Questions created by dellcos
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Why am I trusting in MozRank and the other scores (from a part time SEO perspective)?
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.
Competitive Research | | dellcos0 -
2 days in the past week Google has crawled 10x the average pages crawled per day. What does this mean?
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.
Reporting & Analytics | | dellcos0 -
Meta descriptions better empty or with duplicate content?
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?
On-Page Optimization | | dellcos1