Not really sure what to make of this. If you want to provide a little more information, perhaps we can help.
What do you mean by a "broken backlink"? How do you know they are broken? Finally, can you provide an example of one?
Thanks.
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Not really sure what to make of this. If you want to provide a little more information, perhaps we can help.
What do you mean by a "broken backlink"? How do you know they are broken? Finally, can you provide an example of one?
Thanks.
Here's one way to tell if this site is hurting you:
Do a search for some of your unique content (wrap it in "quotes" for exact match) and see what site ranks higher. If the scraper site ranks higher than yours, then you definitely have a problem and should follow Lesley's advice here.
Also, make sure you place proper rel="canonical" tags on all your pages. Oftentimes a scraper will scrape everything, including the canonicals, giving you credit for the content.
Most of the time, scraped content is nothing to worry about. Most sites over a certain size get scraped and the content published elsewhere. It's quite possible your dip in rankings wasn't caused by this site (although I can't rule it out) so it's best to keep looking everywhere you can.
Okay, a few points:
1. In addition to using Yoast to noindex archive subpages, you may want to also consider seting it to noindex both tag and category pages.
These are found in Yoast under "Titles and Meta > Taxonomies"
2. While the Yoast plugin will put a "Noindex" tag on the page, this doesn't remove it from Google's index right away. Google first has to crawl the page. Using the index removal tool does help.
3. If your site dropped from 320 visits a day to 30, you may have different problems than duplicate title tags and/or content. Not sure what to tell you to look at, but backlinks, penalties or something else may be to blame.
If you're interrested, here's a great (free) webinar on Wordpress SEO http://moz.com/webinars/advanced-wordpress-seo
Hi Courtney,
Reading your question, I'm not quite sure if you are talking about are microsites and doorway pages, or landing pages that target different geographical intent. (I'll assume the later)
It's fine if your client wants to target different geographical areas with specific content. The best practice for this type of thing usually involves:
If your client wants to publish the same content in different places - ask him/her what they hope to accomplish. Not only does this create duplicate content, but it really doesn't add any value for the end user.
Sounds like your instinct are correct. I don't have a list of articles that act as "proof" that you can show your client, but this article on microsites still holds up pretty well http://moz.com/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites
And the dangers of duplicate content: http://moz.com/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world
Hope this helps! Best of luck.
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.
In relation to what Elison said, there's no fixed "best practice" percent. That said, here's a few things I would do if trying to target a keyword. Please note this is only my personal advice, and not based on any scientific evidence:
So if you're talking about "Seattle's Best Seafood" you just can't say "Seattle's Best Seafood" a bunch of times and expect to rank. If I were a search engine, I would expect you to talk about Anthony's Fish House, or the Blue Star Diner, or great salmon dishes. I would expect you, if this was an authoritative page on the subject, to discuss the subject of Seattle seafood in great depth, using a variety of ideas and topics.
Howdy,
Great question! First of all, I recommend reading this official article on Domain Authority:
http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority
Domain Authority is primarily a link-based metric, so external links to your website are going to influence more than anything. But Domain Authority is also a combination of all our other metrics, such as MozTrust, so the quality of the links that you build is important as well.
Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts. Building your reputation by acquiring links from other high authority, trusted domains is the best way to increase your Domain Authority. It's a hard route, but the rewards are lasting.
Hi Pania,
Any chance you could share the URL and the keyword combination you're using? If you're not comfortable sharing publicly, feel free to write the help team (help @ moz.com) and they should be able to get things sorted out for you.
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.
Hi Stephen,
Without doing a full backlink audit, there's a few things I would do first.
Try your site with Panguin Tool to see if you've been hit by a known update: http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/
Also try this over-optimization tool to check your anchor text: http://www.removeem.com/ratios.php
Your theory about the decrease in value of your link profile may be spot on. It never hurts to build more quality links.
On another note, I couldn't help but notice quite a lot of your site is "thin" content. Pages such as this: http://www.thomassmithfasteners.com/full_nuts_bsf.html . While this is common with your competitors as well, beefing these sections up with more descriptive content could never hurt.
Also, you might want to check your title tags. The seem to mostly start with "Thomas Smith Fasterners". Normally, you want to place the keywords you want to rank for towards the begining of the tag, and avoid repeating the same phrases across multiple title tags.
http://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag
Thomas Smith Fasteners - UNC Full Nuts BS 1768 Online Shop
or
Shop UNC Full Nuts, BS 1768 from Thomas Smith Fasteners
Hi Mike,
Before we go any further, I highly encourage you to read this blog post I wrote about 301 redirects:
http://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects
Even more important than the raw "link juice" passed from a 301, you need to consider the relevance of the pages. If your goal is to preserve link equity, then 301'ing everything to the homepage is likely to not to pass much value, and render those redirected pages to a state of little value.
Does the purchased site have any content worth saving? Is it worth it to re-purpose this for your own means and keep the content live? This might make the most sense, but if not, does it feel right redirecting individual pages to the most relevant page on a one-to-one basis on your own site?
You also suggested another possibility: "Maybe I should 301 the newly purchased domain to a sub-page on my site that explains the acquisition and asks them to sign up on my site?" From a user perspective this makes sense, but be warned that it might not pass much link equity.
If it were me, I'd probably put a message on the site with an explanation that the site has been purchased, and offer a link to the new site. That said, be careful with repetitive, site-wide links. Then, after a time, redirect everything to the most appropriate pages on your own site.
Hope this helps. Cheers.
Moz Analytics will likely have many of the features you're looking for, but unfortunately custom reporting is still a few months off.
At the lower price points (non-enterprise) there's not a ton of good reporting options out there, and most folks I suspect do something similar to what you're doing now - Cut and Paste different reports together into something that hopefully looks semi-professional.
Look for the new custom reports to launch this fall (fingers crossed)
Here's my take:
First, basing user experience on cookies isn't always the best experience. Folks change browsers throughout the day (phone, tablet, laptop, desktop) and they often browse privately and/or clear their cookies. This means LOTS of folks will be landing on the "first-time" page when they are actually returning visitors.
But if you can live with this, fine.
From an SEO point of view, where are you directing bots like Googlebot that don't accept cookies? Will bots see the "new visitor" page? Do you want bots to see the new visitor page? (sorry for so many questions, but I don't know your objectives - but these are important questions to think about)
Overall, it's typically best to have a consistent experience between bots and visitors. If this means javascript popup for folks without a cookie set, this might be the best option (but still not ideal, because popups can negatively effect visitor usage and satisfaction metrics, like bounce rate)
If this is something you have to do, I'd go with the popup, but first I'd try to talk the client out of it
Hi TeamSEO,
Sorry to hear about your difficulties. Without doing a full site audit and backlink audit, it would be challenging to determine exactly why you've fallen out of good graces, but a couple of things jump out at me from your description of the problem.
1. Backlinks: You received a message of unnatural links, which is a good indication of a penalty. In these cases, the Webspam team has indicated they like to see evidence that you've taken steps to remove the links, and not just submit a disavow file.
I'd do a complete link audit of your links in GWT, determine which links are no longer there and what links you can successfully have removed, and work on those. Document all your work, then update your disavow file only with the links that you can't successfully manually remove, then submit all this documentation to Google.
2. The letter from Google seems to hint that the problem may not be your backlinks, but some other quality guideline violations, like selling links or hidden text or doorway pages. Looking at your site, it seems to be pretty clean, but sometimes problems stay hidden.
Refer to Google's quality guidelines for a list of things to look for: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en#3
As a last resort, you can ask Google, via reconsideration request, for a list of example pages. They may or may not honor this request, but it's worth trying for.
Unfortuneatly, the Webspam team isn't known for giving out tons of information, but if you're nice enough and persistent enough they may give you a clue. Also, I highly recommend you post this question on Google Webmaster Forums, and explain what you did here. Often times a Googler will jump in on those forums and offer to help. http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/webmasters
Hope you can get to the bottom of this. Best of luck!
I wouldn't worry too much about losing PageRank. In the old days, SEOs used this technique known as PageRank sculpting, but a few years ago Google changed how they handle nofollow links so that you don't actually save anything by using them.
Nofollow should be used on links you don't trust or can't vouch for, and for paid or non-editorial links. Since these links don't fall into any of these buckets, there shouldn't be an issue.
As far as linking out, the real question here is what would make your visitors most happy? Sometimes a visitor that clicks away and goes down a rabbit hole is happier than one who doesn't find anything interesting on your site, so it's best to weigh all sides.
Best of luck!
Hi Alessandro,
Sorry to hear you're having difficulty. For questions like this you can always contact the Moz Help Team (help@moz.com) and they should be able to look at your account and offer some answers. Best of luck!
Google just updated thier link scheme document:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en
Links with optimized anchor text in articles or press releases distributed on other sites. For example:
There are many wedding rings on the market. If you want to have a wedding, you will have to pick the best ring. You will also need to buy flowers and a wedding dress.
I get suspicious anytime I hear about exact match press release links. In my experience they can do little to help you, and everything to hurt.
Whenever I submit a press release I always use url links (example.com) or generic anchors, never a "money" term. This is because Google views press releases as non-editorial, and tends to devalue most links they see coming from these sources.
If that exact match link that you embedded in your press release is widely distributed across multiple sites and distribution platforms, then you're in even deeper.
There's been some talk by Google of late that the newer class of penalties and algorythmic filters can act more at the page level (whereas before they tended to be applied broadly to the entire domain.) This means if you're trying to clean things up, you can start by addressing the one page with the over-optimized links and working your way out from there.
I'd start by trying to remove the links, then possibly using the disavow if you aren't successful. Finally, if the page doesn't have a very strong backlink profile you can simply remove it and serve a 404 or 410 status code, and then remove it from the index using the Remove URL tool in Google Webmaster Tools.
Not sure if this relates to what is happening on your site or not - it's pure speculation on my part. Regardless, I hope it helps in some small way.
Cheers,
Cyrus
Unfortuneatly you're in a pickle, and there aren't many good solutions.
The first thing I would ask is if you are sure these links are hurting you. Even though they may be 'bad', it's possible Google doesn't see them that way and has passed no filter or penalty.
If you determine the links are bad then basically, your options are:
It's true you need to be careful when using the disavow, but if you've been hit by a penalty or think you've been hit by Penguin and have exhausted all other option, it's generally your best bet.
Cheers, Cyrus
Sounds like a very well reasoned response. Thanks for the follow up!
Right now, you can only grade one keyword phrase at a time per report, but you can run multiple reports. So in this case, you would have to run 3 reports and receive 3 different letter grades.
If this is a functionality you'd like to see, we do have a Moz Feature Request Forum: https://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums/293194-Moz-Feature-Requests Users can submit new ideas, and the community votes them up. Our product team then uses this forum for new features and determine what to build next.
Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO.
Hi Pania,
Sorry to hear about the confusion with the On Page report card. In order to help, there's a couple things we can do;
Regardless, we'd love to help you get to the bottom of this. Cheers.
You've stumbled on a very big question is SEO. Unfortunately there's no right answers, just lots of nuances.
In the traditional sense, most social links and mentions are not handled the same way by search engines as traditional links. We do know that Google takes social data into account, and there is a high correlation between content that is highly shared and content that ranks well, but we don't know exactly how search engines use this data.
Think of it this way: when you post your video on Facebook and people share it, that means more people are talking about it and you have a change at more attention, links and mentions. These are all things search engines are looking for, and there's a good chance you'll rank higher. But it may be more of an indirect effect than a direct one.
The one exception may be Google+, which is structured different than other social platforms. Post on Google+ pass both PageRank and anchor text, and post shared there actually "count" as a link, as far as I know.
So the answer to your question is yes and maybe. Social links may be taken into consideration by the search engines, but typically not the same way as traditional links.
Facebook doesn't share all their data with Google, for the most part discourages robots, and you won't typically find posts in Open Site Explorer. That doesn't mean the links don't count, but in the traditional sense they don't carry the same value.
Hi Bob,
You often run into this situation with eCommerce sites - they want to add information to each product but they don't quite know where to put it.
The short answer is yes - but only if it's content that actually helps the visitor. If you can increase the value of these pages by adding unique content by all means do so. On the other hand, if the content is truly valuable, you may consider placing it on it's own page where it might attract more attention.
The thing you want to avoid is adding content just for the sake of adding content. If it's not going to increase visitor engagement then it's probably not worth doing - but I've never seen a case where adding high quality, engaging content actually hurt.
Go for it!
Hi Andrew,
The answer often comes down to duplicate content and whether or not you choose to index these post types. If the posts are unique and valuable and you want to index them, it's generally good to include them in the sitemap.
In general, most post types should are generally included in most sitemaps. On the other hand, if you have entire categories of post types that you've de-indexed, you may not want to include these.
Further reading: http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/
I'm unaware of any study that shows increased website size has a positive effect on rankings. Lot's of spam sites have over 1,000,000 pages, in the vain attempt to rank for anything, but it doesn't seem to help them. That said, there are some secondary consideration that size brings with it.
For example, large sites may have indexation problems if they don't have enough PageRank/Authority for a full crawl.
Conversely, large site will often contain more content, thereby presenting more ranking opportunities.
I can't tell you for certain that redirecting the pages will help you, or hurt you for that matter. In the end you should make the decision based on what's best for user experience. But one thing I'm fairly certain of is that there's little chance that site size is a ranking factor.
I gave Tom a "good answer"
As for other suggestions, none except the obvious.
1. Keep building content that earns links/mentions/buzz
2. Make sure you have a diverse link profile
3. Diversify your inbound traffic sources.
I'm starting to sound like Dr. Pete, so I'll just link to this post and save us both time: http://moz.com/blog/top-1-seo-tips-for-2013
Cheers!
Hi Chris,
There are 2 Definitions of Domain Authority:
1. Domain Authority is a metric used by Moz to predict a website's ability to rank for a given keyword, all other things being equal. It is a predictive metric only, based upon computer modeling and some intellegent guesses, but it in no way effects actual ranking.
That said, there is a strong correlation between DA and rankings. Meaning sites with high DA often rank well, and vice versa. But one does not cause the other. You can read more about it here.
http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority
2. SEOs use the term "Domain Authority" to refer to the body of metrics Google assigns to a site's value. It's a general term and yes, Google uses some version of "Domain Authority" to determine your rankings, but this is not the same thing as DA that you see used in Moz.
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.
Generally, if you've been hit by a penalty, blocking with robots.txt isn't enough. You generally either have to remove or improve those pages entirely.
As you can see, most of these pages are still in the index.
When looking at your site, I found many pages like this:
http://www.enakliyat.com.tr/hata.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/manisa-evden-eve-nakliyat-fiyatlari-37
And also "thin" pages without much unique content. If these pages are valuable to your customer, you should consider updating them with fresh, unique content, then file a reconsideration request with Google to lift the penalty.
I agree with Moosa that it's likely not a problem. That said, I think it can be a problem when the "chrome" of closely related sites start linking together aggressively. One tactics spammers use in link networks is using the same content templates again and again, and I wouldn't be surprised if Google used this in their detection algorithms.
On the other hand, Google has also said they look at site structure and design elements when determining if sites on separate subdomains (but the same root domain) should be considered part of the same site for ranking/link purposes.
Regardless, in your case I think you should have little to worry about.
If the content is unique, there's very little chance you will be penalized for duplicate content.
That said, I've often worked with many eCommerce companies that like to build new sites for new brands or to take a different marketing angle. In general, these sites double the effort required to get them to rank. Not sure if this applies to you, but I generally find it better to try to keep all the efforts focused on a single site.
Regardless, best of luck with your SEO!
Without going over what others have said, which I agree with, it seems each page features one product, right?
So instead of "Products related to <this thing="" my="" customers="" care="" about="">from <my incredibly="" impressive="" brand="" name="">"</my></this>
why not... " related to <this thing="" my="" customers="" care="" about="">from</this>
Which would make it unique. Just a thought.
What you describe is what the cross domain canonical is intended for, but there is a risk of search engines misinterpreting the canonical signals and/or not honoring them.
So you are probably safe doing this, but it's always a little risky when you purposely publish dupe content in multiple places, especially across separate domains.
Interesting question. I don't think Google has every penalized anyone for passing Pagerank to themselves. Technically all paid links should be nofollowed according to Google's policy. Practically speaking, in your case, it's more of a grey area although I seriously can't anticipate too many negative consequences.
Hi Jacob,
Sorry for the late response. We're working on including more links from HTTPS websites (i.e. Google+) which is something we haven't been able to previously do before. But our new crawling technology should be able to handle this no problem. Look for it soon!
Howdy,
The big question is whether or not these links are actually "unnatural." If they are there because of overly-aggressive social booking marking, they may be considered unnatural and you may consider removing them.
Unfortunately, search engines never tell us exactly what links are bad or which are good. Social bookmarking links aren't necessarily good or bad by themselves, but often it depends on the anchor text - lots of exact match anchor text is usually a sign of unnatural linking.
Paddy Moogan wrote a good post on finding low-quality links that I highly recommend: http://www.stateofsearch.com/step-by-step-guide-finding-low-quality-links/
Wish I could tell you one way or another to remove and/or disavow those links, but there's never an easy answer.
-cyrus
Hi Jimmy,
Thanks for the really fun question (note: negative SEO isn't fun, but trying to figure it the algorithm is
Couple of reasons why I think this would be difficult:
1. We have very limited working knowledge of both co-citation and co-occurance. What we do know at this point is little more than theory. So working them into an actionable strategy for positive rankings would be hard enough I imagine, let alone negative SEO.
2. The signals produced by these measurements are likely to be weaker than traditional link signals, thus reducing the incentive to use them.
3. One of the reasons we believe search engines may use co-citation and co-occurance is that they are harder to game (especially when combined with authority and trust metrics) so it follows that they would also be harder to game in the negative.
That said, it's so new I barely know what I'm talking about. Really interesting area
Hi Matthew,
Without getting into the specifics of your site, it would seem the first step would be to identify the duplication errors Moz reports to see if they are actually valid, and then determine what is causing them and takes steps to address them.
Within the duplicate content reports, there should be a number listed next to each URL showing the number of other pages with duplicate content. If you click on this number, you'll get a list of URLs.
By comparing these URLs against each other, you can start to identify the problem. Does that make sense? Perhaps you've already taken this step, but it's hard to tell from the question.
If you find that the URLs are fishy, and you suspect a problem with your CMS, it's often helpful to determine where the Moz crawlers discovered the links to these URLs. You can do this by downloading the entire CSV report. In the last column is a URL showing where the link was discovered. Knowing this is often helpful in rooting out problems.
Hope this helps! Best of luck.
I'm going to take the easy way out and side-step the topic of PageRank, which Alan covers well, and raise the issue of relevance and weighting based on reasonable surfer assumptions.
Generally speaking,
From a practical point of view, I try to get the highest link on a page. After that, I don't worry too much about additional links to the same domain on that page. But there are a lot of factors that play into this, and your situation may differ.
Hi Emma,
I feel your frustration. Unfortunately, we don't know all the ways in which Google's algorythm works, although we have a pretty good idea of many pieces of the puzzle.
Even the highest correlated metric we know of, PageAuthority, only has a correlation of about 0.35 (1.00 being a perfect correlation). Pretty good for SEO, but in the real world it's not the best correlation.
So the factors in the keyword difficulty tool are known ranking influences, but it's impossible to incorporate all 200+ ranking signals (some known, some unknown) into a single tool. Instead, the best way to use the tool is to use it to try to find out exactly why a page ranks above another. Is it over-optimized? What is it about those social signals that help? Are the links from relevant sources? Has the site been penalized?
Yeah, it's conflicting and confusing. In truth, the first 80% of all SEO is pretty standard: Create good content, make sure it's accessible by Search Engines, Follow best SEO practices, market it smartly, get links, repeat. Do this well and you'll win most of your battles. The remaining 20% gets hard, and if we think about it too much, we sometimes waste our time.
Regardless, the best strategy, in my opinion, is not to go after 1 keyword, but 100s at a time using a long-tail strategy. I wrote about it in more detail here: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-rank If you're just starting out, or even experienced, it's the best way to go.
Hi John,
Question: When you say WMT reports 421 instances of "pharmacy" - where do they report this? In your inbound anchor text, content keywords, or somewhere else?
Also, does Google report any malware on your site? I couldn't tell from the question.
Regardless, if you're unsure about any lingering hack, I'd use a tool like Securi to do a site check. If you're site is indeed clean, I wouldn't worry too much about the latent data in Webmaster Tools. But if you're site was infected for a long time, you can try filing a reconsideration request which might prompt a set of human Google eyeballs on the site. If you site is clean, you can also perform a "crawl as google" and submit all linked pages to the index.
Hope this helps! Best of luck.
As Mihai noted, the Just Discovered Links is a beta feature that gets it's tweet data from Topsy. So if your tweeted link appears in our Topsy feed, you'll see it here.
If you're a PRO member, you can also track recent links and metions through Fresh Web Explorer, which uses feeds instead of tweets for discovery.
Howdy,
If you're still having trouble with the Rank Tracker, be sure to shoot a message to the Moz Help Team at help@moz.com
Hopefully everything's been transferred over by now.
As far as other tools, if you need daily ranking I might recommend Authority Labs, as others have here.
Actually, the specific situation with G+ is an interresting question. Let me ask our engineers about this rand see if we can find some answers going forward.
Hi Jacob,
This isn't uncommon. OSE and Mozscape crawl the web and do their best to report on links most likely to influence rankings and traffic, but they don't report all links. The latest index, I believe, is around 90 Billion links. It's a pretty good index, but we can do better, and have plans to do better going forward:
http://moz.com/products/api/updates
My friend Aaron Wheeler gave this explanation of how our crawlers work:
"We update our Linkscape Index every 3 to 5 weeks. Crawling the whole internet to look for links takes 2-3 weeks. And then we’ve got 1-2 weeks of processing to do on those links to determine which are the most important links etc. You can see a schedule of how often we update, and planned updates here.
Linkscape focuses on a breadth-first approach, and thus we nearly always have content from the homepage of websites, externally linked-to pages and pages higher up in a site’s information hierarchy. However, deep pages that are buried beneath many layers of navigation are sometimes missed and it may be several index updates before we catch all of these.
If our crawlers or data sources are blocked from reaching those URLs, they may not be included in our index (though links that points to those pages will still be available). Finally, the URLs seen by Linkscape must be linked-to by other documents on the web or our index will not include them.
I hope this information helps! While the site may not be indexed yet, give it some time – maybe we’ll see it in OSE and Linkscape next month.
Best of luck!
Aaron"
We know update the index every 2-3 weeks, and do a good job of finding/reporting the most important links on the web, but sometimes we miss a few links on less popular pages. We hope to continue to do a better job finding important links!
Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO.
Hi Jacob,
This isn't uncommon. OSE and Mozscape crawl the web and do their best to report on links most likely to influence rankings and traffic, but they don't report all links. The latest index, I believe, is around 90 Billion links. It's a pretty good index, but we can do better, and have plans to do better going forward:
http://moz.com/products/api/updates
We do a good job of finding/reporting the most important links on the web, but sometimes we miss a few links on less popular pages.
My friend Aaron Wheeler gave this explanation of how our crawlers work:
"We update our Linkscape Index every 3 to 5 weeks. Crawling the whole internet to look for links takes 2-3 weeks. And then we’ve got 1-2 weeks of processing to do on those links to determine which are the most important links etc. You can see a schedule of how often we update, and planned updates here.
Linkscape focuses on a breadth-first approach, and thus we nearly always have content from the homepage of websites, externally linked-to pages and pages higher up in a site’s information hierarchy. However, deep pages that are buried beneath many layers of navigation are sometimes missed and it may be several index updates before we catch all of these.
If our crawlers or data sources are blocked from reaching those URLs, they may not be included in our index (though links that points to those pages will still be available). Finally, the URLs seen by Linkscape must be linked-to by other documents on the web or our index will not include them.
I hope this information helps! While the site may not be indexed yet, give it some time – maybe we’ll see it in OSE and Linkscape next month.
Best of luck!
Aaron"
It's hard to predict Google rankings, and there's no one metric that can do this reliably. The best we have to go on are metrics that correlate well with ranking potential. As of May 31, 2013, here's how the following correlated with Google rankings for US search results:
So Page Authority is the highest correlated metric that we know of - beating Google's PageRank by a wide margin. But as Chris points out, this is only a predictive metric. And while a 0.36 correlation is awesome in the SEO world, it's still a long way from a perfect correlation.
For more historical correlation data, I highly recommend looking at the 2011 Ranking Factors (we'll be updating this soon)
Generally, most SEOs have to take a number of metrics and data into account when trying to figure out the ranking potential of a webpage, and it's incredibly hard to create a computer model to replicate this.
Regardless, I hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.