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Thanks!  Good to know.

Redirect...   yoursite.com/image-name.jpg   to....   yoursite.com/page-name.html

The two possibilities that I see are.....

A:  The links that hit Page A have higher pagerank than the sixty links that hit Page B.

B:  The published pagerank for Page A and Page B are not of the same data vintage.

One of the best ways to understand PageRank flow is to spend some time playing with a tool like this.  Once you have that mastered you can build an excel spreadsheet that will calculate it one-step-at-a-time.

PageRank is published "for entertainment value only".  So spending time trying to understand why Page A is PR5 with six links and why Page B is PR4 with sixty links is not a good use of your time - as long as you understand the basic concepts of how it flows.

What is the best way to get more back links?

Produce some awesome content and post it on your own site.  This content has to be so good that everyone everywhere will be sharing it with their friends and talking about it on their blog... it should be so good that even the Pope and Chris Christie will hear about it and comment.

That's the best way to get backlinks.

Best tool to get back links with?

If you are using some tool other than your brain it could be a good way to get in trouble with google.

I have pages that do the same thing.  When that happens I work on the page to drive traffic to pages that convert.  Sometimes I get sales of unexpected items from this traffic.

My product page had been solidly in the middle of the first page for months. Now, it is being replaced by my homepage for the same keywords.

Nice work.  You have two strong pages that are capable of first page rankings.    It is possible to have two pages listed on the first SERP.  You might be able to earn that as your site increases in strength relative to your competitors.

I'm worried about it, particularly from a business stand-point (we offer a variety of products that appeal to completely different audiences

This is an opportunity of a different kind.  You get to show them all of your products.  Just be sure that you feature your big money makers prominently on the homepage.  People don't mind drilling down if you make the path clear and easy.

hmmm...  I think that there is a very fine line between announcing good news, thumping your chest until you cough and spamming everyone in your industry.

Lots of people send these types of announcements out to everyone in their industry and anyone anywhere who has ever had a contact with their business.   Your boss might like this but it will really make him look like a spammer.  Ninety-nine percent of these people don't give a hoot.

So, I would ask the boss who he really wants to reach and what message he wants conveyed to them.

Press releases are valuable when they reach a few of the very right people... and they are spam to just about everyone else.   So instead of thinking "more traffic", think about "reaching the right people with the right message".

Know what you are trying to shoot and aim before firing.

I would rather speak with the person who every day answers the telephone at the business and ask that person how people, new to the business, ask for the products.  If the business has a store where customers come in to make purchases the people who serve these customers can provide similar information.

These types of employees are often extremely valuable in understanding the language of new customers who are having their first contact with the business.

I would do that rather than putting this information out to all of client's contacts.  I think that it would be easier to give this small number of employees the knowledge needed to answer your question properly than it would be to get good feedback from Joe Schmoe who will most likely delete or toss your questionnaire.

These people can also provide lots of information about customer misconceptions about the product, problems that they encounter.  These can be very valuable guides to content creation.

Sum ppl tink dat a rebiew wit a lota misshpeluns kan be a qality hint. So too edet will make it wortless.

I don't think that reviews should be spell checked or edited.  I think that they should be posted "as written" by the author.  The quality of the writing is, in my opinion, an important part of the review.  It can be used as a measure of credibility.

If you get an email with a lot of grammar and spelling problems it can be a sign that it is spam.  I think that the same applies to reviews.

=================

As for Matt Cutts.... I think that he is referring to article content where the author should be taking some care.

Reviews, forum posts and blog comments are going to have spelling and grammar problems everywhere.

If the same article is published on many different websites and it has multiple text links pointing at a website and that website has lots of other articles that are published on many different websites with multiple text links pointing back... then the site runs a risk if being hit with a Panda problem.

It does not matter if you call it a guest post or article syndication or something else, and the links don't necessarily need to be devalued.   The content could have been written by Mark Twain or a Pulitzer Prize winner... its the pattern that causes the problem.

I can sometimes search for something like "georgia" and then search for "guitars" and the first SERP will include a couple music stores in Georgia.

And, if I look at the URL in the address window I can see that both "georgia" and "guitars" are present.  Google sometimes remembers prior queries and uses them to skew your next search.

Honestly.  Being really honest here.

I would find a different industry for my focus.

Your target is really really really really tough.  You have arrived late to this fight and your competitors are fierce, armed to the teeth, occupy ALL of the highest ground and have spent $x00,000 or more to acquire their positions.  Lots of them cheat too.

The only way that I would enter this niche is if I was Mr Mortgage, had a really big company with very deep resources behind me and I was able to service all of the clients myself.  This ground will be very expensive to attack if you expect to be even marginally competitive.

My money says that you will get your ass kicked.  I think this is a very safe bet.

lol.....   I think that he has underestimated the difficulty. 

But, at least his communication has let you know that extreme and probably sneaky measures will be needed.

I am not saying that I would take his advice... I probably would not do that type of website building.  But, I agree with him that you must be willing to spend a worthy amount to compete.

I agree that my examples were online business where domains can work well as a brand.

I believe that SOME local business names lend themselves well to an EMD that might attract traffic.    Examples would be

ScrantonAutoGlass.com

ClevelandRealEstate.com

There is viable search volume for "scranton auto glass" and "cleveland real estate" and these domains would work well.

Not every business has a current name that would work well, but if I had an auto glass service in Scranton I would be willing to acquire that domain and change my name (if a competitor didn't already have claim.

I was wondering if serving 6 or 7 ads on a webpage would have a negative effect on a websites Domain Authority.

If you have two sentences surrounded by six or seven ads then that is a stinky page that will not be respected by visitors.  This could indirectly result in lower rankings as they do not stay on the page, like it, link to it, tweet about it, or visit other pages on your website.

Experiment.

If they break up that domain they need to have their heads examined.

Yes, I noticed that big domains (on the basis of popularity and brand awareness among the public) have an enormous advantage in the SERPs.  I think that they generally deserve it.

Where they don't deserve it is when they have a single product with a skimpy description but they outrank websites where the entire domain is dedicated to information about that product category and they have offer many different products of that type and all of the supplies and accessories.

Google seems to be very poor at identifying topic-level depth and expertise.

Do you know what is the effect on a site that uses another site's infographic in a story or post,

The answer depends upon the quality of the story or the post.

what is the effect on the site producing and storing the graphic?

If the site that uses the infographic is a stronger site then it will probably outrank the source of the infographic if they are optimized for the same keyword.

If the site that uses the infographic has 1000x as many visitors it will probably attract 1000x as many likes, links, tweets, etc... and thus outrank the site that produced the infographic.

No wonder little sites complain about the big brands beating them all of the time... they give away all of their content and wonder WTF happened.

Universities are really bad about changing the URLs of their homepage, department pages and other important content.   Most of the time they do it for no good reason or even bad reasons.

I'm looking for feedback on the impact of search rankings, overall SEO efforts and how Google will view changing example.edu to subdomain.example.edu

Why would you want to stink up the URL of your homepage?

You don't think that domains like Wine.com.... Weather.com.... Hotels.com... are great brands?

I think that you will find that some infographics are better at attracting links than others and predicting which will succeed is really tough...  that means you could spend a lot of money and get zero results.   (Its really easy to spend a lot on content and get puny results.)

And, you will find that very few things can be done all day long every day before you hit market saturation.

Another consideration is...  Google does not like infographic syndication as much as they used to... so the value of a link is a bit squishy and getting worse.

Ask yourself... what is the most valuable thing that you can do for your visitors.

Do that next and continue.

I started a site ten years ago with a hyphen in the domain.  The domain without the hyphen was owned by a domainer.  The harder I worked the more traffic he received when my customers typed the domain without the hyphen.

I finally paid a lot of money to get the domain without the hyphen.

On another project I had a domain with a hyphen.  Within a year I was able to obtain the domain without the hyphen in an auction.  When I redirected the hyphen domain to the non-hyphen domain the rankings went up immediately.   Immediately.

Great question.  Smarts is what separates winners from losers.

"SMARTS" include any of the following (this is not an exhaustive list).....

• on-page optimization ability
• an ability to identify article topics that can become extremely popular
• an ability to identify article topics that are extremely valuable but not popular yet
• an ability to write best-on-the-web content for those topics
• an ability to acquire or create great images to illustrate your content
• an ability to present your content in a way that "hooks" the visitor
• an ability to promote your content effectively to the right people
• enthusiasm and verve

whispering   this stuff is off the radar of most SEOs

In my example presented, If I have competitors ranking higher with lower domain authority and page authority than my site (respectfully with domain authority having greater weight),.. What conclusions can I make around what activities or actions I should be taking to improve my site's ranking?

These metrics are to give you a quick whiff of the competition.  Do they have dozens or thousands of linking roots?   Are they all DA of 25 or less or are their some heavyweights in there.

In my opinion they do not provide any guidance at all on what the next job you should take to improve your site.

My conclusion would be to spend my time improving the site in ways that the visitor will appreciate and spend less time looking at these numbers.

Bottom line, if my goal is compete with other sites, how do I determine from SeoMoz metrics, what I should do to stay competitive, given low correlation?

Don't worship these numbers.

What can you do to make the visitor stay on your site more?  Tweet about it?  Link to it?

These numbers are not guidance on how to improve your website.

You should look at them to decide if you want to attack a keyword.  Then look at them about twice a year.

I agree with Guillermo.... That big brands seem to have an advantage in the Google rankings.

Small businesses can still rank well but they have to throw the same resources into their website as the big brands are spending.  Those resources can be content, creativity, SEO and smarts.

It is a lot easier to compete against the big brands if you pick products or categories where you have lots of expertise and can create content about them that becomes valued and popular on the web.

Content pages are much more likely to become linked, liked, tweeted, etc than product pages.  So, in my opinion a content site with a store is the best way to fight the big brands.

Page authority and domain authority are SEOmoz metrics.

They are great for tracking your progress over time.

Google uses different metrics to rank websites so agreement between PA/DA and rankings generally does not occur.

All of my important domains are EMDs.

I think that the hyphen stinks up the value.

I had a key-word.com, acquired the keyword.com, redirected the key-word.com to the keyword.com, and rankings immediately went up.   Immediately.  As soon as the 301 took hold.

And..... Yes, you rank them just like you would any other website.  Duh.

They are not secret bullets.  You can have an EMD and still get your ass kicked.

They are most valuable in low competition.   When you enter moderate to high competition SERPs their value is not much more than any other domain.  This tells me that the value of an EMD is something like +10 instead of the 10X that most people think.

Also, if you have a site with a strong history and lots of domain queries, redirecting it to an EMD could result in a rankings drop.  Why? The strong history and the domain queries could be worth more than the small EMD bonus.

SEO sites that make it seem like the lift is anywhere from 20-40%

I don't think that it did anything for my CTR.

I don't think that it did anything for my rankings either.

Fifteen thousand links with "insurance" as the anchor text hit the homepage of this site.  Other than that, nobody is linkin' to it.

So, you might have a Penguin problem.  See article here...  http://www.mytrafficdropped.com/penguin/

The Panda algo detects sites that have lots of duplicate content that has been published on other websites.  It also detects trivial content.

If your site is judged to be low quality because your duplicate or trivial content exceeds a certain amount then all pages on your site can suffer a demotion in rankings.

You can read reliable information about Panda here....

http://www.mytrafficdropped.com/panda/

I sell a few specialty outdoor sport items that are branded by a US company but manufactured in China.   Several years ago I wrote unique, detailed descriptions for these items that were much more detailed than the brand owner's.

My pages used to rank really well for the generic item names (similar to "rock climbing shoes").   Then at least 100 "made in China" websites grabbed my descriptions and posted them verbatim.   My rankings tanked in Google.  I didn't even get much long tail from google.

I felt that it was a waste of time to contact all of those websites and try to get them to stop using my content.  They are outside of the USA and they would probably laugh at a DMCA.

So, I have a choice of rewriting that content or discontinuing sales.

The information that you provide is really skimpy...

However, in general, if that type of stuff is dominating then competition is not very tough.

A little hard work should advance your site.

That's what I would do.

I think that this will be helpful.

Good luck.

A good answer to this question can only be given after an analysis of your rankings, your traffic, your targeted keywords, keywords that you are not targeting, and other factors.

So, anybody who gives you answers on the skimpy information provided or without spending considerable time looking at your data is guessing.

You have access to this information.  Spend some time studying it and see what you can find.

Based upon your post I am guessing that you have about 200 different filters and your pages link to them.  If you have a strong site the 200 links are not a problem.

That could be a good approach, but removing the filter pages links and replacing them with links to category pages that each click to filter pages could allow you to target valuable keywords.

Your conversions might drop with that approach and might not.   You might get more linkjuice into category pages by dropping filter page links from filter pages... that might improve rankings of category pages but could hit conversions.

As you see, the question is more complex than the number of links on a page.

That's what I can offer. Good luck.

I don't know what Roger says, but I believe that followed links on noindex pages will pass PageRank, anchor text and other link benefits. Your instructions are to "no index" but the page will still be crawled.

Yes.  That's what I believe.

I publish other people's content.  That caused a Panda problem about a year ago - which I was able to recover from by noindexing those pages.  Now I noindex / follow any content that I publish that appears on another website.

The articles that I write are published on my own site only.

I am saying what I believe based upon observation....    and not something that I have proven by testing.

I believe that brand mentions and domain queries are awesome powerful.

I had a site that was getting a few thousand queries per month that included the domain.   That site was redirected to a better domain and rankings dropped for those queries that used to include the domain.

However, visitors learned the new domain and within a few months a few thousand queries that included the domain were coming in.... and rankings went back to normal.

This isn't "proof" but enough to make me think that domain queries are awesome.

The last question in the text is......

Can rel="canonical" be used to suggest a canonical URL on a completely different domain?

There are situations where it's not easily possible to set up redirects. This could be the case when you need to migrate to a new domain name using a web server that cannot create server-side redirects. In this case, you can use the rel="canonical" link element to specify the exact URL of the domain preferred for indexing. While the rel="canonical" link element is seen as a hint and not an absolute directive, we do try to follow it where possible.

Canonicalling them will give the benefit to the author's original page.   It does not have benefit for you.

If you want them to rel=canonical for you then it is good to do it for them.

If you want to avoid panda with content on your own site then you can noindex, follow those pages.

Your visitors will be able to use them but they will not appear in the search engines.

I have used rel=canonical to reduce duplicate content risk.  However, more important, the rel=canonical gives credit to the page where it points.

One problem with guest posting is that to reduce duplicate content risk and transfer credit to your own site, you  must have the site owners cooperation.

Of course, you can get author credit by linking the post to your Google+ profile - if you think that has value.

"Is posting a link to the original source a sufficient preventative solution to possibly getting dinged for duplicate content?"

No.   To prevent that you need to use the rel=canonical.

See Matt Cutts video here....

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

Infringers....  This site is grabbing content and reposting it without permission.

No, I don't pay any attention to RE.  Sorry.

I had about 50 pages with about 15 words and a great image and they ranked on the second page of google and they pulled a little traffic.

I improved them to a couple hundred words and their rankings went up and they pulled even more traffic.

I have been improving them more to 500 to 2000 words with several great images and now they are ranking near the top of the first page of google and the long tail traffic that they pull in has increased by 10x.

I don't think that there is a minimum or maximum number of words.  However, the more words you use the greater your long tail traffic.  And, more important, the higher quality of your content the more popular your pages will become and that will propel them to better rankings.

The problem with minimum content is that my 15 original words could today be considered thin content and subject to panda problems.

if you are going to tackle this alone, I would try to leverage as many resources internal as possible

I like this....   it means go to the boss and get a mandate to delegate parts of the SEO job to people in related positions. 

Honest...  It means that you have to train the people who do product descriptions to write the title tags, train the IT folks to keep the site running right, train the sales people to get customers linking back, train the buyers to get suppliers linking back... you got the idea?

Get customer relations to write content, marketing people to write content, product experts to write content, get the CEO to write regular blog posts, find customers who love you who will allow you use their letters.