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Hi - I would try to think of it in terms of who is your favorite blog reader. Take a piece of paper and draw out who that is. Then you want to think about "Where do they hang out on the Internet.

If you know who you want to attract, and where they are then half the battle is over. Now you need your "Bait". Your "Bait" is what is actually going to get them to click a link and goto the Blog. Figure out something that you can give your target market for free. It could be an article you wrote. A free infographic with information that has value to them or really anything they feel has value.

Remember your "Hook" is your "Bait".

Hello,

Good internal link structure is very important. It help pass "PageRank" and the "Tags" used in the internal links also help to show Google which pages you think are important for the keywords used in your links.

Also getting good links to the internal pages from other sites is also very important to raise your "Trust" and "PageRank" scores for the various internal pages.

Best Regards

Make sure to go through everything to make sure no one accidentally put no-follow or no index tags on any of your content. If all your tags are ok and you have optimized the content to target the correct terms to the specific pages, you may need to do some analysis of the sites that have moved up above yours. If your site had little or no offsite SEO during an extended period check and see if the competition has picked up a lot of high-quality backlinks.

Keep your content fresh and keep adding to it on a regular basis if possible. Also, make sure you have some form of outreach and try to get as many high-quality backlinks from sites related to your content. Links from high-quality sites that get a lot of traffic will get your site more referral traffic and the search engines should start pushing your rankings back up.

Best Regards

Google looks at many different factors when setting rankings. Authority sites that are very close to trusted sites and are related to the topic. The content of the site and the amount of traffic it gets will help Google determine how popular a site is. If the site has a lot of high-quality backlinks that are related to the topic, and if those backlinks come from high authority sites that will help them move up in the rankings.

There is no magic way to rank number one for a particular search term. These factors help though:

• Content directly related to the search term used.
• The Page Authority and Domain Authority of the site are important. Especially a high (DA) Domain Authority score.
• Lots of generic traffic to the page targeting the search term.
• A lot of very high quality backlinks from sites related to the topic and page.

It takes a lot of work to rank number one for a search term. Quality content that is 10 times better than any other page on the topic and you can probably be on the first page.

Hi Andrew,

Yes DA scores change a lot over time. I have noticed more changes this month than usual though. I was a little concerned when my scores went down one (1) on average, but it looks very widespread. Moz may have made some changes to their scoring model or something. We like most people have been working hard to get our scores to go up.

Best Regards

I feel that the search volume shown in MOZ is generally low compared to other sources. I feel it is more accurate with search terms that have a lot of volume, but in search terms that are under 1000 searches a month, I start to have a lot of problems with the data. Many times there is no search volume data at all for lower volume keywords which get just a few hundred searches per month or less.

Problems with the volume data effect almost everything else in Moz so I hope MOZ sees this and tries very hard to correct these issues.

Hello, the description is like the billboard of your search listing where the title tag is the headline. This is your opportunity to tell people reading the search results why they should click on it and visit your site.

Just pretend it was a paid advertisement for a minute and every click cost you five dollars. Optimize the title and descriptions to convey your message and put your best foot forward. If you think every visit is worth a certain amount of money it is easier to see how important they really are.

Best Regards

Hello,

I am in the process of updating Meta tags and top of page content to try and get relevant text and description tags to show in Google listings. On some of my pages Google uses my Mets "Description" tags and on many others, Google is using the content from the top of the pages. I am not sure how or why which one gets used so I am working on both tags and top of page content.

Best Regards

Hello,

I do not remember seeing anything marked as local in Google search console. I think it would be really great if it was though. I would just take a look at your Google Analytics and that should help you determine what part of your traffic is local.

Best Regards

You need to give MOZ some time to catch up to any changes you make. I am not sure how recently you made the corrections to your website, but I would give it 30 days before I start to panic. Their "Robots"  only index the internet every 4 to 6 weeks from when I see the major update changes.

Hello,

Yes the content should be "canonicalized" and also 301 redirects can help. This is a common problem with sites like you are talking about. It is important to fix the issues of duplicate content as soon as possible so that it does not become a issues in thge search engines.

There is a good article here on MOZ on the subject so I suggest you take a look at it. I hope it helps you with your problem.

Article on "Duplicate Content".

Best Regards

Hi,

Sure it is possible for a sub domain to have higher scores than the root domain. If a lot of link building is done for the root domian it could have some pretty strong "sub Domain and Page" scores. If the root domain got little or no seo work done for it. That can be a problem but if you step up the SEO link building for the root domain then things will get better.

I understand this is really all just one site and you are just putting your shopping cart on the sub domain. Just start pushing your offsite seo and then you will have a strong root and sub domain.

Personally I feel the Root Domain scores are very important and in  competitive search terms the Domain scores are usually more important to ranking well.

Best Regards

Hello,

I would just concentrate on the "Non" www site as it is the one that has the content. If you are redirecting traffic from the other site it will be ok, but don't post any additional links to the "WWW" site though. Also like you said it would be a good idea to go back and correct the links if there are not too many of them.

You don't lose much from the redirect, but the "Dampening" factor of PageRank does deduct a small portion of the links value.

In reality, if the "WWW" site is not being used and has no content just make sure it permanently redirects to your main site and forget about it. Put all your effort into your main site. Build lots of high-quality content and promote it. It takes a little time for the links to start showing up in MOZ, but when they do it can start building fast. Then your "DA" score will start going up.

You may like this article regarding "Organic Quality Scores" and I hope it helps you.

Best Regards

Hello,

From what I have read Google may be using unlinked brand mentions as a secondary signal. It would not get the same kind of energy as PageRank involves but if their computers keep seeing high volumes of brand mentions I do think the brand get credit.

Think of like Ford, Chevy, Coke, Pepsi. Not every mention has a link but Google knows whats going on anyway.

Best Regards

Hello, in WordPress because everything is based on the Database, in my opinion, it is not helpful to have an extraordinary amount of unpublished pages. If the pages are unpublished and are not indexable you should be ok with the search engines, but I think it is not a good practice to get into. Also if the unfinished pages are resource heavy and have a lot of images that take up space it may start to slow the general operation of the site, especially if you are on shared hosting with limited resources.

Traffic is an important indicator along with onsite behavior once they are there. The more people visiting your site the better it should be for your search engine rankings as long as they are engaging with the site. Try to generally keep your bounce rate as low as possible and try to make the site as sticky as possible.

Best Regards

Hi,

That is a confusing problem, but it seems like most of the page content is coming from the Iframe and not the page itself. If you can I would use "No Follow" and "NoIndex" tags on the Iframe and see if that helps. If possible I would build out the content on the correct page as much as possible without affecting its usability too much.

Also, you can try "rel canonical" to the correct page and hopefully that will help.

Hello,

If you have a site that is relevant and scores well than if you redirect it to your new main site it should pass up to 85% of the link value. There are many factors that go into the calculations that are not tied directly to PageRank and the benefit you get from those can be more or less. As long as it is a quality site and the content is related to your new main site it should help.

Best Regards

Hello,

It is important to always keep developing new relevant content. The value of a particular link can be affected by many factors and the age of a link can be one of them.

Personally, I believe many links are considered more relevant after they have aged for a while. I have noticed that links that are 3 to 6 months old and are of high-quality pass more ranking value that brand new links.  Also, the quality of the traffic you are getting through those links is an important factor.

As links start ageing and producing more and more traffic I really think they get more value from the search engines.

Best Regards

Hello,

Personally, if it is just a minor portion of the overall content on the pages I do not see a problem with it.  From what I think you are saying, I consider it to be like placing "Keywords" on a page twice instead of only once. This could actually help you if the text contains the keywords you are targetting.

I would just keep an eye on it and see if your rankings are rising or falling for the keywords you are targetting.

Best Regards

Hello,

Yes, Google suggests that you register all variants of your site. Then make sure to select the preferred one in the search console. That way Google will understand your intent and desire.

http://www.site.com
http://site.com
https://www.site.com
https://site.com

Make sure you select the preferred one to show in the search results.

Best Regards

Hello,

Well I don't have any special solution regarding voice search, but I do think it is really important. Actually I use voice search a lot on my cellphone so I know others are doing it more and more.

I am also looking for best practices in how to optimize for voice search compared to when it is typed in.

I do think it is the future and will probably be the dominate form of search at some point in time.

Best regards

Try to get links to the most relevant page for each search term you are targeting. The link text is important and will influence search engines as to the correct page for each search term. Try to target only one or two important keywords per page. It can be difficult to do, but it will make things more clear to people and the search engines.

Best Regards

If you don't have access to the old Google accout, verify the property from the current new account. Verify all versions and then select the preferred one. This is what Google asks people to do. It is very fast and easy. This is always the preferred method.

Best Regards