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This still doesn't explain why I read that the indexing was less than desirable this time around and then saw a drop in DA ( BY 10 Points! ) While I've improved the SEO of our site, now I'm reading the indexing went great and the Drop in DA is basically our fault. Not sure what's going on, but still, doesn't make much sense, as I've seen half of my backlinks drop from being shown but have verified them still being there, manually.

So even in regards to the above mentioned, seems we're missing data that used to be there, and that this is the result of the drop. Bigger sites didn't see a drop least in regards to sites like EPA and BBB, however the smaller sites did see a drop in DA.

Just trying to understand all of this correctly and not speculate, can you bring me up to speed on what I may be misunderstanding?

Thank you

This is exactly what I was going on about, it's great for onsite and offsite PR.

See about turning some of your guides into infographics, summarizing the data into easier bits of digestible tidbits. In the world of scan happy folks with a perpetual 5 min attention span, longer is better for SEO but not always for the user unless it's presented in a way that keeps them engaged.

Break up text with interactive bits like links or downloadable pdfs, and even images like many others say. Video is always helpful, but balance is even more important. Like a bag of trail-mix, PR needs a proper mixture of content.

Google's trends are for all searches happening for that keyword.

Unless you're the only website relevant for that keywords, odds are you're not going to even remotely match up to what Google says is " trending ".

Even for your brand name, when you search you don't just get your website, you get your facebook, youtube, BBB an anything else, even if others have a company named something likeminded.

So your website isn't the only thing to get that traffic, you'd get the majority of the traffic, so it's possible that the trends match somewhat but highly doubtful you'd match up even in the 90% range.

Another way to look at it is, Google is giving you a idea of how many people searched for a keyword, problem is, everyone doesn't use the same keywords to get the same results. This is even true with brand names, if you have a two word brand name, people might search with it all as one word, or mispells it, even butchers the name but still gets to the results. In that case you didn't see there trend data unless you looked it up, so thats some extra numbers your way.

It's more of a guide for you to gauge how popular a keyword is and high likely it is that people will be searching for that keyword. It's not really meant to be used as concrete data for organic traffic comparisons. That's what benchmarks and historical data is good for.

Hope my long winded explanation helped some.

Also to add onto what Andy has said:

There are people trying to make money off the removal of those backlinks, so in today's world unless it looks like a legit site, better off to just disavow, most likely they're going to ask for money.

Also, this might not be a competitor, it might be a scraper too, what has puzzled me from day 1 about penguin is, how can you punish a site that gets scraped backlinks? Often they use keywords anchor text and so forth.

So disavow, and keep up the monthly checks...