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Great advice guys re the links they certainly seem like the holy grail - I am not doing too bad creating them - I've only a small number but have been careful to try and get them from reputable sources.Google webmaster is picking these up as being in place; but alas at this stage hubspot , alexa, OSE, and SEO moz aren't recongnising them. I am hoping they will at somestage though!

thanks,

SInead

Thanks guys - I am following hubspots "9 Step On-Page Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Guide "

And it has this as part of their step 6, so didn't know that it was only going to be contributing 2% or so towards good ranking. To be honest at this stage I am getting desperate, following guideline after guideline and not getting anywhere, I figure that if I keep working towards best practice it will have to start paying dividends at some stage! Fingers cross - and thanks again for responses

I have been studying my competitor using a number of great tools suggested on this site, hubspot; opensiteexplorer,alexa and of course the competitive analysis tools here - and I really am getting confused about the results for one particular competitor.

here is a sample of some of the strange results coming up for them - that the domain age is 42 years old; That they have 5 blogs associated- when in reality they have zero. That their blogs are getting reweeted multiple times.

So the question is - how can I compete with this- or at this stage should I be looking at how they are doing this with a view to trying the same thing?

Thanks,
Sinead

I intend using Bold tags to add emphasis but I don't want to
actually show bold words
so have amended by css. are the B tags enough to help with SEO or will my amended
CSS damage the effect? Many thanks,Sinead

No I don't have more than one variant...

I have had exactly the same experience-  my ranking report on SEO moz report said I dropped >45 places; from 6th to somewhere outside the top 50 for a search term that I had been doing well on- I made no changes to that page, when I look in google now though I am back to 6th where I had been last week. So the question is; was SEOmoz report wrong or for the date in question 23rd of March or did Google drop my ranking down 45+ places and bring it back in less than 4 days?

Any help grately appreciated.

thanks,

Sinead

Many thanks - very clear

Hi Egol - thanks for the answer - I must have an incorrect understanding of what the competitive analysis does - my thinking was that the competitive analysis looks at what industrry experts considered to be the building blocks for an optimized site and they compared companies on this basis - but critically that this analysis suggested who would rank higher on SERPs

i.e if Company A and B are in direct competition but company A had far superior # of external linking sites, # of externally linking C- Blocks, Far superior total links that company A will rank higher for the most competitive search terms for that sector.

Am I right in thinking then that a domain authority score isn't what I should be looking to emulate if I want to achieve the same or better SERP ranking?

Thanks again,

Sinead

I'm finding this site great for getting at the information that I need but I am having trouble understanding what I see as conflicting Competitive Domain Analysis and keyword research results for companies in my sector.

My company is new to the sector we are in and I am tracking two really well established leaders (Moma and Poppa bear) and one company that is new to the sector (baby Bear) too.

When looking at the competitive domain analysis the Momma and Poppa Bear wipe the floor with baby bear (and of course me!) on every single criteria; but when I see who is actually ranking best for the most competitive keywords for our sector who wins...baby bear; I just dont understand it. What is the reason for the disparity between the domain analysis and actual performance?

Many thanks,

Sinead

Thanks so much for the answers so far - Is there anything that I should we doing to try and ensure that we are included in the next crawl - e.g. submitting a sitemap or similar?

Many thanks,

YGF