Hi Christian - can you send over some examples of Difficulty scores that were 40+ and are now <5. That seems very fishy and we can look into it.

In general, the new tool should be vastly more accurate and useful than the old one. Volume data in the old KW Difficulty tool comes from Grepwords, which we'll be using for non-US volume in the new tool as well, hopefully very soon, so you should see that fixed before the old KW Difficulty disappears.

Thanks @Chrwald - I'm going to ask Dr. Pete to take a look at these.

I think there are elements of both iSTORM's and David's responses that are accurate. Page views in and of themselves are almost certainly not a raw ranking factor, but it could well be that engagement metrics that correlate well with page views (in many cases, at least) do have a direct or indirect positive impact on rankings.

I try not to guess at precisely the elements Google is or isn't using to influence the algorithmic rankings (based on what I read about their move to deep learning, it probably doesn't matter much anyway since the algo is becoming derivatives of thousands of metrics' interplays), but instead worry about the things that will cause the results and user experiences Google wants to reward. That was a lot of what this post was about: http://moz.com/blog/seo-correlation-causation.

Thanks! Check out https://moz.com/blog/can-seos-stop-worrying-keywords-focus-topics-whiteboard-friday for more info on exactly that topic. Basically, I'd suggest targeting all the keywords that target the same searcher intent together on a page, and split up any that have different intent/search goals to different pages.

Yes indeed! Check out https://moz.com/help/guides/getting-started/campaign-setup

It's not best practice for sure, and it doesn't help with SEO (ideally, you want clean, clear, descriptive URLs and paths). That said, if Google can index the content of the page (or the image), it's not a dealbreaker. You can check by using the URL/image path in Google Images e.g. this one.

This is a lousty excuse for an answer, but since I've never actively done PAD submission stuff, it's the best I've got right now.

Check out the thread at http://www.warriorforum.com/main-internet-marketing-discussion-forum/14020-best-pad-submission-software.html - the commenters there tend to like Promosoft (http://www.develab.net/) and Padbot (http://padbot.org/). I have to admit, automated submission of this type always makes me nervous, and my understanding is that a lot of the higher quality and more editorially discerning open source hosting sites don't take auto-submissions (ironically, these are likely the best places to get listed and earn a link).

Hi Greg - short answer is, it depends... Which means, of course, there's a long answer

In Google's eyes, subdomains are often, though not always, treated as separate entities from the main domain, meaning if content or issues on them is giving Google trouble, that won't necessarily extend to the other parts of the domain. However, this isn't always the case. We've certainly seen times when having spam or manipulative behavior on a subdomain meant the root domain and content on it suffered as well.

In the case you're describing, if the crawl issues are things like missing meta descriptions or long titles or other less-than-critical errors, I wouldn't be too worried. But if it's lots of 404s or duplicate content or infinite redirect loops, those could cause issues.

If you're really not worried at all about what Google thinks of the subdomains or the content on them, you could always use robots.txt to block them from accessing it, which should cause Google to not weight that content when judging the site as a whole.

Hi Joony - sorry for our delay! I believe that you can use ip detection to re-route Chinese IPs to the page you want. Just be aware that Google's crawling from Mountain View (even for their Chinese indices), so you'll need to provide links back and forth for manual/crawler navigation, too.

It shouldn't affect your SEO, and the plugin is a fine way to do it. You can also do it manually (lots of examples of how on places like StackOverflow, e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2316307/how-to-detect-a-users-language-through-their-ip-address which is a good thread and has numerous points of advice).

Best of luck!

I just mean the uniquely named portion of the subdomain, e.g. the "xyz" in xyz.domainname.com

Hey Rod - thanks a ton for jumping in. I totally agree with you that diversity is required and that press releases are most valuable when they reach their target and achieve broader press and distribution than merely the PR sites themselves.