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I was curious if Domain Authority considers social signals. "We calculate this metric by combining all of our other link metrics—linking root domains, number of total links, MozRank,MozTrust, etc.—into a single score." Is Social included in the etc? I know you have some social data displayed in the results.

Google has this page on location pages. It's very useful but it doesn't say anything about handling the duplicate content a location page might have. Seeing as the loctions may have very similar services. Lets say they have example.com/location/boston, example.com/location/chicago, or maybe boston.example.com or chicago.example.com etc. They are landing pages for each location, housing that locations contact information as well as serving as a landing page for that location. Showing the same services/products as every other location. This information may also live on the main domains homepage or services page as well. My initial reaction agrees with this article: http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide - but I'm really asking what does Google expect? Does this location pages guide from Google tell us we don't really have to make sure each of those location pages are unique? Sometimes creating "unique" location pages feels like you're creating **doorway pages - **"Multiple pages on your site with similar content designed to rank for specific queries like city or state names". In a nutshell, Google's Guidelines seem to have a conflict on this topic: Location Pages: "Have each location's or branch's information accessible on separate webpages"
Doorway Pages: "Multiple pages on your site with similar content designed to rank for specific queries like city or state names"
Duplicate Content: "If you have many pages that are similar, consider expanding each page or consolidating the pages into one." Now you could avoid making it a doorway page or a duplicate content page if you just put the location information on a page. Each page would then have a unique address, phone number, email, contact name, etc. But then the page would technically be in violation of this page: Thin Pages: "One of the most important steps in improving your site's ranking in Google search results is to ensure that it contains plenty of rich information that includes relevant keywords, used appropriately, that indicate the subject matter of your content." ...starting to feel like I'm in a Google Guidelines Paradox! Do you think this guide from Google means that duplicate content on these pages is acceptable as long as you use that markup? Or do you have another opinion?

Moz's Keyword Difficulty tool is great. Minus one thing... it does't take the domain itself into it's equation. Of course it doesn't take a lot of other things into consideration too like relevancy of domain but lets at least start with adding domain authority to the equation. I've come up with simple math that allows you to take the domain authority of the target URL into consideration. The Equation KD = Moz Keyword Difficulty
DA = Domain Authority
DS = Domain Specific Keyword Difficulty (KD/DA)*KD = DS Equation Applied URL: atari.com
Keyword: classic video games
KD: 69
DA: 77
DS: 62 (69/77)*69=62 You will end up with numbers larger than 100, but it makes sense. If your domain authority is 10 and you're trying to compete with a difficulty of 90 then you should be scared to compete for that term and the number should reflect that. Thoughts? Other ideas?

If you had to choose one SEO metric to measure a site's SEO performance what would it be? I know you shouldn't use one metric, but lets say you had 10 seconds to assess how well a site was probably doing from an SEO perspective. What metric would it be? *I also asked this question on the inbound forms.

I've created a custom Google Segment which you can find here. Segment Settings: Organic Traffic Sessions with 1 visit. Sessions with less than 15 seconds time on site. To calculate Pogo rate then I looked at Pogo vs. Total organic and got the percentage of Pogo sessions. I tested a group of 20 sites and got 53% on average with a high of 87% and a low of 33%. What do you get? Any interesting insights?

Do you think putting blog posts on the root poses a disadvantage? Root: exmple.com/post-name/ Folder: example.com/blog/post-name

Does anyone know of a tool that can get you the total, or close to it, social shares an entire domain has received? I know of... http://www.sharedcount.com/ - but this only gets shares for the entered URL not the entire domain. http://www.pagesort.com/ - this seems to dig a little deeper but not deep enough. I know opensite explorer gets some data as well but still seems very limited.

We've put together this process over the past year that has shown success when it comes to sites that appear to be hit by Panda. The idea was to put together a process that would allow us to give our clients an understanding of the problem at hand and metrics we can use to explain how recovery is going. Would love to hear your opinion or if you have a different/similar strategy.

I know I'm not the only one that's seen this. After Penguin 2.0 some obvious blackhat SEOed sites flew up in the rankings. There's obviously a hole that hasn't been closed. I'm surprised it's been a month and that hole still hasn't been patched. I have no problem with other legit companies out ranking ours for various keywords. In that case I can feel alright knowing it's just something they were able to do that I wasn't but when I see complete blackhat sites ranking that's a whole different story. Estimated traffic before and after Penguin 2.0: http://goo.gl/gurXt What are they doing that's blackhat? Hidden text - compare the cached version vs. the live http://goo.gl/YYGDK 301ing lots of domains, many irrelevant. http://goo.gl/RjOJu Using a trade marked brand (steelers) - not SEO related but I'm sure the NFL wouldn't be happy. Linking between other domains they own. Notice how spammy these sites are. http://pittsburghwebdevelopment.org/2013/06/23/website-development-firm-website-design-pittsburgh/ http://seoinpgh.com/2013/06/23/website-designer-pittsburgh-affordable-web-design-in-pittsburgh-pa/ They were inflating their social presence. Wanted to show you but looks like twitter already took care of them https://twitter.com/seopittsburgh . Also making client sites link to them . http://pittsburghpaplumbing.com/2013/06/19/pittsburgh-plumbersplumbers-in-pittsburgh-paplumber-pittsburgh/ I've talked to other people and they've seen similar things. Thoughts, opinions? Can you find one good reason why this site would rank well for a competitive phrase?

On one of my sites I've noticed some strange links from Google Webmaster Tools recent links feature. They are pingbacks/blog comments but they are using keyword anchor text and linking to my site. I know we are not doing this. Should I be concerned about this possibly being negative SEO? Here's a sample (be careful, shady site)

Are there any tools where I can enter say 5 keywords and it will look at the top 10 sites for each of those keywords then return which sites show up the most.