Hi Ian Watson. We have 2 questions (hopefully you are still monitoring this thread)

1. In the case of an old-page.html that is 301 redirected to current-page.html, will Link Explorer automatically assign inbound links going to old-page.html to the current-page.html ?

2. What is the purpose of showing "Internal, followed links" and "Internal, nofollowed links" on the COMPARE LINK PROFILES PAGE?  What good does it do to know or compare those counts?

Thank you!

Hi Mark,

I asked a similar question here and on a few other SEO forums a few weeks ago. Here is what I learned...

PPC (Bing Ads and Google Adwords) is very easy to fix. Just go into the settings for your campaigns and only target the countries you want your ads to show in. Later if you find that your results are poor in certain cities or states or provinces, you can even exclude them. Targeting your ads this way works very well and is very easy to do.

Limiting Organic results is not worth the effort. Though you can add a huge list of excluded IP's to your htaccess, you then slow down your site because of the computing effort needed to check each new visitor. What is worth the effort, is to go into Google Webmaster Tools and declare your targeted country or region. What I was told by a number of different responders was that doing so means that Google will not count poor site performance outside your targeted country against you.

For example, my US targeted site has a generic Bounce Rate of 60%. When I dig deeper I find that traffic from countries like Phillipines and India have a bounce rate pushing 80%, but that traffic from the US has a bounce rate of only about 45%. Since I have declared the US as my targeted country, Google is supposedly not counting poor performance from other countries against my site. I have set up "Segments" in my Google Analytics to only show US visitors, and that really helps get a realistic uncontaminated overview of how my true customers are interacting with the site.

Hi James,

Our items are large, and shipping to other countries is just way too expensive. So no plans to ever go international.

My understanding is that a low bounce rate (and other stats that relate to a good visitor experience) often result in higher Google rankings. So we really do want to know if there is some way to shut off the flow of foreign visitors...

I have ecommerce sites the only serve US and Canada. Is there a way to prevent a site from appearing in the Google results in foreign countries?

The reason I ask is that we also have a lot of informational pages that folks in other countries are visiting, then leaving right after reading. This is making our overall Bounce Rate very high (64%). When we segment the GA data to look at just our US visitors, then the Bounce Rate drops a lot. (to 48%)

Thanks!

Too bad that "Boost" didn't work for you. It is an interesting concept...

I wonder how they "force Google to crawl your bad links"?  Does Google provide some sort of form that URL's can be submitted to for spidering? Or is there some other way to quickly bring individual URL's to their attention?

I once read a small study about trust badges that said they were definitely important, but that people didn't really notice any difference between big-name (expensive) badges and obscure (cheap) badges. If I can find a link to the article I will post it.

If you don't have any badges at all, you should see if adding any badges increases your conversions. Your SSL Encryption badge is a good start. And see if your shopping cart provider has a badge available.

In the US having the Better Business Bureau (BBB) badge would also be a good way to start, and I think you still get a backlink when you sign up.

I don't have documentation, but the new page it redirects to has this tag:

So I would guess I did the 301 redirect the to this new page at the same time I launched the new page (there was no major design changes - just shortening the URL and getting rid of the capitals and underscores)

Thanks David. That does explain the issue better.

However, the occasional really long lag time for OSE to re-crawled pages that have been 301 redirected is still a problem for those of use who subscribe to Moz and are trying to use it to monitor and improve our SEO. But I think there is an easy solution...

Give Moz subscribers a new tool like GWT's "Fetch as Google" - but call it "Fetch as Moz" and have it trigger BOTH the Moz spider and the OSE spider to go re-crawl that page. This would let us quickly and positively know that our data for 301'd pages has been transferred to the new page.

Can this be done?

Hi David,

Sorry to be blunt here, but no it doesn't make sense - and I also think it is incorrect...

Websites do internal 301 redirects all the time (redirecting from old page to new page within the same site) BUT your explanation above appears to say that OSE does not follow those redirects and move the data from old to new url ?  That would make for a pretty useless SEO program...

Your message also appears to say that if we have to go contact everybody that links to www.mysite.com/old-page.html and have them change their link to www.mysite.com/new-page.html  ? That's just silly...

I think your explanation is incorrect because SOME of the 301 re-directs I have done on my site have passed the data perfectly in OSE and Moz. Run OSE on these two URLs and you will see:  Old URL = www.bestdryingrack.com/clothes_drying_rack.html    New URL it was 301'ed to = www.bestdryingrack.com/clothes-drying-rack-main.html

So it appears that inconsistency is the a big problem here. That should be some firm rule like: "Moz will transfer all data across 301 redirects on the same domain within 1 month"  This would let us analyze or sites without trying to keep track of silly situations of which new pages have the proper data and which ones we still need to fudge between old and new page data.

I hope this all makes sense...

Hi David,

I waited another week and just now checked the new and redirected URL again. The data STILL has not transferred over to the new URL.

It's been a long time. This excessive lag time in moving data across re-directs really needs to be fixed.

Personally I can mentally keep track of it, but what about the other SEO programs out there that are using Moz data? They have to experiencing "garbage in - garbage out" problems on any analysis involving re-directed URL's.

Can you check into this and let us know what's up?

Hi Daniel,

I also submitted a Disavow file, then learned new things and updated the file to reflect the new knowledge.

You can only have ONE disavow file. So you simply create a new file (which may or may not contain many domains that were in the original) and then go to Google Webmaster Tools and delete the original file and upload the new one.

This article has good info on how you should create your Disavow file: http://moz.com/blog/google-disavow-tool

Especially this part from the article:

Google rejects many disavow files because of bad formatting, but webmasters usually never know. Guidelines state the file type should be .txt only and “must be encoded UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII.”

Good luck!

Hi Ron.  If the keywords and phrases for your niche are REALLY LOW volume (like some of mine are), then I suggest using Google Adwords by running a few short PPC campaigns.

A two week run with your keywords set as a Broad match will gather enough data to activate an interesting Adwords report. This report is found on the "Keywords" screen of an individual campaign. Click the "Details" button then select "Search Terms / All" on the dropdown. This will list exactly what phrase people typed in the search box, how many times it was searched (Impressions), how many Clicks those phrases got, etc.

Just peeked at one of my campaigns and for the last 30 days it only had 2400 impressions. That's pretty low volume and those small volumes do not show up well in any free tool that I know of. Though they used to in the old Adwords Keyword Tool. I miss it...

Thanks David. That does explain the issue better.

However, the occasional really long lag time for OSE to re-crawled pages that have been 301 redirected is still a problem for those of use who subscribe to Moz and are trying to use it to monitor and improve our SEO. But I think there is an easy solution...

Give Moz subscribers a new tool like GWT's "Fetch as Google" - but call it "Fetch as Moz" and have it trigger BOTH the Moz spider and the OSE spider to go re-crawl that page. This would let us quickly and positively know that our data for 301'd pages has been transferred to the new page.

Can this be done?

Hi Mark,

I asked a similar question here and on a few other SEO forums a few weeks ago. Here is what I learned...

PPC (Bing Ads and Google Adwords) is very easy to fix. Just go into the settings for your campaigns and only target the countries you want your ads to show in. Later if you find that your results are poor in certain cities or states or provinces, you can even exclude them. Targeting your ads this way works very well and is very easy to do.

Limiting Organic results is not worth the effort. Though you can add a huge list of excluded IP's to your htaccess, you then slow down your site because of the computing effort needed to check each new visitor. What is worth the effort, is to go into Google Webmaster Tools and declare your targeted country or region. What I was told by a number of different responders was that doing so means that Google will not count poor site performance outside your targeted country against you.

For example, my US targeted site has a generic Bounce Rate of 60%. When I dig deeper I find that traffic from countries like Phillipines and India have a bounce rate pushing 80%, but that traffic from the US has a bounce rate of only about 45%. Since I have declared the US as my targeted country, Google is supposedly not counting poor performance from other countries against my site. I have set up "Segments" in my Google Analytics to only show US visitors, and that really helps get a realistic uncontaminated overview of how my true customers are interacting with the site.

Hi Ian Watson. We have 2 questions (hopefully you are still monitoring this thread)

1. In the case of an old-page.html that is 301 redirected to current-page.html, will Link Explorer automatically assign inbound links going to old-page.html to the current-page.html ?

2. What is the purpose of showing "Internal, followed links" and "Internal, nofollowed links" on the COMPARE LINK PROFILES PAGE?  What good does it do to know or compare those counts?

Thank you!

Too bad that "Boost" didn't work for you. It is an interesting concept...

I wonder how they "force Google to crawl your bad links"?  Does Google provide some sort of form that URL's can be submitted to for spidering? Or is there some other way to quickly bring individual URL's to their attention?