Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Go Minnesota!

Those blizzard conditions yesterday made for an interesting commute in the AM.

Any who... to your question.

I don't think there is anything you can do for those specific keywords. Those keywords are more or less asking Google for a listing of snow removal companies in the Lakeville area. The "best" results then would be a directory. For those keywords, Google automatically is doing the 3 websites, then returning the local results.

If you do a search for straight up, "snow removal" Google will return local results first without the 3 websites first.

My best advice to you is to get ranking #1 for the local results for those keywords. Since I don't know the name of your company/website, that is about all of the help I can give you.

Good luck Derrick,

Mike

One of the biggest things is competitiveness of the keyword.

For instance. The company I work for does accounting software. That means that we are up against HUGE names like QuickBooks, SAP, Microsoft, Epicor, SAGE, etc.

When this is the case, you may need to either break things up into niche category pages or subdomains and/or target long-tail keywords.

Also, if this is a new site or a new page, it can take time for Google to index it and rank it up higher in the SERPs.

Be proud you got an A! Now just fine tune things to get where you need to be in the SERPs.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Hi Rasmus,

I think the SEO best practice or normal practice is to target one keyword per page. I think the reasoning behind it is you can tailor the title, url, content, backlinks, etc. to that particular keyword instead of splitting it up between multiple.

That being said, I think it all comes down to the competitiveness of your keywords. If they are very competitive, you are better off doing multiple pages; however, if they are not completive or more "long-tail" types of keywords, you could definitely attempt to have them on a single page.

If this does not help in answering your question, I would simply recommend trying it. See if you can get the results you want using one page... but if you can't attain those results, switch it up and try the two page approach.

Hope this helps.

Mike

This has been a much debated topic over the last few weeks.

According to Google Webmaster Tools regarding the disavow tool, "This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool."

So as you can see, most sites shouldn't need this tool. If you have thousands of spammy links coming from one source, with keyword heavy anchor text, that could look bad to Google; however, you are more or less averaging 1 link for 200 different domains. As long as that anchor text is unique (even if it doesn't completely make sense) you "should" be fine.

This article from Search Engine Land, 6 Things To Think About Before Disavowing Links, states "If you haven’t actually been penalized and you start disavowing your links, you’re essentially outing yourself to Google that you manipulated the system. Make sure that you equivocally know you were penalized and it’s not just some random fluctuation in rankings, a sitemap or indexing problem, or an accidentally no-indexed page."

You say, "Contacting these sites to have these links removed would be a very long process..." Google actually recommends you contact the site owners first and make an attempt at doing everything in your power to request your links get removed prior to using the disavow tool if you choose to do so.

Long story short. With that few links coming from that many unique domains, AND the fact that you haven't received a warning from Google... I would be tempted to just leave things and evaluate the keywords you were previously ranking for. If you see that it has been a straight up nose dive in rankings, there may be some concern, but fluctuation in rankings (at least for me) is relatively normal. In the course of a week, I can be high on page 2 or on page 5 (I have extremely competitive keywords) - I have come to expect this type of fluctuation, because I always rise to the top eventually.

Hope this helps.

Good luck.

Mike

No. Google states, "An exact match is a match on every exact character in your URL—without
exception—from beginning to end."

If you want to account for both /thank-you and /thank-you/, you could set up two goals to track them. Ideally you should only be linking to one version, but setting up 2 goals would also fix that problem.

Mike

Hi Tauri,

If you have the GA tracking on your /thank-you page and visitors leave and come back to that page, the goal will have been fulfilled. It does not matter that they left your site, it matters that they have accessed your /thank-you page.

Here is a little more info on URL Destination Goal Examples.

Hope this helps,

Mike

No. Google will not index your page differently; however, it can potentially slow your pages down, because you will have additional code.

Here is what Google has to say on the matter, "Where possible, use absolute rather than relative links. (For instance, when linking to another page in your site, link to www.example.com/mypage.html rather than simply mypage.html)."

There are a few reasons behind this thought process: 1) crawlers cannot get confused when crawling your pages, because the complete path is available 2) should your site content be scrapped, the links would point back to your own page 3) if you have poor site structure, this can increase errors (for instance if you switch to HTTPS for a signin page and you continue to use relative pathing for navigation, you could then have links to the HTTPS version of your website and the HTTP version).

Also, just for reference, when you are looking at using relative or absolute for canonical pages, Google states, "rel="canonical" can be used with relative or absolute links, but we
recommend using absolute links to minimize potential confusion or difficulties."

Hope this answers your question.

Mike

I pick up what you are putting down... thanks for the clarification Frank.

Here is how I think things would play out...

If you are creating /super-awesome-best-thing-ever as a new page that does not exist yet on your site, it will have very little rank. It if you redirect site.com to site.com/super-awesome-best-thing-ever you will have a partial drop in page rank due to the 301 redirect. Just because you are redirecting your homepage to the /super-awesome-bet-thing-ever does not mean it will get the full power of your old homepage, site.com. You would also need to change all of your internal links to point to site.com/super-awesome-best-thing-ever instead of site.com, because you'd lose some of your link juice flow if you also used the redirect internally.

And if you use a 301 redirect, you are telling Google that this change is permanent - inferring that you are no longer going to use your domain of site.com. Does that mean Google would remove the URL site.com from the index... I don't know.

I do know that SEOmoz places keyword usage in the URL under the "moderately important" section of its on page analysis - that said, I wouldn't go to trouble of this. I think you are better off optimizing your homepage for the keyword or creating a /super-awesome-best-thing-ever landing page.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Did you submit an xml sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools?

This alerts Google that your site has changed drastically and that they should crawl it and index the new content.

You should also submit a sitemap to any other search engine you want to rank in. Yes the search engines "should" find your site eventually; however, this gives them a heads-up.

Hope this helps.

Mike

That is very odd that it is ranking that high.

Using OpenSiteExplorer, it shows that rockymountainpatiofurniture.com only as 5 internal links. The other 2 links are blog comments.

I looked and on Google, RMPF has almost 3000 indexed pages and after a 48% scan using Screaming Frog, the homepage has over 5406 internal inlinks.

I can only assume we are not seeing all of the information related to this site. It appears to be pretty established and have a decent number of internal pages with unique content.

That probably doesn't help much... but it does give you a little bit more information.

Mike

It looks like it is pulling some localized results for that. I am in Minneapolis, MN and do not see rockymountainfurniture.com in the first 50 results; however, when I change my location to Atlanta, GA (I looked at the location in your profile), I do see them on page one.

Mike

I personally think this may confuse users. For instance, if they click on your company logo from another page and are directed to www.site.com/super-awesome-best-thing-ever stead of www.site.com... that might appear kind of strange to them.

Why don't you either:

• optimize your homepage for super-awesome-best-thing-ever

• create a landing page for super-awesome-best-thing-ever

If you are trying really hard to rank for super-awesome-best-thing-ever, I would try the above 2 options first. If you still aren't getting the results you want, then maybe try the homepage redirect; however, I think that is somewhat odd functionality for the user.

In most cases, the super-awesome-best-thing-ever is going to be more specific. For instance, if bestbuy.com redirected to bestbuy.com/electronics-retailer that would confuse me... A LOT.

Have you tried other options first?

Mike

Research Tools > Keyword Analysis

They do show different information than AdWords; however, the SEOmoz one is pretty cool, because it analyzes your completion as well.

You may need to run the "Full Report" to get the information you are looking for; however, the basic summary is also very helpful when researching keywords.

Mike

Hi Darcy,

For assessing your competitors, I have heard that SEMRush.com is the way to go. I have only used the trial of it (which I found simply OK); however, I have been assured by some SEO authorities that the paid for version gives you A LOT more information.

As far as if you wanted to check the organic searches that your website is receiving or keywords that your site "may" rank high for, you can use Google Webmaster Tools > Search Queries will give you the information for your own site.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Like Mike said, it looks like a coding issue.

It looks like /food-retailing/supplies/food-preparation and /food-retailing/supplies/safety-janitorial are both linking to /food-retailing/supplies/

You can use validator.w3.org to check for some coding errors.

A quick glance at things looks like your /food-preparation page has an open tag in the code lines between 1423-1431:

2. Page:

3. 1

4. []( RIGHT HERE YOU ARE MISSING CODE<br />            <br />            <div id= "Page 2")

[That was just a quick glance.

Hope it helps.

Mike]( RIGHT HERE YOU ARE MISSING CODE<br />            <br />            <div id= "Page 2")

Hi Mark,

This sounds like a bug or issue with the SEOmoz software.

Contact help@seomoz.org and ask one of the help associates to look into this for you.

If you do not have many pages, it definitely shouldn't take that long.

The help team responds extremely quickly!

Good luck.

Mike

Here is Matt Cutts quote I think you were looking for, "...if we see a link from a domain, we might count it once, but if we see 50 links from a domain, we still might choose to only count it once. So on an algorithmic side, we do a pretty good job of compressing those links together.”

Thanks for the explanation on your experiences Marie. That definitely helped me understand your previous posts.

Thank you for your response Tom!

Spot on about the H1s. I noticed this in my on page report card and that is definitely something I am going to look into fixing ASAP!

You recommended GTMetrix in another post and I ran that test a few days ago. We are looking into leveraging browser caching. I just need to sit down with our webmaster and explain the benefits of it to our site and our visitors.

Thanks for the awesome and prompt feedback Tom!

Mike

Hi!

We recently launched our new website after MONTHS of work. Now that it is live, we are looking to fine tune the design and SEO efforts.

This is our new website.

And for reference, this is our old website.

Any and all comments on design and SEO would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your help!

Mike

Hi Marie!

I think you are correct in saying, "If someone linked to you because they liked your store, this is a natural link. KEEP IT!" is very true.

However, wouldn't Google consider this type of linking a link scheme of sorts?

Matt Cutts even says the following on WebProNews.com - “But then there’s also on the manual side,” he continues. “So, imagine that you have a Polish website, and then you see a site-wide link in English talking about, ‘Rent cheap apartments,’ you know. To a regular person, that looks pretty bad. So, certainly it does happen that you have site-wide links – maybe you have a blogroll or something like that, but if I were a manual webspam analyst, sort of doing an investigation, and we got a spam report, you’re an English site, and you’ve got a site-wide Polish link or something like that or vice versa, it looks commercial or it looks off-topic, low-quality or spammy, then that can affect the assessment on whether you want to trust the out-going links from that site.”

The site in question has 3,000+ links coming from that blog website. It appears that each page on the blog is linking to your website via the anchor text treats me well.

I looked at some of the content and the other links on the blog website and they don't seem to correspond with the content or type of site www.jans.com is. I guess if it were me, I would ask the blogger to write a blog about my company and link to it once or twice in the blog article, instead of 3,000+ times in the sidebar navigation.

I am interested in why if you, "... have a fair sized information site for which I do no link building and I regularly get whacked out spammy looking links pointing to it." That you don't try to clean these, "spammy looking" links up?

I understand and completely agree with the mentality of, "If it ain't broke, why fix it?" But from a good SEO standpoint does it not make sense to clean these links up by requesting the webmaster to remove them?

Also, I hope you don't think I am coming off as being hostile or anything. I really like your responses to questions as I know you are extremely knowledgeable in SEO. I am just trying to better myself and become more knowledgeable on the topic.

Thanks for any additional information you can provide!

Mike

I (knock on wood) have not had to use it yet.

Google states, "We need to recrawl and reindex the URLs you disavowed before your disavowals go into effect, which can take multiple weeks."

And again, I would reread this article which I posted previously regarding when to use the disavow tool, ""This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool."

And again like I said above, Google recommends you contact the site owner first and make a good faith attempt at doing everything in your power to get links removed prior to using the disavow tool.

Good luck.

Mike

TextMarketing is spot on!

Either re-writing from memory or having someone else write the content based on a generic layout are two ways around having duplicate content.

And just for some additional info, this what Google considers duplicate content: "Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar." and "...content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic. Deceptive practices like this can result in a poor user experience, when a visitor sees substantially the same content repeated within a set of search results."

Duplicate Content = BAD SEO and BAD User Experience.

Mike

Using OpenSiteExplorer.org, newbieontheblock.blogspot.com/ is listed under the 3rd linking root domain - under *.blogspot.com/.

You have 3,000+ links coming from that website. It appears that each page on the blog is linking to your website via the anchor text treats me well.

Does this help?

Mike

1. It appears that their are. Duke Tanson wrote a really good article regarding using the disavow tool. He shares that the tool he used for this task was http://tools.seogadget.co.uk/ - stating, "I got all the contact details of the domains I wanted to remove using this tool."

2. If you know for certain the links are negatively impacting your site, I would probably send a couple of emails to the webmaster over the course of a week or two. This would show that you have tried multiple times to resolve the issue and give the webmaster time to resolve the issue for you. If multiple weeks have passed with no reply, you may have to take matters into your own hands with the disavow tool.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Hi Matt,

Matt Cutts actually suggests that you should use the disavow link tool with caution and only in certain circumstances.

Also, there is an article on Search Engine Land regarding things to think about prior to using the disavow tool, which states, "If you haven’t actually been penalized and you start disavowing your links, you’re essentially outing yourself to Google that you manipulated the system. Make sure that you equivocally know you were penalized and it’s not just some random fluctuation in rankings, a sitemap or indexing problem, or an accidentally no-indexed page."

Google Webmaster Tools calls out the following, "This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool."

I am not saying that you shouldn't use the disavow tool - simply suggesting that you use caution.

Mike

Yup. Those look pretty spammy.

You should first try to contact the webmaster of these sites and request that your links be removed.

Google wants you to try as hard as you can to personally get your links removed from spammy sites prior to using the Disavow tool. It is also recommended that you save email correspondence between yourself and these webmasters to prove to Google you are actively trying to clean up your backlinks.

Does that help?

Mike

Contact the webmaster and request that they remove your links from their site.

If this does not work and you have documented proof that they will not remove your links from your site, you can consider using the Google Webmaster Tool - Disavow Link tool. But be very cautions in doing so.

Google recommends you contact the site owner first and make a good faith attempt at doing everything in your power to get links removed prior to using the disavow tool.

Hope this helps.

Mike

If they have a PR of 0, it would probably be worth your time to contact the webmaster and request you link be removed.

I do not believe that getting those types of backlinks removed would do any harm on your site. It would probably be more beneficial than anything.

Good luck.

Mike

Matt Cutts says that you should use the disavow link tool very carefully and only in certain circumstances.

I found this article very helpful: 6 Things To Think About Before Disavowing Links from Search Engine Land. It states, "If you haven’t actually been penalized and you start disavowing your links, you’re essentially outing yourself to Google that you manipulated the system. Make sure that you equivocally know you were penalized and it’s not just some random fluctuation in rankings, a sitemap or indexing problem, or an accidentally no-indexed page."

And according to Google Webmaster Tools , "This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool."

Hope this information answers your questions.

Mike

Hi Nick,

1. My personal suggestion would be to give the illusion that your site is "light" on content through the use of whitespace. Take a look at SquareSpace.com and Desk.com - both of these sites, in my opinion, give the illusion that there isn't a lot of content, because of the whitespace and large images; however, both of these pages have OVER 1000 WORDS on their homepage... which is a decent amount. My guess is this is the idea your designers had in mind when they said "light" on content - but I could be wrong.

2. I am not aware of any studies on the subject off hand; however, I am sure there are some out there. As a side note, I do know that Google Analytics cannot track PDF CTRs out of the box, but supposedly you can add some code to the PDF's link that will allow you to track it. I suppose you could do some A/B testing on the subject.

3. If you want your PDF to rank well, promoting it anywhere would be great.

Personally, I think you should try to convince your designers to let you put the PDF content in an HTML page. It doesn't have to be at a navigational level, but within a page called Case Studies or whatever. My reasoning behind it is that I would assume for most keywords, people would rather view a webpage vs a PDF. Some people may think that if they click on a PDF that is all of the information your website would have on the particular topic, whereas if you click on a website, your assumption might be the entire website would be about a topic.

Also a personal side note - one of our PDFs ranks on page one for a keyword. We have not optimized this PDF or attempted to get it to page one... it just happened because so many people linked to it. The problem is that we didn't do a good job of optimizing the PDF, so that is where our traffic stops... people can open the PDF, but they do not have any links to lead them back to our website (which is our fault for not doing something about this). Point being - you may not get the traffic you want coming back to your site if they just open the PDF from a Google SERP.

Long story short - it depends on the purpose of your PDF. Is it strictly for users to read and be done with it? Is it something you want to rank well for and drive traffic to your website? If it is the latter, make sure you optimize the PDF so that users can get back to your website.

Personally I would rather have people linking to my website than a PDF on my website.

I hope this helps and I hope I was able to answer your question.

Mike

http://www.seo-browser.com

That does a decent job - I was able to see your tabbed content in the example URL you PM'd me.

Really the final test is going to be testing it once your page is live and indexed by Google.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Hi Shawn,

Google does not look at page content the same way humans do. Google is more concerned about you providing a good experience for your users. I believe that using tabs, if coded correctly, is one way of providing good experience and additional information.

If you view this text only version of the dell.com page you referenced, you will see how Google is viewing that page - there are no tabs, simply text and hyperlinks.

As far as SEO is concerned, it used to be the goal to put all of your important content, above the fold; however, that is not as important as it once was.

If you Google: site:www.dell.com Native HD 1.0 MP webcam with dual digital array microphone, you can see that the Inspiron 15z Ultrabook appears in one of results. This text is on the Tech Specs tab and is still being indexed by Google.

Long story short - Google "should" (depending on the way you set up your tabs) be able to crawl, index, and rank your page when you use content on tabs.

Does that answer your question?

Mike

Had this happen to me a bit ago.

In Firefox, click Help, select Restart with Add-ons Disabled..., then restart Firefox.

When you open it again it asks if you want to start in Safemode or Reset things. I chose Safemode. Then I closed Firefox.

Re-opened it and was able to sign in.

Hope this helps.

Mike

It appears correctly on the browser tab and the source code looks accurate.

Please note, the title tag text is also under the "author" tag... which doesn't make sense.

Also, Google is displaying your contact as "Contact - 65 Broadway Dental" instead of the title you have in source.

If you haven't changed the title tag in the past week, I would think it should appear in your SEOMoz report. If you didn't make any changes, you could contact help@seomoz.org to have them look into the issue further for you, because that seems a little odd.

Mike

Just a heads-up: 6 Things To Think About Before Disavowing Links from Search Engine Land.

It states a few interesting thing:

"Matt Cutts warned about using the disavow links tool with caution, and if it were me, I take any warning from him to the heart."

AND

"If you haven’t actually been penalized and you start disavowing your links, you’re essentially outing yourself to Google that you manipulated the system. Make sure that you equivocally know you were penalized and it’s not just some random fluctuation in rankings, a sitemap or indexing problem, or an accidentally no-indexed page."

Just saying... be careful.

Mike

Rock and roll. Thanks for the explanation.

In terms of SEO, links from completely external sources (domain1.com linking to domain2.com) are better than subdomains linking back to the root (sub.domain1.com to domain1.com).

The reason for this, is that it is assumed you can easily manipulate linking to your root from a subdomain.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Hi David,

Are you filtering things under the Advanced Reports tab using Open Site Explorer? If you are, you should be able to get up to 100,000 links.

I have sometimes encountered your issue when I try to export a CSV using one of the other tabs; however, when I use the Advanced Reports tab you can get a lot more data.

If you continue to have issues, I would contact the SEOMoz Help team.

Hope this helps.

Mike

That does seem like a lot of links; however, if it is linking to relevant content and is doing so with using unique and applicable anchor text, I would think you should be fine.

If it is always linking to your root domain with the same anchor text every time, that may raise a red flag.

Long story short - if it looks natural and makes sense, you "should" be fine.

Hope this helps.

Mike

I would probably do 301 redirects instead of linking.

The reason behind my thought is that if one of your competitor's visitors were to visit your newly purchased site, why would they click on a link to your website? Wouldn't you rather that they be redirected to your website to the applicable page?

But if you are just trying to up your DA by link building, I suppose you could link from the purchased domain to the new.

Putting the website as a subdomain of your own would make sense if the purchased site has good content that pertains to you; however, if you are not going to update the content or change it to be more focused to your business, I don't know how much sense that makes to users.

The bottom line should be what is going to provide the best visitor experience.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Yes. If you do not want the archived pages to be indexed you can use the noindex directive.

This will alert Google to not index those pages and also tell the SEOMoz crawler to not report errors or warnings on those pages.

Mike

Correct. When you setup to campaign a subfolder, you will only get crawl diagnostics and reports for that particular subfolder.

SEOMoz Help states, "The PRO Web App crawls, grades and checks rankings only for pages found on that domain or subfolder. When tracking a subfolder, we will only crawl pages that exist in that specific folder. We will not crawl links that go to other folders."

If you were to create 2 campaigns:

subdomain.example.com/USA

subdomain.example.com/Canada

And both pages are in English, you will get different crawl diagnostics and other metrics for these campaigns.

Does that make sense?

Mike

Check out the SEOMoz Help section:

"Duplicate Page Content

Duplicate Content means there are pages that are identical (or nearly identical) to content on other pages of your site, which can force your pages to unnecessarily compete with each other for rankings.

Here are some things you can do about duplicate pages:

Delete content that is similar on each page.

Add some new and unique content to each page that is on the report. This can be done by adding more information, ideas, product descriptions, or anything that can make it differ from other pages on the domain.

You can also add a rel=canonical to one of the duplicate pages. Here are a few ways to do this:

Add a rel="canonical" link in between the  and elements. This should be done on the version of the page you want to be ranking or that non-canonical version of the two (or multiple) pages.

To specify a canonical link to the page http://www.seomoz.org/blog.php?item=seomoz-iscool, create a  element that looks like this: <link rel="canonical"href="<a href="http://www.seomoz.com/blog.php?item=seomoz-iscool">http://www.seomoz.com/blog.php?item=seomoz-iscool"/></link rel="canonical"href="<a>

Copy this link into the  section of all non-canonical versions of the page, such as http://www.seomoz.com/blog.php?item=seomoz-iscool&sort=fun.

Keep in mind that that canonicals will stop the pages from ranking against each other, but they will still show up as duplicate content from a UI perspective, so we will still count them as duplicate."

Let me know if this answers your questions.

Mike

When you create a new campaign, choose:

"Subfolder

Track a specific subfolder.  Note that the subfolder path must resolve or we will not be able to crawl the content of that folder.

Examples: www.seomoz.org/tools, guides.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization"

From your example and the second example in the quote above, you should be able to do the subdomain.example.com/subfolder structure.

Hope this helps.

Mike

I guess I would have to know the URL you are referencing to actually verify what exactly you are talking about.

But here is an example of links for a single page on my site:

I have 24 linking root domains with a total of 722 total links to ABCpage on my site.

One of those linking root domains is my domain. I have 331 internal links pointing to ABCpage.

So that leaves almost 400 links left spread across 23 other domains. MANY of these domains have 5+ pages on their websites linking to ABCpage. Other domains of the 23 have a single page linking to ABCpage; however, they may have 3+ links to ABCpage.

You can see links can add up very quickly.

I don't know if this helps or not, but if you are willing to share your website's URL, that would let me or others analyze it if you have any concerns.

Mike

SEOMoz defines that metric on OpenSiteExplorer.org as, "All links to this page including internal, external, followed, and nofollowed."

So more or less, total links means all possible links.

Hope this helps.

Mike

It is tough to say without knowing your domain; however, you should read this which explains a lot about domain authority:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain-authority

"How do I influence this metric?

Unlike other SEO metrics, Domain Authority is difficult to directly influence. This is because it is made up of an aggregate of metrics (mozRank, mozTrust, link profile, etc...) that each have an impact on this score. This was done intentionally because this metric is meant to approximate how competitive a given site is in Google.com. Since, Google.com takes into account a lot of factors, a metric that tries to calculate it must incorporate a lot of factors as well.

This means the best way to influence this metric is to improve your overall SEO. Particularly you should focus on your link profile (which influences mozRank and mozTrust) by getting more links from other well linked to pages."

Hope this helps.

Mike

Yes.

You should/could use the canonical tag to specify your preferred version of pages with identical content. This can be the homepage or any other pages within your site.

Mike

For clarification, the main reason I suggested the local phone number is it will actually look more creditable (in my opinion) when a user is searching business directories.

For instance, if I visit YP.com (which is one of the GetListed directories) and search for "consulting" near "Stockton, CA" I get many results:

1. ABC Company (800)XXX-XXXX

2. DEF Company (209)XXX-XXXX

3. GHI Company (209)XXX-XXXX

...

If I searched for consulting near an area I specified, I personally would rather find a company that has a local area code. This would make more sense to me, because I specified an area... so clearly I want to work locally. If I specify an area and the results return an 800 number, I personally become a little suspicious as to whether the company is actually local or if they just employees in the area that can help me.

I think that when you are adding your information to business directories, I would lead with the local number, then 800 number, because people that are using these directories are looking for solutions for a specific area.

On your website, I would suggest leading with the 800 to establish you have a national presence, then your local phone number.

Good luck.

Mike