('name'); ?> - <?php _e("Page not found", "fungames");<br />} elseif (is_search()) {<br />   bloginfo('name'); ?> - <?php _e("Search results for", "fungames"); echo esc_html($s, 1);<br />}<br />?><br /></title>

I hope this may help -- good luck!

Are you asking how to prevent certain pages from appearing in search results? If so, I'd review Moz's guide to robots.

Specifically, I'd recommend the use of both the noindex meta tag and the robots.txt file. Good luck!

Just a couple thoughts off the top of my head:

1. Double-check all technical international SEO issues and ensure that the robots.txt file is not mistakenly blocking any desired pages.

2. Make sure that you have a separate Google Webmaster Tools setup for each root domain / subdomain / subdirectory (however you have set up the international sites) and have submitted an individual XML sitemap for each one. Also make sure that the geographical targeting in each GWT setup is set to the desired country.

3. If Google is only indexing a small percentage of a site's pages, it is often because Google is thinking (accurately or not) that a site has duplicate content. "Duplicate content" is not a penalty per se -- it is when Google, for example, sees two pages that are very similar and then indexes only one of them so as to not provide redundant pages in search results.

Example: Say that you have an e-commerce product that has ten variations (such as color). The content of each variation page would often be very similar except, for, the listed color. In the case, you would want to use a rel=canonical tag on all variation pages that points to the main page for that product. (In other words, you don't want all of those pages to be indexed, and Google often would not index them anyway.)

Most likely, I would use a tool such as Moz or any other SEO software to crawl the site and see if any duplicate-content issues are present. Once these are addressed (if the problem exists), then Google will likely crawl and index your sites more thoroughly and accurately.

I hope this helps -- good luck!

Thanks for the question. I'm not able to go through your site at the moment, but I would ask: Do you really need a separate page for every single make, model, and part number? Correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems to be what you're doing. If so, you're just asking for a Panda penalty.

Here's a basic example: Say that you sell Honda Civics. Would you want to create a separate page for "red Honda Civic," "green Honda civic," and countless other colors? Of course not. All of the content would be entirely the same except for the listed color throughout each title and page's text.

I'd take a look at Amazon as an example. Say that I go to a page for a certain T-shirt. The same page for that individual product will include all of the color variations w_ithin that single product page_. Each color variation is not a new page and URL (or if it is, it has a rel=canonical tag back to the main product page -- I don't remember). I'd look to this example as a way that you can vastly cut down the number of product pages so that each one is truly unique, valuable, and useful to both search engines and customers.

I hope that helps -- good luck!

Sorry to respond to your question with a set of questions, but there are some things to consider because the old press releases may provide value in ways that might not be obvious. I'd ask yourself or the client these things:

1. Public companies are required to report and archive company news and financial information. If its a public company, then I'd keep them because press releases are a way to satisfy this legal requirement.

2. Is there even a small chance that the releases would need to be cited for something? Say a customer or reporter asks a question (over e-mail or on social media or something) -- it could be answered by sending a link to an old press release. Plus, old information can always be valuable for "institutional knowledge" -- say a bunch of longtime employees leave, then new hires could read them to get up to speed on what the company has done in the past.

3. Might the press releases contain text that could be found in relevant, long-tail searches? If so, I'd keep them.

4. Are there external links to the press releases (check Open Site Explorer or similar tools)? If so, I'd keep them (and obviously 301 redirect the links to the new site).

These are just a few issues off the top of my head. In general, I think that there's never a case when a website can have too much information or content (as long as it's managed well). Unless you're talking about hundreds of pages, I don't see how a migration would be too much of a pain. Plus, it's always good to have extensive company archives because, well, you never know!

I can tell you that the old press releases on my company's site get a bit of traffic -- both straight from organic search and from people navigating there from other pages. I'm sure the same is true for most sites.

Again, this is just my two cents. Whatever you end up doing, good luck!

I would recommend deleting the four-year-old domain and NOT redirecting it (and the "link juice") to the ten-year-old domain for one simple reason: If the newer domain has fallen in rankings as you describe, there is probably something wrong with it (in Google's eyes). And you don't want to taint the older site with the newer one.

One issue, I suspect, is that Google views it as potentially a keyword-stuffed copy or duplicate by you of the older site (as in, two cites on the same "C-block"). In such a context, there is no reason for also the newer site to rank highly -- it offers no added value for the user that the older site does not.

So, if you just cut the newer site and focus even more on only the older one, you might even see the older one start to do even better since it doesn't have a keyword-stuffed duplicate "weighing it down." Good luck!

Regardless of what the competitor is doing, it does not violate Google guidelines to put a phone number in a meta description. You can put whatever text you want -- especially since the meta description is no longer a ranking factor. Putting the phone number there can be a very good idea -- it minimizes the distance between the prospect and a salesperson.

However, the issue is that such a scenario is not easily tracked in analytics (and it probably cannot be tracked at all). I'll post a few links have on how to integrate phone-based inquiries with Google Analytics:

How Call Tracking With Google Analytics Increases Your Profits

Mobile Calls Are the New Conversions

I hope this helps!

We have a new client (a mobile app) who created a program to create thousands of pages of "unique, user-generated content" for their website. An example: A person in the forum in app asks a question, and people respond. The client's program then compiles the question and responses into a unique, auto-generated page for the website. (I don't think the app is utilizing deep linking -- though I was going to recommend it -- so the app content is not indexed by search engines yet.) The pages are already created -- they are just not live on the site yet.

I'm very skeptical. But the client says it's similar to what Stack Overflow does (or something like that).

Basic example. Say that a question for which the client wants to rank is, "What Are the Symptoms of Cancer?" I'd think that a quality, human-created, referenced, well-written, authoritative page would obviously rank more highly than a UGC page based on a forum discussion on that topic. But of course, doing that for hundreds of questions is costly and hard to scale -- both of which are concerns of the client (a startup with little money).

Has anyone had any experience in this? It's the first time I've tackled such an issue. Thanks in advance for any thoughts!

Moz's help page here states: "The number of domains with at least one followed link to any page on the root domain."

Example: Say that website A has ten links to your site and website B has five links to your site. This means that you have two domains that have a total of 15 links to your site. "Followed linking root domains" refers to the first number. The "followed" part means that the other websites have not applied "nofollow" to the links.

The whole topic of linkbuilding and link earning is very big and complicated, so I'll refer you to this category of Moz posts and guides to peruse at your leisure. The general rule today is to "earn" links rather than "build" them -- meaning that you should use social media, content, public relations and more to get others to give you links rather than you building the links yourself.

I hope that helps!

I'm pretty sure that Google can tell that it is a forum with user-generated content, so I wouldn't worry too much about it. However, the key to look out for is to see if people are using the user-generated content to spam for their own purposes.

That's what got MyBlogGuest in trouble, and it's likely why Yahoo! is shutting down Yahoo! Voices. It's not anything they did -- it's what others did via their websites.

I would 301 redirect that page's URL to the new website -- and manually change all internal links to that page to the new website. Others may suggest that you find all external links to that page and ask the site owners to change them, but that's usually not worth the hassle -- the 301 redirect will take care of it.

Not everything on the Internet is relevant to the "SEO" world directly.

Services like Outbrain are meant to help to promote your content and are only worth it when you're content and social media strategies are integrated and very good -- the people who see your image and headline in Outbrain (or others) click to your website, love the content, and are pushed to share it further. The whole idea has nothing to do with links directly (though people may become aware of your content via Outbrain and social media and then choose to link to you themselves -- thus gaining an earned link).

Secondly, I find that Outbrain and similar services are rarely useful for monetizing. It really only delivers significant revenue if you have a HUGE level of traffic such as Reddit or Fark.com or something.

First, I'd look at this great essay by Mark Trapenhagen (a speaker at this year's MozCon and renowned expert on Google+, by the way) to get some background on authorship following Google's removal of author photos. Here's a summary of his final points:

1. Authors still matter

2. Bylines are not invisible

3. Author and publisher images still appear in personalized search

4. Authorship builds your "author" data in Google

5. Google remains committed to author authority in search

This final point, I think, is most important. When I was at SMX West, a Google executive hinted that Google is looking into some type of "Author Rank" in the future. Mark has more thoughts here.

Building the Google+ profiles of both organizations and individuals is very important for the future. While there are a lot of problems with any "Author Rank" -- people trying to misapply it, assign it to inappropriate pages, and incorrectly implement it -- but once Google can figure that out, I would bet that they will use it.

So, starting yesterday, I would use publisher markup for the organization's brands and authorship markup for the individuals who write for those organizations. It's that that difficult to setup, and I would bet that the returns will be great -- as long as you keep producing quality content and building the organizational and individual brands!

Here's the way to look at it. When people search for "best London restaurants," Google doesn't really want to deliver results based on titles, descriptions, and other on-page factors. Google wants to deliver a list of the ten restaurants that human beings in London actually think are the best.

In short, Google is increasingly thinking like a human and not like a machine. I would ask yourself this question: Why does your website deserve to rank for that keyword? Does it deliver the best content and user experience on the Internet for the user intent behind that search term? Has your site built a brand so that people view you has an authority on that topic? If the answer is "no," then why should you rank highly?

Today, the key to "SEO" success is to build an online brand through the following process:

1. Build a great website on a technical SEO level (fast-loading, optimized for mobile, etc.) with a wonderful user experience (UX).

2. Publish original, authoritative content on the topics that would interest your audience.

3. Use public relations and social media to promote both your website as a whole and the content on the website

4. Repeat steps two and three indefinitely, and traffic, links, rankings, and more will grow naturally over time.

It's not easy, and it takes time. But nothing good ever comes quickly.

What I guess I am saying: To be successful today, think less like an "SEO" and more like a "marketer." What makes you special and differentiates you from other similar websites? What is your brand? How will you position the website? What's your messaging? Those questions are more important to answer today than those about keywords and links.

Good luck!