Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi There,

Thanks for writing in and sorry that you are running into some issues with the Keyword Difficulty tool. Unfortunately, Google has changed the way that they present rankings information, so we have had to make some changes to our collection in order to keep up with these changes, I'm afraid that this has caused some issues with providing the real time data for the Keyword Difficulty tool and the tool is currently unresponsive. We are hopeful to have the tool working again within the week, but at this time, unfortunately, we do not have an exact ETA for when that tool will be up and running again. I thank you for your patience while we work to resolve this issue.

We will be posting updates on this issue in our Known Issues forum when they become available. You can access that forum here: https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/22457872-keyword-difficulty-and-rank-tracker-issues

I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

-Chiaryn

Hey Sean,

Thanks for writing in and sorry that you are running into some issues with the Keyword Difficulty tool. Unfortunately, Google has changed the way that they present rankings information, so we have had to make some changes to our collection in order to keep up with these changes, I'm afraid that this has caused some issues with providing the real time data for the Keyword Difficulty tool and the tool is currently unresponsive. At this time, unfortunately, we do not have an ETA for when that tool will be up and running again, but we are hopeful to have the issue resolved by the end of the week. I thank you for your patience while we work to resolve this issue.

I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

-Chiaryn

Hey Michael,

Thanks for your patience. I've heard back from the engineers and it looks like like co.pt, co.nr, and co.ee are registrars and not official cctlds. Technically, those co.pt, co.nr, and co.ee would be considered root domains that sell hosting to "subdomains" such as blackjackonline or roleta, etc. Given this, we are actually presenting root domain info correctly.

We are planning on creating subdomain based metrics for pages like these to make the information more relevant to the site being researched in the future. I hope this clears things up a bit. Let me know if you have any other questions.

-Chiaryn

Hi Michael,

Thanks for following up with these great examples! Unfortunately, it looks like you're right; our index is considering co.pt or co.nr to be the domain, rather than blackjackinline or roleta online (etc.).

I'm going to send this information to our engineers so we can work on getting this information corrected in the index. I'm afraid it may take some time to fix this issue and we most likely won't be able to resolve the problem for the current index. I'm really sorry about that!

Please let me know if I can help you with anything else in the meantime.

-Chiaryn

Hi Martin,

Thanks for writing in. I just took a look at your campaign and it seems that everything has updated correctly at this time. Sometimes, the email regarding updates will be sent out before the information is actually updated in the web app interface, so that may be what happened with your campaign. I'm really sorry about that!

Can you take another look at your campaign and let me know if you're still seeing any issues?

Thanks again,

Chiaryn

Hi Michael,

Thanks for writing in with a great question. It would be really helpful if you could provide me with some specific examples of domains you are looking for the .co.nr, .co.pt, and .co.ee TLDs so I can look into this more directly. It will really help me investigate your question to have more specific examples.

If you aren't comfortable sharing the domain information here in the public forum, please let me know and I will create a private support email for you.

I look forward to hearing back soon.

-Chiaryn

Hi Cody,

Thanks for writing in and sorry for the confusion. It looks like there was a syncing error when we updated the information at the beginning of the month. I have reset the connection to your account and you should be seeing better data for that time period.

Please let me know if you are still seeing any issues on your account.

-Chiaryn

So glad I could help get this figured out! Sometimes it just takes another set of eyes.

-Chiaryn

Hi there,

I looked into your campaign and it seems that this is happening because of where your canonical tags are pointing. These pages are considered duplicates because their canonical tags point to different URLs. For example, accessories/lights.html?cat=78&price=-100 is considered a duplicate of accessories/lights/safety-lights.html?manufacturer=514 because the canonical tag for the first page is accessories/lights.html while the canonical for the second URL is accessories/lights/safety-lights.html.

Since the canonical tags point to different pages it is assumed that accessories/lights.html and accessories/lights/safety-lights.html are likely to be duplicates themselves.

Here is how our system interprets duplicate content vs. rel canonical:

Assuming A, B, C, and D are all duplicates,

• If A references B as the canonical, then they are not considered duplicates
• If A and B both reference C as canonical, A and B are not considered duplicates of each other
• If A references C as a canonical, A and B are considered duplicated
• If A references C as canonical, B references D, then A and B are considered duplicates

The examples you've provided actually fall into the fourth example I've listed above.

I hope this clears things up. Please let me know if you have any other questions.

-Chiaryn

Hi Nathan,

Thanks for writing in. We did have an issue where a few campaigns were seeing calendar icons rather than actual rankings during the week of October 9th that may have affected your campaign. Unfortunately, we don't have a way to provide data from a week that was missed because there isn't an index of historical rankings that we would have access to. I'm very sorry about that!

The issue that affected your campaign has been corrected and you should not experience this same issue again. I truly apologize for the inconvenience this causes. Please let me know if you have any questions or if I can help you with anything else.

-Chiaryn

Hi Martin,

Thanks for writing in. Because the number of internal links on the page is something that is considered to be a low importance factor and nofollowed links provide less link juice than followed links, we currently don't provide this information on the On-Page analysis. If you would like to see the number of internal nofollowed links on a page, I would recommend using Open Site Explorer to pull that data.

We are always looking for ways to improve out products, so I will forward your request to include the information on nofollowed links on the On-Page reports to our product team. Hopefully, we'll see that information added sometime in the future.

Please let me know if you have any other questions.

-Chiaryn

Hi Amanda,

Thanks for writing in. The way to get SEOmoz to show ranking data for location specific results would be to add the city or state name to the keyword. For example, if you are looking for results for pizza places in San Francisco, you would want to add the keyword as pizza San Francisco rather than just pizza. Our system is set the provide ranking information for what most users would see, so adding the location to the keyword will help narrow the results down.

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any other questions.

-Chiaryn

Thanks for following up with me. As I mentioned, the keyword difficulty score is actually based primarily on the websites that are already ranking for the site and how hard it would be to knock those pages out of the top 10 results. If the pages ranking for that keyword, even if the search volume for that keyword is low, it would be difficult to beat the pages that are already ranking.

For example, the keyword "clinique visuelle chibougamau" is considered to be a competitve keyword because there are several sites ranking for that keyword that have a very high domain authority (http://screencast.com/t/Y1SiElwUbGd) and several that have a moderately high domain authority (http://screencast.com/t/vtIlKWyLT), so it would be very difficult to push those pages out of the rankings because powerful sites tend to dominate these results and links in quantity and quality (at both the domain and page level) are required to earn top ranking to push those site out of the rankings.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any other questions.

-Chiaryn

Hi There,

Thanks for writing in. We do index French pages and the tool uses domain and page authority plus the mozrank/moztrust of the top 10 results to create a difficulty score on an algorithmic scale. When you run a report in the Keyword Difficulty tool, we provide the authority information for the top 10 pages. If you let me know the keyword you are looking at, I can take a look at the top 10 results and let you know if the percentage seems accurate.

-Chiaryn

Hi Jenny,

Thanks for writing in.

There isn't a way to sort by date in OSE because the index is updated to a new, current index with each update (usually about once a month) and it isn't compared against previous indexes, so each link in the current index has been discovered again that month, even if it has been in previous indexes. Technically, the way our index is created means that all of the links in the current index are "discovered" or "rediscovered" within the past 3-4 weeks. We don't retain historical link data in the index because we think it is important to show the most current data that we can so our index doesn't necessarily show you what are considered new link, just what would be considered current links.

We do show historical link metrics regarding the number of links and linking root domains in the link analysis section of the campaign web app, but I'm afraid that they don't show specific links in the historical section.

Let me know if you have any other questions about OSE.

-Chiaryn

Hi Kyu,

Unfortunately, our crawler does not report if there are issues crawling your site due to JS or Flash, as it is actually unable to parse either of those languages so it does not process any information in those languages. Google's crawler is much more sophisticated than ours, as Host1 points out, so they may be able to parse your site and index it more thoroughly than we can.

Please let me know if you have any other questions.

-Chiaryn

Hi There,

Thanks for writing in.

You may be seeing this discrepancy because we only provide the option to check Google Belgium (which defaults to Dutch) in Rank Tracker, rather than breaking Google Belgium into language specific engines, as we do in the campaign. It seems that, in the campaign, you are are tracking the campaign under Google Belgium-French, which may mean that the system is pulling rankings from different datacenters and the results can be different between the two languages.

It's also important to note that Rank Tracker is an older tool that works off of a completely different system than the campaign rankings, but we are working to align it with our campaign rankings collection and include more of the search engine options that you have with the full campaign.

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any further questions.

-Chiaryn

Hi Martin,

Thanks for writing in and sorry for any confusion. I took a look at your campaigns and I do see that your On-Page reports seems to be working, so I'm afraid I'll need more information to look into the issue. Can you please let me know the keyword and URL combination that you are having issues with? If you would like to keep your campaign information confidential, please let me know and I will create a ticket in our email support system for you.

I look forward to hearing back soon.

-Chiaryn

Hi Virginia,

Thanks for writing in and sorry for the confusion. I took a look at your On-Page reports and it does look like this is a bug and it only seems to be happening with the A grade reports. I'm going to create a ticket in our help desk so I can have our engineers look into the issue. You will receive an email with the details from our system as soon as the ticket is created and I will update you there when I have any further information.

-Chiaryn

Glad to help!

Hi There,

One important thing to note about Open Site Explorer is that the information for a site defaults to page specific metrics, while the campaign information will show you domain metrics. For example, if your competitor's site is www.example.com Open Site Explorer will show you only the links that point directly to that URL as a default while the campaign will show you the total number of link to all of the pages on the example.com root domain.

You can pull the root domain information by changing the of the filter on the Inbound Links tab (http://screencast.com/t/uxI55g8Noh) or going to the Compare Link Metrics tab (http://screencast.com/t/cXHEs0mpGK) in Open Site Explorer.

I hope this clears things up. Please let me know if you have any other questions.

Chiaryn

Hi Luis,

Thanks for writing in and sorry for the confusion. Unfortunately, it looks like the reason we aren't able to crawl past the splash page is the the "Enter" link is in Javascript, which our crawler can't parse so we aren't able to crawl through that link. Google even occasionally has issues crawling through Javascript links. For this reason, it’s important to have an actual html link on your homepage and other prominent navigation areas of your website.

I'm afraid we still wouldn't be able to crawl the campaign if you try to set it up as www.sample.com/home.php because the .php suffix indicates an individual file on the site, and the campaign can't be set up for anything smaller than a subfolder. Unfortunately, the way the site is set up right now isn't compatible with our crawler but, if you change the "Enter" link to an html link, we should be able to enter the site with no problem.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any other questions.

Chiaryn

Hi There,

Sorry that your graphs aren't loading properly. It isn't normal for the graph to take such a long time to load and there doesn't seem to be any issue with your Analytics connection. I checked all three of your campaigns and I am seeing that the organic traffic graphs are taking longer than normal to load. I'm seeing all of them eventually load, but it does seem that some of them are taking about a full minute so I will need to send this to our engineers to look into. I'm going to create a ticket in our help desk and use that to communicate with you and the engineers about this issue. You will receive an email from our help desk once the ticket has been created with a link to access the ticket and you can reply to me there with any further information or questions you may have.

-Chiaryn

Hi Ian,

I apologize sincerely for the issues you've seen during your free trial. Sadly, you joined us at a difficult time and I understand that you've had a very frustrating experience, which is never a good way to start out with a tool. I've responded to the help ticket you sent in, but I wanted to follow up here to make sure that you know that your trial period has been extended for another month.

Both the Rank Tracker and Keyword Difficulty tools should be working again, apart from an issue with the AdWords data on the Keyword Difficulty tool. Unfortunately, Google is currently not allowing us to provide that data, but we are working on a solution to provide that information in the future.

To all of the other users that wrote in, thanks for sharing your good experiences with Ian and I apologize again for the difficulties of the past few weeks. We are working on making things better so it is easier for us to recover from these types of machine failures in the future and we truly appreciate your support.

If any user is still experiencing any issues with their campaigns or has any questions about the issues we've had recently, please feel free to write into us at help@seomoz.org.

Thanks again,

Chiaryn

Hi There,

Unfortunately, due to the limitations for our API, we are only able to export the top 25 links from each linking root domain, including links from your internal domain. We do provide you the ability to look at those links within Open Site Explorer, but I'm afraid that the system doesn't have the capability of exporting more than 25 links from each domain at this time.

I apologize for the inconvenience that may cause.

-Chiaryn

Hi Dean,

Thanks for writing in and sorry for the confusion. I logged into your account and checked several of the URLs that are returning a 404 error and they are legitimately pages that are returning a 404 if you go to those URLs.  I looked into the referring pages, and it seems that these URLs are being created by the RSS feed on your pages. Since the RSS creates dynamic URLs, those URLs would not consistently exist on the site.

This won't necessarily hurt your SEO, but our crawler will still report any 404s it finds on your site.

-Chiaryn

Hi There,

Thanks for writing in and sorry for the confusion.

It actually isn't possible for the SEOmoz crawler to access pages that require a user login. I went to those URLs and I was able to access the pages with out be logged in as a user, so they don't require user sign up to access them. Since these pages are linked to by other pages on your site and our crawler is not being blocked from these pages and the pages don't actually require a user to be signed in to access them, we will crawl them. I can't say why Google wouldn't be crawling those pages, but there is definitely nothing in place that would stop our crawler from accessing them.

If you would like to stop our crawler from accessing those pages in the future, you may consider adding a disallow directive in your robots.txt file using the user-agent rogerbot.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any other questions.

Chiaryn

Hey Boo,

Sorry for the confusion. The issues with Open Site Explorer definitely wouldn't be the cause of any issues with on-page reports, since those tools are separate. I would need some more data in order to fully look into the issue, such as the old on-page reports. I'm going to create a ticket in our support system so that you will be able to send me any attachments you might have and so that I can send this to our engineers more easily, if necessary.

Once I create the ticket, you will receive an email with the necessary information to access the ticket and you can reply to me there.

Thanks,

Chiaryn

Hi Everyone,

We actually have a known issue with some non-Latin character sets that aren't displaying properly in On Page reports, CSV files, and the Web App IU. We have had complaints about Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, and some others character sets. It only affects specific characters, so we still support those languages sets in our tools. As of right now, we aren't sure when this will be fixed, but our engineers are working on the issue.

For now, you can download the export the data to a CSV, you should be able to open UTF-8 CSV files in Excel using the Text Import Wizard, which allows you to specify the encoding of the file you're opening. (Note: this may only work on PC versions of Excel)

a.       To start the Text Import Wizard, on the Data tab, in the Get External Data group, click From Text. Then, in the Import Text File dialog box, double-click the text file that you want to import.

b.      Under ‘Original data type’, select Delimited

c.       In the ‘File origin’ drop-down, select UTF-8

d.      Click [Next >]

e.       Under Delimiters, select ‘Comma’

f.       Click [Next >], then [Finish] and [OK] to save it under the existing worksheet

You can read more about the issue in our Known Issues forum here:

https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/21080226-encoding-issues-with-non-latin-characters

I hope this helps. Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Chiaryn