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Both pages are indexed now.  Well done!

SERP position is clearly relative to other sites.  If they are generating links of a type and at a rate that Google favours more than your activity you will appear to drop in ranking.  Anyone still see the 'Google Dance'?

It has been a lot more difficult getting this data since Google started masking the keywords people type into their searches from webmasters.  I remember having access to really useful data on this but now it is minimal.

Hello, I too am sad to see them go! I have found them really useful to find out what the current thinking is on issues which are often so contentious.  It can be very difficult finding a useful answer on the interweb as so many views are conflicting.

If you have most of your backlinks pointing to your main page and have separate landing pages for each venue/region then your main page should rank well when people type in 'magician' and the locale.  You will need unique content on each internal page; you can rewrite the pages to maintain the meaning and use a tool like Copyscape to check they are significantly different.

Great pun in your question!

As SEO people we are programmed to follow these trends and look for causality, both so we can understand the effects of the changes we make and so we can spot emerging problems.  This is clearly a very important process.  Sometimes, however, I am sure that peaks and troughs occur as part of the random mix of behaviour which leads people to visit our sites.  Chaos theory clearly shows that in any truly random sytem patterns, peaks and troughs can appear.  I have also noticed that when the weather changes for the better I get less traffic on my ecommerce site; I suppose people go outside instead of spending time on the internet.

That is a very interesting question!

Although it is clearly a good idea to have a keyword or keywords in your primary URL, the problem is that your keywords may change over time and you can't have ALL of your keywords in your URL.  IMHO it is probably more important to have a short domain name so that if you have a blog or page title containing a keyword it will show up in full.

I have often wondered, does Google count these referrals as true traffic?

I agree with Andy.  The problem with having two or more main sites is that you will end up diluting your efforts when you might be better putting all your eggs in one basket!  These efforts include, blogging, social media, content creation and backlinking.  Dedicated landing pages are definitely a good idea with plenty of quality chat about offering your services in the different areas.  Your backlinks will be better applied to one site, rather than two, unless you have a huge amount of resources to plough in.

I have been using my Moz bar for years now and have installed it on all my computers.  Shame I can't get it on my iPhone!  I find it great for grading websites on the fly and deciding whether they are good to do business with or not.  I also use it to monitor my own website and make tweaks here and there as I go along.  It is also really useful to check the effects of changes I make to content to page loading speed and other metrics.

Many thanks for this reply. However the filter says specifically that I have too few links, it is very specific about this.

Hello!

One of my sites is triggering the 'too few backlinks for large site' filter.  I am wondering how many backlinks I need so as not to trigger this.

Many thanks for your help.

Toby