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Page Linking Root Domains are the number of unique domains that have a link pointed towards the particular page you're looking at on your site. For example, if you have a separate page for Contact Info on your site, this would only count links pointed directly at your Contact Info page and not any other page on your site.

Root Domain Linking Root Domains are the number of unique domains pointing to any page on your site. This will always be the higher number since it includes all pages, not just one.

Does this make sense?

In my opinion, neither of these strategies is very good.

Redirecting domains like the marketer suggests will offer no benefit, SEO or otherwise.

Building content on an exact-match domain could work, but why not just try to rank for those exact match terms on the main site? Getting the new domains to rank may still take a good amount of work. If searchers do click through to those sites, they're still going to have to click again to get to the main site. This could be simplified by just doing a good job to bring searchers to the main site directly.

If I'm understanding correctly, you're trying to site up a blog for a company and to derive SEO benefit from that blog by sending links back to the main site?

First off, if you're trying to acquire links to your site, I wouldn't recommend either strategy. A company blog is typically used to write great content and have other sites link back to your content.

If you're using either of your strategies (A or B), there might not be much value for a link back to your own website depending on how the websites are hosted  from the same server (see here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/do-sites-on-the-same-c-block-and-same-server-count-as-seperate-linking-root-domains-when-linking-to-each-other)

I would recommend this: set up a blog at either blog.website.com or website.com/blog and post content on their. It can link back to your website.com/pages. No, these don't count as external links, but there is still the potential for SEO benefit.

If your write great content, you can earn links from external sites, which is potentially more valuable and seems to be what you are looking for.

1 - Go to the main Campaigns page.

2 - Click Settings next to the specific campaign you want to archive.

3 - Scroll to the bottom and hit "Archive".

I refuse to believe this comment in the BMR blog post: "In our wildest dreams, there’s no way we could have imagined this happening."

Please.

They had a great run, and I bet they made some serious $$ during the lifetime of this product (which they had to know wouldn't last forever).

If you're going for an exact match domain but you misspelled the keyword, I don't really see the point of continuing to use it.

Are there people still searching for your misspelling? Does Google autocorrect the misspelling? (chances are it does) These are factors to consider. It also might deter people from visiting your site if the fact that it's a misspelling makes it look like spam.

Of course you can still rank for the keyword your targeting. Exact match domains are no sure bet anyway, plus any domain can theoretically rank for any term.

I believe you can see if you're in the top 50 if it's set up as a keyword within a Pro Campaign. But still, it could be useful to see lower ranks than that, too.

Agreed. It would be nice to get a thumbs up or marked as a "Good answer" when someone is actually helped.

Perhaps SEOmoz could do a little more to prod people towards using these features, as I'm sure most new Mozzers either just forget or aren't aware of how or when to use them.

I'm still using both strategies. I use this tool to find new leads for both: http://linkprospector.citationlabs.com

Obviously these are among the harder links to build, but they're certainly more sustainable than the quick and easy methods that are out there. We've seen several of those (cough cough...blog networks) go by the wayside lately.

For another tip, this is usually where I start when I need ideas: http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

What you're describing to me is basically page authority and domain authority.

When you create a new page on a website (like a blog post) there won't be any links to it or any other metric for establishing authority, so it probably won't have much page authority at all.

However, if it's a PR5 site (which has a good amount of domain authority), it will still be a valuable link. Typically it's stated that the deeper in the site the link is, the less valuable.

So, based on how I'm understanding you're question, the answer is more or less "yes."

Have you considered using the Mozrank instead of Alexa? This might be a better metric, plus it's easy to see if you use the MozBar extension for your browser. I definitely recommend this instead if you're attempt to obtain links for SEO value on any site (not just limited to article sites).

I'm not sure I would recommend article marketing for traffic like you're going after. Creating great content on your own site or guest posting on related industry blogs will almost certainly be a better strategy than submitting to general article sites.

I agree with eyepaq. Your friend is mostly likely suggesting this in an attempt to rank for both of the phrases - "Bars in New York" and "Bars New York"

If that's the case,  there are better ways to target different keyword phrases than trying get it all into the title tag.

Quoting the SEOmoz page (http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/page-authority

Unlike other SEO metrics, Page Authority is difficult to directly influence. This is because it is made up of an aggregate of metrics (mozRank, mozTrust, link profile, etc...) that each have an impact on this score. This was done intentionally because this metric is meant to approximate how competitive a given site is in Google.com. Since, Google.com takes into account a lot of factors, a metric that tries to calculate it must incorporate a lot of factors as well.

This means the best way to influence this metric is to improve your overall SEO. Particularly you should focus on your link profile (which influences mozRank and mozTrust) by getting more links from other well linked to pages.

The best way is to implement their advice and improve your overall site SEO with inbound links, on-site SEO, etc.

By the way, if you have't read the Beginner's Guide yet, I highly recommend it: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

Is it possible to generate an XML sitemap for a site without PHP? If so, how?

If you want daily tracking, I would recommend trying a different service like SERP Fox. These will give updated rankings regularly and have many of the same options as the SEO Moz rank tracker.

I haven't seen any issues with tracking ranks in SEO Moz, but I don't check it daily.

Have you considered switching to simply "noindex, follow" for these pages? This would both keep them out of the search index and would allow for the benefit of external links to these pages.

I agree with Alan. Ideally the blog is on the same domain at a location like you suggested (hotelassetsgroup.com/blog). Having an a domain with the keywords are targeting is often helpful, but it's not the end all, be all for ranking for that or other key terms.

Check out this other thread, which is along the same lines: http://www.seomoz.org/q/which-is-better-for-linkbuilding-internal-or-external-blog

I second @SEOConsult. Here's a SEOmoz post about Xenu that you might find helpful (although it's mostly about building links on other sites)  http://www.seomoz.org/blog/xenu-link-sleuth-more-than-just-a-broken-links-finder

Domain hunter is also a great tool and it's nice that it's a browser extension: http://domainhunterplus.com/

You might not need to worry about stolen content if 1) Your content was indexed by Google first and 2) Your content outranks the stolen content in search. Here's a video from Matt Cutts at Google that might be of interest to you: http://youtu.be/4LsB19wTt0Q

1. Why not just do a Google search for your content? If it's in the Google index, it will show up in search. You can make it easier by doing a phrase search that will be unique to your piece of content.

If you're looking for something that will check your whole site or do it automatically, I'm not aware of a tool that does that. A lot of people use Copyscape (www.copyscape.com), but that might not solve your problems.

2. You can file a complaint with Google here when you're logged into your Google account: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-notice?pli=1&

If you don't like SEOmoz's version, there are many 3rd-party rank checkers out there. Many of them aren't free, however, especially if you want ranks tracked automatically.

Check this out: http://tools.seobook.com/rank-checkers/ or try a Google search for even more options.

Jen,

Not be be a jerk here, but the entire SEOmoz site is devoted to SEO and building links that are more powerful and sustainable than sites like Build My Rank. There's tons of information and ideas!

I highly encourage you to take a look at the SEOmoz blog. You can even just start looking at the Link Building category for posts to get going: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/4

I would add a "noindex" tags to the archive pages and leave the article page alone. If it's the same archive setup I'm thinking of, there's little value to leaving this in the Google index so that's it's searchable.

Are you using WordPress? This can be easily done with the Yoast SEO plugin.

In my experience, it does a good job of picking up the canonical tags. In fact, if you go into your campaign, go into the Crawl Diagnostics section, then click the blue "Notices" button, it will show you how many "Rel canonical" URLs were picked up.

If you're not getting many pages shown here, perhaps you should recheck to be sure your tags are implemented properly.

I agree with EGOL and would add that some very subtle variations often have different rankings. For example, I've seen different results when comparing "Rhode Island Wedding" and "Rhode Island Weddings" in the search results. These variations are arguably closer than the ones you are posing yet are different, so don't assume anything.

If you don't want to waste keywords that you monitor, I would recommend tracking the variations that have the highest search volume first. After a quick search, "Hamilton Island" has much more monthly searches than "Hamilton Islands." It might not even be worth it to track the latter term since the search volume is much lower.

Yes, these things can still work and produce results, but they are not the preferred or best strategies by any means.

I really like this post for link-building ideas: http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

He includes your strategies (although with varying levels of support) and he recommends Ezinearticles as one site to use.

Is the detailed report showing check marks that "corporate catering" is in the meta description and other areas that it's not in? For what it's worth, corporate catering does appear in the URL, Title, and H1. It also is displayed in the nav bar.

Yes, you'll want to forward the "domain.com/keyword-is-here/index.htm" version to the "domain.com/keyword-is-here/" version.

Here's an explanation of what you're looking for: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization

There's a form here for reporting spammy Gmail addresses to Google. I'm not sure how responsive they are or how well this works: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=abuse I've had a lot of luck with captchas in the past for reducing spam. But if an actual person is filling in your form and sending you spam, this obviously won't help. I've seen blog sites with a checkbox to "confirm you are a human" which can supposedly stave off automated captcha readers.

I don't try to reinvent the wheel but instead go with tools already out there as frequently as possible. The SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty tool is one of them if I want a simple number: http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/keyword-difficulty/

If you want to try to assess it yourself, I'd still look at things like page linking root domains, root domain linking root domains, authority, etc.

In terms of the Yoast SEO plugin, it's really not that complicated no matter what you're level.

There's a brief description of how to use it here: http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

This post is very handy, too: http://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/how-to-install-and-setup-wordpress-seo-plugin-by-yoast/

I would 301 redirect the index.html page to the http://www.domain.com/keyword-is-here. There's no reason to have both pages if they're the exact same content.

This is sorta covered under the "SEO Best Practice" section from page I sent you to: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization (although I know it can be a little unclear)

This page also gives a good yet slightly different explanation that might be easier to follow. Scroll down to the "Canonical and Duplicate Versions of Content" section with the pink diamonds: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/basics-of-search-engine-friendly-design-and-development

Yes, you should definitely include the city name. A search for just "plastic surgery" is too broad and much less likely to pull up your particular business.

When I type in "plastic surgery" in my search, not a single web page contains a local result for plastic surgery in the City I live in (although several of the paid ads show up locally).

Local Places pages do show up for local businesses, but I'm assuming you're talking about pages on your website and not Google Places.

No, Googlebot does not accept cookies.

I don't think that Creative Commons license applies unless they explcitly state that on the news site.

For example, CNN.com says "All Right Reserved" at the bottom of their page. If you check out the terms and conditions, it says "You may not modify, publish, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale, create derivative works, or in any way exploit, any of the content, in whole or in part. You may download copyrighted material for your personal use only."

MSNBC.com is even more clear on their Terms and Conditions: "You may not modify, copy, reproduce, republish, upload, post, transmit, or distribute in any way any material from this site including code and software without express permission from MSNBC or as permitted inReprint Requests ."

I'm not an expert, but taking 30% of their content does not seem to meet their rules for reproducing their content no matter if you're attributing the source or not. Perhaps a quote or two from an article is fine, but 30% sounds like a lot.

Perhaps the sites that Shahzad is using do follow Creative Commons, but many of the major news sites do not seem to do that.

I think you're right that Google has discounted the value of exact match domains now as it's not as easy to increase rankings solely on the merit of the domain alone. However, I don't agree that exact match domains aren't helpful at all anymore. I see cases all the time where exact match domains are very higher in search rankings in Google. Value of having the exact match domain may be "dying," but I wouldn't say it's dead yet. If this is a new domain with no domain authority, it does you no help to simply redirect from that domain to yours regardless of how good the keywords in the new domain are. At minimum you would need to build up the new domain to get any value out of it (unless you you want to buy the domain just to ensure competitors don't get a hold of it).

Here's a guide that gives you some more sites that can help: http://www.seomoz.org/article/keyword-research-guide

It's a little dated, but most of the stuff on there should still exist.

Personally, some of the strategies I used are:

1. Look at my analytics. Where are my visitors coming from? Are there any similar terms using synonyms or different word order that I need to target?

2. Look at competitors. What keywords are they targeting? You can find hints by looking at their content, title tags, meta tags (if they're well-optimized, that is).

I think another important question to ask is Am I ranked as highly as I can be for the higher-volume terms? To me, I'd rather effectively target the terms that the most people are searching for rather than attempt to target a lot of low-volume long tail terms.

Thanks for your help, I get it now!

In addition to your video, I also found a post on Matt Cutts' blog that answers it:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html

They should appear on the day that your weekly ranking reports post. If that's Thursday of every week, you won't see them until next week if the new keywords were added today.

Mine show a little calendar graphic with the day the rankings will be posted for the first time for new keywords.

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Just so I'm understanding correctly, you're asking about linking to the sites that are already linking to you? If so, there's no added SEO benefit of linking to them because they're already linking to you. If anything, it could be harmful as too many reciprocal links can be bad for SEO.

As a general rule, I'd say just link out to anything that's worthwhile to link to. Like Keith, I'm not a huge fan of blog rolls, either. Instead, you could just link out from a content page in a context that makes sense.

Has it just been one day? I'd give it at least a day or two more before panicking. Things tend to move around in Google like that.

Meta keywords and description have zero direct impact on SEO rankings.

Don't bother filling in meta keywords at all. It's a waste of time.

Meta descriptions can be important for getting clicks, but they won't help for where you rank in Google if you're trying to optimize the descriptions with keywords.