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Hi Bob,

Great question. I wrote a post a few months back about this when SEOmoz re-released it's Directory List - most of the advice still applies today:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-link-directory-best-practices

I don't think directories are inherently bad for SEO, although their value has certainly diminished over the years. That said, I generally stay away from "general" directories and stick with niche specific directories. Some general rules to follow:

1. Make sure the directory is editorial - if they accept anyone, you don't want to be there.
2. Be sure to make directories only a small part of your overall link building effort. An old rule of thumb used to be 2 regular links for every directory link. I might go 4 to 1 just to be safe.
3. Be wary of directories that let you choose your own anchor text. Not only are these directories usually lower quality, but over-optimized anchor text can lead to penguin dangers.
4. Check the ratio of MozRank to Page Rank. The closer this ratio is to 1, the less likely the directory has been penalized. For example, a directory with a homepage Mozrank of 6, but a PageRank of 1, probably has had an algorithmic or manual action taken against it by Google.
5. Niche specific directories are best. If you run a nursing home, try to get in directories of nursing homes.

In short, it's fine to use directories, but be cautious, and use them in moderation. Think of them like sprinkling salt over your larger link building efforts.

Hi Loren,

I took a peek at your website, and checked some things behind the scenes using my super-awesome administrative powers here at SEOmoz. It looks like one of two things happened.

1. Rogerbot encountered an error when crawling your site
2. Your site had trouble with rogerbot.

In either case, you probably want to contact the help team (help@seomoz.org), especially if the problem persist in the next crawl report.

On another note..

Those extra-long title tags might cause some crawlers a little confusion. I'm not saying they're bad for you, but I doubt they are helping you much from a search engine point of view. Undoubtedly, I'd say with near certainty that Google is not indexing the entirety of your title tags. Paginated lists like this are tough to get indexed properly. If folks are actually searching for these obscure part numbers, perhaps this is the only way to scale it. That said, I would encourage you to experiment.

I'd also recommend performing a site audit. A good resource would be: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-perform-the-worlds-greatest-seo-audit

Also, our Learn SEO section is a good place to start.

Hi Waqid,

Yes, if you create a mobile site that is accessible, search engines may discover and crawl it. There is a lot of debate surrounding this, but if they discover duplicate content, you might be dinged in the rankings.

This is a problem with 10,000 solutions.The best practice today, and one that search engines are leaning towards, is a SINGLE URL approach, in which you use CSS style sheets and HTML5 to get your content to display correctly across all browsers, both desktop and mobile.

In reality, this is often more difficult than is practical, so workarounds are required. At a minimum, if you do build separate pages for mobile, make sure they contain the rel=canonical tag pointing to the original URL of your main site. That way, if a search engine discovers these pages, they won't penalize you for duplicate content and will be able to give proper attribution.

Bryson Meunier has a blog on the subject of mobile SEO that's pretty insightful. You can find it here.

http://www.brysonmeunier.com/

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Hi Matthew,

Thanks for the detailed answer. Some good advice here, but I can't say I agree with everything. In particular, it's a pretty broad statement to say that Social marketing has nothing to do with SEO. We know Google uses social media to discover new content, social shares are highly correlated with rankings, and Google has incorporated many SEO-like features into Google+ that have implications across the broader algorithm.

Also, social signals are greatly incorporated into personalized results and local SERPs.

There's a few other points. But I guess we both agree to learn as much as you can and question conventional wisdom. We agree more than we disagree.

Anything with "Link Exchange" in the title should be bumped to a Spam Score 100

Those are really, really horrible links. I'd probably disavow them just to be safe. On the other hand, unless you've received a manual action notice in Google Webmaster Tools, it's quite possible those links aren't hurting you at all and Google is simply ignoring them.

On the other hand, those links are just awful.

Hi Diane,

To be honest, I wouldn't expect much SEO benefit out of this site.

The type of articles submitted give the impression of a low-quality article directory. The other red flag is they seem to accept just about anyone with very little editorial oversight. In the past, evidence suggests that Google tends to not place much value on links from sites like this.

If you're looking to attract traffic, I'd spend a considerable amount of effort to ensure you're creating high quality, relevant value on your site, and then sharing/engaging by perusing a more specific audience, as opposed to a general article directory.

For example, you could use Followerwonk to find influencers in your specific niche, and try to get your content in front of them.

If you're looking for ideas/inspiration, here's a good place to start: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/content-and-blogging

Best of luck with your SEO!

Hi Max,

As you know, SEOmoz uses a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to host our static content. This greatly improves the load time of our pages by distributing our content across a cloud network, and results in an improved experience for users.

If I understand your question correctly, you have set up a CDN and have created duplicate content issues.

To solve this, it's important to set up your CDN only to serve static content, like images, stylesheets and javascript. That is what a CDN is designed for. Do not duplicate your entire site - your HTML - as this will cause duplicate content issues.

If for some reason you need to replicate your entire HTML, then there are some steps you can take to mitigate the damage, although it's going to depend on your exact circumstances.

For example, you can set full URL canonical tags so that all your mapped CNAMES point to your primary URL.

To revert back to one copy of your HTML, you might want to put 301 redirects in place on the duplicated content (pointing to the original) before removing them from the CDN.

But even these aren't ideal solutions. It's best just to serve your static content, and only one version of your HTML.

Hi Amit,

This is an important question, and how you address these errors and warnings depends on your experience level and the needs of your site. It's also a tremendous opportunity to further your SEO education.

For many folks like yourself, the best thing to do is to tackle each one of these issues one at time, learn from online resources until you are a near expert, then move onto the next one.

Each site is different, so there's no "one size fits all" solution. The exact "fix" will always depend on too many variables to list here, but here's some tips to get you started.

1. 4xx Errors. The best thing to do is download the CSV of your crawl report and open it in a spreadsheet program. Find the URLs that cause the error, and in the last column find the "referrer". This referrer will tell you the URL that the bad link was found on. If you go to this page, you can usually find where the broken link originated and decide if it needs fixing.

2. Too Many Links - This is a warning, not an error, so you may choose not to fix this. To understand the warning further, I recommend reading this article by Dr. Pete:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

If you decide that you should address the pages with too many links, you can then start to decide which links you should remove.

3. Canoncial  - Finally, these are notices, which aren't necessarily bad, we just want you to know they are there. For a little background, you might want to read the following:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

Hi CJ,

302s, by definition, don't have page titles (because they redirect - there's no title on the page)

So the URL listed there is the URL. This is a little confusing because of the formatting on the SEOmoz report. By default it displays "Title" "URL", but this obviously doesn't work in the case of redirects. Something our UX people should probably take a look at.

Anyway, whats more important is how to fix this.

1. Download your crawl report in CSV format.

2. Open the CSV in Excel or similar program.

3. Search for the URL: http://www.example.com/www.example.com

4. In the last column you'll find the "referrer" information. This is the page that the broken link was found on.

5. Go to that page on your website. Find the broken link. Fix. (unfortunately, I can't tell you how to do this step.)

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO!

Hi Egol,

Let me add my 2 cents. In my experience this sort of thing works, but there are quite a few things that can go wrong. Some general thoughts:

1. The 301 redirect will only pass about 80% of the pre-existing link juice, and drop over time.

2. If the new domain has a lower domain authority or vastly different backlink profile, this can hurt the new page's ability to rank.

3. Works best to keep the title tag and other html elements as close to the original as possible, including page layout.

I've found it also helps to build new links to the redirected page as soon as possible. Really, I don't like to redirect pages if I can help it, and usually do so only out of necessity.

Hi Mozter (nice username

I liked Martin's answer, so let me just add my own 2 cents.

Yes, there are advantages to having keywords in the URL, but there are also drawbacks as well. The keywords can not only be used as a contextual signal for Google - improving your rankings in some cases, but keywords can also help your click-through rate when the URL appears in search results.

Then there's the downside.

• Longer URLs are harder to share socially
• Longer URLs tend to rank slightly worse, for whatever reason
• Keyword stuffing / Over-optimization

Finally, many SEO believe in creating a flat directory structure, meaning most pages of your site should be as close to the root directory as possible. i.e. homepage.com/your-page-here. In my opinion, this is a better solution that having several directories in the same URL like homepage.com/keyword/keyword/keyword.

In cases like this, it's best to default to the user and try to optimize for their experience.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

Unfortunately at this time it is not possible to view historic Domain Authority metrics. There are a couple of reasons for this, including the prohibitive cost of maintaining older indexes (my understanding is they are extremely large and to maintain/store/serve.)This may change in the future, but right now there is no access to historic indexes.

The other reason is that metrics like Domain Authority are comparative metrics that change from index to index. This means that it's best to use these numbers to compare yourself to the competition, but not to your own previous metrics as the base calculations can change. DA measures relative strength - so it's completely possible to improve 10% by raw numbers, but if your competition improved 10% as well, your relative DA really didn't change. For this reason we caution against folks measuring DA over time, and instead using it as indicator of ranking potential in real time against other competitors.

That said, SEOmoz does offer a Historic PageRank checker that does work for many domains. It's kinda fun.

I almost always use absolute URLs. Dana has a point about efficiency, and a lot of developers HATE writing anything but relative URLs, but I think most modern servers can handle the load just fine, and developers can be bribed with cookies.

The advantage of Absolute URLs is they're less likely to break with various CMS's (content management systems) and on-page elements. I've seen javascript do some crazy things to relative URLs causing 1000's of broken, uncrawlable links.

And when your content is scraped, either for black hat reasons or perfectly legitimate reasons like embedded RSS feeds, then you get full credit for the link. But to be fair, and to recognize Gamer07's point, Google likely devalues most of these links anyway once they detect the duplicate content.

Interesting question - I've had this discussion a couple of times with different SEOs. Here's my best understanding: There are actually 2 different answers - one if you are talking about Google, and one for every other search engine.

For most search engines, the "Allow" should come first. This is because the first matching pattern always wins, for the reasons Geoff stated.

But Google is different. They state:

"At a group-member level, in particular for allow and disallow directives, the most specific rule based on the length of the [path] entry will trump the less specific (shorter) rule. The order of precedence for rules with wildcards is undefined."

Robots.txt Specifications - Webmasters — Google Developers

So for Google, order is not important, only the specificity of the rule based on the length of the entry. But the order of precedence for rules with wildcards is undefined.

This last part is important, because your directives contain wildcards. If I'm reading this right, your particular directives:

Allow: /models/ford///page*

Disallow: /models////pageSo if it's "undefined" which directive will Google follow, if order isn't important? Fortunately, there's a simple way to find out.Google Webmaster allows you to test any robots.txt file. I created a dummy file based on your rules, In this case, your directives worked perfectly no matter what order I put them in.

| http://cyrusshepard.com/models/ford/test/test/pages | Allowed by line 2: Allow: /models/ford///page* | Allowed by line 2: Allow: /models/ford///page* |
| http://cyrusshepard.com/models/chevy/test/test/pages | Blocked by line 3: Disallow: /models////page | Blocked by line 3: Disallow: /models////page |

So, to summarize:1. Always put Allow directives first, as most search engines follow the "first rule counts" rule.2. Google doesn't care about order, but rather the specificity based on the length of the entry.3. The order of precedence for rules with wildcards is undefined.4. When in doubt, check your robots.txt file in Google Webmaster tools.Hope this helps.(sorry for the very long answer which basically says you were right all along

Hi Mark,

Each crawl report takes approximately 1 week. The crawl commences each week on the day that you originally started your campaign. So if you set up your campaign on a Monday, each week your new crawl would also start on Monday.

(The dates in the Campaign manager can be a little deceptive. Most dates refer to the date the crawl started, not the date it ended, so it make it look like the time between crawls is longer than it actually is.)

So you should be getting your new report in a day or two. If it takes longer than that, feel free to contact the help team at help@seomoz.org.

As a PRO member, you can also try the custom crawl for a 3000 page crawl. It usually takes about 24 hours and returns your results in a spreadsheet format.

The problem with sitewide footer links is that they are not "editorial" - meaning they are part of the CMS and not actually written by a human within the context of actual content.

Over and over again we see these types of link devalued by the search engines. Often it's the fast track for NOT ranking for the keywords you're trying to optimized for.

See this case study on WPMU.org and how sitewide footers caused a Penguin penalty for them.

Google, and search engines in general, are getting better and better at detecting "unnatural patterns" in links and doing more and more to devalue them. This doesn't mean all sitewide links are bad, and that they shouldn't be used, but to make it a major part of your linking strategy might be subjecting yourself to risk that you don't want.

Unfortunately, as you noted this method is working for some of your competitors. It sucks when you see folks get away with stuff that you know will get you burned. With this in mind, I totally agree with Jason's statement:

"Additionally, I've always been of the opinion that one good footer link on a website's homepage - or an in-text link on the client's "about" page - is more valuable than a site-wide footer link. While I don't have any proof of this, it's something you might test. On sites we design, we like to put an "about this website" sub-heading on the client's about page, then link to our site in that text. It seems natural to me, and my site does OK."

If it were me, I'd adopt Jason's policy, or something editorially similar, 100%. The advantages are:

• The links are truly editorial, not part of a CMS
• Text links tend to carry more weight than image links
• You could write more about your site and services, which may convert better.

Of course, if you are doing this across 100's of sites, it may be tempting to try to scale it with pre-written text or a template. Again, this creates pattern and smacks of non-editorial linking. It's best to craft each page of content unique to the site you've worked on. Otherwise, where is the value?

Best of luck!

Hi Andreas,

Looks like you're doing everything right, but I want to make sure all the bases are covered. Depending on the size, link profile, link structure and domain authority of your site, it can take several weeks for Google and other search engines to complete migrate a domain. Here are some important processes not to overlook.

1. Did you file a change of address within Google webmaster? http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83106

2. When migrating domains, it's important to leave an old sitemap up, so that Google will try crawling the old URLs and register the 301s. If you neglect this step, it may take much longer for Google to crawl the old URLs to see that they've moved.

3. As Joel pointed out, make sure to update as many internal and external links as possible.

That should cover the basics, but there are a million more details you can explore to make the process go more smoothly. For a detailed approach, here's a couple of excellent guides written my some very smart folks.

• https://seogadget.co.uk/domain-migration/
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos

Hope this helps. Best of luck with the migration!

Super interesting question!

First, let me put out a disclaimer that metrics like Domain Authority are comparative metrics that change from index to index. This means that it's best to use these numbers to compare yourself to the competition, but not to your own previous metrics as the base calculations can change. DA measures relative strength - so it's completely possible to improve 10% by raw numbers, but if your competition improved 10% as well, your relative DA really didn't change. For this reason we caution against folks measuring DA over time, and instead using it as indicator of ranking potential in real time against other competitors.

With that out of the way, last time I checked, MozRank was calculated on an algorithmic base scale of around 8.5. (Sorry, I can't be more specific - but that's part of the secret sauce. Heck, I don't even know the exact numbers.

With this knowledge, you can use a typical base calculator to figure relative strength. For example, a Mozrank of 5 on an 8.5 log scale calculates to 44370.531 um... raw MozRank points. Using the same calculations we find a MozRank 6 equals 377149.516 raw points, or 8.5x the original.

You can do similar calculations to determine the logarithmic change of DA, but keep in mind the disclaimer above and remember that since we can't reveal the exact scale, your calculations will be estimations, at best.

Hope this helps!

Hi Kyle,

First of all, I can't wait for Marie's book! I don't want to recover any ground that she's already gone over, so I'll just share a few thoughts.

1. Has Google verified it's a link penalty? "Site violates Google's quality guidelines" could also refer to on-site issues like hidden text or doorway pages. Given the information you provided, it's most likely a link based penalty, but you never know.

2. Not sure from your description, but I almost always disavow entire domains using the domain: command instead of individual URLs. I've seen requests rejected because they disavowed not enough URLs when they should have blocked the entire domain.

3. I agree with Marie. If you've been penalized, it's generally safer to error on the side of disavowing too many domains than not enough. This isn't to say you should disavow known good links, but if links are questionable, why take a chance.

4. Also agree with Marie on submitting documentation about your removal efforts. Wrote a post about it here: http://cyrusshepard.com/penalty-lifted/  

(they tend to like everything in Google Docs files. Cuts down the risk of spam)

5. Minor point, but Google likes everything formatted in a UTF-8 encoded .txt file. I've never seen one rejected because of this, but I hear it happens.

6. I'm turning into a fan of Link Detox for toxic link discovery. Instead of running it in standard mode, upload a file of your complete backlink profile from Webmaster Tools and have Link Detox check those links. Sort the final list by hand - this means check each link! For hints, read Paddy Moogan's post about low quality links: http://www.stateofsearch.com/step-by-step-guide-finding-low-quality-links/

Damn, we should turn this into a blog post!

Hope this helps!

Great question! Thanks for asking it here.

Short answer: yes, in most cases Google will see the keyword in your URL, as long as your parameters and crawling structures are configured correctly. (At this point, we have no reason to assume otherwise). But how much benefit you will see is debatable.

In truth, a URL with 3 parameters would be considered "overly-dynamic" and not ideal for SEO. There's a good chance Google isn't crawling that deep on your site and many of these may be missed. Check a few random URLs to see if Google has indexed them.

Also check Google Webmaster to make sure your crawling parameters are set right.

Here's the deal: Keywords this far out in a URL probably won't count for much in Google's algorythm. Any ranking boost you see will most likely be negligible. But this doesn't mean it's not worth it. You might get a rankings boost, and you also might see a higher Click-through rate in the SERPs as Google highlights keywords contained in the search query.

So what's the conclusion? Yes, adding keywords to the end of the URL is probably a good idea and you may see a small boost from it, but I wouldn't expect much more.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO!

Hi Tanja,

Keep in mind that the Adword Keyword tool is meant for advertising, so the "competition" is thought to be a better measure of paid competition, not the organic rankings you are trying to achieve.

The best approach is to use the KW difficulty tool to analyze the competition. Look at all the metrics. Run a complete report for your top keywords. Are the competitors pages properly optimized? Can you beat them anywhere? Pay close attention to title tags and inbound anchor text, as these carry a lot of weight.

I still get most of my ideas from Google's tool, at least as a starting point. I then try to find modifies that I can more easily rank for. There are 3 types of modifiers I can think of off the top of my head:

Let's use the keyword "running shoes" for example:

Type Modifier: "Wholesale Running Shoes"

Location Modifier: "Running Shoes Germany"

Date Modifier: "Running Shoes 2012"

By optimizing my page around specific modifiers (and you often can't find these in Google Adwords) you can rank more easily for given keywords. The more specific, the better.

Hi Luke,

Thanks for asking this question. There's been a lot of misconceptions around press releases lately, in the wake of Matt Cutt's recent statements, and I've been meaning to write a blog post about it soon.

I happen to use press releases for link building, successfully, quite a bit. The trick is realizing that the links on the press release sites themselves don't really help you, and can actually hurt you if you over-optimize (or even optimize) the anchor text.

Press releases distributed across a vast network of duplicate, low quality pages have the potential to create a very Penguin-like problem.

Here's a portion of my presentation from MozCon which addressed this topic:

http://www.slideshare.net/cyrusshepard/high-roi-content-strategies-for-seo/48

My three rules for press releases are:

1. Don't link to yourself (or client) using important keywords
2. Linking using generic anchors or your domain name is fine, i.e. http://example.com
3. The goal is not links directly from the press releases themselves, but from 3rd party sources that pick up on the news and write their own content about you - the way a press release is traditionally supposed to work.

In my opinion, if you press release doesn't earn links from independent 3rd party sources (news sites, reporters), or earn you significant traffic, then you most likely didn't have anything newsworthy to announce in the first place, and likely wasted your money.

The whole thing rest on newsworthy content. As a PR professional, I'm probably preaching to the choir, and I'm sure you understand better than most, perhaps even better than me.

In the end, don't fear the press release. They serve a legitimate purpose. Just use them the way they were meant to be used - by earning links instead of buying them.

If you're looking for a more automated solution, or tools to assist, here's a summary of the tools mentioned in the post:

1. rmoov

2. Link Cleanup and Contact

3. Remoove’em

4. DeleteBacklinks.com

You can also use any number of services to dig out bad links, including Open Site Explorer or Majestic, but the aforementioned Link Cleanup and Contact tool is among the best.

After identifying bad links, many webmasters leverage Mechanical Turk to find contact information and even write emails.

These are just a few of the ways to tackle the problem - there are undoubtedly many more. Find the solution that best works for you.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

Typically, spam links don't generate much actual traffic. Is it possible that what you're seeing in GA is referral spam instead?  http://www.optimizesmart.com/geek-guide-removing-referrer-spam-google-analytics/

Also, do you see the links in Open Site Explorer? This might help determine if the links are real or if the referrals you are seeing are "phantom"

The link title element is not known to be a significant ranking factor. In fact, stuffing this attribute with keywords might even have the opposite effect.

This is one of those cases where you ask "what's best for the user?"

Lots of good answers here.

Generally, there's not much benefit to doing this, especially if the domains are new as Streamline Metrics pointed out.

The risk however, is if the domains have a negative history associated with them. If bad links were pointed at the old domain, then those links will now point at your main site when you redirect them. If an algorithmic action like Penguin or an over-optimization filter was applied to the old site, your risk carrying that baggage to the new site.

Sometimes it makes sense to redirect domains.

• SEOmoz.com redirects to seomoz.org. Lots of folks type seomoz.com, so this makes sense.
• You migrate an old domain.

In general, however, there's virtually no SEO benefit to buying a previously unestablished keyword rich domain and redirecting it for traffic, rankings boost (unless on those rare occasions it's a very popular domain name to begin with)

"How can you get a D.A. of 45 using backlinks they get?"

Keep in mind that Domain Authority doesn't have the same strong spam algorithms that Google incorporates. Although there is a consideration for spammy sites, it's actually much easier to manipulate Domain Authority than it is Google (although in the future improvements to Domain Authority will likely mean more spam is discounted)

Unfortunately, manipulating Domain Authority in a black-hat way does nothing for your rankings. While Domain Authority remains one of the best predictors of how a domain will rank in search results, Google does not actually take Domain Authority into considerations. If your competitors are buying obvious unnatural links, it's likely they are not doing as well in search results as you might suspect.

If you're looking for long lasting results, better to have 1 good earned link than 1000 spammy one.

That's a great question. I'll see if I can shed some light on the issue for you.

If I understand your question correctly,  you're wondering why Twitter doesn't show up as a backlink to your homepage, http://www.idyllic-software.com/, in Open Site Explorer or any of the other SEOmoz tools. Is that correct?

(I'm referencing this report here: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/domains?page=1&site=www.idyllic-software.com%2F&sort=domain_authority&target=domain)

It does seem strange, because OSE has indexed your twitter account. We can verify that here: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=twitter.com%2Fidyllicsoftware

With a Page Authority of 48, that usually would be high enough for Linkscape to index the link to your site on your Twitter page. Unfortunately, Linkscape isn't foolproof, and sometimes it does miss links, especially if there aren't a lot of inbound pages to the linking page in question. (sorry if this seems like a circular argument)

My suspicion is because Linkscape has only indexed three inbound links to your Twitter page, there isn't enough Authority present to follow the links found there. The only solution is to build more, high quality links to your Twitter page to ensure the links get indexed.

That's the bad news. The good news is that the links are obviously there, Google can see them, and if Twitter links count for anything, then you are getting full credit, regardless if they show up in Linkscape or not. Oftentimes you'll see edge cases like this where a link appears in one index but not another. Moz is working on doubling the size of the current index, so there's a good chance you'll see your links in an upcoming update.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Hi Keith,

Instead of answering this question, I suspect what you're looking for is a basic introduction to Google's Algorythm, and how everything fits together.

And although nobody but Google can really answer that, perhaps I can point you in the right direction. For example, it's important to remember Google uses over 200 signals in it's algorithm that all work together in a very complex fashion. A few of these we try to examine in our Search Engine Ranking Factors study.

You can never quite tell what factor pushes a website to the top, but often we have hints. One of my favorite tools is Moz's Keyword Analysis tool (run a full SERP analysis after the initial analysis) which will show you multiple data points and analysis to help you figure out why one result ranks higher than the next.

And not to dodge the question about Panda and the other updates, but they tend to work together. You can find more information about each here: http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

Interestingly, there's a strong correlation between the number of nofollowed links to a domain and higher rankings, although the correlation isn't as high as with the number of followed links to a domain.

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics-1

Most well ranking websites have a natural amount of nofollowed links, but I've never seen any evidence that a 50/50 ratio would either harm or benefit you.

Regardless, you want to keep working to build good, mostly followed links. If you continue to do this, you should be in good hands.

Hi Sinead,

The most likely reason is that Competitive Domain analysis looks at link factors, and not keyword factors. For example, competitive domain analysis doesn't look at important factors such as title tags or incoming anchor text.

The way to think about competitive domain analysis is that all things being equal, the site with the better metrics, especially Domain Authority, one site will rank higher than the other.

Unfortunately, in the real world, nothing is ever equal.

One thing you can do for a deeper understanding is to check each keyword using the SEOmoz Keyword Analysis tool: http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/keyword-difficulty

This takes on-page factors into account, as well as link metrics, and might give you some insight into why one site ranks above another.

I'm going to sidestep this question and say that the profile Google prefers is one that is earned, and not built.

Anytime you are able to choose the anchor text of your external links, this is a "built" link and no matter how much you diversify, you risk creating a pattern that Google can detect - if not now, then in the future.

The external sites that allow you to choose your own anchor text, in most cases (but not all) often are not the best link targets.

Is this realistic? For a lot of link builders, probably not. But the key is to diversify as much as possible. A lot of folks will tell you silly rules like 20% branded anchor text, but those rules have changed so much in the past 2 years, where will they be a year from now? Google keeps changing the rules to crack down on unearned links.

Regardless, I'll get off my soapbox and leave you with a couple of posts/videos I made about the subject of anchor text:

http://moz.com/blog/high-value-tactics-futureproof-link-building-whiteboard-friday

http://moz.com/blog/click-here-seo

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Hi Xoffie,

This is a really good question, in part because we don't yet know the benefits of adding rel=author to your content, beyond the sometimes rise in CTR.

We assume that Google wants to someday incorporate authorship metrics into it's ranking algorithms and knowledge graph. (if they do this now, I suspect it's minimal or in an experimental stage) Currently, the major benefit of the authorship markup is getting the rich snippets boost from the author profile, and possible increased social visibility in the SERPs.

If you find the photo is hurting you, the first thing I would do is experiment with different photos. Attractive, eye-catching photos seem to get a higher CTR, and you could even experiment with adding a branded logo as your official profile pic as well.

If your site has a good Google+ pretense, you may benefit from the rel=publisher tag. Mostly, I've only seen this tag help much larger publishers like the NYTimes, but it seems to be rolling out to a broader base of publishers now as well. But again, the benefits of rel=publishers mostly seem to be an increased visibility in the SERPs, and don't seem to highly influence rankings (yet)

In the end, I'd recommend on focusing on appropriate rich snippet markup for your products, including price, description, photo, etc. and not worry so much about the authorship markup.

If I understand correctly, you have incoming affiliate links which don't work on HTTPs due to varnish, so you are redirecting them to HTTPs, where they do work. Let me know if I'm missing anything.

Okay, first of all if you are serving up two versions of your site on any page (HTTP and HTTPS) without 301'ing one to the other, you should absolutely have canonical tags pointing to the HTTP. And without the affiliate tracking parameter.  (Edit: see thoughts below on NOINDEX)

As for 301 vs 302: Technically, to stay within Google's guidelines, affiliate links to your site should be nofollowed. In practice, sometimes they can offer a ranking benefit, but more than often Google discounts them. Regardless, if you abuse them for linking purposes it can come back to bite you in some instances. There's no clear answer, but keep in mind 302s may very well negate some of the link equity from these affiliate links (which may or may not be a good thing)

NOINDEX - My thought process is, if you don't want the HTTPS URLs indexed, and the link equity from the affiliate links isn't a consideration, then it's likely best to NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW the pages. This ensures they will be kept out of Google's index, keep crawl efficiency optimized, and deliver cleaner results. This also means the canonical tag isn't necessary. (and probably unwanted, as it sends conflicting signals with the NOINDEX tag) Keep in mind this strategy effectively kills any incoming link equity from the affiliate links, but does help keep you within Google's good graces.

Lots of good answers here, so let me start at the top.

Looks like you are dealing with 3 issues/questions.

1. CMS - No difference

2. Shared server or different server - Google is most likely going to be able to determine an administrative relationship between your sites one way or another, so this probably doesn't matter anyway.

The real problem comes when you start to interlink 200 sites. This can cause penalty headaches when done aggressively between different domains or subdomains (especially in light of Penguin). This typically isn't a problem with internal links on the same domain. +1 for subfolders.

3. Subdomain, Folders, or Directories - As far as Google Places goes, all are fine - as long as each seperate business has it's own separate

• Webpage (whether it's on the same domain, subdomain or folder)
• Address
• Phone #
• etc

... then Google will treat them as different business that you can claim in Google Places. (and you can manage them in bulk)

The advantage of placing everything on the same (sub)domain is that you consolidate your ranking power. Instead of doing link building for 200 sites, you can link build for just one. (Although you still want to target local links to specific pages - helps a ton). As long as you spread link equity amoung the individual business pages (both internal and external) you may have an easier time ranking when everything is on the same domain. +1 for subfolders.

The disadvantage of the folder method is branding. It makes your URLs potentially longer, and you might prefer the shorter domain names for local websites.

There's no "right" solution, but if it were me, I'd build everything on the same domain.

By the way, here's an interesting article from Matt Cutts

"If you have a lot of store or franchise locations, consider it a best practice to 1) make a web page for each store that lists the store’s address, phone number, business hours, etc. and 2) make an HTML sitemap to point to those pages with regular HTML links, not a search form or POST requests."

Wish I would have found that before I wrote out my answer.

Hi Jimmy,

I get a 404 when visiting the URL you gave for a sitemap http://www.mobbly.com/sitemap.xml

Is this correct?

Unfortuneatly, it's pretty common for Google not to index all of your images. It really depends on several factors - the uniqueness of the image, the authority of the page, how prominant the image is, the alt text associate with the image, etc.

Here's a good article about getting more bang from your buck with images - http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2013/01/23/google-image-search-traffic

Hi Louis,

You are right, the first starter crawl should be complete within the first couple of hours. One reason it might take longer than normal is if the SEOmoz crawler, rogerbot, has trouble crawling your site.

I took a look inside our system and it appears the website associated with your campaign doesn't have a robots.txt file. Because the SEOmoz crawler is extra polite about crawling, whenever it doesn't find a robots.txt file, this can prevent it from crawling at all.

To fix this, create a text file called "robots.txt" and with the following information in it, and place it at the root directory of your site.

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Read more about robots.txt here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt

Unfortunately, it may be too late to add this to fix your starter crawl. So here are some things you can try:

1. After adding the robots.txt file, try creating another (duplicate) campaign and seeing if that works.
2. Or wait until your next crawl
3. Contact the help team at help@seomoz.org

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Hi Thomas,

Great question. Fortunately, there's a super awesome resource on just this topic. It's called:

21Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic (updated for 2012)

To be fair, the best ways to promote a blog really haven't changed that much in the wake of Penguin or other algorithmic updates.

If you are creating useful content in a way that engages your audience, and then apply smart marketing to promote that content (see Rand's post above) then your blog will be above 95% of all other blogs out there.

If you're specifically looking to build links, there's a ton of good ideas here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/4

Best of luck!

Hi Suzanne,

The way most SEOs work is to move from low-hanging fruit to more challenging opportunities.

1. For most new users of SEOmoz who run their first PRO campaign, this means addressing the site audit in your crawl report, starting with the errors first.

You said you have a large site with 1000s of pages, so it's likely the crawl found 100s or even 1000s of errors on your site. This can make it a little overwhelming to know where to start.

Take advantage of the Help Guides. Here's the guide for the Crawl Diagnostics Tab. Read this top to bottom. If you don't know what something means, this is an excellent time to start researching. If you are faced with an overwhelming number of errors, there are a couple things you can do to prioritize.

• Sort the URLs of the errors by Page Authority. This will help you address your most important pages first.
• Export your crawl results to CSV. Once they are in a spreadsheet form, start to look for patterns. Multiple errors are often caused by the same problem, so making a small fix can sometimes lead to big results.

2. Add more keywords to your campaign. You can get these from Google Analytics. This Help Guide will guide you. Read articles on Keyword Research and find out what keywords you would like to rank higher for. Start to devise a plan.

3. Have you connected a Google Analytics account? This is extremely helpful. Yep, the Help Guides assist with that, too.

4. Check your On-Page reports. These are generated for any keyword/URL ranking in the top 50. Again, can you spot any patterns? Any changes you can make across your site to improve the keyword relevance of your pages? Try improving a handful of pages that already rank well for high volume keywords and see what happens. Experiment.

5. Analyze your links. Use Open Site Explorer Top Pages tab to make sure links to your site aren't being lost to broken URLs. Find out where are your best links are coming from and figure out how to do more of that. Look at your incoming anchor text. Does it mirror the keywords you are ranking for?

(Really, this is a much of a learning process as anything. But each step takes you further)

Examine the links of your competitor. Where did those links come from, and can you earn those same links? Where are your competitors stronger than you? How can you catch up? The keyword difficulty tool is great for this too.

6. Install the MozBar, if you haven't already. Start surfing everywhere with it. Use the tools to analyze pages and figuring out why they rank where they rank.

7. Even though your site has been around for years, there may have been some things overlooked. So pretend it's brand new . Watch this video from Rand about launching a site.

8. When you get stuck, browse old blog post, search Google, or ask a question here. The web is full of SEOs willing to help.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

Hi Clancy,

Best practices is to host your blog on the same domain, and same subdomain, as your main website. This offers so many long term benefits, you're almost throwing everything away if you consider anything else.

Depending on the technology you are using to construct your website, there are different ways to prevent your users from accessing your site, but there is not a one-size-fits-all solution. If you're using WordPress, you can simply install a maintenance or "coming-soon" type plugin to keep visitors out, and then install your blog on a subdirectory.  example.com/blog

If this isn't possible and you want to host your blog elsewhere, keeping on a subdomain as Jim suggested would be the next best alternative. Apart from linking to your site, there's not much else you can do to pass link juice between the two sites. You can, after your site launches, move your blog and migrate your traffic via 301 redirects.

Hi Alan,

It's not uncommon for Bing/Yahoo to vary in search results from other search engines, but the scope of the difference you describe does seem a bit odd.

Although I can't tell you exactly why it isn't ranking there are a few things we can look at:

1. The site is in Bing's cache. That's reassuring. And the last crawl date was pretty recent.

2. To analyze problems, I'd check the site through Bing Webmaster Tools. If you don't have a Webmaster account, I'd take a few minutes to set one up and verify your website. Once you do this the webmaster suite has several diagnostic tools you can take advantage of.

• SEO Analyzer
• Link Explorer - Enter your URL and see if Bing has indexed links to this particular page
• Fetch as Bingbot - See if the Bing crawler discovers any issues when crawling the page

It's pretty common for Bing/Yahoo to index far fewer pages than Google, and indeed you can see the huge different numbers reported for your site

• 20400 for Bing
• 1,300,000 for Google

Which seems like a really big difference. Bing does a pretty good job of removing low quality pages from its index, but I can't be certain that's what happening here. It might be worth a look to see what pages are being indexed, what ones aren't being indexed, and finding out what the difference is.

Regardless, hope this helps, if only a little. Best of luck with your SEO!

Hi Eugene - It sounds like you are doing things right.

Open Site Explorer diplays Link Metrics for every single page in it's index as if it is independent - even if it 301 redirects or points a canonical link towards another page.

For example we can see that the inbound link metrics for the SEOmoz.org/blog differ from the metrics for SEOmoz.org/blog/ (note the extra backslash).

One advantage of this method is that we can see if our external links are pointing to the right page, and correct them if necessary. At this time, OSE will notify you if the URL you are checking 301 redirects to another page, but doesn't tell you if it has a canonical. OSE will also calculate redirected metrics into calculating scores such as MozRank and Domain Authority, and I believe there are plans (if they haven't been implemented already) of including canonical metrics into these calculations.

But back to you - what you really need is a way to make sure you've implemented your canonical tags correctly. You can check the duplicate title/duplicate content and the canonical reports in the SEOmoz PRO platform. You can also use the MozBar to check canonical tags, or a tool like URI valet to make sure your canonical tags are pointed to the right URL.

This is important because you want to avoid canonicalization errors that can lead to a loss of rankings and search engine visibility. That said, from your brief description, it sounds like you're doing everything right.

So you basically have 2 different arguments here, both of which are probably true.

1. Raw +1s don't directly effect search rankings  (What Matt Cutts said)

2. Sharing on Google+ likely has secondary benefits that help search engine visibility. (What I said in my Moz article, although not as clearly as I would have liked)

Matt Cutts wasn't refuting the article directly (as far as I could tell) but debunking the conclusion that many people were drawing from it.

Regardless, we know links are important, and good content is important, and the type of content that earns good links is also often the type of content that earns +1s. Hopefully, you can find a way to pursue it all at once.

Casey got the definition of inbound links vs. # of linking domains right, so let me just add a couple of points.

If you look at correlation ranking factors, the number of linking root domains correlates higher to good rankings than the number of raw links. As our friend at Seattle Organic pointed out, it's much better to have 100 linking domains than 100 links from one site.

I wouldn't worry so much about the 1:1 ratio. That's a situation that will take care of itself as you build links.

Best of luck with your SEO!

I really like Ryan's answer, and I'm going to endorse it.

If you are only looking for ONE metric to judge links, then DA or PA wouldn't be a bad choice. Certainly better than the old PageRank. But I wouldn't advise using just one metric.

DA takes all of SEOmoz link metrics into consideration, including MozTrust and MozRank. Of all the metrics out there, it is best indicator of a given domain's (or page's) ability to rank for a particular phrase. We know of no other publicly available measurement that does as good of job.

That said, it shouldn't be the only thing you should look at when evaluating link prospect. Relevance, Context, number of links on the page, position and other considerations should all be brought into play.

Best of luck in your link building!

First of all, let me start with the disclaimer that I'm not an expert in all these areas of technology (AJAX and offscreen rendering) but let me offer my 2 cents.

Google's quality guidelines state that no text should ever be hidden from the user, so in general I recommend against it. In reality, it's actually pretty common - and a lot of webmasters commonly justify CSS image replacement and other techniques using this line of argument > but in general I prefer to always play it safe.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66353

That said, I'm more concerned about other areas of your site, specifically that search results are rendered on their own subdomain, while product images are served from another separate subdomain. Splitting the domain authority like this is most likely hurting the ability of your products to rank.

I couldn't find a cached version of your search results, (probably because of the server no cache control) but it appears all the search results depend on JavaScript to render. At least, when I view the page with JavaScript turned off (using the MozBar) I get an empty page.

Also, how are the search results getting crawled? I see a few links to search results on the homepage and /product/images/ page. On the product pages themselves, I see links to search results like this:

http://search.veer.com/?termonly=1&searchTerm=2647 - which I actually think is a brilliant way to get those search results crawled, but I assume that URLs is identical to http://search.veer.com/childhood? Also, the related keywords disappear when I turn off javascript?!

So, I might be worried that big G isn't crawling your search results pages that much at all, which if true, sorta makes the point moot.

Like I said, I'm not expert in this field, so take everything I say with a grain of salt. If you're goal is to get better crawling/indexing of your product pages through Google crawling your search results,

• I'd do an audit of your site with all javascript turned off, or
• Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site
• check your server logs to see how often google is visiting your search results,
• See if there is another way to get better indexing of you product pages (related image links, etc)
• Make sure link juice is flowing through your site appropriately through html text links.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Unfortunately, using another analytics provider won't help, because Google strips the keyword information from the referrer string before it ever hits your analytics software. Hence, no analytics provider will be able to give you that information. (and some theorize this is exactly why Google did it - to stop certain 3rd parties from collecting keyword data that Google itself makes money on)

So what can you do? A few options:

1. Use the data from Google Webmaster Tools: A lot of folks argue (myself included) that the data isn't as usefull, but at least it's something.

2. Urge your client to move away from keyword based reporting. Annie Cushing made an excellent presentation on this topic: http://www.slideshare.net/anniecushing/breaking-up-with-your-organic-keyword-data

3. Use any one of several workarounds to better understand your not provided data. Here's a partial list: http://cyrusshepard.com/7-fantastic-seo-tips-for-googles-not-provided-keywords/

In the end we're likely never to get those keywords back, so we'll have to work with alternative solutions.

The truth is, you can trust them all, but every index will always report different numbers.

For example, it's estimated that Google's index was 2x the size of Yahoo's.

The web is full of links. Billions and billions of them. The problem is that 80% of them are junk. Most indexes maintained by companies like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and even SEOmoz and Majestic can't afford to waste the resources crawling, processing and storing all of those junk links. So the question doesn't become what you keep, what's more important is what you throw away.

Yahoo tended to report a lot of links. It was kind of fun because they reported many links right away, even if they weren't important and didn't help you to rank.

Linkscape (the name of SEOmoz's index) tries very hard to produce a quality listing of links - links that actually have an effect on crawling, indexing and ranking. The huge advantage of Linkscape over Yahoo is that OSE will actually tell you the value of a link through metrics like Domain Authority, Page Authority and MozTrust. You couldn't get these metrics from Yahoo.

Our friends at Majestic wrote a post that we featured on the SEOmoz blog highlighting this difficulty.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-counting-links-is-not-so-easy

No index will report every link, but OSE will represent the majority of links that matter, and provide actionable metrics to go along with them.