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I have a big website....

If the current titles and descriptions are "close" but not "optimal" then small tweakings will probably not be a problem.

But... my concern is that you have a large website and plan to do this job in one day.

I often spend a bit of time on each title and description.  I want a title that presents the the page for the proper keywords (so I do a bit of KW research).  I also want a title that elicits clicks or presents a value proposition (so I spend more time on that).  Then I want a description that personalizes the article to the search audience, or presents secondary keywords and secondary propositions (again, more time).

These things can take some time, but, if done deliberately and well, they can multiply your traffic potential beyond what you might get from a "slap them on quickly effort".

So, I would spend 1/2 day per week over the next couple of months on this job.  I would do the pages with the highest anticipated value first, then work my way to the less important pages, while keeping an eye on the performance of those most important pages.

I agree.  And that is the reason why it is better to spend your time improving your website than worrying  about a site above you that is impossible to understand.   It's possible that they earned those rankings.  It's possible that Google has incorrectly ranked them (which most often happens in low competition SERPs such as the ones here).

**It comes down to having data demonstrating the value and properly communicating this with the client. **

That makes perfect sense when starting out.   I hold the opinion that many if not most businesses are not able to make a profit at PPC given the competitiveness of PPC and the cost advantages (shipping, inventory, labor efficiency, etc) of large companies.  If you don't do careful math you can happily bid yourself into bankruptcy.

So, telling the client to test with a budget amount to prove that they can make a profit makes sense.  But once that is demonstrated they should not be budgeting.

The only exception (and this is not a budget) is when you are looking for the sweet spont of "maximum profit per day".  That is the intersction of sales volume and bid costs that has the highest yield per unit of time.

When they stop bidding, they are making opportunity for all of their competitors.  I hope that this weakness of mind persists.  They should be trying to run us out of business.

I must be missing something here.

Danny.   You are right.   Bet on yourself.  Bet big.

Low IQ.

I would improve the category page and enjoy!

Where I think things potentially go wrong is that they have around 20 micro sites in operation...

Did they built all of these outhouses because they thought they would be a source of "links" ?

The first thing that I would do is to be sure that the content that is in use on their site today, right now, is unique content that originated with the company.  If that is not the case, then it is time to throw things overboard or noindex the items that are not original and unique.  If everything is original and unique then I would get into an "improvement & consolidation" mode, pulling good content out of the outhouses, improve it to the point of being Great Content, and posting it on the main site.

Keep in mind that problems related to Panda, Penguin, or other algos occur when you are crossways with one or more Google Principles.  These can be really hard to diagnose and require a full site audit requiring many hours, done be someone who really knows their stuff.  What you will get here with a generalized question is not much more than kibitzin'.

If you have a really good site or even a really good article it can rank almost globally for English language queries on the many different country-specific Googles.  For this to happen your site or your article needs authority and popularity.  This is not about "SEO", instead it is about "awesome content".

Awesome content or an awesome site can attract a global portfolio of links, likes, mentions, bookmarks, etc.  This is easier to earn than it is to manufacture.

I have a site that fits this description.  I was working on lots of other important stuff as mobile-friendly rankings date approached.  I was going to "wait and see if this is really important."   When google first started using mobile friendly as a ranking factor there was little change in rankings.  Lately mobile rankings seem to be more important and traffic/rankings dropped more.

I am not going to "do something" to mitigate.  I really don't think that there is a "patch".   So I called the person working on mobile friendly and asked her for twice as much time until finished.   I am simply going to get the mobile done right, done faster.

Read the answers to questions here that are given by Miriam Ellis.  Find lots of her postings in this SERP.

This is how it is probably going to work.  When you go cheap, you might see a bit of progress at the start.  However, if you are shoveling coal into the engine at 1/4 tons per hour but your competition is shoveling coal at 4 tons per hour, you are not going to catch them.  Never. Your rankings are going to fall over time even if you get a foothold at the start.  You are simply outgunned.  In addition, if your attorney just started his website then he arrived at the fight at least ten years late.

If someone who owns a business came to me and said.... I only got $500/month, and they are attacking something quite expensive and difficult, I would let them know that they really don't have the resources to compete.  I would recommend getting a part time McJob, selling the Jaguar, getting a home equity loan, and giving up cigarettes, booze, and eat beans every night.  Then spend that money on their SEO.

Good SEO can fund itself, but if you don't put up at least enough resources to be competitive don't expect to make genuine progress.  I know a few SEOs who do not take jobs where the client does not want to invest what is needed.  Why?  The client will never achieve satisfaction.

Someone in my family does roofing and if the client there is not willing to pay enough money to do a good job, it is better for him to decline the job than to put on a roof that is going to leak or make no profit on dangerous work.

I would get in touch with the webmaster.  Let them know that they have been spammed.  They will probably take that page and other pages down.   They don't want this stuff on their website.

(I doubt that it is hurting your site.  But getting the page taken down will help the school and eliminate worry for you.)

If they are professional writers and do excellent excellent work I might do it as a reward.  Be strict with this.

Also, you need to review their Google+ profile to be sure that it does not contain content that is disagreeable for any of your visitors who might go there.  Reserve the right to remove the link and be very clear about reserving that right.

This will require some administration work from you, and some traffic loss.  So you got to be getting value from it.  Overall, if it keeps content quality very high, I would not have a problem linking to a google+ page at the bottom of the article.   I have done this.  I have also linked to faculty members university page if they write an article for my site.  They enjoy this and often link back to my site to share their article with others.

If you have worthy authors who produce great content then giving them credit as a reward for excellent work will make them feel acknowledged.  If their name is on their work and they are good people then they will work harder than if their name is not mentioned.  Maybe if their name is on the article they will share that on their blog or on facebook.  That can be helpful for you.  Their parents might share it and say... "my son wrote this".  That is good for you.

Putting the authors name on the page costs you nothing, however, it can make a huge difference in the mind of some authors.  This has the potential to bring you better content.

Now, if those authors demand links to their websites and their friends' websites that will not be good.   Your traffic will leave through those links.   If  those websites are not nice websites, now or in the future, then you might be linking to manipulative websites or bad websites which google does not like.

If they are writing low quality content and demand links, then they are trying to use you.  Stop their employment.

Kane, this is a very informative, generous and valuable post.  Nice work!

Panda is a site-wide reduction in rankings.  Site-wide.

So, if you have crap on the site your good content will suffer right along with the crap.

The days of publishing crap are over if you want lots of traffic from Google.

Nah... I bet a month's pay that isn't  it.

I can't figure out how my competitor seems to fit four invisible nav menus into her home page.

Putting invisible stuff into your pages is not a good idea.  Google is well known for slappin' people down if they have stuff in their code that is not shown to visitors.

So, time spent trying to figure out "how your competitor is doing this" is better spent just chucklin' about it and getting straight back to the work of making a good website.

I rarely look at my competitors' code.  I might do that for about ten seconds per year.  I don't have enough time to make all of the content that I need.  Its best to spend time on that.

How should i modify content from thin to high quality content.

Just make it high quality.  How you do it is not nearly as important as the fact that it is converted into high quality.

Somehow i realized that my pages where targetted  keywords didn't had the keyword density lost a massive ranking after the last update whereas all pages which had the keyword density are ranking good. But my concern is all pages which are ranking good had all the keyword in a single statement like. Get ABC pens, ABC pencils, ABC colors, etc. at the end of a 300 word content describing ABC. Whereas the pages which dropped the rankings had a single keyword repeated just twice in a 500 word article..

I am willing to bet big money that keyword density has nothing to do with your problem.  You said in your first sentence that your content is thin.  That is probably your problem.  Just replace it with quality.  Everywhere.  As soon as you start thinking that "I need this many words" or I need to "say something this many times" or repeat this or that phrase, that is when you start making rubbish.  It makes your content look like it was produced by a machine and not by a creative human.

Is is better to launch 1 or 2 pages par day or doing it by batch of 10 pages once a week ?

I get 'em out there as fast as I can.  The big caution that I give on that is to not put out rubbish.  Spend the time needed to make every page a quality page.  It is better to have a smaller number of quality pages than to have a ton of rubbish.

Does it make any difference ?

Yes, to your bank account.  Sitting on great pages or great content is like sitting on money.

Google owns the Chrome browser and if they wanted to get information about the behavior of visitors on websites, they would have designed a way to collect that data.  Also, if you are running Google analytics on your site, you have no idea what bounty they are reaping about what your visitors are doing.  You can bet that these two tools, at minimum, are a pipline sending lots of data into their databases.

I've not heard anyone from Google say exactly what info they get from the Chrome browser or from analytics or what they do with it but Google is well known not to say stuff about how they get their info.  They are also well-known for putting out bad info about what they are doing. 

It's best not to worry about what Google is doin' or thinkin' and just work your ass off making a better website.

At my office we have two people working almost 40 hours each per week on content and one person filling the sales.  That, in my opinion, is what is required to produce rain when you don't have a big brand name generating automatic traffic.  (We also make a little money from ads.)   Most business are not willing to spend that kind of time on content.  The only SEO that we do is on-site.

The problem with many websites is a lack of content.

The business owner doesn't want to write the content (can't write, doesn't have time, can't afford, etc.).  The SEO has a hard time finding someone to write content that fits the business and satisfies the owner.

So, the SEO is left trying to promote and optimize a turd.

This is what creates demand for low quality SEO and links that are bought or provided but never earned.

Are businesses still hiring SEO that use strategies that could lead to a Google penalty?

Yes, as explained above.

**Everett Sizemore - Director, R&D and Special Projects at Inflow:  **Use the Google Scraper Report form.

Thanks.  I didn't know about this.

If that doesn't work, submit a DMCA complaint to Google.

This does work.  We submit dozens of DMCAs to Google every month.  We also send notices to sites who have used our content but might know understand copyright infringement.

Everett Sizemore - Director, R&D and Special Projects at Inflow Endorsed 2 minutes ago Until Manoj gives us the URLs so we can look into it ourselves, I'd have to say this is the best answer: Google sucks sometimes. Use the Google Scraper Report form. If that doesn't work, submit a DMCA complaint to Google.

This site needs more content to reduce bounce rate and there are tons of opportunities for content.

The blog is hard to find and the content there is very skimpy.  I'd go with several hundred words minimum with plenty of photos of gear, people, and underwater discoveries.

The trips page should have outlinks to photo-rich blog posts and photo galleries of previous trips, photos of clients (with permission) so they can link to the trip page from facebook and say... "I did that".   Photos of clients (with permission) are kickass.  Videos showing clients are rocket fuel.  Videos featuring the client experience (with proper branding) will be shown, shared, and viewed by many - provided that video conditions are good.

Videos are also good for promotion.  Do cave diving?  Send the video to the local news paper websites of featured clients. Send it to CavingNews.com.   Got videos with coral?  Share to climate change blogs.  Videos with wrecks?  Send to marine archaeology blogs.  Underwater videos are very popular and novel when they are in newspapers and websites that don't usually cover underwater topics.

After you got a great library of video posts, and beefier blog posts, then feature the most popular and the newest on the side bar of every page.  Spread the links to these all over the site.  Use fantastic images to elicit clicks.

I used to dive a lot but that was nearly 50 years ago when scuba was still new and novel. People are curious about "what is down there?"   So, videos showing what's underwater could be popular on lots of local websites.   Old foundations, wrecked cars, quarry equipment, parts of historic bridges.  There is history on the bottom of reservoirs, flooded quarries, and rivers where lock-and-dam construction has flooded original culture.  Newspaper sites and history sites will feature these videos or link to them on your website.

On my sites, if I have rel=caononical on Page A, referring to Page B (on another domain) as the source of the content, I do have a followed link from Page A to Page B.  That link is in a sentence that says that the content was originally published on Page B on the other domain.   I do not know if this is the way that Google would have done this, but this is what I have done and I can say that the results have been excellent.  Page B does very well in the SERPs.  (Page A is on a much more powerful website.)

and an online shop: shop.domain.ae

I redirected two subdomains into a folder of the root domain (like domain.ae/shop/).

The results were nothing less than kickass.   KickAss.

That's awesome.  I have often asked... "Is anybody really making money from social media - Tell The Truth".  They have a secret sauce.

Definitely organic SEO.

I do not participate in any social media that is connected to my website.  I don't have an inclination to do that and I don't think that it is worth my time to do that.  I believe that creating more content that a visitor might share is a better use of my time.

A few things that I do that might have a social element are...

I have social share buttons on my sites and some visitors use them.

I have retail reviews on my sites.  Customer response to them is positive and with schema mark-up the pages of those websites receive review stars in the organic SERPs, which I feel is helpful.

I have category pages and content recommendations that automatically promote the content that visitors are engaging.  This allows my visitors to determine what should be promoted.  I believe that visitors do better at that job than me.

I have an industry news page that is updated five days per week.  It links to several items of news and excellent content on other websites each weekday.   Lots of people subscribe to Feedburner feeds and emails of that content.  Also lots of people visit the site daily and click to that page.  When I have new content or content that is relevant to the news, I promote it on this page. That immediately promotes it to a large number of people.  I pay attention to what people engage on this page and that informs content development.

Those are the ways that I try to give visitors a role in the site or an opportunity to share it with others.  These are not "social" but still enlist the help of the visitor.

You would be essentially being flying blind for however long you used it.

Right.  And as soon as you stop paying them, then your rankings will tank.  They will probably turn the network onto your competitors to retaliate.

Do you think machines generating content will eventually take over the SERPS?

I think that a lot of "mash-up" and "spun" content gets good traffic in the SERPs.  I know a guy who used to publish this type of content and had people write to him about "his articles".

What is your opinion of the death of the content writer?

If you are going to make a massive improvement in anything you have to do something new.  Something different.  And, the more different you make it the greater the probability that you are going to fail but also the greater the probability that you are going to win big time.

I believe that the automatically written stuff is going to digest and regurgitate instead of creating something new, novel, amazing, better, groundbreaking, spectacular, creative.  So, I still think that good content writers have a better chance of winning than the spinners and mash-upers.  But, they can do things at a much larger scale.

From what I am understanding talking to different people in the journalism industry it is already happening..... they look promising to a media outlet that pays $60k a year for someone to rewrite AP or Reuters news articles.

Journalism done by people in the field will be the source of all news.  But, most of the news that we read is rewritten, rereported, plagiarized.  Very little of it is truly "breaking".  It's a shame that the original source has trouble making money these days.  But, often those who rereport do a better job of explaining and presenting.

I saw an ad on Search Engine Roundtable and the call to action was... "What is the #1 metric that Google uses to rank websites?"

I thought, "I gotta know that!". (I usually don't click ads but this one tempted me.)

So I clicked in and saw a method "proven by Rand Fishkin" that will "boost the rankings of your website".   This company has software that will use Rand's proven method (plus data from another unattributed test to boost the rankings of your website).

I am not going to use this software.  The video made my BS meter ring.   But if you want to see it....

http://crowdsearch.me/special-backdoor/

Rather than use this "software", I would suggest using kickass title tags that deliver the searcher to kickass content.  That has worked really well for me for years. Great title tags and great content will produce the same results.  The bonus for you is that the great content will give you a real website.

Just a tip... if you post links through URL shorteners in an SEO forum then are much less likely to be used than if you post the actual URL.  People are wary about going to mystery destinations.

I suggest lots of patience here.  One of the goals of the rel=canonical is to have the ranking value of the BigSchool page passed to the new domain.  If you simply do rel=canonical that will happen.   If you use noindex, nofollow, robots, meta robots or anything else then you will take, by total chance, whatever google decides to give you.

I would be willing to sit for months on this if you are going to rel=canonical route.

It can take google a really long time to honor some rel=canonical.   I have used some and it has taken many months for all of them to be honored.

How can we leverage articles and studies that have already been published online that is featuring our client and show them in full onto our own website?

You can show them online and give rel=canonical to the original source.  That is SEO value for the original source.  That gives visitors to the site the opportunity to read them on your site.  That is the leverage you can get out of duplicate content.

If you want SEO value for your own site then you gotta do the work of writing original content.   That is leveraging the fame and fortune of your doctor.

The mistake that a lot of people make is to confuse dangerous short cuts with leveraging.

Oh, that is a very good point.  This is very bad for people who have clients.

Oh... Good.   Miriam replies.  

She knows a lot more about local search than I do, and a lot more than just about anyone.

Thank you Miriam.

**In this specific instance, the original source outscores the site where content is duplicated on almost all the common metrics that are deemed to be indicative of a site's relative authority/standing. **

Yes, this happens.  It states the problem and Google's inabilities more strongly than I have stated it above.

**Any ideas/ potential solutions that you could help with ---- will be much appreciated. **

   I have this identical problem myself.   Actually, its Google's problem.  They have crap on their shoes but say that they can't smell it.

If you go the "quality content" route and can only produce a small number of new articles per month, the best thing to do is to produce only "evergreen" content that can be recycled out to the front page.  That will give the appearance of activity and diversity - at least to visitors with a good memory who have not been visiting your site for a long time.

Also, if you have a page of "news" where you link to articles on other websites about industry trends or interesting topics.  That can develop a following of thousands of people who visit your site frequently just to check that page - or subscribe to your feed.

Scraped content frequently outranks the original source, especially when the original source is a new site or a site that is not powerful.

Google says that they are good at attributing content to the original publisher.  They are delusional.  Lots of SEOs believe Google.  I'll not comment on that.

If scraped content was not making money for people this practice would have died a long time ago.  I submit that as evidence.  Scrapers know what Google does not (or refused to admit) and what many SEOs refuse to believe.

We both posted at the same time.  We both recommended Rand's post and I like how you say that sometimes the site or the niche might not require sending out the entire United States Navy.

I would post once every three days and put three times the effort into the post - to increase the quality of the site.

I could post three short, quickly-written posts per day.   Instead, I think that it is better to post once or twice per week and put all of that work into a small number of very high quality pages  --  pages that will be among the best on the web for their topic.   That's what I do.

I think that Rand's recent post explains this idea well.... Why Good Unique Content Needs to Die  

This is just my feel for this after watching my own sites pull in thousands of visits per day from image search, but I have not done systematic study.... and Google could have changed even if I did systematic study.

First, I say that character count is irrelevant.  What you need to focus on is the keywords you want to  be visible for.

If you are optimizing for image search, I would use very specific keywords.  The exact keywords that you want your image to rank for. AND, most important, the exact keywords that people will relate your image to.  If you call it a duck and it ain't a duck, that blows the value of alt text.  Google knows a little about this stuff, even if they make the news by messing up once in a while.

If you are optimzing for websearch, I would use the specific keywords for my webPAGE on the highest image in the code of the page.  It is really important to give people an image that their query relates to.  If your page is about ducks and you image is a weasel, they are going to leave.

After that, it I mix it up, keeping relevant to the image and relevant to the page.

What am I missing?

Moz numbers do not determine Google rankings.

Google likes the other site better for this query.  Neither of your sites are appropriate destinations for a person who searches for "churches in tyler tx".    Neither of your sites should be ranking for this query.

Google might not care for your site because your title tag begins with "Churches Tyler Texas".  That title is appropriate for a church directory but not for your website.  Google knows that your site is not a directory of churches in that community.    If you search for "Baptist Church in Tyler Texas" (which I think is the perfect query for you to attract visitors) and look at how your title tag is shown, you should see that Google has changed your title tag.  They don't enjoy it for this query.

If I ran this site I would change the title tag to Sylvania Baptist Church - Tyler Texas (or something similar, being very direct about what the site is about and not trying to use the title tag to present your  site as a directory of churches.

To accomplish to goal of being visible when someone searches for a Baptist Church(es) in Tyler Texas, I would focus my efforts on local search, rather than organic search.  A good place to start learning about local search is here... https://moz.com/learn/local

Being optimized for local search will qualify your site to be listed on the map of churches that appears for the query "baptist churches in tyler texas"  OR  "churches in tyler texas".   These queries are where the action is at for your target searcher.

I see that you are on the map and in the local pack for "churches in tyler texas".   Getting better optimized for local search might help you do better for this more important query.

The quality of your image and its appeal to people are the most powerful optimization elements.

I would not name this folder /blog/

Instead, I would name it    /news/    /tips/     /goodies/    /stories/     anything but   /blog/

Why?   If you name it /blog/ it will attract hackers, spammers, and weasels like bugs to a Georgia porchlight.

Google has been rewriting title tags for about two years.

This domain could beat the Pope's.