I can think of two potential causes here. One is simply that the number of indexed pages that shows in Search Console often lags behind by several weeks these days so it may simply be that.

The other is that you may have the wrong version in Search Console. Apologies if you've already checked this but just in case you're not already aware, Google treats www.domain.com and domain.com as completely separate entities so if your site lives on the www version, you must use that same version in Search Console, otherwise you'll see blank metrics like you are right now

I've only ever seen the demos for Hubspot but from what I've seen, they're very different tools - both excellent at what they do, but very different.

MozPro gives you access to a bunch of metrics and research tools predominantly for SEO decision making while Hubspot is essentially an advanced CRM; a way to track sales metrics and guide leads through the conversion funnel.

Granted, they do track some on-site metrics and provide some very helpful info there as well but it's still quite different to the Moz suite.

If we decide to go with HubSpot next year, it'll be as well as Moz Pro.

I can't say I've come across this one before but I've just done some brief research and basically it appears to be a fake traffic website, as the name would suggest.

Sites like this work on a scheme where you visit sites in their list of "members" and this earns you credits. The more credits you earn this way, the more people can visit your site. Think of it like exchanging visits.

I've never used one of these myself but I'd imagine there will be certain criteria that must be met to earn the credits; maybe a certain time on page or performing an action so you're not generating a bounce.

A bit more info I found on a black hat forum:

"...easyhists4u is, alike others, website service, which will give you plenty of free and real traffic, however, to get the free traffic, if you don't wanna pay for it, you firstly need to earn credits and to earn credits, you need to browse other people's websites, then you earn credits and you can exchange those credits for a free traffic. It's simple and easy, but the catch is, you're trading your own free time for your traffic, which is kinda a deadend, because you need to spend like 1 hour to get enough credits for like 10 visitors to your page, which is kinda a joke, if you think about that."

As for the question of how this benefits you, real and engaged traffic has been proven to help your rankings in the short term. It stands to reason that continuing to pay for traffic every day would offer you continued improved rankings as a result of this traffic. I don't condone this sort of thing since it misses the true point of SEO and just focusses on SERP positions.

Finally, how your client was selected is one that I can only speculate on. I'd suggest it's either a previous SEO provider submitted them to this scheme so they could report "traffic growth" to the client. Alternatively, the owners of this site fake traffic site could randomly select domains to drop into their members list so that people do exactly what you've done here - notice them in the referral list and look closer at them.

All in all, I'd suggest contacting them and attempting to have the site removed from their list and adding them to the disavow file as well. It's unlikely you'll get a response from them but it's worth the 60 seconds it takes to send an email anyhow.

Fake traffic like this is painful because it completely messes with your stats and forces you to mess around with filters to exclude them as a referral source.

Hi Rachel,

I've just spent a minute or two having a look over the site and link profile and there are quite few reasons why the spam score would be so high.

Looking at the link profile to start with, most of the links are made up of SEO directories and blog comment spam and this alone would be reason enough to consider the site spammy.

Looking at the onsite work, at first glance things don't seem too bad until I let Screaming Frog crawl it. There are some internal links pointing to 301s which isn't great efficiency for crawl budget but far more problematic is the ~50 pages that exist purely to chase a particular keyword. They don't offer any value to the user at all and are very direct in the keyword they target with only ~50 words of the same content on each with the location changed.

For example:
https://cyntox.com/oklahoma/
https://cyntox.com/north-dakota/
https://cyntox.com/ohio/

Here are a couple of resources to better understand the Spam Score. Matt provided them in another thread and they proved very handy, just don't fall into the trap of only fixing elements that Moz looks at to lower the score; produce a stronger and more genuine website instead!

Blog Post
Whiteboard Friday

As is so often the case with Moz's spam score, if you want to lower the spam score you just need to lower the spam I hope that helps!

Hi Fabrizo,

That's a tricky one given the sheer volume of pages/music on the site. Typically the cleanest way to handle all of this is to offer up a View All page and Canonical back to that but in your case, a View All pages would scroll on forever!

Canonical is not the answer here. It's made for handling duplicate pages like this:

www.website.com/product1.html
     www.website.com/product1.html&sid=12432

In this instance, both pages are 100% identical so the canonical tag tells Google that any variation of product1.html is actually just that page and should be counted as such. What you've got here is pagination so while the pages are mostly the same, they're not identical.

Instead, this is exactly what rel=prev/next is for which you've already looked into. It's very hard to find recent information on this topic but the traditional advice from Google has been to implement prev/next and they will infer the most important page (typically page one) from the fact that it's the only page that has a rel=next but no rel=prev (because there is no previous page). Apologies if you already knew all of this; just making sure I didn't skim over anything here. Google also says these pages will essentially be seen as a single unit from that point and so all link equity will be consolidated toward that block of pages.

Canonical and rel=next/prev do act separately so by all means if you have search filters or anything else that may alter the URL, a canonical tag can be used as well but each page here would just point back to itself, not back to page 1.

This clip from Google's Maile Ohye is quite old but the advice in here clears a few things up and is still very relevant today.

With that said, the other point you raised is very valid - what to do about crawl budget. Google also suggests just leaving them as-is since you're only linking to the first 5 pages and any links beyond that are buried so deep in the hierarchy they're seen as a low priority and will barely be looked at.

From my understanding (though I'm a little hesitant on this one) is that noindexed pages do retain their link equity. Noindex doesn't say 'don't crawl me' (also meaning it won't help your crawl budget, this would have to be done through Robots.txt), it says 'don't include me in your index'. So on this logic it would make sense that links pointing to a noindexed page would still be counted.

Basically it's to do with the way the tools you're using gather this data.

The short answer here is that none of these tools can possibly give you real-time data - there will be a delay of anywhere from days to months depending on a number of factors so a fresh link built today may not show up in Moz (Open Site Explorer), Majestic, Ahrefs etc until some time early next year. It's a similar story if a new domain isn't showing up in the tool at all - if no backlinks have been "found" yet, it has no data to show you.

Since Google doesn't provide any of these tools with access to the citations they've "seen", each of them have their own way of collecting this data and trying to emulate what Google does as best they can.

What this means is that these tools have to recrawl a site before they can detect any new/lost backlinks and list them for you. This obviously takes time and a lot of resources given how many websites are live at any one moment so it will be done using some kind of algorithm and/or schedule.

Because each tool has their own way of doing this, you may even see one tool show you a fresh citation faster than others. Unfortunately this is the best indication we have of a backlink profile. Frustrating since we'd all love to report to our clients/managers exactly how a link building campaign is progressing in real-time but it just means that part of our job is understanding roughly how these tools work and communicating realistic expectations around them.

I hope that helps!

You're currently on the right track and for all the right reasons. As a user, I'd rather see the surgery rather than an individual doctor and as you mentioned, splitting your reviews across multiple doctors isn't ideal.

From your side of things, you're obviously better off having the doctor's surgery listed and having the potential to drive traffic to the website.

Another factor that I'm not 100% sure about is how the current situation of individual doctors being listed will play with Google guidelines.

Hi Falguni,

If you're looking for white hat SEO (which is what you'll find at Moz) then there's really no generic forum(s) that will send you traffic that matters. Link building via forums has to be done in a particular way anyhow to avoid being spammy and these forums should be specific to your niche.

Essentially what this means is if you're working for a finance company, the forums that could be used correctly for them would be different to an accommodation website or a plumber.

Locating the best forums takes a bit of research - what you're looking for is an active forum specific to your topic that you can genuinely contribute to, much like I'm contributing here right now, though I do this for community engagement and a mutual sharing of knowledge rather than traffic or leads.