Hi Guys,

I've been asked to pull up the DA for a site from the last couple of months and for the life of me I can't seem to work out how to pull a history of DA for a site.  it's only the previous three months but how can I do it?

Thanks in advanced.

It really makes no difference as they would both be around the same, I would recommend YouTube as it is another search engine giving you even more opportunities to be found.

Directories can be alright if they are niche and you think users will find your site helpful in there, so its good if your looking to list your self for the user and not the link. e.g. yell.com etc.

"I have a site where all broken pages are redirected to the homepage. I've been told that it's a bad idea in terms of SEO. I just can't figure out why :)"

"I am not sure what type of site you have but I have a Ecommerce site and when I remove a product I redirect it to the category page it was in."

You've given two different statements.   Best practice to to 301 to the most relevant page.

You can also redirect to similar products.

Hi Jeff,

I'll take a snippit from the webmaster tools

"In addition to returning a 404 code in response to a request for a page that doesn’t exist, the server will also display a 404 page. This may be a standard "File Not Found" message, or it could be a custom page designed to provide the user with additional information. The content of the page is entirely unrelated to the HTTP response returned by the server. Just because a page displays a 404 File Not Found message doesn’t mean that it’s a 404 page. It's like a giraffe wearing a name tag that says "dog." Just because it says it's a dog, doesn't mean it's actually a dog. Similarly, just because a page says 404, doesn't mean it's returning a 404. You can use Fetch as Google (or other tools available on the web) to verify whether the URL is actually returning the correct code."

and to help here is another link

http://forums.seochat.com/search-engine-optimization-28/diff-between-404-soft-404-error-467526.html

"The error 404 "page not found" means that the page you are finding server can't find he page.
Soft 404 means page not found and user will move to either home page or custom page."

Hope it helps.

Hi there,

Yes PDF do pass link juice, they are not the most optimum links however there is a nice pro's and cons on it over at search engine land

You can also find a fantastic guide to them over at lunametrics

Hope that helps & good luck.

*Phantom down voter?

Panda 4.1 was released in the last couple of  weeks and has been going up and down, as well as this penguin update is due this week some sites are already reporting issues with this too so it may be due to that.

more info here -

https://serps.com/tools/volatility

http://www.rankranger.com/rank-risk-index

http://mozcast.com/

nothing here though -

http://algoroo.com/

so expect some fun in the next week!

Hi Cristine,

Hope you've got found your answer but I just wanted to also give my input.

Whilst they do pass some "link juice" its more akin to creating a separate site meaning double the work, this can be fine if that's what you want but for me its a lot easier to create e.g. www.yoursite.com/blog then any links created also benefit your site as well any users can also browse your site straight from your blog pretty easy etc. You can see what Matt Cutts said about a similar subject way back in 2007 here - https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/

Regarding your second point if it's getting found and is working that fantastic but what is the likelihood of this? If you're running an email marketing campaign and relying on direct traffic this may not be an issue but I don't know of many sites that rank purely on their content alone from the start you can give yourself a bit of a boost from your main domain via a subfolder.

In Summary- If your site is getting found, getting exposure and all that jazz fantastic give your self a pat on the back, however if not there is nearly double the work on trying to get a subdomain to rank compared to having it on your main site, this is fine for some of the experts but if not I'd recommend you give this a try first and if you want you can move it onto its own subdomain at a later date. In terms of metric unfortunately they do matter if you're after exposure and organic exposure.

Finally you can also see (via Q&A) some example here - http://moz.com/community/q/moz-s-official-stance-on-subdomain-vs-subfolder-does-it-need-updating

Hope that helps and best of luck with your blog.