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Thanks for the response Patrick!

Not exactly ... what is happening is:
http://www.example.com/widget-a-article
(click tag)
http://www.example.com/tag/widget-a (this generates a list of all articles with the relevant tag and a summary of each article)

What I'm wondering is whether I should use a 301 redirect on the tag to make it go:
http://www.example.com/widget-a-article
(click tag)
http://www.example.com/widget-a (the cornerstone page)

(instead of)
http://www.example.com/tag/widget-a (the summary tag page)

Is the summary tag page that is created by clicking the tag siphoning of Google Juice from the cornerstone page?

The title is pretty self explanatory ... we have cornerstone pages ( such as a page for "Widget A") that rank for a certain keyword and then relevant articles that all link to that particular cornerstone page.  Each of those articles  has the same tag ("Widget A") to tie them together.  If you click on that tag, it creates a list of all articles with that tag.  We think that this may be siphoning off some of that keyword Google Juice from our Widget A cornerstone page.

Our question is, should we 301 redirect that tag to point to the Widget A cornerstone page, use a rel canonical pointing to the Widget A cornerstone page, or just leave it alone like we are doing now?  Our goal is to have the Widget A cornerstone page receive the most Google Juice possible and not be diminished by the tags.

Note* - We don't want to stop Google from crawling the tags because some of our tags rank highly for other keywords.  Also, we tried 301 redirecting the tags before and our ranking dropped significantly ... however, we made a lot of site changes at the same time so we are not sure if the drop in rank was due to redirecting the tags or the site changes.

Help please ... thanks in advance

We subscribe to both Moz and SEMrush to help administer our sites.  However, SEMrush, which used to update our campaigns once per day, hasn't been functioning for over one month now ... and it isn't just our campaigns, people are complaining about their service all over the internet.  Still, they haven't posted a single status update on their blog or on any of their social media even though everyone has been complaining about the issue.  Emails go unanswered, and when they do answer, their response is that they are having technical issues and will have the problem fixed by Monday ... and they have been saying that for about 6 weeks now with no end in sight.  Does anyone know if they are going out of business or are they just completely dropping the ball?

I am not sure ... we don't track revenue by device type.  However, the timing has to be more than a coincidence ...

Our traffic has dropped 25% in the last 3 weeks while maintaining our keyword rankings.  At first, we thought it was due to the simultaneous change in Google UI where they removed the separators between ads and organic results.  However, now, we have also noticed that our user devices have gone from ~ 50% desktop/50% mobile to 20% desktop/80% mobile.

Just food for thought ...

Interestingly, our site traffic is down ~ 25% in the past 3 weeks as well, with no loss in keyword rankings.  We are presently assuming that it has something to do with Google's removal of the separators from between paid ads and organic search results.

Just something to think about ...

Since the last week in March, one of our sites with ~ 1 million high quality page-views per month has had a 25% drop in traffic, CTR drop from 4% to 3%, and AdSense eCPM has dropped from $8 to $5 ... however, all of our keyword rankings have remained unchanged.  Also, it is an extremely consistent niche with no drop in relevant searches ...

The only thing that we KNOW for sure has changed is the removal of the separator and indentation from the Google search ads to our #1 ranking positions.  Could such a simple alteration in the Google search results UI have such a significant impact on our numbers?  Is anyone else experiencing a similar revenue drop without a rankings drop in the past two weeks?  Besides punching up the titles to make our search results more appealing to users, is there really anything that can be done about Googles new paid results placement?

Your thoughts and suggestions are invited.  Thanks guys and gals

That is great and all. But since this entire site is devoted to search engine optimization, your suggestion to forget about optimizing my cornerstone page doesn't really help ...

A page that is specifically designed to rank for a particular keyword or group of keywords ...

I have a cornerstone page and 10 related articles that all have links to the cornerstone page.  My question is, should the cornerstone page link back to those 10 articles as well or will it lose juice by doing so?

Thanks in advance

I used pages for my category specific cornerstone articles that tend to get updated and then use posts to point to those cornerstone articles.  Works for me ...

Yes ... brought it all in house to ensure that we stayed 100% whitehat.  Spent A LOT of time removing and disavowing spammy links.  Once that was completed, rankings IMMEDIATELY rose causing our quality content to actually be seen by people.  Our content was high quality and unique which resulted in it immediately being linked to by big sites like CNN, Fortune, WSJ, etc which caused 1,000 little niche sites to link to it as well which resulted in an even bigger boost.  When everything went bad, it went bad quickly ... and when everything went right, it shot up like a rocket.  They key, as everyone else says, seems to be to provide well structured quality content and the rankings will take care of themselves.  

Most important thing I have learned so far:  Provide quality content that is well structured according to the principles found here on Moz and your rankings and backlinks will take care of themselves.  If I had done that from the beginning when I started in March, my sites would be 3 to 4 times more successful than they are now.  All it takes is a week or two to read and watch EVERYTHING that this site has to offer ...

I hired an offshore seo provider from India about 6 months ago ... within 30 days, my traffic dropped by 90%.  It took me four months to recover ... just sayin'

Still don't quite get mozcast yet ... maybe I better read the "About" section again

Was there a new Google update in the past couple of days.  Traffic on my test site has gone from ~ 1,000 per day to over 4,000 per day for no particular reason.  Most of the traffic is still coming from Google and is not the result of any new major links.  My keyword rankings also appear to be the same ...

Damn that Google

I used a fresh, cache cleared browser on a separate machine.  Also, Google Webmaster Tools confirms that I have been ranking in the top 10 for these keywords.

I have a set of keywords for which I have been consistently ranking in the top 10 for months.  Moz Pro, a service that I pay for, has shown for the past couple of months that I don't even rank in the top 50.  Google Webmaster Tools confirms that I have been ranking in the top 10 for these keywords.  Am I doing something wrong or is Moz Pro more of an estimation tool?

Thanks

PS - I'm doing it by adding a

around the script ...

My title say it all ... should I add a nofollow tag to my Ebay affiliate links?

Thanks in advance

Thanks Drew

Thanks Chris!  One clarification ... when you say that you would be looking at "more than just written content", what specifically do you mean?  What other type of content would you employ?

Thanks

Suppose I create a cornerstone page with the targeted keyword "Dog Collars".  I write a dozen articles on various dog collars and point a link from each article to my cornerstone page.  Should the anchor text  for the links from each of those articles to the cornerstone page be "Dog Collars" or should they vary, but still be relevant to "Dog Collars" for best SEO?  Should half of them be "Dog Collars" and the other half various?  Also, if I have 12 articles and all of the anchor text is already "Dog Collars", should I go back and change them so that they all don't say the same thing?

If hope my question makes sense ... thanks in advance.  I will give thumbs up for helpful responses and suggestions

Many of my tags rank higher than my actual articles for particular keywords ... some even rank #1.  Not sure what to do about that ...

Hello Patrick,

Thanks for reaching out to us.

In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have completed processing your infringement notice. The following URLs will be removed from Google’s search results in a few hours:

XXXXXXXX.com

However we need additional information from you in order to continue investigating.  Regarding this URL you've provided, please identify the exact content that you claim infringes upon your copyright. Once we have received this information, we will be able to continue our investigation.

We appreciate your cooperation.

Please let us know if we can assist you further.

If you would like to file additional requests, we ask that you contact us by using the online forms at: www.google.com/support/go/legal as we do not accept add-on requests.

Regards,

The Google Team

Are you asking me out on a date?

I have an electronics niche news website.  A scraper who had an online store selling products in my niche copied every one of my articles and posted them on his site under the heading "News" ... generally within 1/2 hour of me posting them on my site.  His site was even showing up in the rankings before mine.  I filed a copyright infringement claim with Google two weeks ago via their online form explaining what he was doing.  Today, I received an email from Google saying that they have reviewed his site and have delisted it from the search engine.  I just checked, and he is GONE ... completely delisted, no trace.  My site traffic has also jumped at least 25% today.  It pays to complain!

Just sharing

Great question.  I, too, thought that setting up Google authorship was supposed to prevent this from happening.  I have the same problem with both legitimate republishing and with scrapers who sometimes get ranked higher even when posting just part of my articles.  Also, my Google plus blurbs and links to my articles get ranked in the #1 spot and my original article will end up on page 10.  Google is whacky ...

I have a gadget site and have MANY links to my site from sites that offer web analysis or SEO tools.  For example, the site chkme.com has over 1,000 links to my home page.  I don't know who they are, why they are linking to my site, and their site is irrelevant to my industry.  Should I disavow links from sites like these?  My site seems to be linked to from a lot of "website worth" type sites as well.  I think I may have been hit with an unnatural site penalty but I do NO blackhat or any type of link building whatsoever.

Thanks in advance

Excellent ... thanks for your suggestion.  I had been placing a link in the new article back to the old and all of my old articles outrank the new.  Should I remove the links to the old articles one I have placed links from the old to the new?

What is the best way to pass rank to a follow-up article?  For example, we write an article "Product A Rumors" that ends up ranking #1.  When Product A is released, we write an article called "Product A Review".  What is the best way to pass rank from the first pre-release article to the second  post-release article?  We don't want to do a simple 301 redirect as we want readers to be able to go back to the first article to see the progression of the Product A life-cycle.

Also, should we go back and edit the old article to add a link to the new?  Should we add a link in the new article to the old?

Thanks in advance

Yes ... I need to get better at schema implementation.  Reading up on that now

Well, I like wordpress ... I just need to get better at implementing it appropriately and that is what I am trying to learn here.  If a url was changed, i put in the required 301s.  And you are correct, I do not have the skills or money to build a site from scratch ... maybe some day

I streamlined the categories and tags.  For example, I had a category named Sony ... I also had a tag named Sony and a tag named Sony Smartwatch.  I would condense all three into a single tag named Sony Smartwatch and delete the other two (placing appropriate 301 redirects as I deleted).  I had hundreds of tags and categories like that so I streamlined everything from several hundred categories and tags into less than 100 total.  I did this hoping to address my obvious internal duplicates problem and increase my ranking even further.  However, immediately after I streamlined my categories and tags, my ranking plummeted.  I still think that it was a good idea, I just got hit with some other issues at the same time which is making it difficult to pinpoint the cause of my dramatic drop.

Marcus:

Thank you SOOOOO much for your amazing response.  Everything you said sounds completely logical to me.  I have set up a Moz Campaign pursuant to your suggestion and will start figuring out how to use it properly.  In addition, I will begin working on the duplicate content issue.  I had put 301s in place for the other site, but it still shows up on Google.

Again, thanks so much ... I am going to reread your response a couple of more times to make sure that I don't miss a thing.

My organic Google traffic just completely died and it is not Panda related.  I really need someone to offer some suggestions because I am about to give up.  This is going to be a bit complex ..

Here is the skinny:  I have several relatively new sites.  My main site for the purposes of this discussion is smartwatchnews[dot]org and I host my sites on wpengine.com.  My traffic was was slowly building and I was averaging 2000+ unique visitors per day on 8,000 highly ranked Google impressions.  In addition, Google was indexing my new posts about an hour after they were made.  After reading seoMoz in its entirety and subscribing to Moz PRO, I decided to streamline my site, and focus my content to provide a better user experience.  Here are the changes I made:

1. For ease of administration, I converted all of my sites into a single multisite wordpress installation.  For some reason, Google now has half of my pages listed on the master site smartwatch.smartfamily.wpengine.com, and not on smartwatchnews.org.  I have implemented 301 redirects for the pages at issue hoping to fix this problem.

2. At the same time, I also streamlined my categories and tags and used 301 redirects to route users to the right pages.

3. Finally, I subscribed to Moz Pro, analyzed my sight, and reduced usage of my keywords to around 3%. I had not stuffed, but the focus of my site necessarily resulted in me using certain words frequently.

Within one week of implementing the above-listed three tweaks, I went from getting 2,000+ visitors per day to ~200 and my Google impressions went from around 8,000 highly ranked per day to approximately 150 poorly ranked.  In addition, Google went from indexing my site hourly to indexing about once per week now.  I do absolutely no blackhat, link-building or marketing of any kind.

Other interesting things I have noticed:

1. Several SEO companies have linked to my site recently ... for example, all of a sudden, chkme.com just showed up in Webmaser Tools with over 1,000 links to my site.  I have no idea who they are.

2. Google Analytics shows that my site has an average page load time of 33 seconds!  It has never taken me more than 2 or 3 to load one of my pages and I have Google PageSpeed scores in the 90s.

I guess what I really want to know is, can I just create a bunch of quality content over the next few months and the problem will remedy itself, or is there an obvious problem that I need to fix?

I am at my wits end ... can anyone offer any suggestions before I simply chuck the whole thing?  Thanks in advance for ANY assistance, ideas, or simply "hang in there's" ;-(