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DA and PA are Moz metrics not google ones.  That's the first thing to note.  Moz recently made some changes to their way of calculating the metrics that made them a more accurate predictor of the ranking capability of a page.

So basically they are an integer that's arrived at by a calculation involving the number of links pointing to a page and the power and authority of those links. DA is global, so one domain in the pond of the whole internet and PA is a local to your individual site.  So each page you own in the pond of your whole site.

So how do you use these metrics?

1. find out whether google is ranking links and a pages 'power' or the content therein.  Sometimes the first three results all have very high DA of 60-70 and 80+.  This means that to compete you'll probably need to get a ton of links to your page to be in that top three.

Other times the top three can have little or no domain power and just be great articles.  This is more common now.

2. You can look at the PA or your individual pages and rank them according to PA. Then see where each ranks and whether there are any statistical outliers.  Sometimes a page with low PA will be doing well.  That's great.  Other times a page will bomb and if you find that it has a low PA then you might want to insert some internal links to it to bump it up a bit.

By way of additional research look here:

https://moz.com/blog/the-new-link-explorer-is-here - rand on DA updates

https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/ - matt cutts on pagerank

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/pagerank-patent/250603/ - roget montti on pagerank patent and lots of _science, yo. _

Go get em!

Thanks all - and everyone listen to Miriam, she is another local search power hitter.  While I'm here I forgot to mention local citations.  I outsourced my citations to a guy actually on this forum.  I won't mention the business because I don't want to come across like I'm spamming the forum but you might be able to figure out who it is.  He is a lovely Russian guy who has a large citations business and their audit really helped me save a bunch of time and they got all our citations out and perfect in a week or so.  That's one less thing to do and something that for a few hundred you can safely outsource if you're short on time.

I am a firm believer that life's too short for citations. And I'm bad at making typos so it's a dangerous game for me to be in!

Also found a smidge over 1000 in SEM Rush.  That figures though because you have about 50 x 5 in your navigation alone.  Then the best sellers and then all the gifts and sliders and footer etc.  THere's an awful lot on the page.  Every basic advertising book warns about the common mistake people make when advertising - they write everything they do on one ad (or page).

Perhaps you need to organise things a little more.  Read up on data architecture.  It's a big word but not a particularly difficult subject.  They are big on DA at google so the inference is that they use it to rank sites.  I've also found in my own SEO experience that finding the defined edges of topics and sorting into those topics really works.  There is no right answer as usual, it's a game of trial and error.  You need to test everything and add / subtract subtopics from pages and swop them around to find the optimum position.  No tool will do this for you - pen and paper is best.

I would say about 100-200 is the maximum amount you want to dilute the links coming from a page.  I think 200 is ok if it's ecommerce.   People say it doesn't work anymore but pagerank sculpting works for me.  I don't do it intentionally but there is a strong correlation between number of links x 'link from' page's authority and target pages authority.  When I link over about 250 links this stops working - presumably because the links are spread too thinly.

So get to grips with information architecture and then look at sensible topics for a page.   Or just go to another page like yours that's ranking well and steal their IA, topics and internal linking strategy.  Learning new stuff is great but plagiarism is quicker. 

This is a great challenge you have here because it's 100% achievable. These are some things to consider- it's not exhaustive by any means.

1. Set up your google my business profile and get it all optimised with the right categories & seed the Q&A part and offers with a good introductory offer and some frequently asked questions

2. Watch this: https://moz.com/blog/local-businesses-need-websites

3. Seriously consider changing the name of your company to London Removals - as this will really really help things.

4. Start collecting google reviews (not from the same office as they won't show up)

5. Add Schema markup (local business) in the datahighlighter

6. Set up all your keywords and content inside Moz or your favourite SEO tool and start watching the rankings

7. Optimise your homepage with London removals in the name of business, permalink, first paragraph, one of the H1's, meta description and image Alt.

8. Start writing content based on the main local keyword topics.  Don't focus on keywords but on one topic for each article.  Think about creating the best article you can that exhaustively covers that topic and make it 10X better than the current one on google.

9. Speak to your customers and find out what information they want to know and write about it

10. Set aside two hours a day learning from Youtube and Moz about SEO strategies and possibly speak to or follow Joy Hawkins, she's the queen of local search (sorry other queens and princesses of local) I learned local SEO in about 8 months this way and was able to rank locally for everything in Liverpool.  London is different.  Perhaps you should focus on a London Borough to make it easier.  So call the business Removals North West London or Removals South London.  There are enough people in one Borough to give you plenty of customers and make the job of SEO a little easier.  Remember that the most important signal is LOCATION!.  So you'll do much better being mega removals Westminster or Mega removals Southwark etc.  I'd say the volumes are easy enough (about 500/month for removals north London) Then once the business grows you can buy another unit in another postcode and rinse and repeat.

That should give you plenty to be going on with. Good luck!

Haha lol.  My business does 40k Net Profit a month and Starbucks is still too expensive!

But seriously, I have had loads of fake reviews, mainly from our competitors but have noticed some random ones creeping in.  Not patients at the practice but instead very generic.  It reminds me of the webform spam which started off as porn / viagra and then became more insidious so as to get past my gatekeepers or get a click or response from the newer receptionists at the practice.  They have started saying nice things like "great article, I loved reading this, can I have an appointment please for whitening".  The girls on front of house always respond to them because that's how they are trained and they are too busy usually to spot the email address that's from a bangladeshi pharmacy (very common one) or some sort of mens health company.

I try to stop them but al my actual enquiries end up in the trash.  It's a nightmare.  But spammers are adapting.  They are not ever going away. The more tech we use to screen them the smarter they get.

I have had lots of success getting google to remove reviews though.  It's not as hard as everyone says if you have the data and stats and evidence for Google.

Best thread ever.

Can we talk about Rand's book here? Just delete me mods if it's not appropriate or interesting to anyone.

But I thought it was great - no they're not paying me - it put me in the mind of my absolute fave book of all time 'Trust Me I'm Lying' by Ryan Holiday.  I mean rand is nothing like Ryan Holiday but the style of complete and utter openness and fearless criticism of what is bad in the world really gave me a lot to think about.

I can highly recommend it.  And to be honest (not transparent - those are different) to be honest don't be tempted to give up in the first few chapters thinking it's a rags to riches personal story.  Because it develops into a real goldmine of technical advice and the sort of advice that you can't get anywhere - emotional advice.  Being a founder is hard and I'd say it's well worth a read (or listen in my case)

You'll be surprised if you've only ever seen him on Whiteboard Friday.  It's like a different rand altogether.

What did you all think?  I remember some [person] trolling him once for some talk he gave at an SEO conference saying 'stick to whiteboard Friday - nobody wants to know about your life'  But you really do.  Because you need to know that your business is different from everyone else's.  I'm an optimist and think that in marketing the next decade is going to be the decade of authenticity.  And this is a great place to start.

_Moderator's Note: This question has been edited to comply with Moz's TAGFEE Code and Community Etiquette Guidelines. _

She certainly fits the genius bill for sure.  That's funny because my PPC guy was saying there's loads of CRO opportunities.  You're right - I'm becoming obsessed.  All this gamification of apps is making me crazy.  Seeing just a 5% drop in traffic will ruin my day and we could have converted £25,000 of new patients lol.  I'm not even kidding either. I'm getting bummed out by stupid stuff.

Who was it who said you cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.  I think it's time to bin the dashboards for a week and come up with some new thinking.

Thanks for your advice. I'm also gonna hit Joy up at Sterling.  Even her lowliest agency tea-boy could probably move the needle for our site.

Yeah you nailed it as usual.

Schema stars just don't show up on homepages.  You're probably right.  A homepage is a homepage and it's going to kill my local rankings to try to mess around with a 'dentist Liverpool page'  Should I take all the schema review attempts (that failed) off the homepage?  Is it damaging things?

I went through a big phase of consolidating content and it worked really well and now I'm number one for lots of stuff (or sometimes one and two!) I'm experimenting with more specific 'topics' now trying to write more content - also trying not to fall foul of maccabbees or beinng so specific that I just don't get enough traffic/keywords on each page to get them ranking.

It's all testing and I really feel now like I'm in a maze just randomly testing routes and trying to stick to best practice but doing it blindly.  I audit my competition every time I do a search.  Sometimes I just don't know.  The auditing tools all come up with different ideas and they are less and less reliable as google is taking these giant leaps.  But that's the point.  If we were able to work it out then the whole thing would fall apart.

One thing that has had a HUGE effect is all the DCMA's i've been putting in and disavowing dodgy domains.  I really don't think google is as good at ignoring them as they say they are.

I've experimented with Ad Words (appearing first on all the mobile searches as a sort of branding exercise) but i'm not sure that's helped with CTR like the research suggests.

Sometimes I want to pay some pure genius to look at it for me and run a really comprehensive report but I know I'm just going to pay for a crappy SEM Rush branded PDF report or a something straight from an SEO SAAS product.  I need someone with a brain to look at it for me.  I feel like i'm at the limit of what I'm actually mentally capable of and it's frustrating me.

I also think that it's sometimes not me moving the needle but the whims of google.  Search console is showing some really strange results with demand like some days there'll be 3x the impressions but I don't see any featured snippets or reasons.

Im sorry - i'm ranting at you.

Yeah pricing customised things is difficult.  I tell my patients getting a smile makeover is like buying a car.  And they say 'what sort of car' and I say - 'well you've just answered the price question - it's up to you not me'

Remember manuals and technical content will be duplicated from the manufacturers sites so will harm not help. Also can you get links from the manufacturers like in their 'find a supplier' pages.

Also find everyone in the office with a degree and get them to join their university alumni and write a piece about your company and how they've done well in their careers.  Universities will publish these in their blogs and blast your DA into outer space.

I would ignore what other people are doing.  The charity sector is not always known for it's super-efficient and industry leading digital marketing activities.  So although the advice that John Mondt gives is sound for many industries, he is right to include the phrase 'what's working' for them.  So don't just copy their link profile or go after links before carefully analysing them for quality and their potential to be relevant in the future.  I work in Dentistry and copying other dentists link profiles is more likely to land me with a penalty than take my DA anywhere special.

Charities tend to be filled with people (at the senior levels) who have pretty impressive backgrounds and CV's.  Also you're in a very strong position because charities are good for the world so no matter who you contact, you're always going to be coming from a place of positivity and wanting to make the world a better place.  This is huge.  So I would round up everyone at your charity on the board who belongs to any university, trusted organisation, professional body or other trusted domains and reach out to them for guest posting ideas and shameless plugs of your organisation.

Link building for a non for profit is about just putting together a great pitch about how you're helping the world and then asking for help to spread the word.  Don't be afraid to be totally authentic and honest about wanting to improve the visibility of your website (short of asking for links which is against the guidelines)

Hope this helps.  But I was looking at a big charity just now and there are CBE's on the board, people with honorary degrees from universities and people who are members of huge and trusted organisations.  So as a linkbuilder, i'd reach out to those people and put together a strategy of how to leverage those relationships to gain links.  Or in this case 'do PR' as white hat linkbuilding and PR are now pretty much synonymous. (used to say not synonymous, sorry, PR and linkbuilding are the same - that's a typo)

hope this helps.  PS: I love helping charities so maybe hit me up and I could help you in more detail. Obviously i'm not going to charge you but a mention from a charity website is always a great thing for us.  We just did a huge campaign for international women's day that bumped our DA three clear points.  Win!

You're playing a really dangerous game here.  The google algorithm maps the blogs to find correlations between who's posting on them and an unnatural link profile.  PBNs are in direct breach of the rules so you may get a great result but you also might get a penalty and be wiped out.

So it's up to you.  Sometimes this sort of thing works but you're playing Russian roulette with your revenue stream.  How much revenue are you making from google? Is it your only channel?  Can you afford to lost the entire channel for - say for example - two months while you try to undo the manual action for webspam?

I've seen the sophistication of the PBN products google uses first hand and it's not something I would want to mess with.  but if you are wanting to make a quick buck and aren't worried about the long term viability of Google as a channel then go for it.  But be aware that over-optimising anchor text is the sort of thing that will get google looking more closely at your site and then with the fact that the PBN has signals that show it's a PBN and then you'll wish you'd not ever tried to cheat.

This is effectively cheating. It's black hat. So proceed at your own risk.  Maybe you need to go over and ask the folks on some other forums where they are more into this type of stuff.  They will know how to get the best short term gains from things like PBNs.

No way.  Avoid at all costs.  Directories are completely useless for linkbuilding in 2018.

DIRECTORIES DO NOT WORK IN 2018 - you will harm your site. Directories are not the same as local citations.  Citation building is very important for a new site and you can do this manually with Moz Local or Get it done for yuou by Whitespark.  They are pretty cheap and do a decent job.

And I'm not just being a nay-sayer I've actually tested about 30 out all pointing to homepage and deep pages inside my site and it harmed them or didn't make any difference at all.  They were mostly paid and all used to have a good reputation but it's a bad strategy.  The only one that's remotely decent is called Joe Ant - that's showing up as a green light but it's referring no traffic at all so google's likely just ignoring it.

And in the future as things move on - more and more directories are going to get de-indexed and having links from de-indexed sites hurts your rankings.  I did my little test in January this year so it's bang up to date and I spent £1,350 on paid directories ranging from £5 a pop to £20 to some that were £250 and they were national and local and none of them worked. I ended up having to disavow them.

There are much better ways to get your first few links: Linkbuilding to stand the test of time and how to get your first 50 links

Also there's a great little tool called SEO Profiler - it's super cheap and has lots of bugs and it's pretty crappy compared with Moz or the big boys but I use it for three things: 1) top three position benchmarking, 2) it has a great schema builder that creates J-son and schema for you by magic and 3) it has this exhaustive list of 'starter backlinks' that is a great place to look for link opportunities that are nice and easy if you've got a new site or are starting out.

It's right what you say but i've seen some evidence that google is going even further now.  It's about establishing what are the doorways into your site from the serps.  Some people might be looking for just 'candy' and they may see your site in the serps.  But probably not since that's supremely competitive.

So the most efficient way I've found is to divide all the content up into 'categories' or topics.  So these could be toffees, mints, chews etc. Then you must take a view on what the user wants.  Do you think there are people out there who want to see pages about only hard mints with soft mints on another page.  Or have both of them on the same page. If you get too granular then you might fall foul of the new maccabees update that penalises for having loads of articles targeting keyword variations.

To give you an example from my business, I have veneers, dental implants, whitening and routine dentistry.  Then on each of those pages I have before and afters, prices, procedure, and pretty much everything on there using H2's and schema to pick up specific queries in blue as hyperlinks in the serps.

Comprehensiveness is very important. If I want my pages to rank they must include EVERYTHING users want to know about that thing. So for 'mint candy' i'll want to see hard, soft, sugar free etc etc.

Always be testing. I've had success incorporating reports and videos into the pages too.  So you could have a report about how your candy is made or a commercial from a mint candy company or whatever.

But most important is to model the topics of the high performing competitors and be comprehensive and helpful and answer the query. Don't worry too much about internal linking so long as the links are natural, use anchor text and obey your structure and hierarchy of topics.

My home page doesn't rank for anything. But we make millions of pounds a year from our Veneers, Implants and Whitening pages. So maybe you need to focus less on the homepage.

Ok so you have two avenues here and people focus usually on one and not the other.

I'm a local dentist and struggled with the map pack.  I find it easy to rank number one for terms with a local identifier like 'product+location' which always trigger the maps.

The problems you might encounter are that the maps are great but they take the user to the home page.  This is problematic because I'd actually rather them be taken directly to my product page and not have to navigate around to find what they're looking for.  So maps are great but they do have this annoying limitation in UX and I find from looking at user feedback from recordings (like from Hotjar) that they can get lost and pogo back to the serp - always bad.

The other limitation is NAP-W.  So it can be worth getting your NAP absolutely squared away - which it sounds like you have.  But I got some great results from doing an audit with a company called whitespark who basically do it for you for a few hundred dollars.  Moz also have a great tool but it's not working here in the UK at the moment.  However, my NAP was in a mess so you may well not need these although it's a small investment and got us from 7% to 14% in the maps (out of thousands of positions) so that's a LOT of map 1-3 positions.

So places you must go are:

1. INDUSTRY SPECIFIC (like universities and local clubs and trading links with local businesses and local bloggers)  Bloggers want money and for hardly anythign they will publish nice advertorial that will move the needle.

2. LOCAL - It has to be local.  google 'Hyper local citations' for some examples.

3. BUSINESS - and this is the one people neglect.  You sell a product but you are also a business so get in touch with local business groups, start up organisations and write articles about business.  Then you have two sources of links.  Your product and general business stuff too.  This is how I've had some massive successes.  Local newspapers will write about small businesses and the people and stories behind them.  Use this.

Avoid signing up to rubbish local directories.  They don't work.  I read in Search Engine Roundtable - (which is reputable) that there are still some good directories out there but I ran them through my systems and they are all absolute rubbish.  I respected that company and really lost a lot of respect for them when they were touting these crappy listing companies.  Probably paid. Who knows.

Remember NAP and directories are different.  You need to be listed in relevant citation sources like local newspaper directories for businesses but the old web directories are a waste of your time and money.

If you have professionals working in any of your client organisations get them to write for their university alumni - if they went to uni in their city this will skyrocket your local pack presence.

But if you are new it can just take time.  So be patient and don't try anything shady to try to game the system.  Google is getting smarter and smarter and what worked even 6 months ago will get you penalised after the huge quality and link algo changes that happened in March, April and possibly in May too (of this year)

Also remember link building cannot be done without building relationships with real people.  It's essentially now PR.  Doing real things with real people in the real world.  Gone are the days of basement linkbuilding.  Use your brain not the tools. And don't copy other sites because what they did 9 months ago might now be banned in the eyes of google. Sure model their successes but don't blindly follow their strategies - they might be working with less reputable agencies and you'll do yourself harm.

Yeah I agree there.  It's going to rival those other tools.  Ahrefs is kind of king of link metrics but I can become lost in the data and sometimes lose sight of all the other stuff I should be doing apart from link-building.  It's almost addictive and I find myself obsessing over the metrics that sometimes don't have an impact on my rankings.

The most impressive thing about Moz is the position tracking which is 100% accurate for me on a local and national level.  I'd love to see historical positions displayed in a chart.  Not sure whether I can do that in Moz already.  But it's really useful to look back at changes you've made and try to correlate them with position changes rather than just see this week's snapshot.  There's a tool called SEO profiler that does this but the problem is the positions are always wildly inaccurate! - so it's a great feature that's sometimes useless if it's not accurate. I'm thinking of jacking in my subscription to them if they can't even get the positions right. Also SEM Rush is showing all my rankings wrongly at the moment.  It's nothing like forecasting my traffic accurately so I figure It's also not forecasting my competitors positions accurately either.  I'm frequently going back to google and doing the work manually to see what the real positions are.  Moz does this very well. Always 100% bang on.

And then this Q&A forum.  Which is worth more than all the tools in the world put together IMO.

NOT  is the answer.

Directory submissions are the WORST way to spend your time and resources.  They just don't work. And I'm not being 'holier than thou' because I actually tried them out last year (because I test everything and have a fairly small site so thought it might work) but it didn't.  There was no benefit and the directories I used were all paid with links to internal pages.  It took me a couple of days (+ about $500) and after a month I ended up having to disavow most of them and then the others kicked me off after 6 months wanting more money!  It's a total joke.  Run by total jokers.

Even automating it is a very bad waste of time.  **If you're a local business and are actually talking about 'citations' then that's a different thing altogether. ** But directories died years ago.  Many of them aren't even in the index or google has algorithmically discounted them because they have literally too many links spread too thinly so each link carries a tiny proportion of juice.  And the ones that are in the index come back with very high toxic score in SEM Rush and AHrefs with the exception of one called Joe Ant.  That one is showing green lights.  So I didn'd disavow but i've not seen one single referral from them.

I also noticed an ENORMOUS increase in spam following my little test.  I get hundreds of submissions to my forms and site and even people calling.  I've also seen a significant increase in strange black-hat links added to my list.  This is not 'negative seo' but the scrapers and black hat people crawl the directories to find people still dumb enough to pay them (like me!!!) and see them as easy targets for other dreadful SEO products.

Avoid. Avoid. Avoid.

Absolutely correct.  Google disregards TM and R symbols so use them when you legally should for yours and other products and it will not impact your exact match SEO efforts.   I think they have a small effect on CTR in the SERPS because they show you mean business and are more professional and are also being professional when using the hard won TM's and R's of other brands (which is a legal requirement and you can get into trouble for not using them)

Did you know that if another brand doesn't have a R or a TM then you can mention them directly in your adwords too?  Just a fun fact.

This is a great challenge you have here because it's 100% achievable. These are some things to consider- it's not exhaustive by any means.

1. Set up your google my business profile and get it all optimised with the right categories & seed the Q&A part and offers with a good introductory offer and some frequently asked questions

2. Watch this: https://moz.com/blog/local-businesses-need-websites

3. Seriously consider changing the name of your company to London Removals - as this will really really help things.

4. Start collecting google reviews (not from the same office as they won't show up)

5. Add Schema markup (local business) in the datahighlighter

6. Set up all your keywords and content inside Moz or your favourite SEO tool and start watching the rankings

7. Optimise your homepage with London removals in the name of business, permalink, first paragraph, one of the H1's, meta description and image Alt.

8. Start writing content based on the main local keyword topics.  Don't focus on keywords but on one topic for each article.  Think about creating the best article you can that exhaustively covers that topic and make it 10X better than the current one on google.

9. Speak to your customers and find out what information they want to know and write about it

10. Set aside two hours a day learning from Youtube and Moz about SEO strategies and possibly speak to or follow Joy Hawkins, she's the queen of local search (sorry other queens and princesses of local) I learned local SEO in about 8 months this way and was able to rank locally for everything in Liverpool.  London is different.  Perhaps you should focus on a London Borough to make it easier.  So call the business Removals North West London or Removals South London.  There are enough people in one Borough to give you plenty of customers and make the job of SEO a little easier.  Remember that the most important signal is LOCATION!.  So you'll do much better being mega removals Westminster or Mega removals Southwark etc.  I'd say the volumes are easy enough (about 500/month for removals north London) Then once the business grows you can buy another unit in another postcode and rinse and repeat.

That should give you plenty to be going on with. Good luck!

If you can do that then I'll be able to save about $500 straight up a month in my subscriptions budget and spend MUCH less time between tools.  SEO heaven. That about sums it up.  And more time to focus on making my people happy and helping my patients smile.