Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Eric,

There are no absolutes in SEO.  Ask me any question and I can give you 5 different good answers for it.

There are no absolutes when it comes to platforms for SEO tools, either.  They've each arrived at their distinct solutions from different perspectives, although they may be trying to attain the same goals.

Experience is the answer.  Using and comparing how the tools provide the answers you're looking for is what make them shine for each of their particular qualities. You have to use them all to understand how to compare them all. There are no shortcuts to that.

Depending on  the strength of the page, Google's indexing of the noindex tag can take between weeks and months to recognized.

toti,

I assume it's not the theme that's the problem in google my business (google places) rather, it's likely their shared address. If two businesses are using the exact same address (and phone number too?)  google may have problems with it.

As  far as two website having the same theme but different content--that is not a problem.

"Can I safely asume that links between subsites on a subdirectories based multisite will be treated as internal links within a single site by Google?"

At best.

Unless they're otherwise straight-up  professional links with zero spam intention, I wouldn't use them.

Don't think of your page as a place for keywords. Think of it as a place to use words to explain what your product is, what solutions it provides and what audience it serves. Sure, you need to sprinkle your keyword(s) in there in the appropriate places but it all the other words that are going to make a difference.

By your question, it looks like you may be overly focused on the search term you want to rank for, at the expense of words that describe the concepts.

Google's algorithm is advanced. It can tell between gratuitous copy and what's been written by experts. However, many  experts don't know how to write for search engines. Scientists and academics like to save the best for last. Google rewards displays of expertise at the beginning of the page.

What you need is an expert writer and someone on  staff  who already knows the answers to the questions you're asking.

Scott,

Google local  aka "google my business" is a whole separate thing than  just optimizing your web page.  You should read through these results to come up to speed on it.

If you're talking about how your business shows up with a map and specific business details on the right hand side of the serps, that's GMB. Google maps complements GMB but consider them separately, as far as I'm concerned. GMB has an entire interface for including your business details, location, reviews, etc. and if you haven't claimed your biz you need to go ahead and do that. Here's a bunch of info on it for you here at Moz.

You're barking up  the wrong tree.  It is an incorrect way to measure. It's a little tiny piece of the puzzle but you're thinking it is the whole puzzle.

Ryan,

Google search and Google My Business employ very different algorithms. They weigh different factors when deciding which results to show at the top. For example, only businesses within a specific geographic area will show up in the GMB results for a query but a wide variety of content, including businesses, video, documents,  blogs, etc, for the whole country can show up in google search.  With that being the case, it wouldn't be possible for the two to provide the same results in the same order.

Rosie,

Targeting low competition keywords is the generally accepted strategy for new marketers starting out with new websites and blogs. However, that doesn't mean it is necessarily easy to rank for those terms, especially if you're new and have little experience with optimization.

Generally speaking, terms with the lowest competition are that way because there are few people using them in their searches for your product, so it doesn't make much sense for the big guns to spend their time trying to rank for every longtail term out there.

Optimizing for longtail terms is a good way to learn your craft, though.  When you're good enough to rank well for any longtail terms you want, you'll automatically start wanting to try for more competitive terms because you are going to want more traffic than you've been getting. BUT, you really need to start way down there in order to learn your craft. Otherwise, you'll get frustrated and burn yourself out trying to rank for the competitive terms before you're ready.

Sam,

Link equity or, "link juice" is about sooo much more than domain / page strength and number of links on a page.  Did I say sooo much more? I meant sooooo much more.

There's textual relevance, page relevance, domain relevance, age, purpose,  status, location, and no doubt, a bunch of other factors.

Doing SEO by the numbers will only get you so  far.  You have to learn how to feel it.

Remember, correlation does not equal causation.

What about:

• having a good business model?
• knowing you audience?
• having the right people for the job?
• setting proper expectations?

All those things come after the 3 things you mentioned?

Sam,

You've got it backwards. Ranking for 1000 keywords doesn't help you rank for 100 in the top 10. It's ranking well for 100  in the top 10 that helps you rank for 1000.

You get yourself ranked for those 100 by doing your homework, not asking people in a forum to spoon feed you detailed answers when those answers have already been published all over the web, including here in Moz's Learning Center. You're not going to get anywhere with that.

I'd say you  want to come up  to speed on your understanding of backlinks  and keywords, first of all.

Don't  worry about all that  header stuff; Google doesn't (very much).

Are your most important words in the topmost locations in your html? That's what you want to care about. Are you  using them in your initial headings? Are you using them in your initial  sentences and paragraphs?

But remember, it's not just about "keywords" it's about supporting/complimentary vocabulary. If you're just throwing your keyword into copy that is otherwise fluff ( contains little topical concepts and terms), you're not going to beat out other sites that do.

Sam,

It's not a bad idea to use your primary terms in  both your H1 headers and in the body of your  copy.  Also make sure to  use them in of your page's meta title.

Bifrost,

Moz has a list of 27 signals that they use to determine their spam score here:

https://moz.com/help/link-explorer/link-building/spam-score#:~:text=Spam%20Score%20represents%20the%20percentage,the%20data%20we%20fed%20it.

You could also do a google search for the anchor text with a search like this:

site:yourdomain.com "your anchor text"

Screamingfrog might be more thorough and anyone who has anything to do with websites should be well versed on how to use screamimgfrog--and as many different ways to accomplish tasks as possible.

I'd hold off worrying about it for now.  I've heard many people talk about slow indexation lately.  In the mean time,  aside from the obvious check-for- nofollow- noindex-robots.txt suggestions, have you looked into the history of this domain? By chance was it penalized before you bought it?

Still, one of these pages  has to rank huger than the other--they can't both rank exactly the same.

Nick,

It's kind of a head smacker when you think of it.  It makes sense that the order of the words in the query would make a difference in ranking. Different orders may mean different things. Also, since google is trying to match the searcher's words to potential websites that satisfy the searcher's intent, the order of words on a website definitely a site's ranking for specific keywords.  Those these may be only subtle differences between  site's copy, but still, someone has to rank at the top for a particular order and someone still has to rank at the bottom for that same order.   It's the algorithm.

Good catch!

Sam,

Unless that paragraph is a large portion of the copy on both pages and/or is prominent at the top of your page, the impact on rankings will be nil for one page and maybe just a tiny bit for the other page.

Do you think you've been hit with a penalty?

Maybe there were external links pointing filter pages, so having a canonical tags on them pushed the juice to the canonical page?  Have you looked to  see if you have backlinks pointing to those pages? Even if there currently are not, it seems it could happen. So, I'd say it's better to keep both.

Do remember these numbers are for approximate guideline use, there's nothing absolute about them. Use the  results to give you an idea that one term is more or less competitive than another by a little bit or by a lot.

Shannon,

I can't answer exactly what's going on behind the scenes that causes the two different numbers to get spit out but I can tell you that the difference between 18 and 21 is so little as to be negligible.  When you get down to long tail keywords like that, things can get a little wonky, as far as exactness.  I wouldn't worry about that, if it were me.

Andy,

The answer to your question has a lot to do with the specific keyword, or search term, you  used in your competitive search.  It is not uncommon for a client to misunderstand the difference between their off-line competitors and their online competitors. Online competitors can be specifically related to a target keyword.  For example, page-one search results (i.e your strongest online competitors) for " widgets" would be different than your competitors for the "wingdings" search term--even though they may be similar products or synomical terms.  That's to say, it's easy to identify the online competition for a search term--it's every site that shows up between where your (client's) site shows up and google's #1 spot.

The choice of keyword with which to compete online is more difficult but there are tools to make it a little easier. The tools may show you that "widgets" has 100K other sites optimized to compete for the top spot and that "wingdings" has only 50 websites optimized to compete for the top of that search result. In that case, it's easy to see how you might choose to tell your client to optimize their site for "wingdings"

There are two potential catches with that choice, though. One is that "optimization" is not a black or white thing. "Optimization" is what develops a site's capability to compete with other sites for specific keyword(s). Optimizations can be good or bad or more or less in their effort to create the perfect content formula that google's ranking algorithm will place at the top of the results, so the competition is quite like a moving target. The other catch is the issue of how many people actually use that term when they go to google and search for your client's product. It can be very possible that the reason so few sites are optimized for "wingdings" is because most people, in fact, use the search  term "widgets." Why optimize for a term that few people search for?

So, to get back to your questions. It's kind of hard to say otherwise than it takes a knowledgeable SEO to help an uninitiated client understand how keywords and competition work online as well as to propose options the client can take to overtake their competitors for said keywords. Finally, I would say, it's very hard to sell an SEO project to someone who doesn't understand what it is. At the very least, they have to understand keywords, they have to understand search engine competitors, they have to understand the value of SEO, and they have to understand that they are probably going to have to make a good-sized investment in their website to affect the changes that will move the needle against their competitors.

"site is also using no follow for all of the "filters" on a page (so all ?color=, etc. links are no follow)."

For clarification, do you mean  you're using nofollows on links pointing to "?color=" pages or links on/from "?color=" pages?

Hey don't worry about it Azad, I submitted a contact form to them for you letting them know you were looking for ways to help them rank higher.  Maybe they'll help you out with more money for a real link building campaign.

Ryan,

G doesn't crawl/index every url it encounters. Its decision to do so is based on it perceived value of the the page/the page the link is one. You can increase that value/PR/PA by sculpting your internal links, revised silo-ing of your content and/or acquiring backlinks to pages deeper within your site.

If you're a brand new site with 20M pages, what reason have you give google to crawl all those pages. Just submitting them or listing them on a sitemap isn't enough of a reason.  I mean, 20M pages! google's like damn dude, what's up with all that?

100,

Have you looked into canonicalization? If the pages are dupes or substantially duplicates, use the rel=canonical tag to show google that there is only one main one you need indexed.

https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization

I'll certainly take Miriam's  word for it. I guess I'm out of date on google local.  Thanks for the heads up.

I agree with Martijn,

These days, heading tags don't do much. More important, I'd say, are the actual words you use in those lines that contain heading tags. The beginning of the first like (like where an h1 tag would be) should include your most important words. The beginning of the following paragraph (like where a page intro/summery following an h1 tag would be) should round out/expand on that vocabulary. The following headings and paragraphs should reinforce the vocabulary of the first paragraph.

Too often, the fluff that people produce for website copy gives them little to no relevance to their desired theme/topic.

As per guidelines, I  don't think there's a problem either way. Algorithmicly, it seems like it would take some time to build up the authority of the new site but that would be normal. I still think you may have an address issue with GMB, though.

Bruce,

No, the phrase does not have to appear on the page and lots of factors determine how a page might rank for the phrase without it being on the page, even things like location of searcher and time of year may influence which site ranks for such long tail terms.

A page might say "I buy fresh turkeys where my grandmother lives" and because of other factors on the domain, it might rank for your search. Or maybe, "they have fresh turkeys where I buy my alien abduction books" and something about the domain helps that page rank for your term.

Things get very squirrely way down at the end of the long tail keywords list. As you learn more, you'll probably begin popping your head up a little higher on that list and figuring out how to beat the competitors, rather than trying to go for the least competitive terms. But that's OK, everyone starts there.

I think I'd be more concerned about your google my business than the overlap in the sites, especially if the content is different. But, have you or the client examined the backlinks and authority of the other sites using similar tactics? The bottom of the search results is chock full of sites who used some tactic or another because they thought that was what was working for a competitor, when, in fact, it wasn't.

You would need different phone numbers and physical addresses to differentiate the "two" businesses in GMB.

Hein,

More sites optimized for specific keywords = more competitive, even if the keyword is not very often searched. "purple and black widgets" for example my have 1000 sites "optimized" for the term but maybe only 2 people search for it per month.  In the above case, a keyword difficulty of 30 and volume of 500 would be the better choice.

Shehzad,

It's probably not worth it. If you're not experienced at valuating domains and links, it would be best to stay away. To be identified as spam early in a domains lifespan is a tough thing to get out from under.

If it helps at all, you have to consider that it won't be much and it won't be for long. Google is also a registrar and it can recognize who owns what sites, when they change hands, and combine that with when a domain changes hands and all of a sudden, everything from one site is pointing to another. Not that that doesn't happen regularly in business for good reason, but be aware.

Also, beware of people who are selling domains with "good" backlinks. Very often, those links just window dressing to make the domain look more valuable than it is. That it has a low spam score could just mean that the domain is new or that bad backlinks are new or that moz hasn't valued the links correctly.

No need to do guest posts until you understand how to value links like the back of your hand.  Otherwise you  are likely to be taken advantage of.  You can be assured that many people who are asking you have very little knowledge of what they're doing or if such links will help or hurt them or you. Study up, practice, investigate, use tools.

Calvin,

If the content on the page  with the backlink is relevant to the content on the page it is linking to, that's good. If the anchor text on that link is also relevant, that's even better.

If content on the page that the backlink is pointing to is not of a relevant or complimentary subject, google will weigh the value of that  link less.

If you change the URL of a page that is being linked to from another site and do not properly redirect the old URL to the new URL, the link will not benefit the new URL at  all.

Calvin,

Let me go back to a previous answer:

Better to stop now with that and take a month to study up on link building before you do more damage.  There's plenty of good info right here on Moz for a start.

A site that sends traffic to your site via a link counts as a referral.  A site that has your website address shown on it but that address is not clickable (maybe as an image or it's just not hyperlinked) might technically be a referral but since analytics  identifies clicks on a hyperlink as a referral, that's usually what it means--and that's regardless of "DA".

Only the clickable part is actually called the "link".  The surrounding text can provide context for that link, in regards to how google determines the link's value to the page being linked to. Words included in the clickable part of the link are considered to add much more important context  than those surrounding it so google weighs those more heavily than surrounding words.

"Domain authority" is moz's approximation of google's pagerank scheme. DA approximates the overall value of all the pages on the domain and "page authority" approximates the value of individual pages. It is very possible to have pages that have zero PA on a high DA site and that links on that zero PA page approximately worthless so don't pay attention to DA only.

You would be best to rethink your back link strategy.  For the most part, if YOU can create them, or you can have someone else create them for you, they're either worth nothing or you'll take a hit for them from google--regardless of the ration of links to referring domains.  Better to stop now with that and take a month to study up on link building before you do more damage.  There's plenty of good info right here on Moz for a start.

Calvin,

Think  about the difference  between 500 different companies giving your company a recommendation and 500 employees of a single company giving your company a recommendation.  If you were a non partial 3rd party deciding which might be more influential to a potential customer, which would you say might be?

Google's algorithm attempts to replicate that decision.

While 500 employees of one company might be influenced by a single person (such as a CEO), it would be much more difficult and a much broader show of support if  500 people from a wide range of influences to make a common recommendation.

It's a logical choice. Don't shy away from logic when it comes  to google.