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So, I'm getting ready to start a campaign to get some backlinks.  Pretty sure this is a silly NOOB question, but what is better: To get backlinks directed to my home page To get backlinks directed to she specific product/topic being discussed in the backlink. Thanks in advance for any help.  My GUESS on the whole topic is that linking to a specific product page from a backlink with anchor text is best practice.   It will boost the Page Authority of that page while boosting the overall Domain Authority . . . a win win.

I know this question is terribly general . . . but I don't even know where to start in terms of sharing info, which I would be glad to post on request. My site was recently re-designed and migrated to a new server.  I certainly expected SOME drop in traffic as google gets the snew site all figured out, but as you can see this drop has been dramatic.  It's a simple wordpress site, I have yoast ptimized on it, I don't have many obvious errors that have not already been fixed that I can see.   
I just . ..what the heck is going on and how can I fix it?    Is it normal and takes a month or two to sort out?  Help! Screen%20Shot%2012-04-15%20at%2011.32%20AM_zpsczdmzcjt.png

I just upgraded our website to a new one.   This is the first crawl of the new website.  It is telling me I have 24 Critical issues, all of which are duplicate content errors. Thing is, the urls are not duplicates and the content on the page is not duplicated either.   Example, here is one error where it says there are two duplicates: <colgroup><col width="595"></colgroup>
| http://winterguardtarps.com/portfolio-item/props-10 |
| http://winterguardtarps.com/portfolio-item/props-2 |
| http://winterguardtarps.com/portfolio-item/props-7 | There are photos in our portfolio, and none of them are the same. I'm a bit of a noob, but what am I missing here?

I have a personal site that is pretty strong (35 DA) likely from the fact that I have had it for so damn long (like. . . 15 years). So, since it's my own site of course I used it to link to my business site. Sadly, it looks like that site has "five spam flags" . . . which is ironic since it's totally legit. Anyway, what can I do to reduce spam flags?   It mentions "low trust", small proportion of branded links, and "large site with few links".   Pretty sure it's not the latter, since the site is just a wordpress site I use to share some of my music. (www.damonsongs.net in case anyone wants to hear it . . . ). So. . . 1) can I do much of anything to legitimze the site and 2) am I better off removing the site link I am trying to promote? Insights welcome!

Episode 2 of "Damon the idiot noob" web series . . . I have like . . ..90 plus temporary redirects in my moz "medium priority diagnostics". But the majority of them have a url, but no redicret url. How can it be a temporary redirect if there is no redirect address? Some of the addresses simply don't make any sense.  Like: http://www.thirdcoastsigns.com/catalog/seo_sitemap/product How on earth would a "seo_sitemap" be followed my a "/product"? This is a Magento site, so I know some of these things get created automatically . .. but what on earth is going on here? Help welcome, appreciated, and welcome. Did I mention it is welcome and appreciated?

Hi everyone . . ..bear with me as I am  "noob". My moz analysis brought up a few "critical" issues, one of which was a missing or empty title for a page.  That page is: http://www.thirdcoastsigns.com/sales/guest/form Which does not even appear to be a working page . . . so I'm at a bit of a loss ow to fix this. I suspect it's a little bit of SEO expertise and a little bit of Magento expertise.   Thoughts and suggestions welcome! P.S.   Look forward to my NEXT noob question about a bunch of pages I have flagged as "Pages with temporary redirects".    Stay tuned!

So . . . I've written a beautiful blog (or video or podcast or whatever . . . just take my word for it that it will be nominated for an Oscar, Webby, or Pulitzer very soon). What's the best way to get the word out about it? Let me rephrase that.  I know I should tweet, post on Facebook, social networks etc cetera.  My real question is, should I link to the home page (which is where my blog is located . . . it would show up there) or should I link to the specific page of the full blog post? Seems to me, linking to the blog post directly gives me a better chance at tracking the success of the article in generating interest and traffic, but I was assuming linking to the home page helped pump up the importance of my overall site? I still consider myself an SEO Noob so be sure to speak slowly and not use big words.  Consider drawing pictures.

My website is a Joomla based website.  My designer is good, but I don't think he knows that much about SEO . . . so I doubt if he added any extensions that can assist with SEO.  I assume there are some good ones that can help my site. Does anyone know what/which Joomla extensions are must haves?

I get a lot of form submissions through my website that are clearly not actual people (unless they are insane . .  ).  It fills out stuff nonsensically, has an email address, and usually some stupid snippet of text that makes no sense. Does anyone know why people do this?  Clearly there can't be any SEO benefit to submitting to someones web form. I guess if I added a "captcha" option it would put a stop to this . .

My duplicate pages went up 50 plus in the past week, and my duplicate page titles went over more then 100. We recently redesigned the website, but it has been up for several weeks now.  The only change I made specifically last week or late the week before was to get my 301 redirects done to get the www. version and the non www version pointing to the same place (as well as a couple other sites that point to it). I'm sure this is not enough info to figure out what went wrong . . . I'd love some help in figuring this out though.

This is not a question really, just an observation. Yesterday I was listening to "Stuff You Should Know" podcast, and it was about "Tickling".  They were addressing how it is impossible to tickle yourself, and they theorized it was because our brain is AWARE that it's your own hand doing the tickling. The first thought that came to my brain was that our brain had put a "NoFolow" link on the tickling page of our brain website when it is from our own hands. I'm reading WAY to much about SEO . . . Happy Friday everyone.

Just when I think I'm starting to get it . . . info comes in that blows my mind. I'm using several tools at SeoMoz and others trying to keep track of my link building success, which has been largely me registering at related industries bulletin boards and forums and posting as well as making sure we are listed properly in any and all sites listing companies in our industry etc. I have to say I was a little frustrated with the results.  I had seen SOME increase in the back links, but almost no move in the number of linking domains. NOW I just logged into googles webmaster tools . . . and their data says I have more than DOUBLE the number of linking domains as any other sites are suggesting. What's going on here?  I can understand slight discrepancies due to when they crawl the data etc . .. but 22 linking domains compared to 9-10 from everyone else?  What the heck?

I've been working hard to use this EXCELLENT tool for optimize some of what I consider my most important pages . . . But the automatic tool that pulls pages and grades them (the "summary" of the "on page" report) . . . I don't get it.  It only graded three of my pages, and I don't understand how it chose what keywords to grade it for? I'm just very confused.  I don't understand how it chose the pages to grade, not the words it chose to grade it against. 😞

OK ok . . . the SEOMox report card told me it's actually better NOT to have meta tag keywords on my page, because my competitors can then look at my page to see what words I am trying to target . . . That makes since, but is also painfully counter intuitive.  I thought I would just double check and make sure . ..  NO META TAGS KEYWORDS? and if so . . .. what (if anything) should I have in the meta tags?

OK, I read a previous thread about whether people found press release sites useful (specifically I am considering a reputable pay for release service). I understand the knock on press releases in this digital age (namely that no one reads them and arguably never did . . . ), but I was interested in moving the discussion in a different direction . . . Do press releases services really help a sites performance based on increased backlinking?  Is there a SEO benefit to PR services? My company is a local print company.  I've done quite a bit of research on my local competitors, and specifically for a couple products we would like to dominate.  The good news is that it looks like the hurdle would not be terribly high to really take over the web presence with a well planned and executed website/SEO campaign. My inclination is that for a relatively small company like mine (dealing with relatively small competitors) it WOULD benefit me to pay for the sheer number of backlinks a PR program would generate. The monthly cost is frankly about the same as the cost of this site, which OF COURSE I get value from (hey moderator, how about a couple extra MOZ points for that one!) Specifically, I am looking at this for myself, but feel free to expand the question to the broader topic.

In Google Wemnaster tools, I have the option to set it to either have as default the "www" or without it. What are the pros and cons of one way or the other . . . or is this a way more complicated question/can of worms I have opened?

Specifically, I just redesigned my site.  I'm reading Danny Dovers book, and learned about checking the cache version of the site to see what google is REALLY seeing . . . . . . which evidently is my old site. Obviously, my sites not going to make any real progress with SEO as long as the site is out of date.  It says it last checked the site on 5/5 and I launched the site on 5/9. Obviously, it does not do these things immediately, but anyone have any ideas on how long it should take before google starts to show me some love?

I'm a little new to SEO, so maybe this is obvious to some . . . I'm attempting to build backlinks by submitting articles, posting on forums etc.  I just wrote my forst article for ezine and submitted it. I was feeling pretty good about myself until I mentioned it to someone trying to sell me their SEO services and he said that ezine articles are considered "nofollow" on all their links. Well, that was pretty frustrating to hear!  It got me wondering, how many of these other sites have all their posts and blogs listed as "nofollow"?  Is there a way for me to figure it out ahead of time?  Obviously, there are only so many hours in the day and I would rather focus on posting on sites that will actually help me build backlinks! Thanks for your help in advance!