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It's been FOREVER since there was one...

The concern I'm more interested in is whether or not this information is reliable enough for me to base any decisions off of.

I watch the link metrics because I want to see how links I am acquiring are stacking up against my competitors links. These tools don't seem to be very good at letting me compare the quality of my links to my competitors links. When Moz ranks a link from someone's OWN pinterest page, a page with hardly any followers, as a better link than one that the same competitor has from a top design blog surrounded by great content, I start to lose confidence that these tools are worth using.

I'm on board with the whole idea of content being the most important thing. The links I'm getting are just part of my overall strategy that is definitely heavily weighted towards putting out good content. I just want a reliable idea of which links are valuable and I don't think I'm getting that.

Any tools out there beside this that you might think are good measures of the value of links?

I'll jump right in. I look at the "Competitive Link Analysis" and I see that it says at the top "See the Top 5 contenders for each SEO ranking factor and compare it against the competition."

I take them at their word that the 5 links they are displaying are what they think the 5 best links are. On my site they do alright, although my top 3 links are from the same domain, and I know that those links aren't really that great. But they are decent and whatever. The next two are good links.

HOWEVER, the links for my competitors are in many cases CRAP. Yet Moz shows them as being the best link my competitor's have. Or at least in this analysis. For example, The number 1 link (supposedly) for a competitor of mine is a link from their own Pinterest page. They have 50 followers. I have personally dug up links they have that are 1000X better than this link. Links so much better that someone just using common sense and no training whatsoever would know that it is a better link.

I do get valuable information from this site, but stuff like this makes me wonder if I'd be just fine without any of their link building tools and just going on my own. I do not trust their accuracy. And yes, I've read all the blogs about how they correlate to rankings...

Am I missing something? I know you can't be perfect, but this stuff seems to be very poor information in some cases. I have been a member for a year roughly.

2 weeks later, 2 more large spikes of 10X average...nothing bad is happening...oh well...

For the past 3 months my site www.dlawlesshardware.com has had an average of about 400 pages crawled per day by google. We have just over 6,000 indexed pages.

However, twice in the last week, Google crawled an enormous percentage of my site. After averaging 400 pages crawled for the last 3 months, the last 4 days of crawl stats say the following.

2/1 - 4,373 pages crawled

2/2 - 367 pages crawled

2/3 - 4,777 pages crawled

2/4 - 437 pages crawled

What is the deal with these enormous spike in pages crawled per day? Of course, there are also corresponding spikes in kilobytes downloaded per day.

Essentially, Google averages crawling about 6% of my site a day. But twice in the last week, Google decided to crawl just under 80% of my site.

Has this happened to anyone else? Any ideas? I have literally no idea what this means and I haven't found anyone else with the same problem. Only people complaining about massive DROPS in pages crawled per day.

Here is a screenshot from Webmaster Tools: http://imgur.com/kpnQ8EP

The drop in time spent downloading a page corresponded exactly to an improvement in our CSS. So that probably doesn't need to be considered, although I'm up for any theories from anyone about anything.

Thanks, you were a big help. I'll do the A/B you are talking about.

I am thinking at this point I'll probably go with the body text. The site I'm talking about has well written text as the body of most pages. And, as I said, I'll be writing custom descriptions for the most important pages.

Thanks for the response.

I understand what you are saying. It sounds to me like you think (as Luke does below) that if duplicating the body text (which is good quality) will work then that's the best way to go?

What about Luke's suggestion of using dynamic text? Do you think dynamic text could be better than quality body text? I've never worked with any dynamic text. Are what are the downsides?

I'll investigate the questions you posed as well.

Thanks, we are thinking along the same lines here. The text from our body will 95% of the time be of good quality for a description, so it might work just fine.

I didn't think about creating dynamic text. Good idea. This might be the best middle ground for all the pages I don't plan to give personal attention.

Looks like I have a couple options to consider.

I am working with a yahoo store. Somehow all of the meta description fields were filled in with random content from throughout the store.

For example, a black cabinet knob product page might have in its description field the specifications for a drawer slide. I don't know how this happened. We have had a programmer auto populate certain fields to get them ready for product feeds, etc. It's possible they screwed something up during that, this was a long time ago.

My question. Regardless of how it happened. Is it better for me to have them wipe these fields entirely clean? Or, is it better for me to have them populate the fields with a duplicate of our text from the body.

The site has about 6,500 pages so I have and will make custom descriptions for the more important pages after this process, but the workload to do them all is too much. So, nothing or duplicate content for the pages that likely won't receive personal attention?

I am working with a yahoo store. Somehow all of the meta description fields were filled in with random content from throughout the store.

For example, a black cabinet knob product page might have in its description field the specifications for a drawer slide. I don't know how this happened. We have had a programmer auto populate certain fields to get them ready for product feeds, etc. It's possible they screwed something up during that, this was a long time ago.

My question. Regardless of how it happened. Is it better for me to have them wipe these fields entirely clean? Or, is it better for me to have them populate the fields with a duplicate of our text from the body.

The site has about 6,500 pages so I have and will make custom descriptions for the more important pages after this process, but the workload to do them all is too much. So, nothing or duplicate content for the pages that likely won't receive personal attention?