Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Simon,

I just checked out your campaigns and everything looks good right now. We are really sorry about any inconveniences this may have caused. Let me update you on what happened and what we have done to make sure it doesn't happen in the future.

Over the weekend our server hosting provider experienced some temporary power outages that last for a few hours. When this happened some of our databases that contain user membership status went offline. When this happened our crawlers assumed that the campaigns had been archived and when the database servers came back online then the crawlers thought the campaigns had been unarchived.

In the past we have had the practice of kicking off a 250 page starter crawl when a campaign has been unarchived and then scheduling the full crawl for 7 days out.  Your campaign would have received a full crawl on it's next scheduled crawl though. This is much like what happens when you first create your campaign. This isn't ideal for a few reasons though. One being a scenario like what happened over the weekend and two that it can skew your historical data by having a 250 page crawl stuck in the middle, even if archiving was intentionally done.

Moving forward we will be implementing a change to this that makes it so when you unarchive a campaign your full crawl will be scheduled and you won't receive a starter crawl. If you need more immediate crawl data then I recommend using our crawl test tool. With that tool you can receive up to 3,000 pages crawled. The only difference being it comes in the form of a csv file without the pretty web interface.

Let me know if you have any additional questions. Also, in the future if you are experiencing any issues with your service go ahead an let our support team know. If you go to seomoz.org/help you can generate a help ticket quite easily. By generating a customer support ticket our Help Team will keep you up to date on any issues with your account and work with you to resolve any issues as quickly as possible.

Again, my sincere apologies for this issue with your crawl.

Have a great day!

Kenny

Hey Scott,

I just checked out your campaigns and everything looks good right now. We are really sorry about any inconveniences this may have caused. Let me update you on what happened and what we have done to make sure it doesn't happen in the future.

Over the weekend our server hosting provider experienced some temporary power outages that last for a few hours. When this happened some of our databases that contain user membership status went offline. When this happened our crawlers assumed that the campaigns had been archived and when the database servers came back online then the crawlers thought the campaigns had been unarchived.

In the past we have had the practice of kicking off a 250 page starter crawl when a campaign has been unarchived and then scheduling the full crawl for 7 days out.  Your campaign would have received a full crawl on it's next scheduled crawl though. This is much like what happens when you first create your campaign. This isn't ideal for a few reasons though. One being a scenario like what happened over the weekend and two that it can skew your historical data by having a 250 page crawl stuck in the middle, even if archiving was intentionally done.

Moving forward we will be implementing a change to this that makes it so when you unarchive a campaign your full crawl will be scheduled and you won't receive a starter crawl. If you need more immediate crawl data then I recommend using our crawl test tool. With that tool you can receive up to 3,000 pages crawled. The only difference being it comes in the form of a csv file without the pretty web interface.

Let me know if you have any additional questions. Also, in the future if you are experiencing any issues with your service go ahead an let our support team know. If you go to seomoz.org/help you can generate a help ticket quite easily. By generating a customer support ticket our Help Team will keep you up to date on any issues with your account and work with you to resolve any issues as quickly as possible.

Again, my sincere apologies for this issue with your crawl.

Have a great day!

Kenny

Ya it looks like it is happening in both Firefox and Chrome. We'll work on getting it resolved for the next release of the the Mozbar.

have a great day!

Hey Scott,

It does indeed look like the Firefox Mozbar is pulling those open graph and twitter description. I'm going to generate a ticket for this so that we can get this fixed up.

Let me know if you have any questions or concerns.

Kenny

The search engines - Google, Yahoo! & Bing - all maintain multiple indices that run across multiple datacenters. This means if you query different datacenters, you can get somewhat different ranking results. Other elements, such as personalization, geography and search history (even if you're logged out of your Google/search engine account) can also influence ranking positions. Hence, there can be a lot of variation in what different people, searching from different computers/locations might see in the rankings.

Our solution has been to run searches from a variety of IP addresses and IP blocks using non-personalized, search history/location agnostic requests. In our experience, these have provided the most accurate results, showing what the "most" users see, though we know there's still quite a bit of room for fluctuation. If you have suggestions about how we might improve the technical process of fetching rankings data to get better data, please let us know and we'll pass it on to our engineering team. We're always looking for ways to get you better data.

We also do not count universal results towards this ranking. Instead, these universal results are handled differently. To learn more about rankings and universal results check out www.seomoz.org/help/rankings

Let me know if you have any addition questions or concerns.

Kenny

Ahh... The standalone Rank Tracker is a different tool than I have been referencing. It does appear to be having issues displaying the chart. I'll put in a support request for our engineers to look into this.

I do recommend that if you have keywords that you need to track historical data for that you use the rankings tool inside of a campaign. This is the preferred way to track keywords over time. I suggest, when possible, to strictly use the rank tracker tool for one off rankings collection.

Kenny

We will store data from your weekly rankings updates and allow you to view this history for your keywords. You can only see historical data back to the point in which that keyword was added to your campaign.

Unfortunately, we can not pull data from before that keyword existed in your campaign.

Hope that helps!

Thanks for helping @shiftins

Rankings only update on a weekly basis. The date your rankings are updated is shown on the either the campaign overview page on the rankings module, or on the rankings page at the top of your keyword's table.

If you would like to learn more about our rankings functionality check out our help center at www.seomoz.org/help

Hello,

You can add a crawl delay to your robots.txt file.

It would look something like this:

User-Agent: rogerbot
Crawl-Delay: 5

(time is in seconds between page requests)

Hope that helps!

Kenny

Hey Craig,

Sorry about the issues you are experiencing with the crawler. I just opened up a customer support ticket for you so we can investigate this on our end to see what's going wrong.

My apologies for the inconvenience!

Kenny

Hey Kenji,

I see what's going on here. You have setup your campaign as a subdomain campaign for www.evenues.com but your site currently ranks in Google for evenues.com without the www. Because this is a subdomain campaign we only pull rankings where the www.evenues.com subdomain ranks.

There are a couple things you can do with this. One thing would be to create a root domain campaign for evenues.com and then the campaign will pull rankings for and of your subdomains. The other option would be to go into Google Webmaster tools and tell Google to always show your site as www.evenues.com in their search results.

Hope that helps!

Kenny

Hey,

I just looked into the issue that you are experiencing with our crawler. The reason the the discrepancy is because you actually have two separate campaigns running for the same site. One is set to crawl the root domain and one the subdomain.

The root domain campaign actually still presents these errors and has week over week but the sub-domain campaign is setup for the www version of your site and that's why these errors are not present, because the crawler won't even attempt to crawl off of www.

It is advisable to perform a 301 redirect as the other commenters mention.

Hope that helps!

Kenny

Our software is only granted access to your Google Analytics information and nothing else. That means we do not have access to read you emails or access any other information inside of your Google account. You can also restrict previously granted access to your account from your Google account settings.

https://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=41192

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It looks like there aren't any external links pointing to your homepage but if you filter to pages on this root domain there are a couple dozen.

You will probably see some more links appear in the upcoming Mozscape Index update.

Hey,

You could use a dev subdomain (e.g. dev.example.com) to get a crawl but we cannot crawl a specific IP address. You will alos want to make sure that our user-agent rogerbot has permission to crawl your dev site.

Hope that helps!

Kenny

Ahh... The standalone Rank Tracker is a different tool than I have been referencing. It does appear to be having issues displaying the chart. I'll put in a support request for our engineers to look into this.

I do recommend that if you have keywords that you need to track historical data for that you use the rankings tool inside of a campaign. This is the preferred way to track keywords over time. I suggest, when possible, to strictly use the rank tracker tool for one off rankings collection.

Kenny

Hey OV,

Keywords are not case sensitive. One common mistake is that people will confuse "Broad Keyword Usage in Page Title" with "Keyword Placement in Page Title"

The big difference is that keyword placement refers to only if that keyword is the first word in the title.

Let me know the url though if you think we are reporting this in error.

Kenny

Hey Howard,

It's super easy to delete your brand rules. From the brand rules page under the manage keywords section you will see all of your brand rules. As you hover over a rule an "x" will appear that will allow you to remove that rule from your campaign.

Learn more about managing your keywords: http://www.seomoz.org/help/manage-keywords

kenny

Unfortunately, you cannot alter the domain after the campaign is created or the way that we track your domain. So you couldn't switch from tracking a subdomain for your campaign to tracking the root domain. You will have to create a new campaign if you wish to alter the way your campaign is currently setup

It does appear that the FAQ is currently out of date.

You can setup a new campaign to track the root domain (*.example.com) and it will track all the subdomains in one campaign (ex. blog.example.com and www.example.com). Another option would be to setup two separate campaigns to track subdomains. One campaign for blog.example.com and one campaign for www.example.com

This will of course depend on your needs.

Hi Andy,

We saw some temporary issues with Google.co.uk last week but everything should be good for your latest rankings update. If you experience issues in the future please write into help@seomo.org using the email associated with your account so that we can assist you further.

I'm so sorry about the inconvenience but everything should be back to normal now.

Kenny