Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
Hello everyone!
We'll be holding a webinar on Friday to help new members learn about what all Pro has to offer, show some off our most popular tools, and get you comfortable with the dashboard.
Register here: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/589105390
Date: Friday, August 29th (this Friday!)
Time: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM PDT
Hope to see you all there!
Hi Dana,
Thanks for bringing this up! It's an interesting topic for sure, and actually something we've discussed. For us, we find that many people don't come back to mark something as answered, which is why we changed it around a bit. We use the "answered" bit, as a way to see how many questions get asked, replied to, AND "answered."
I'm not sure I totally agree that by marking something as answered, means that it's shutting down the discussion. In our mind it simply means that the original poster got the answer they needed. It doesn't necessarily mean that the discussion has ended. But this does mean that if it's not clear, we should re-think it.
We'll definitely take this into consideration though in the coming months as we discuss changes/upgrades/etc. to Q&A. I love that people care enough to even bring this stuff up!! We may reach out to you if we come up with some changes/solutions, and get your thoughts. I also like the idea of proposing some ideas here in Q&A for changes to Q&A and see how people respond. 
This gets me very excited!
Thanks again for bringing this up, and getting this conversation started. I know we'll be talking about it soon because of it!
Jen
I'm happy to announce, the first index of the year is out. We did have a smaller count of subdomains, but correlations are generally up and coverage of what's in Google looks better, too. We're giving that one a high five!
We've (hopefully) removed a lot of foreign and spam subdomains, which you might see reflected in your spam links section. (another woot!)
Here are some details about this index release:
Thanks!
PS - For any questions about DA/PA fluctuations (or non-fluctuations) check out this Q&A thread from Rand: https://moz.com/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scores.
This is exactly why I love my job. #thatisall 
This is a great thread Alan! And not just for new Mozzers, but for everyone really. As you said this is a collaborative forum so please mark questions as answered, thumb up good answers and mark as "good answer" if it helped you!
The SEOmoz staff can't be everywhere and we count on the community to help each other out. We really appreciate all the contributions and I absolutely love hearing stories about people getting jobs through Q&A or gaining significant help, etc. Let's keep that stuff going!
Thanks again for bringing this up Alan, it's great to have the reminder. And Thanks to everyone for being so helpful!
Hello everyone!
We'll be holding a webinar on Friday to help new members learn about what all Pro has to offer, show some off our most popular tools, and get you comfortable with the dashboard.
Register here**: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/132016958**
Date: Friday, October 17th
Time: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM PDT
Hope to see you all there! If you can't make it, you can watch a previous webinar here: http://moz.com/help/guides/getting-started
Yep! I totally read it. I'd say this part "For us, we find that many people don't come back to mark something as answered, which is why we changed it around a bit. We use the "answered" bit, as a way to see how many questions get asked, replied to, AND "answered." answers that. We want to see how many questions were answered, and the original posters are notorious for NOT marking things as answered. Even after we started emailing them asking them to mark things as answered.
I'm not saying it's perfect, just giving you our thoughts on why we do it. Also, I don't believe anything happens automatically. But Associates and staff are asked to mark a question as answered if they feel they've answered a question. A lot of this comes from the old days of "private questions" where if we didn't mark a question as answered, we could literally spend hours and hours going back and forth with a member.
Hope this helps bring light to why we do things that way. As I mentioned above, we're totally open to changing, and I'm definitely not trying to say our way is best. Just giving insight as to WHY we do it.
Thanks!
He's just a normal guy. Shoot him an email rand at seomoz.org. He's better at responding than most people I know, including myself
Hello my friends! It looks like the conversation has gotten a bit heated here. Before I say anything else I'd love it if you all would take a read through the SEOmoz Community Etiquette page. This Q&A forum is about helping out our fellow SEOs and not about attacking or yelling at other members.
As you're asking or answering questions, try thinking about the tone the of the message and the kind of responses it might find. I always love to see a healthy debate but please keep personal attacks out of it.
Thanks!
18 H1s definitely seems excessive, however in the grand scheme of things this would be a much lesser priority in my book than many other things. I mean if this is the biggest problem, then you're doing quite well. If you're wondering if the developer is doing the right things overall, that might be a different question. I just don't think that worrying about the H1s on the page is that big of a deal. I'd make sure the site is crawlable and all those other high priority things before I spent too much time on this.
Hi David!
Are you looking for this post http://moz.com/blog/tips-for-filming-whiteboard-presentations from Nick Sayers?
Hey guys, I'm just about to publish a blog post that talks all about a bunch of new changes. The focus is for people to earn points for not only participating but adding value as well. Sadly we've had people who are only focused on gaming the system and creating silly questions or adding spammy answers just to gain points. So we've taken quite a few measures to give people MORE points for valuable answers/questions and less points for non-valuable ones. The post is going up in the next 20 minutes or so that has quite a bit more information.
Thanks!
Jen
Josh,
Please do not throw TAGFEE around without fully understanding its meaning. It is fine to have a disagreement, and for the most part this is a wonderful discussion. You however are being quite condescending and not empathetic to others. I've warned you in the past, and this is a final warning.
Jen
Hey Joey!
I actually just gave a guest lecture last week on this exact topic. You should check it out on slideshare and see if it helps you out a bit! http://www.slideshare.net/jennifersablelopez/lopez-dedicated-passionate-community.
Thanks!
Jen
Hi Eric,
Open Site Explorer doesn't use Google at all, it uses our own crawl of the web which we call the Linkscape index. Hope that helps!
Jen
Hi guys! For now we don't have any plans to change our ranking tools because this information is valuable to our customers. Plus it really is public information that is relevant to their business and they should have the right to access that. We are however looking at various alternatives and will be actively engaging with PRO members and the general community for a long-term solution. Be sure to watch the blog for more info!
Thanks,
Jen
Check out Rand's blog post about it for all the details: http://moz.com/blog/open-site-explorers-new-link-building-opportunities-section.
We'd love for you to check it out and leave us your feedback!
Thanks,
Jen
Hey William,
Sometimes other members just try to be as helpful as they can.
Jen
Hey everyone! OSE isn't going anywhere, we'd never leave you high and dry that way.
Hi Eric,
Thanks for reaching out, our goal has always been to help our customers as quickly and efficiently as possible, while always staying TAGFEE throughout. I can completely understand your frustration here, and interestingly enough we've been talking as a team about how we can ensure that contacting is as easy as possible, and ensure that we're able to still give the best service possible.
Normally emailing us at help@moz.com, or submitting this form: http://moz.com/help/contact, will always do the trick. This weekend however we experienced some server issues which seemed to cause many of our help emails to bounce, and right now we're hearing that many folks are getting a response saying our mailbox is full. 
We're feverishly working hard to get this resolved, because we do care deeply about the customer experience.
I've assigned your question to our Customer Service Manager, and will ping him about it as well. We'll update this thread when we have more information about the mailbox quota issue. At that point you will be able to send an email with the specific issues you're having.
Thanks for all your patience, and for bringing the issue to our attention! If we don't know about it, we can't fix it.
Have a good day!
Jen
Thanks for posting this Jon, I really love this discussion. It's amazing to see people in the community wanting to be TAGFEE as well. When we first started talking about it internally I remember feeling a bit relieved. Each of the words and the overall meaning and feeling are so positive, I feel that it makes my job a bit easier. I always have these tenets top of mind and that means both at work and in life in general.
I've personally had a rough year with health issues and such and keeping TAGFEE in mind has helped to keep me focused and positive. I've also found that these also help me as a parent. I often find myself thinking "What's the TAGFEE way to respond to [this situation]". Now I'm not perfect and sometimes these principles can be hard to live by, but it gives me something to strive for and constantly want to be better.
Seeing the community wanting to implement these in their work/life as well makes me giddy! Thanks again for starting this thread.
Yikes! I'm so, so sorry about this. We've just sent a "red alert" to the engineering team asking for them to dig deeper into the problem. This is definitely unacceptable for things to be running this slowly.
As Keri mentioned, we are working on a better solution long-term which should go up in a couple weeks. But we'll get on this ASAP to get things running better in the interim.
Hi Donna,
I think it's fair to feel that way, it's definitely frustrating on all ends. While we do try hard to be as open and upfront as we can with information, we can most definitely work harder on getting it out sooner. I also very much appreciate the kind words about the community, and that you took the time to leave your thoughts. I'm sure many folks feel the same way. I'll let Rand (or others) jump in and respond as well, but I wanted to say thanks!
Jen
Hello!
We've posted this within the apps, as well as on our social channels, but I wanted to share it here as well.
We are doing required database maintenance tonight starting at 7pm, Pacific time. This update will help make things work a bit quicker. Woot! The rest of the tools will still be available at http://moz.com/researchtools. Thank you for your patience!
Hi guys! Badges have long been on our to-do list but unfortunately the only "official" ones are on the badges page linked to previously. I love the idea of having a PRO badge though, and it's good to know people would like to have them. I'll be sure to let the team know about this thread and that there's an interest.
Thanks!
Jen
It automatically shows that the question has been edited. It is Keri's job to keep the community informed, and she was making sure that people realized that Thomas' original response was because of the edit.
Hello!
These are great questions, we have a welcome webinar each Friday, you can sign up for this weeks here: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/718064534. We'll do a live walk through, and answer all your questions as well. Additionally, I'd check out our campaign set up videos and check out the FAQ in our Help Hub: http://moz.com/help/guides/getting-started/campaign-setup. These should help you get the ball rolling!
Hope this helps,
Jen
Hi Stephen! So sorry about this. It looks like there was a change to the way GA authenticates so we need to make a code change. The fix should be up by tomorrow morning (we're in the Pacific time zone). If ever you have an issue like this, please feel free to email help@seomoz.org so we can keep track of technical issues such as this.
I've assigned your question to someone on the Help team who can give you additional information as well.
Thanks!
Hi Lara! Yes, we'll definitely have a video bundle for this year's MozCon videos. We've just finished editing the videos and we're now working on getting them all set up and open to purchase. They should be available by the end of the month. I'll be sure to go back and update this post when they're live!
Thanks for asking!
Hi Nathan!
In a scenario like this you'd want to email us at help[at]seomoz.org to open a support ticket and we can help you get accounts figured out.
Thanks!
Jen
If you do use URL tagging when you share posts, you may be able to find out which URLs are doing well. For example if you tag your twitter shares and FB shares differently, then see if those are the ones getting shared on FB.
Also, don't forget to add FB insights for your site as well. You don't get referral traffic specifically but you do get a lot of additional information about the content on your site, as opposed to what you share on your page. You can get more info about it here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/4-facebook-marketing-tactics-you-might-not-know-about.
Plus, most people see posts in their feed and not necessarily from specific pages, so this may also be why FB shows it all coming from one page.
Hope this helps a bit!
Thanks for this response EGOL, between you and Dana, you've got us all talking. We want to make the right changes for the community, so I always appreciate when these conversations come up. We're going to keep your suggestions in mind as we start to delve into some changes to Q&A.
Also, thanks for all you do!
Jen
Hi! OSE and the toolbar do use the same data, they both pull from the Linkscape index. It would be helpful to take a look at a specific URL so I can help point out what's what. But one thing to note, as Daniel already mentioned, when you're looking at the toolbar it shows both Page data and Root Domain data. In OSE at first glance you're getting just the data for that page. If you click on the "Full List of Link Metrics" tab, you'll see the exact same numbers.
Hope this helps! I'm happy to help further by looking at specific URLs.
Thanks!
Jen
Hi Nevil!
I highly recommend you read through this article: The Ultimate Google+ SEO Guide from AJ Kohn. He's put in a ton of work to try to figure out how to make Google+ work for you from an SEO perspective. One part that jumped out to me from the post that seems quite relevant to your particular question is this line:
Content from people you engage with more often or content that is more popular overall will rank better.
I'd definitely read through his guide, as it's by far the best one out there for info on Google+ for SEO purposes.
Hope this helps!
Jen
Specifically in Open Site Explorer, check out the "Top Pages" tab to see if any of your top linked to pages are returning a 404. This tab is actually the first one I look at when running analysis of a site.
Wow. It's times like this that make me feel so proud to be a part of this amazing community. Unfortunately there isn't a way to opt out of the free month, but I do appreciate where you're coming from! It's interesting to hear that it makes you feel uncomfortable to know that you could be rewarded for your efforts. But think about this, the reason we offer rewards is to help keep the Q&A forum at the top of its game. And from what I can tell, that is exactly what you help do by participating. I might not be able to change your feelings about this, but I hope that not being able to opt out, doesn't mean you'll stop adding to the community. Because we need more of you.
Oh yea... and pizza and fruit baskets would be a hit in the office. 
Sadly the answer is no if you only do a 301. Mike King recently wrote a great post on Search Engine Watch though that walks you through how to make it happen: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2172926/How-to-Maintain-Social-Shares-After-a-Site-Migration.
Hope that helps!
Hi! Yes, our crawler does read wildcards in a robots.txt file. This change was made in the past 3 months or so. Hope that helps!
Jen
Hi! This is a really great question. I would highly recommend checking out one of our weekly webinars: http://www.seomoz.org/dp/wednesday-webinar with the Help team. Each week they cover a different topic and show you how to best use our tools. You'll get a chance to ask specific questions and get in-depth information.
Also, we have an extensive Help Hub that has lots of information on how to use the tools, why you should use them, etc. I'd check that out as well: http://www.seomoz.org/help.
I hope this helps get you started down the right path.
Thanks again for asking!
Jen
Just wanted to jump in and give all of the answers here a high five! These answers are seriously spot on.
Hi Bill!
A couple of your questions that haven't been answered yet:
How do you do this and how do you know if it's already being done?
When you look at the code for a page, if you see a lot of code within tags, that means that the CSS is on the page rather than in an external file.
You can do the same with JavaScript. If there is a lot of code within the tags in the source code, you know there is JavaScript on the page instead of in an external file.
If it has not been done on a site is it hard to go back and do?
It is very simple to take this code, put it into an external file, then link to it like we do on this particular page's code:
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="[/q/moz_nav_assets/stylesheets/production/all.css?0.4.25](view-source:http://www.seomoz.org/q/moz_nav_assets/stylesheets/production/all.css?0.4.25)" />
That is what it looks like when you link to a CSS external file.
If possible though, I'd definitely have someone who knows and understands the code help you out at first. There's nothing more infuriating that making what you think is a small change to a JavaScript file and it end up breaking the whole site.
Good luck! And I hope this helps a bit.
Hi Adrian!
So sorry about the slow response today, we do try to be as absolutely responsive as possible even on the weekend. In the future if you ever have any issues with the tools please send us an email at help[at]seomoz.org. That is usually the quickest way to get in touch with us.
Q&A is a great place to get your general SEO and other inbound marketing questions answered, but may not get the quickest place for a support type of question.
We'll definitely keep everyone posted on what's happening with the Keyword Difficulty Tool.
Thanks!
Jen
I'd highly recommend not using Twitter solely for higher rankings. Twitter helps you with brand management, customer service, community management, etc. If you're only using Twitter to try to game Google, you're probably going about it the wrong way. I'd focus on managing your Twitter account in a way that will benefit you as part of your overall marketing strategy.
Use that comparison to show them that you're mixing up your link juice by getting links to both URLs and by consolidating you'll be able to rank that home page better.
Hope that helps!
Hi Jeremiah,
To my knowledge, I don't believe we've avoided this answer. We've been pretty upfront letting everyone know that Google revoked our access to their API and have not told us why. We don't believe we'll be getting that data back, so we are actively seeking other sources of data. Right now, we're checking out correlations with Bing to see if their data will work for us.
We appreciate your patience and as soon as we have a good solution, we'll definitely be letting everyone know.
Thanks!
Jen