Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I think you're looking for this: http://pro.moz.com/tools/crawl-test

Just thought I'd shoot an update - according to WPEngine the redirect will always be there. No way around it on their platform.

Generally speaking no.  You can set up multiple report generations with custom reports, but your site is generally crawled once per week.  You can use other tools like screamingfrog to help track down errors.  GWT is also another good source, but only updates once per week as well.  Once you get the errors out of your system, you'll not want to be bothered that many times a week (I would suspect).

Perhaps, you may want a manual crawl: http://pro.moz.com/tools/crawl-test

A good question - From my end; I have several clients with keyword rich urls.  They do not seem negatively affected.  That being said, most of the clients have the keyword in their actual business name, like ACME Plumbing. However, even the ones that do not, have not been negatively affected.  Depending on your client's name I would try to drop the " - " in the domain and push it all together : brandbianalytics.com

I believe best practice is to always canonicalize to the original content.  However, the mix of the original content within those blog pages is tricky because I'm sure a lot has to do with how much content is duped.

Have you tried running any reports for duplicate content issues?  I know Moz has some great tools and one of my favorites is Screaming Frog Spider.  Have you also looked at your GWT to see what if any issues Google may have?

Duplicate content can be bad, but there are a few cases with transcriptions that we've recently discovered where penalties are non-existent.  One of the recent lessons we learned was from a similar thread about video transcriptions.  Phil in the post submitted some good links and research to back it all up.

Here's the link to that discussion: http://moz.com/community/q/video-seo-youtube-transcriptions-dupe-content
I hope this points you in the right direction!

We routinely link from our blog to product pages, landing pages, and content silo pages. As long as you do it naturally you'll be fine. We have a standard of our internal links being "helpful" to the user experience to help guide our team. For example, let's say its a product review blog article. It would make sense to link from that article to the actual product. What doesn't make sense is linking to that product from a blog article with content that is not related is rather "spammy" if you will.

You can invoke Google's eye if you're internal linking is clearly spamming, but this would result in lost rankings over time because your content does not serve users' search intent or answer their query, if that makes sense. In terms of a magic number of what is considered too much, there's no telling. I view it as more of a ratio instead of a hard figure. Long story short, keep the linking natural and make sure it helps the user solve their search query and you'll be fine.

Howdy Moz,

Over and over we hear of folks using microsites in addition to their main brand for targeting keyword specific niches.  The main point of concern most folks have is either in duplicate content or being penalized by Google, which is also our concern.  However, in one of our niches we notice a lot of competitors have set up secondary websites to rank in addition to the main website (basically take up more room on the SERPS).  They are currently utilizing different domains, on different IPs, on different servers, etc.  We verified because we called and they all rang to the same competitors.

So our thought was why not take the fight to them (so to speak) but with a branding and content strategy.  The company has many good content pieces that we can utilize, like company mottos, missions statements, special projects, community outreach that can be turned into microsites with unique content.

Our strategy idea is the take a company called "ACME Plumbing" and brand for specific keywords with locations like sacramentoplumberwarranty.com where the site's content revolves around plumber warranty info, measures of a good warranty, plumbing warranty news (newsworthy issues), blogs, RCS - you get the idea...and send both referral traffic and link to the main site.

The ideal is to then repeat the process with another company aspect like napaplumbingprojects.com where the content of the site is focused on cool projects, images, RCS, etc. Again, referring traffic and link juice to the main site.

We realize that this adds the amount of RCS that needs to be done, but that's exactly why we're here.  Also, any thoughts of intentionally tying in the brand to the location so you get urls like acmeplumbingsacarmento.com?

Sorry - guess I did not read your question correctly.  I believe the general rule of thumb is that it would be considered duplicate content.  I went through MOZ's youtube and it appears that they write original content for the video description and save the transcription for onsite only.  I currently do the same thing and have not noticed any penalties.  Hopefully this helps a little bit.

I feel that it is a big benefit. Essentially with popular plugins like Yoast's WordPress plugin, work by listing your website and not the youtube link. If you're looking to convert traffic on your website, why send users to youtube?

+1 to Chris.  I've had nothing but low value, spammy links.  In fact many of those spammy links were lost with the latest Google update and caused our rankings to drop. To find someone to manage that many different campaign keywords is going to be tough, especially over seas.  I find that they do not have access to the same resources like we have here at MOZ.

In fact most of the time I ended up providing the exact instructions for what I wanted to do.  Hopefully it doesn't come across poorly, but there seemed to be no independent thinking into the backlinking strategy either.  I mean there were no links built from industry leaders, trusted manufacturers, guest blogging opportunities, etc.  All just directory postings and profile builds on random websites.  And for a regional service provider (US based company), I feel that links built on websites outside of the US are not even relevant.

In my opinion the person you are looking for may need to be an in-house employee.  You can still use contractors to help on other parts of your project.  But  especially something like social media engagement, you may want to shy away from over seas developers.

All that being said and done - if it works, it works.  Best of luck in finding that special person - good help is hard to find!

I think these are great guidelines and recommendations.  Quick question though - what if a small business has multiple locations and a different phone number at each location?  Would it serve any purpose to have a microsite for these locations which are also branded accordingly?

Another strategy I see commonly used are subdomains under the main umbrella site.  Any thoughts on that one?  The client really wants to take up more space on the search results.  So I want to make sure that we do a legit and unique approach to this.  It may be that we instead create niche landing pages on the main site like:

acmeplumbing.com/sacramentoplumbingwarranty

Where this page is a specific section dedicated to plumbing warranties, faqs, warranty changes, newsworthy stories, etc.  That way we continue the size of the site and keep our efforts focused in 1 place.  One our main challenges is that competitors are finding ranking opportunities using keyword specific urls and different google voice phone numbers attached to the same business and location.

Another very helpful answer - thank you.  Moving forward, I still think the best approach is one website at the end of the day.  After all, the saying is that it is better to mine one mine deep than to mine several at the same time.

In this particular niche, service industries like plumbing have exact match domains with less notable content.  We're still working on the ability to offset this advantage they appear to have.

Thanks again!