Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Two big things stand out to me upon my comparison. the georgia site has far less backlinks and lower page rank than yours. You will find that the links they do have are extremely relevant in post links from other sites. On top of this they are also listed in DMoz. Their pages have great On Page SEO design and very good interlinked pages. Their site is 8 years old and likely has been well established as an authority.

Your site has a higher page rank which although that is a good thing is not an overpowering factor in ranking for a single keyword. Looking at your blog I noticed that you have made good use of interlinking with yourself for the terms you would like though the content is a little thin. What stands out most to me is that your links come from directories which have very little value compared to a relevant contextual link from the post of a site about divorces and lawyers.

I noticed you have a backlink from this page http://www.affordable-uncontested-divorce.com/ the anchor text here is "uncontested divorce blog" rather than "uncontested divorce". Really it seems like you should instead be focusing on more local terms such as "uncontested divorce new york city" for example as your site seems to be location specific. unless of course you do offer to cover cases outside new york then just going for "uncontested divorce" is fine.

Another note to add is that facebook shares don't influence the SERPs directly if at all.

The SEOMoz factors are a guideline to understanding the authority of a site and not a definite predictor of results in google since such factors are quite complicated.

to summarize:

1. age comparison.

2. relevant high value links as opposed to easy to get links.

3. appropriate anchor text for desired keyword.

bonus tips:

1. a few of your blog pages had broken image links

2. your images in your blogs have a good alt text but they link to the image source. try linking them to your about page or even the same post it is on as an image link with alt text is about the same as a text link with anchor text though you would be linking to a post you care about instead of an image location.

1. SemRush - SemRush is by far the best tool I have used for keyword research. You can see almost everything you can imagine about all your competitors keywords. You can also get an almost endless list of keywords almost instantly with any search. For example I searched money and instantly got a 10001 long list of keywords including the term money with incredibly useful data which you can save and keep even when you are not a member. This one offers a free trial though you need to give a credit card and cancel before its done.

2. Keyword Country - Keyword country is great. you can search and sort by almost any data types and with all sorts of ranges. You can search by CPC for keywords which is just ridiculous. This one also offers a free trial. Well worth checking out.

3. Market Samurai - From my experience market samurai was my first and favorite keyword tool for a long time and it even comes with a free trial.

4. Adwords Keyword tool - I wasn't much of a fan of this one at first but then I noticed if you log in you can see up to 800 results and use it pretty well to find some good keywords.

Generally I use several tools together to do my research as I find each has its strengths and weaknesses.

This is with over a year of experience. Enjoy!

I suggest looking into building links with tumblr. you can make a tumblr blog and in the options you can set that tumblr blog to forward to your website's domain. after doing this you can then like other people's posts on their blogs by clicking a little heart on other tumblr blogs and by doing this you will get a link back to your site from their blog. this is a really easy way to get a lot of links quite easily.

having a lot of experience and practice I managed to get well over 10,000 in about a few weeks. Part of the reason for such a large number of links is because posts can be reblogged which means that another person's blog will have a copy of a post including the links to your blog. This means that liking one post sometimes gets you even over 10 links on 10 other tumblr blogs.

This is great for getting indexed and getting crawled very frequently though not so great for getting a variety of anchor text.

if this is unclear check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJYWNh1S_8o this video is a bit old but i think it goes over how to set up your account to point to your site.

hope this helps.

I have noticed the same thing too. Not only can your browsing history change the results but also if you use google plus and have +1'd a page of your site it will also show up higher in the results.

I find it helps a lot to use a rank checking tool rather than looking at your own SERPs.

Many times I had a broken heart from these confusing results

buying and selling links is frowned upon by google.

ah yes i believe i am mistaken. I got confused since seoquake does not cross out the links from my twitter page though it should cross out nofollow links.

the commentluv tip should help out though

Hey again NickEubanks,

1. checking up on my stats again for my site. its age is 59 days old and has not been registered before.

2. crawl stats are high of 137, average of 61, low of 10. That includes every data point since it is so young(less than 90 days old).

3. seomoz campaign says that I have 78 pages crawled though i dont think all of them should get indexed as pages seemed to get indexed within minutes usually. 59 are indexed. 57 were indexed today and I wrote a post as well as made a new navigation page to keep organized and then it went to 59 within minutes. I don't think tag pages with a single post get indexed or something since some tags do seem to get indexed and also have multiple posts.

4. total links: 1628 from 538 domains. Domain homepage PA of 40 with a DA of 33. Dmozrank 5.3.

my page for the keyword i plan to rank first for is PA 38, 67 links from 14 domains.

The site ranking in first position is much younger (2 year old site) than the other 6 beating me as I am in position 8.

these 6 have 5 with between 60 to 80 DA and one of the worse ranking site on the serps with a DA 46 though it was beating a DA 62.

Each also ranges from have very little to quite a lot of links.

first i'll share the first position stats as it is related to your main focus. PA 14 DA74, 71 links from 4 domains.

all the other 6 are over 10 years old.

after my site is a 6 year old site which i am now beating.

hope you enjoy this juicy info.

so in about 2 months i got to DA33 to answer your original question. This has been fun.

Wayne gave a good answer.

From a great deal of research I have found that a 301 redirect loses some of the link juice to avoid people abusing the power of building many domains and then forwarding them all to one main domain.

In my opinion this is well worth it still especially when you don't have to go through the work to have established the link portfolio.

One thing to look out for though is making sure that the link portfolio really is as good as you think it is.

Look into the backlinks and see if they are from reputable sources which will stay there or if thy are just a mass of profile backlinks and comment spam which could just make it seem like they have a lot of good links or even get those links removed later on.

At the very least the 301 redirect will help get the robots to your site to increase crawl frequency which i find to be great when you want your pages to be indexed and updated quickly on google.

When I started adding related posts at the end of each post and created a strongly relevant internal linking throughout my posts my ranking shot through the roof.

Yet another related post plugin for wordpress is great.

edit(i forgot to answer your question of where my sites are): I have used this strategy with several sites, dittoeffect.com which currently is over a year old and gets about 1million+ hits a year as well as another site which I will not share the name of which is only a month old competing with some 10 year old credit card sites for some decent terms in the top 10 (3000 a month search volume terms).

Sometimes it may seem that way however the way I see it is that sometimes a tumblr blog is not very popular or does not have a lot of links and page rank going to it so it won't be crawled for quite some time (even up to 60 days sometimes). Because of this you can see a fairly regular stream of links coming in.

Also I doubt you would be as obsessed with it as I was as I was building close to 700 likes a day (700 or more links a day) so I could focus my attention on this over a short period of time.

Being really good with searching on google and through other means I also used this to get links from high page rank sites including 400-800 over PR4-6 page links included in those. The higher page rank pages do get crawled faster though so sometimes it may be wise to avoid getting more than one from a domain. Also since these links are virtually endless, limited by the time and effort put into it, you can just get like 20 a day in a couple minutes and then just forget about it to keep it looking really natural.

Make sure to look at the rules for tumblr as self promotion is not something they support.

A good thing to do though which I don't even really see as self promotion is to search in google:

inurl:tumblr.com "your keywords"

in my opinion by liking relevant pages to your site you are then avoiding self promotion as you would obviously have interest in these pages as well as the added bonus of being able to add 1000s of relevant links.

Another important note is that your blog can be something like ditto-effect.tumblr.com and the links you get show up as ditto-effect. google sees these as links with the anchor text "ditto effect" without the hyphen so thats great too. Only fall back is that these can only link to your main page and only one tumblr account can be pointed to a domain.

Its hard to say the value of some of these links because its not in content though at the very least this is a great way to get page rank to go up as well as get your site crawled like crazy.

If you have any more questions don't hesitate to ask