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Hey all, have a really strange situation I've never encountered before. I launched a new website about 2 months ago. It took an awfully long time to get index, probably 3 weeks. When it did, only the homepage was indexed. I completed the site, all it's pages, made and submitted a sitemap...all about a month ago. The coverage report shows that Google has discovered the URL's but not indexed them. Weirdly, 3 of the pages ARE indexed, but the rest are not. So I have 42 URL's in the coverage report listed as "Excluded" and 39 say "Discovered- currently not indexed." When I inspect any of these URL's, it says "this page is not in the index, but not because of an error." They are listed as crawled - currently not indexed or discovered - currently not indexed. But 3 of them are, and I updated those pages, and now those changes are reflected in Google's index. I have no idea how those 3 made it in while others didn't, or why the crawler came back and indexed the changes but continues to leave the others out. Has anyone seen this before and know what to do?

Hey all, so in the past when I make changes to a site, I make the changes, review the analytics in the wake of the changes, analyze and go from there. Little things here and there, no biggie. With my new company, we're doing a full website redesign from scratch (Currently on Wordpress, moving to custom). They are asking me about analytics and reporting and I was hoping to get some insight here. When the new site is ready, they are launching it at www2.ourdomain.com and sending 25% of traffic to ourdomain.com to that with the other 75% going to www.ourdomain.com (current site). So two questions- how would you go about setting up analytics for that? And how do you ensure the www2 version doesn't get indexed but stay in Google's good graces? If you de-index your "home page" that 25% are seeing I can't imagine that's helpful for SEO. Hopefully that makes sense! Trying to look at how to A/B test to ensure the new site is working and converting before pushing all traffic to it.

I have an opportunity to take over a massive domain name list (several thousand). If at all possible, I'd really love to not have to search each keyword individually in the tool and map out the priority score for each. Is there just a way to view the keywords by highest priority scores? Then potentially download the csv and alphabetize to help me narrow in on domains that would be the most worthwhile to develop? I know it sounds like a big ask, and likely not possible, but never hurts to at least ask about it. Thanks!

My company is Squatty Potty (yes, of magic unicorn fame) and I recently redid our website's navigation. We're overhauling it currently to rebuild the whole thing, but what is there should give a good idea of site hierarchy to Google I would think. The funny thing is, when you Google [squatty potty website] we do have sitelinks. But when you Google just [squatty potty] we don't. Any ideas on why sitelinks would appear on one search but not the other? I see they appear with [squatty potty logo] as well. I can't figure out how to get them to appear for my brand name search, any help appreciated!

Hey all, I've just started at a new company. We spend quite a bit on Adwords and I'm tasked with seeing how that is going and assessing that spend. The problem is, Adwords and Youtube ads have been given to a third-party advertising agency. They are only willing to share the number of clicks, cost and conversions, stuff like that. They refuse to give us access to the account. Is this legal? I mostly want to get in there to look at keyword history, see what we have bid on, how often it was searched, stuff like that. But they won't let us in and I'm wondering if they are required to let us look at our account as I would think they are. Please help!

My domain uses a redirect of all traffic to https. The site is https://www.tallslimtees.com. I've been working on it this year and know there are several good, topical links coming in. But OSE shows nothing. Any idea why this would be the case? How can I see all of my links and the data on them?

Random I know. I started a fun pet project at www.me-not-spammer.info. Total spam. Totally says it's not spam. Satire and all, something only SEO people will get really. Anyway I want to make a sidebar of other "not spammers" and need to find a bunch of spammy websites. Problem is they don't rank in search engines obviously so I know of only the ones who leave comments on some of my wordpress sites. Anyone have a list of a bunch of them so I can link to them in my blogroll?

Nearly all of my domains in webmaster tools show thousands of links to me from atomysolutions.com. Problem is only a couple links show up to them in OSE so can't learn much there. I try to access their site but every page I do I get a 403 forbidden error. All I can gather is they are some kind of health and beauty thing. I did a site search in Google and looked at the cached result of the first page but it took me to sexyshoes.co.uk or something. I honestly cannot figure out. OSE shows them as one of my linking domains, but I can't see any of the pages linking to me. I need to know if this is a spammy site that I need to disavow. I have no idea how or why they link to me. Any insight from any Mozzers is GREATLY appreciated! 🙂

Hey Mozzers, I have a lot of blogs that deal with health/exercise/fitness and that niche and need to get content for them. I'm not looking for mass content that is crap. I'm looking for well thought out stuff. Any bloggers in that industry want to be guest authors and put up some posts on any of my sites? Trying to get good content and this seems like a good way. You can include a link back to you obviously. Please let me know if you are interested, I'm happy to get in touch and post your content on my sites. Thanks!

I'm helping out on a site (www.treadmillreviewguru.com) which formerly had rich snippets appearing in Google. They use hCard markup. All of the markup is visible on the page. The search preview in Google's rich snippets testing tool show a picture, a rating and all that. However, nothing is appearing in search results. Here is an example page: http://www.treadmillreviewguru.com/nordictrack-treadmill-reviews/nordictrack-commercial-1750-treadmill-reviews-ratings/ This page ranks in the top ten (for me, global results) when I search [nordictrack commercial 1750 treadmill review]. Does anyone know why Google would display the rich snippets a few weeks ago and then not display any at all?

I've done several Youmoz posts and only recently noticed for some reason that other authors have included author links and links to their websites in their bio section at the end. I edited mine with a full URL but it only shows up as text. No editor there when you edit your profile so no way of adding a link. Anyone know how this is done?

At SMX during the You&A with Matt Cutts, Danny asked why the algo update was called Penguin. Matt said: "We thought the codename actually might give too much info about how it works so the lead engineer got to choose." Last night Google released their 39 updates for the month of May. Among them was this: "Improvements to Penguin. [launch codename "twref2", project codename "Page Quality"] This month we rolled out a couple minor tweaks to improve signals and refresh the data used by the penguin algorithm." Whoa, codename twref2 for Penguin improvement? Is this giving us an insight about how it works? I would guess the ref2 means second refresh perhaps. But tw I am not sure about. What do you think? Is there a hidden insight here?

Hey mozzers, I'm trying a post-penguin experiment with a brand new website. New domain, separate hosting from all my other stuff, all that. It is run on an article script that allows new authors to make articles and post them. It is all health related and there are no other topics. I'm trying to see if a brand new site can get something to rank quickly with no SEO being done. No links of any kind, just social media sharing of articles. Authors can put links in their articles to anywhere they want, so if you want to help your health site out with a link, go for it. I'm looking for any writers who want to join us in this experiment. i figure if we get a lot of content on there, all original, no spun, natural links, we can do well. if so, I'm abandoning all penguin hit domains and starting over. And you all can get some links out of it. I've already got me and my employees, so the more the merrier. Just let me know if interested.

I am not looking for a full service SEO agency. I just want link building. Not paid links, not link networks, not blog comments, not bookmarks...real, legit, decent links. Does anyone have any experience working with an SEO agency that helped them develop their link profile positively and at a reasonable price? I'm willing to pay for the service, I just want to work with someone who won't buy links or send a bunch of spam our way. If anyone has worked with such an agency, please let me know so I can contact them for more info. Thanks!

A site I help someone with in link building was recently redesigned. I do not have access to the site in any way. Well, after the redesign, no conversions were tracking in Adwords and Analytics ecommerce tracking showed no transactions and no amounts. I found the Analytics code and sent it to their programmer. I have linked the Adwords and Analytics accounts. So now conversions are tracked in Adwords and transactions are tracked in Analytics. However, amounts have vanished and not returned. I'm not technically savvy enough to figure this out. How do I get this Analytics code to track transaction amounts so that they appear in Adwords and in Analytics ecommerce tracking?

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but I am not a programmer and my client's programmer is asking me how to set this up. Normally I do it in my cPanel, but they can't and need to write it in the .htaccess file. The client's new website was posted at dev.site.com and of course their programmer put robots="index,follow" and so the site is completely indexed. They are launching it tomorrow at www.site.com. I need a wildcard redirect that takes dev.site.com/anything and 301 redirects it to www.site.com/samething if that makes sense. Basically redirects every dev.site.com URL to www.site.com so we don't have duplicate indexation issues. Can anyone tell me the code to do this that needs to go in the .htaccess file? I would just do it through cPanel but that's not an option, so any help is appreciated.

I have a big client who is looking to have some design work done on their websites. Really just redoing them essentially. They were asking me who the top web design companies in the country are. Anyone have any suggestions? Who are the most renown agencies?

Hey guys, I normally work in WordPress and just use a 301 redirect plugin. I bought a site and rather than maintain two similar ones have decided to redirect one to the other. I am having trouble with the .htaccess file. Here is an example. These are two redirects: redirect 301 /category/models/next/2
redirect 301 /category/models I want both of these URLs to redirect to the same URL of the new site. However, the /category/models is the only one working. It redirects to the new page just fine. The /category/models/next/2 is redirecting to nearly the same URL on the new site, only it is adding /next/2 to the end and that is bringing up a 404. Why is it adding /next/2 to the new URL? How can I fix this? There are several doing this. Help appreciated!

Hey Mozzers, quick question about link networks. I've identified quite a few, like these: Build My Rank Unique Article Wizard Authority Link Network Article Ranks EZ Article Link Socialadr Linkvana SEO LinkVine Does anyone have experience using any of these? The basic premise is they own or their members own tons of different blogs. You write an article, give it to them, they publish it one one of those blogs. You include a link in your article. Done. They charge a monthly fee to use and all that, so is it worth it? Anyone had any success with them? Finding mixed things on forums online, and since many of their websites like awfully spammy, wanted to poll the Mozzers and get your thoughts.

A couple of weeks ago I created a Google+ page for my website and you can see the page here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/101532714567190382783/posts?hl=en I was logged in to my account when I did so. I'm now ready to start posting on my page and I cannot for the life of me figure out how. I've tried everything I can find to update that page as the page, but I cannot use Google+ as the page. I have no idea how to post anything. Please help!

Over the weekend we learned Google co-founder Sergey Brin donated $500,000 to Wikimedia, the parent company of Wikipedia.com. Last year I believe Google donated $2 million to Wikimedia. I now ask, is this suspicious in anyway, seeing that Wikipedia ranks so well in Google for so many terms? There are several blog posts about it online here and there throughout the years, but what does everyone think?

Get ready to have your minds blown. Try a search in Google for any of these: proform tour de france tour de france trainer tour de france exercise bike proform tour de france bike In each instance you will notice that Proform.com, the maker of the bike, is not #1. In fact, the same guy is #1 every time, and this is the URL: www.indoorcycleinstructor.com/tour-de-france-indoor-cycling-bike Here's the fun part. Click on that result and guess where you go? Yup, Proform.com. The exact same page ranking right behind it in fact. Actually, this URL first redirects to an affiliate link and that affiliate link redirects to Proform.com. I want to know two things. First, how on earth did they do this? They got to #1 ahead of Proform's own page. How was it done? But the second question is, how have they not been caught? Are they cloaking? How does Google rank a double 301 redirect in the top spot whose end destination is the #2 result? PS- I have a site in this industry and this is how I caught it and why it is of particular interest. Just can't figure out how it was done or why they have not been caught. Not because I plan to copy them, but because I plan to report them to Google but want to have some ammo.

I think I may have a problem with someone trying to get me in trouble for paid links. If you look at the following websites, scroll to the bottom and look at the featured links area. There is a link to my website with my keyword on all of them. mercurynews.com contracostatimes.com twincities.com insidebayarea.com marinij.com Now I see a lot of the same links here which leads me to believe these sites are all owned by the same group. Also, 4 of the 5 are Bay Area news sites. The question I have is, are these links hurting me? I did not buy these and did nothing to put them there. I asked the previous owner of the domain who I am in touch with. He is the only other person to own it and he never purchased those links. My guess is a competitor is targeting me perhaps? Just wondering on everyone's take on this. I really can't afford to be getting hit by these potentially penalizing links right now, not when the busy season is starting up. Should I try to get them removed? Does anyone have experience with this or know how it might have happened?

The site I am working on is a code nightmare for starters. I'm editing a file called layout that controls the section of each page. The programmer from a while back got unique titles by putting this piece of code in: <title><?= $this->metaTag ?></title> In all the different controllers and stuff I can see where the title is the name of the product plus review or something to that effect. How do I do this for the meta description? Right now the meta description is static in the layout file, and so every page has an identical one. I was hoping there was a way to make the meta description automatically use the first 140 characters on the page or something. Something like this:

I can't find anything online that deals with this issue. I have a page getting indexed by Google at mydomain.com/widgets and I don't know why. No links to it anywhere. The page it is closest to is mydomain.com/reviews/widgets and so I tried to set up a 301 to point one to the other. The problem is each individual widget review is at mydomain.com/widgets/reviews/products/widget-name and so when I redirect /widgets to mydomain.com/reviews/widgets it also redirects each individual product to mydomain.com/reviews/widgets/reviews/products/widget-name. Is there some way to just redirect /widgets without having it affect each product review? I cannot change URL structure either, nature of the site. Any ideas?

The website I am working on is http://www.treadmillreviews.com. If you look at any of our affiliate links, they all have an href value of # or something that keeps the user on the page. However, there is an onclick="window.open('affiliate link URL')" code in them that has the affiliate link open in a new window. This website was set up to "hide" the affiliate links in essence this way. I just tried to make a PPC campaign in Google. Got shut down in about 20 minutes for being a "bridge page." Now, all of the content is original and not copied from anywhere. Supposedly Google could not see these links. Yet we got labeled how we did, and now I"m thinking it is causing rankings to hurt a bit. My question is, should I change how all of the links are set up? Should I make the href value be the affiliate link? It is a redirect like CJ.com uses. Should I nofollow those affiliate links? What is the best way to handle this problem? All help is appreciated.

I am redoing a site and the URL's are changing structure. The client's site was in magento and in the store they would get two URLs, for example: /store/categoryname/productname and /store/categoryname/productname?SID=dslkajsfdoiu947598whouieht983hg98 Do I have to 301 redirect both of these URL's to their new counterpart? Both go to the same content but magento seemed to add these SIDs into the navigation and Google has both versions in the index.

Hey guys, have a business partner prepping a new website and it is ready to go. He wants to do something similar to threadless.com which gives users the ability to upload things, vote on things and buy things. He asked me who could build the site and I frankly didn't have any recommendations for him. Does anyone here have a positive experience with a web design/programming person or company that they trust? I would like to get a good recommendation to him of someone who can build this thing, built it well and build it in less than the usual 6-12 months. Does anyone like that even exist? If so, please respond with your answer, looking to get moving on this project soon. Thanks!

I just went to my campaign to check on rankings, and my Bing rankings are wildly different from my Yahoo rankings. None of the keywords are even close, every one is very different. Anyone know what is happening here? Shouldn't they still be the same?

Hey all, I have a certain format I want to follow on my text ads across several ad groups. I deleted all the past ads and only three ad groups remain with ads that follow this format. When I hit add new ad group, the ad come pre-populated with the text of a now deleted ad and I cannot for the life of me change it. I would love for one of my active ads to come up as I only have to change one name and one number in each ad. How do I control what that default ad is? How can I make it stop being an ad I have deleted. Please help!

Hey all, anyone know how to add new campaigns in the pro dashboard after you upgrade? I went from pro to plus pro to get 12 campaigns, but it won't let me add anymore. It says I am a plus pro member and all, but there's no option to add more campaigns, anyone know what to do here?

I want to get into some good paid directories, but every list I have found out there is either just a top ten and repeats the same ones or is a list of 500 where I know most are worthless. Has anyone submitted to paid directories that has a list of good ones that are actually worth submitting to?

I've only ever submitted my sites to tons of free directories, not the paid ones. I'm thinking of getting into a few paid directories now, but just wondering, anyone had experience with a paid directory link being treated like a paid links an penalized or anything? Has it helped you? My competitors has a lot of backlinks from paid directories, so I"m thinking of doing the same thing. But if Google thinks of paid directories as paid links, I would be better off just turning him in 🙂

In the old Q&A set up your response was automatically given a thumbs up by you so that you got a mozpoint for every response you gave. Now you have to manually thumb up your responses. Why was this change made? Can we get it back to the way it was?

I have a lot of websites and they are all fitness related. Some are affiliate sites and some are blogs. I've made some great relationships with some big players in the fitness space and it has worked out well for both of us. Is anyone here in the fitness industry? Are you open to building new relationships? Do you know other websites or blogs in the industry open to creating new relationships? I don't mean a simple link exchange, I mean a real relationship where sites try to help each other out more than an arbitrary link in a list on some resource page.

My first YOUMoz post was published the other day and I got some pretty good feedback in the comments. I was wondering what topic, tip or insight would people like to see from a YOUMoz post? I want to start a new one but have some writer's block, if there's anything out there someone would really like to see, I would love to run with an idea.

I recently redesigned a website that is now in WordPress. It was previously in some odd, custom platform that didn't work very well. The URL's for all the pages are now more search engine friendly and more concise. The problem is, now Google has all of the old pages and all of the new pages in its index. This is a duplicate problem since content is the same. I have set up a 301 redirect for every old URL to it's new counterpart. I was going to do a remove URL request in Webmaster Tools but it seems I need to have a 404 code and not a 301 on those pages to do that. Which is better to do to get the old URL's out of the index? 404 them and do a removal request or 301 them to the new URL? How long will it take Google to find these 301 redirects and keep just the new pages in the index?

I learned Google PPC years ago and got certified by Google. Back then and for a long time since I know it was best practice to capitalize words in your domain name. I know Google no longer does this and that words in your domain name of your ad are now all lowercase. I hear recommendations and see them practice that adding keywords in a directory are a good way to still get capitalized words in your ad. When I learned PPC, I was told your display URL and your destination URL had to match. Now I'm seeing ads where that is not the case. If I have an ad that takes someone to my homepage of a coupon site, can I have a display URL that says: mysite.com/Coupons Even if the destination URL is just mysite.com ? I'm seeing conflicting things online and it's hard because I don't know what the current guidelines are after this change.

Ok I see this happening all of the time. I get my hands on a new website and there are one of four header tag issues: 1. There are no H1 tags at all 2. There are multiple H1 tags on the same page 3. Every page has an identical H1 tag 4. Header tags are used all out of order Do any of these have a negative impact on rankings? I've always tried to get one H1 tag on each page, have it be the first header tag, and make it unique to each page. Is this a waste of itme? Could improper header tag use hurt a website?

Right now I train my interns and new hires on 5 techniques: 1. Appropriate blog commenting the right way 2. Saving social bookmarks 3. Submitting a website to a directory 4. Publishing articles with links 5. How to build up, maintain and use a Twitter/Facebook/Digg/StumbleUpon profile for SEO Are there some other lower level link building tactics you have tried to teach interns or new hires?