Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You should really look for companies that match what you need. For instance if you are a local company, you should look for someone in your area who has experience in your industry and success with other clients as well. If you have a larger budget and you don't necessarily care where the people you work with are from, you can check out the Moz recommended list http://moz.com/community/recommended and see if a company's strengths match up with what you are looking for. Every company will have different strengths, different strategies, different ways of tracking and to add value to your campaign. Contact a few of them and find who matches your needs the best.

Moz is only one set of data and it is limited. There are a lot of other factors that come into play. Their anchor text could be richer, I see more followed domains for them in Ahrefs, they may have more NAP listings or branded mentions than you, they may be better optimized on site. It's hard to get an accurate picture of the landscape, but you just need to remember that all these tools provide insight and some data, but they're not working with a complete data set.

The title tag is the meta tag that appears on the tab in a browser. http://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag

You are confusing this with the url. http://moz.com/learn/seo/url

This is typically caused by a link on the page that is not formed correctly.

It looks like Google is aware of and has made this connection already. If you Google "employee manual" you will see that it actually bolds the term "handbook" as well. This usually indicates they can be used almost interchangeably in the content.

You have the right idea. Have a separate page for each with their own NAP and link your Google My Business listings to each location page.

If most of your pictures are the same type of container, you could use a tool like import.io to grab the information from each page. This will miss items in the template and has to be trained just a bit but I think it could work for what you need.

Screaming Frog

Sometimes the links pointing to the homepage make it strong enough that even a slight mention of the words can make it more relevant than the page in the eyes of the search engine. Other times older versions of a page were redirected to the homepage rather than page > page. What also happens sometimes is that duplicate content on a page will cause a page to be hidden in search results and Google will instead return the homepage in its place (usually in a lower position than the page would have been.)

I'll add to this that generally you're adding keyword rich anchor text to these links. If I was Google, this is something I would look for when determining if a site is relevant. It likely is 1 of the 200+ factors and likely what site you are linking to and how relevant is are other factors.

There aren't many links showing to the site at all in OSE or Ahrefs. Rarely would a site with so few links receive a penalty. They also have their main keyword in their branded name, which I think can partially shield them since it's part of their brand name.

Remember as well that these tools include only a portion of the links that are out there. Most sites such as social/branded and NAP (name, address, phone#) listings don't show in OSE. These sites tend to have more links that include the brand or url or generic items such as "View Website" that can be balancing out the keyword rich anchor text as well.

If there are links on 3rd party sites that still point to those old pages and the links were never updated to the newer addresses, then yes, Google will still crawl them.

Can you elaborate? Sometimes people panic if their rankings drop for a single week, other times there are legitimate problems.

• What is the time frame for the drop?
• What keywords dropped?
• Did traffic or conversions drop as well?
• Was there a website redesign or change to the structure of the site during this period?
• What has your SEO company been telling you they are doing?

"Let's put this to bed once and for all, folks: There's no such thing as a "duplicate content penalty." At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that."

"Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don't follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results."

This information is from Susan Moskwa, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst.

The only problem with duplicate content is that Google has to decide which copy should rank highest.

A quick way to check for an association in Google is to search and see what is highlighted. I chose to search for "Barnes and Noble" who reside on barnesandnoble.com and whose brand is Barnes & Noble. The answer is that no, they are not associated, but that doesn't mean that your site won't show. Obviously Barnes & Noble has established themselves as a brand and will show if you search with and or &.

Technically most NAP (name, address, phone#) listing sites are directories such as yelp, yellowpages, etc. There are also usually industry specific directories which should be fine to submit to as well, such as AVVO for lawyers or healthgrades for medical professionals. After that is where it gets iffy, some sites like BOTW, DMOZ, joeant are still considered quality by most, but there are hundreds of thousands of other directories where submitting may get you in trouble.

This is correct. You have consolidated both versions of the domain. No need to worry.

I'm with keszi on this, redirect all pages anyway as they still had some value. Think of Google as a user for a second, it was aware of all these pages and suddenly they are gone. Those pages were valuable to Google, and if not redirected that value disappears.

Google has not updated their pagerank since December 2013. It is an outdated metric and you should not be worrying about it. The url was changed so the new url has no pagerank and never will, but it doesn't make the page any less strong.

There were many webmasters who reported drops around October 11th which appears to be what your screenshot from Webmaster Tools shows. This could have been when Penguin actually rolled out (rather than when it was announced) or could have been an update to the previous Panda update. A couple references:

https://www.serpwoo.com/blog/review/scam-reporting-sites-drop/

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-4-1-poll-19330.html

As for redirects, no they are not permanent even though a "permanent redirect" does sound like it would be doesn't it? They are permanent as long as they are still in place if that makes sense? An easy way to see this is redirect an established domain to another site. i.e. let's say microsoft.com redirected with a 301 to google.com for a period of 6 months. Those searching for Microsoft would actually see Google in the SERPs instead for those 6 months. When the redirect is removed after 6 months, Microsoft would be returned again and Google would be no where to be found.

http://www.mobile-tronics.com/Catselect.asp?DepartmentID=1&RepID=&MenuID=sub3&BasketID=  this was your url for computer furniture from 2001-2008. I'm guessing after that a SEF plugin was used to change the urls. If this was the case, this redirect was in fact in place until you changed the structure recently. You may have lost the value of all links to this page (and most of the rest of your site) that you had accrued from 2001-2008.