Per: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177, the name should, "...reflect your business’ real-world name, as used consistently on your storefront, website, stationery, and as known to customers." You'll want to only have one listing using the businesses correct and current name.
Posts made by RyanPurkey
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RE: Same location, same industry, same phone number, old name
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RE: Has anyone used Moz local for their clients?
If your client has listed with every place that Moz says they get listings then it looks like your client has already gone the DIY route as mentioned on the Moz Local "How" page...
Still, as a designer you might be able to tie in something like photography services to make their local listings look all the better. Google has been emphasizing higher res especially: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038221?hl=en, "For best results, add photos that are at least 2,000 px wide and no wider than 2:1 ratio."
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RE: Google box
Great thing to add to the bookmarks! Thanks Miriam. It's nice to get some numbers associated with my, "...if the brand isn't well-recognized," answer. Cheers!
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RE: Has anyone used Moz local for their clients?
Hi Susan. When using Moz local you'll actually need a a verified Google or Facebook listing as per the help doc: "Moz Local takes the time and hassle out of managing your listings across multiple sites and directories. When you submit a listing on Moz Local, it must match an existing Google Places or Facebook listing across all of the following attributes: Business Name, Address, Phone Number, and Website. Because you've already gone through the phone or postcard verification process with Google and/or Facebook, your Moz Local listings will be validated if they exactly match Google or Facebook.
Some of our partners—such as Infogroup and Best of the Web—may call or email to confirm your listing information is accurate, but no postcard or PIN entry is required." (https://moz.com/local/how) This allows all the separate ones to line up with each other.
As for an offering to your clients, adding an additional management fee is usually worth it to most of them in cost savings of their own time.
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RE: How do you track keyword ranking in local google.com (India) search engine
As Alick mentioned, you can use the Moz Rnak Tracker tool, just be sure to select "India" from the drop down on the far right next to Search Engine.
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RE: Google box
Have you used Google's recommended structured data to identify your company's social profiles: https://developers.google.com/structured-data/customize/social-profiles? You're also going to need to have enough searcher side input to trigger the knowledge graph as well, so that might be a sticking point for a while if the brand isn't well-recognized: http://youtu.be/mmQl6VGvX-c?t=1m18s
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RE: SEO effect of content duplication across hub of sites
Duplicate content doesn't tend to burn a website out unless there is aggressive scraping going on as well as other balck hat signals. It sounds like the bigger question you're asking is how can the site be made to have unique content when it, along with many others, are pulling the same MLS content. This was asked about a year ago here: http://moz.com/community/q/real-estate-mls-listings-does-google-consider-duplicate-content, and the general consensus remains the same: try to find a way to make your content unique.
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RE: Remove new Knowlage graph overlay
I've seen it disappear when using a Google from a different country, google.com.mx or google.ca for example... Neither of these make the searches more generic however.
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RE: Does paying a reviewer for an impartial review violate Google's guidelines?
As part of the measure of impartiality, it'd be up to the reviewer to decide whether or not they link to your site with follow or nofollow. Also, in a video from Matt Cutts discussing paid links, he mentions as one measurement whether the payment would be surprising or not. As his example, he says it's not a surprise if you're a movie reviewer and they let you into the movie for free. Likewise, if the company providing a review is a firm of analysts and there's a minimum payment required in order to pay analysts for the hours involved in the review that wouldn't be surprising and is advertised up front. The last thing to consider, is the value in this review the link or being reviewed and having your company exposed to the people who read those reviews. Matt's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zupIbMyMfBI
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RE: How do I best optimize a video for a client's name?
Looks like you're doing a lot right! If it's an option you could list the "Videos" section within the site links (if he has some). You can also show him that Google displaying videos is largely dependent on what someone is searching for, for example, Search + "video". Overall, I'd try to get him to express his goals with the videos in a way different than rankings or how Google is laid out.
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RE: Advice for grouping short content briefs?
You'll have more content on the page if it's not gated, but it's really difficult to say one way or the other at this point when comparing the non-gated page versus the gated one. Testing between both types, non-gated would give you a good idea via Analytics.
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RE: Creating an internal link network of clients
The idea of creating links between each site could be a reasonable addition, but under the umbrella of "Sponsors" and in a duplicated format it sounds--and may appear--like paid linking.
If the clients are actively agreeing to endorse each others businesses, you could go about incorporating the links in different ways; for example, say Contractor A got a tattoo with Tattoo Shop B, linking back to Contractor A's site within his testimonial would be fine as you're connecting the sites in a way that's already been done in real life. Similarly, you could create a section on one site that's called, "Business in our neighborhood we recommend" and so on. I'd differentiate per the design and style of the business and be as true to life as possible.
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RE: Art website is being spammed for NFL Jerseys - should I disavow?
Hi Joe. Marie Haynes wrote a nice article on this a couple of months ago (http://moz.com/blog/preparing-for-negative-seo), and example #6 seems to be most applicable:
This was not a competitor trying to hurt my rankings. In fact, the tens of thousands of spammy links that were pointing at my site were actually helping my rankings at that point. What had happened here is that someone had taken advantage of a vulnerability in a Wordpress plugin that had not been updated. They were able to hack into the site and create a whole bunch of new pages. They then pointed huge numbers of spammy links at these pages and redirected them to their Michael Kors affiliate sites.
In this situation, we removed the offending pages, found and fixed the access point, AND I also disavowed all of those links. According to Google, if you get hacked and have bad links pointing to you, you can probably ignore them because their algorithms are good at picking up and just discounting this sort of thing. However, it concerned me that these bad links actually were helping this site. If Google was just discounting them then they should have had no effect. I am 99% sure that I would have been ok to leave them, especially since the pages they pointed to had been removed (which also removes the link pointing to that page), but just to be absolutely sure that something odd didn't affect me with the next Penguin update, I disavowed them all at the domain level.
The whole article is pretty good, so take a look. Best of luck getting it all squared away.
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RE: Long tail searches
I see. So Moz's rank tracking tool is probably better utilized for tracking more generic terms like things you'd have at a category level, "[some county's] bankruptcy filings" vs the specific item level pages within your site. The information you can get on those is more readily available in something like Google Analytics; for example, you could run a report that is filtering just the item level pages and check their level of organic visits. Cheers!
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RE: Google now automatically adding (NAME).UK.COM to the end of each page title
Hello James. The current titles I'm seeing are pretty short, for example, your title on the resources page is simply, "Resources" As a general guide, consider how your title tags stand completely on their own. "Resources" is so vague that Google is adding information that--net effect--is probably helping your CTR. You can make your title tags more specific and longer and they'll either end in a ellipsis (...) or not have anything appended. Here's the Moz guide on best practices for further reading: http://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag
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RE: Advice for grouping short content briefs?
Hi Allison. I think your new format is fine as your older format seems to be similar length when you consider the amount that gets cut-off by the membership login. Here's how the combined page looks in Google's cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BLtwig_9MFsJ:www.chemengonline.com/november-chementator-briefs-5/&hl=en&gl=mx&strip=1
With separate briefs you'll be able to title and describe each one more accurately. Whether that impacts your business model is larger question. Cheers!
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RE: Mismatch on the City and Zip Code as strategy?
Uh oh. Miriam's advice is spot on. They should best get that cleaned up.
Per the guidelines: https://support.google.com/business/answer/2853879?hl=en, "Enter the complete and exact street address for your location."
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RE: Adjusted Bounce Rate WP Plugin?
If you have Google Analytics installed it's been able to do this since 2012. Here's a nice recent post on it which is fairly thorough from Glenn Gabe over at Search Engine Watch: http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2322974/how-to-implement-adjusted-bounce-rate-abr-via-google-tag-manager-tutorial. Cheers!
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RE: Now that Google will be indexing Twitter, are Twitter backlinks likely to effect website rank in the SERPs?
He also said the same thing about Google+ (see: http://moz.com/blog/google-plus-correlations) with the applicable quote being, "This post caused quite a bit of controversy. Matt Cutts of Google responded to this thread on Hacker News to imply +1s aren't used directly in Google's algorithm.
While I take Matt at his word that Google doesn't use raw +1s to rank webpages, the evidence seems to suggest Google+ posts do pass other SEO benefits not found easily in other social platforms. If this is not the case, I'm hoping Google will clarify."
Right below that, Cyrus pulled in Mark Traphagen's comment, "It is not the +1's themselves that are causing the high rankings of posts but the fact that most +1's on a site result in a shared post on Google+, which creates a followed link back to the post. It's instant organic link building." While the mechanism is different in Twitter, it is some what similar and the likelihood of something getting a large number of tweets correlating with a large number of backlinks, is likely.
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RE: How to set up international SEO for english speaking countries
Hi Thomas. Yes, inbound links to subfolders tend to help Domain Authority rise better than those going to subdomains. Rand recently did a White Board Friday on this, found here: http://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday. Cheers!
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RE: Mismatch on the City and Zip Code as strategy?
That's odd. Are they a Service Area Business (SAB) that's attempting to show up in results for those given areas?
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RE: Going to Mozcon - what to do in Seattle
Ah perfect! I knew you'd guys would (and have) pull through on this one. Great lists! Andy should be all set.
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RE: Content Rewriting and Page ranking
This would make a great split test from a UX perspective but also be a good way to slowly introduce the new content.
Just from search, If the page changes dramatically it might bounce out of the rankings briefly, but if the content topic and contextual relevance is mostly the same it should reappear. You could try introducing parts or all of the new content as an update to the top fold of the page as well, monitor rankings, then remove the parts you don't like. Several ways to test it out... cheers!
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RE: Long tail searches
A big factor that can really help with long tail matches is getting a few quality backlinks to the specific long tail pages, and the best way to do this is by proving that your site will be a reliable resource to the type of people that would link to it. Wikipedia is an excellent example of this model. People linking there always know what they're linking to and that the page won't change or crash. In your instance, how are you going to get people linking to your copy of the case, versus the government hosted one, like so: https://www.ustaxcourt.gov/InOpHistoric/DynamoHoldingsLPDiv.Buch.TC.WPD.pdf
Solving that will go miles in solving your long tail.
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RE: Going to Mozcon - what to do in Seattle
Hey Andy. Seattle is great. I bet a bunch of mozzers could chime in on this one as they're there every day, but some other things to do: take a "duck" ride, go on a brewery tour, check out Pike Place Market... those are all classic Seattle activities.
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RE: Does a subdomain benefit from being on a high authority domain?
Rand recently did a whiteboard Friday on this very thing: http://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday, the pertinent part on your question being:
You're asking, "Should I put my content on a subdomain, or should I put it in a subfolder?" Subdomains can be kind of interesting sometimes because there's a lot less technical hurdles a lot of the time. You don't need to get your engineering staff or development staff involved in putting those on there. From a technical operations perspective, some things might be easier, but from an SEO perspective this can be very dangerous. I'll show you what I mean.
So let's say you've got blog.yoursite.com or you've got www.yoursite.com/blog. Now engines may indeed consider content that's on this separate subdomain to be the same as the content that's on here, and so all of the links, all of the user and usage data signals, all of the ranking signals as an entirety that point here may benefit this site as well as benefiting this subdomain. The keyword there is "may."
I can't tell you how many times we've seen and we've actually tested ourselves by first putting content on a subdomain and then moving it back over to the main domain with Moz. We've done that three times over that past two years. Each time we've seen a considerable boost in rankings and in search traffic, both long tail and head of the demand curve to these, and we're not alone. Many others have seen it, particularly in the startup world, where it's very popular to put blog.yourwebsite.com, and then eventually people move it over to a subfolder, and they see ranking benefits.
If at all possible, make it part of the domain in a subfolder.
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RE: Can someone evaluate this page so I can continue adding others?
Ya, a 15% non-indexed rate is not bad. There was a Q&A here earlier that was looking at similar things: http://moz.com/community/q/some-urls-in-the-sitemap-not-indexed. That should help ease your mind!
DA isn't a function of how many pages your site has, but how many other credible sites link to your site: http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority. Cheers!
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RE: At what point to stop comments on a blog? Do too many comments hurt the page?
Yup! That sounds like a good interaction and a lively page that will keep presenting fresh, meaningful content each time it's updated. The only comments I'd worry about are spam (which you've screened) and really off-topic comments, but neither of those seem to be a problem. Since people are commenting under the same topic(s) as the article, it just adds to the page as a whole.
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RE: Can someone evaluate this page so I can continue adding others?
You'll be able to answer the first question via GWT. Compare your sitemap submitted page count to the number of pages Google says it has placed in its index. The larger percentage gap of pages submitted to indexed is an indicator that the pages are simply not being listed. The related products and up sell items is another way to make your pages more unique as well.
If you start not ranking for your branded search then that would be an indicator that of a general de-rank. Something like that though is much more common for sites with spammy links.
Amazon and eBay get listed in Google because they are massively represented on the internet. One of Google's short-hand ways of describing ranking is placing sites in order of the likelihood that someone would encounter them just clicking and surfing through the internet. Trying to break down how Amazon and eBay get indexed to the level of on page elements doesn't really apply. Those companies are determining their design elements purely on UX and sales.
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RE: Can someone evaluate this page so I can continue adding others?
The page looks fine, but people run into NOINDEX - FOLLOW considerations when their pages aren't only similar to other pages on their domain, but similar to other pages in the rest of the Index. As their domain gains strength overall their able to see more of their similar product pages get indexed, especially if they grow in unique content over time as well: reviews, videos, photos from the product in use, etc.
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RE: Google Search Results...
I see. If you have some idea of what section of your site might be in there that you don't want, you can use site:company.com inurl:whatever to narrow it down. You should know the file or call for search and shop pages and can put that name after the inurl modifier.
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RE: Does moving Server (IP) affect rankings?
In most cases a server move with no other changes to page structure, names, etc. would not impact rankings. Perhaps in very rare cases the IP could be associated with a known spam server, but you can check something like that out at sites like: http://whatismyipaddress.com/blacklist-check.
If the server move enhances your site's speed and responsiveness then go for it. Cheers!
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RE: Page Rank Lost After Website Transfer
Hi Matt. Yes, spidering the URLs without the www. will trigger a 301 Redirect "Moved Permanently" as the site is setup to have the subdomain 'www' as default. The inbound links however also use the www. from a cursory glance, but I'm noticing that some point to aspx pages, for example: http://www.goenergylink.com/Home.aspx which now returns a 404 so it doesn't look like you used the completely same names. Further, there's no 301 Redirect in place for pointing that Home.aspx page to its new location.
The 'sitemap' here is also oddly executed: www.mckmarketingdesigns.com/sitemap/ and links like these: http://www.thecontrolrooms.com/apps/members/membersList?offset=1&q=&sort=DISPLAY_NAME&view=list with the anchor text, "Insulation Services Columbia Mo" are spammy as well.
Are you receiving warnings from GWT?
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RE: Google Search Results...
Ok, but what's your goal with this? And why don't you know your own subdomains that you've created? It seems like you could work backwards from a better starting point by applying those things.
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RE: Google Analytics, new property or views?
I'd avoid multiple properties for the same property (the website) for the points you outlined above. A new view would allow the previous time comparisons, and could probably be made to be less meaningless by applying and removing a few segments that end up doing similar things as your filters.
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RE: Keyword Research and Planning Flow
Hi Alex. Today's webinar (http://moz.com/webinars) by Cyrus Shepard is covering this topic very well, although you're going to have to build your own workflow that works best for you. Since the webinar is going on right now (2015-02-10 10:56 Pacific Time) you'll have to wait for it to become available in the previously recorded webinar list. The title is: SEO Basics: The Fundamental Signals Used to Rank Our Content Higher
This along with the beginners guide is going to cover much of your initial steps in SEO: http://moz.com/learn/seo
As for on-page considerations, this is one of the most canonical resources: http://moz.com/learn/seo/on-page-factors. Cheers!
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RE: Google Search Results...
Hi Cyto. Why don't you try exporting pages receiving google/organic visits from Google Analytics using the Landing Page metric as a secondary dimension... It won't be all inclusive, but it will give you a good idea on what pages are indexed and drawing in visitors. You can then compare that data against your sitemaps.
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RE: Why do my search results differ from MOZ's rank tracker
Hello. Have you been using Google Webmaster Tools to get some ranking data as well? Plus Analytics to pull in some rough data on organic search volumes? Are you using the same search engines in Moz's tools? (i.e. Google en-UK vs Google en-US?) Precise rankings are always going to be a bit difficult to report because of the many factors you listed, but the traffic from organic listings and to specific pages is much more manageable.
In the specific example you provide above, instead of congratulating them on their rankings you could let them know that their visits from search have gone from X to Y.
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RE: DNS vs IIS redirection
Within IIS you use the IIS Manager. Here's a blog on page-by-page: http://www.proworks.com/blog/2010/02/11/adding-a-301-redirect-in-iis-for-individual-pages-with-non-aspx-extensions/ It's older but still applicable.
There's also software available like ISAPI_rewrite that can help with the process if you're migrating between Apache and Windows servers: http://www.helicontech.com/isapi_rewrite
The Windows doc on this: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/6b855a7a-0884-4508-ba95-079f38c77017.mspx?mfr=true
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RE: Local Citations
Do you mean to login to the account handling the multiple listings or that each listing is going to have it's dedicated location page? like:
- https://plus.google.com/104914913477473234234/about?hl=en
- https://plus.google.com/109204651908822844333/about?hl=en
If the latter, yes, each location will have a page of its own and there are some tasks that work best on a page-by-page basis, but you can accomplish many of the tasks via bulk upload: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3217744?hl=en Cheers!
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RE: Omitted Results city-queries for the same brand on different subdomains?
The trend towards SERPs displaying distinctly different domains has been a steady one. Maybe if you google something as dominant as "Google" you'll see a few subdomains... maps.google.com, translate.google.com... but in general the power of a subdomain isn't nearly enough to overcome the next competitor / diversity of results.
As far as strategy goes, I wouldn't plan on dominating the SERPs with results 1-5, instead being one or two click attainable from the results within a given search is a better measurement of penetration. For example, if someone searching for your product gets:
- Your page
- An independent, positive review of your product
- Image results featuring your product multiple times
- A competitor
- Another review of your product
- ....
You're doing exceptionally well.
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RE: Does Google Penalize for Hiding Address?
Hi Miriam. Thanks! Honestly, the mailbox advice was a consideration purely from a privacy stand point as I wouldn't recommend anyone to use their home address for any business based activity regardless of what Google recommends.
But you're absolutely correct that Local is designed for physical addresses of public locations open for designated hours. If that's the setup that someone is pursuing than they should definitely make it as straightforward as possible. Thanks for emphasizing that point here and your superb answer below!
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RE: How to set up international SEO for english speaking countries
Without resources for multiple sites, you'll likely want to create separate folders for the regions, ex. yoursite.com/usa/, yoursite.com/uk/, yoursite.com/au/ and so on. To further guide users you could employ location based redirects to their applicable portion of the site. As far as Wordpress design goes you'll want to clearly label each section and state the the services and products being offered are (US/UK/AU) specific.
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RE: Effects of Anonymizing IP Addresses?
That's interesting! It makes me wonder how the law on anonymizing German IPs is effective at providing them with privacy if you're being told the original data is kept intact. On the page you linked to it seems to contradict that saying, "The full IP address is never written to disk in this case." Thanks for the follow-up and additional insights!
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RE: Google Mobile algo traffic issue?
Hi Luke. Yes, Google has been putting an emphasis on improving mobile, especially from a UX perspective. As such I've seen sites get the following message in GWT:
Fix mobile usability issues found on example.com
Google systems have tested ### pages from your site and found that ##% of them have critical mobile usability errors. The errors on these ### pages severely affect how mobile users are able to experience your website. These pages will not be seen as mobile-friendly by Google Search, and will therefore be displayed and ranked appropriately for smartphone users.
If you have access to their GWT you'll likely find the same with further details on what needs improving. But this ranking drop is very much an official stance from Google and you can find several blogs discussing it, for example: http://www.vpdm.ca/mobile-friendly-websites-important-to-google/.
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RE: Should pages with rel="canonical" be put in a sitemap?
I would just title them according to their view type. Try to put your most informative words as close to the front as possible so that it's easy to read in browser tabs, for example: Red Widgets, All Widgets, <$25 Widgets... etc. Meta description could probably be a repeat of the title tag. Make the title as UX friendly as possible.
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RE: My website backlinks decreased month over month for 3 campaigns what is the reason?
Hi Karen. Yes there was a recent update, please read about it here: http://moz.com/products/api/updates (that's the home of API update news btw). And here's the Q&A post discussing the specifics as to why link numbers fluctuated: http://moz.com/community/q/have-questions-about-the-jan-27th-mozscape-index-update-get-answers-here. Enjoy!
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RE: Noindex large productpages on webshop to counter Panda
I see. There's a pretty thorough discussion on a very similar situation here: http://moz.com/community/q/can-i-use-nofollow-tag-on-product-page-duplicated-content. Everett endorsed Monica's answer with, "... you might consider putting a Robots Noindex,Follow meta tag on the product pages. You'll need to rely on category pages for rankings in that case, which makes sense for a site like this." Monica's long term solution was to also work on getting specific user-generated content on as many product pages as possible. Cheers!
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RE: How valuable is a link with a DA 82 but a PA of 1?
I agree with Travis. In short, yes it's an excellent link. Like Travis mentions, getting caught up in the numbers can be misleading at times, and for a short hand of the sites and people you want to work with it's better to think of them as relationships. In this case, being connected to an official site that's reputable, spam-free, and exclusive is an excellent connection.