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 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 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

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 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!

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)

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.

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.

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!