Welcome to the Q&A Forum

The last two indexes have resulted in lower DAs for many sites. You'll notice that your competitors are likely also lower. The next index release should be back to normal. We apologize for this frustration.

My question is: is unique visitors the right metric that you should be measuring? On Fiverr.com I can get 2000 to 10,000 unique visitors for $5. http://fiverr.com/gigs/search?query=unique+visitors&x=0&y=0

Can you tie your metrics to something else that might have more value for you, such as purchases, newsletter signups (still easy to fake, but at least takes a little more time), etc?

Also, are you planning on paying $1 or so to get into the user's regular inbox? If not, you may wind up in their "other" mailbox, which many people don't know even exists.

Why not try Facebook advertising instead?

And we've updated! Thanks again for your patience everyone.

Matt updated his post to clarify that Guest Blogging for SEO purposes / links is what he has an issue with, not the concept of guest blogging as a whole.

Trust me, it hasn't slowed down the number of guest post submissions that YouMoz is getting!

It's not a 1:1 relationship. My site can have three backlinks from moz.com, but that only counts as one linking root domain (since the domain for each of those backlinks is moz.com). Does that help?

I'm looking forward to seeing the answers on this one. There's not going to be a simple answer that will cover everything, that's for sure.

This summer I went on a vacation with my parents, and used the "simple" purchase of a pair of hiking boots to show him some of the complexities of measurement. In Montana and North Dakota I saw billboards for a sporting goods chain (that I hadn't heard of before). In the campground in South Dakota we picked up a "welcome to Sioux City" brochure that mentioned this same chain. When we were at breakfast, I looked up the chain on my mobile phone to see what the hours were and the store location. I found out that it opened early and was only a couple of miles away, so we went there and got hiking boots for my dad from the brick and mortar store after he tried them on. So, which channel gets the credit for that sale, and how much credit should each channel get?

Things I can think of that can lead to correlations that may help your cause. Look at sales volume and look at visits to your site, and see if there's a correlation. What about visits to the store locator page? Searches that include intent regarding address, hours, etc?

Are there any products where someone would likely search for them online then buy them in person, because of the cost of shipping or needing them right away or the fact that you don't ship them? Look at visits to those pages and look at any corresponding increase in B&M sales for those products.

Tread carefully on LinkedIn. If one group puts you on moderation for self-promotional content, it can trigger moderation for your other groups, even if they never put you on moderation explicitly (see http://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/38735).

Do a little bit, and see if anyone actually reads what you post in the groups (by looking at the referral traffic in your analytics program). All too often, the groups are filled with everyone promoting their own posts, and nobody commenting on the posts or questions that other people have. You'll need to decide if LinkedIn is worth the time you spend on it.

It's likely on our end. We did have a smaller index this time, and will have a smaller one next time as well. I know it's frustrating to see your numbers go down one month, but it's actually best to look more at how are you doing compared to your competitors rather than absolute numbers each month.

We have information about each update at http://moz.com/products/api/updates. Here's the information from the most recent update from the engineers:

One note: With this index release, there is a slight reduction in link counts across the board, but the majority of them should be there.

The reduction is due to some scheduling issues we ran into a couple of weeks ago (and have since fixed) for the crawlers. So, we will have slightly reduced counts for this index and the next, and we'll return to normal after that.

CNN, Tribune, and other big companies often have both in-house people and agencies. I know people who are at (or were at) both CNN and the Tribune who are in-house SEOs who work with contracted agencies.

SEOmoz staff and associates do monitor the Q&A and often respond. I don't know the answer to this question, but I'll get someone who does know the answer to come in and contribute, as I'm sure others would like to know the answer. If you sent a tweet to @seomoz they're also likely to respond there.

Maybe also look at the visitors by location in your Google Analytics, and show increases in visitors who are from the areas where you have physical stores?

I'm betting with some searching you can find some more ideas of how to help tie in the website to in-store sales, like promotion codes from the website if you order in store.

What about even a customer service initiative where you could order online and have it ready for pickup at the store?

No problem! Also, one other factor is that even if you did know that they didn't pay FB to boost, you don't know if there was a third-party service they used to get likes.

After we switched from SEOmoz to Moz, we lost a link to that tool. We're looking at making it more visible again, but right now it is just having to know about it, unfortunately.

I'd love to see a case study from a firm talking about the amount of traffic they get from these links, and if it turns into any leads or sales for them.

Alan, have you tried contacting the help desk about this? They'd want to know about this as well in case it's a problem on their end.

http://seomoz.zendesk.com/home

Hi Atul,

Here's Google's comprehensive explanation about Fetch as Googlebot, and what it can do for you.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=158587

What are the positive effects of 300 fake google+ likes? What do you hope to achieve? Is it worth the time involved?

They're automatically chosen. If the keyword is ranking in the top 50 of your preferred search engine, the keyword is added. We have some more information at http://moz.com/help/pro/on-page-reports that should help.

People who come to Moz are in the same niche as the recommended companies. It'd be way different if I had the same link at the bottom of my site that's about model battleships.

For example, if your organic traffic from multiple engines suddenly took a dive at the same time, it might indicate that there is an issue with instructions to the search engines in general. Another user also had Google traffic drop and posted in Q&A, and we discovered that a robots meta tag with "noindex, nofollow" had been placed on many of the pages. It wasn't a penalty at all, it was all of the search engines following the directives given.

In referring sites, if you saw refers come from listofeasytohacksites.com, that could provide a clue as to what is happening.

We are all trying to help here, and trying to make sure something bigger isn't a factor.

Hi Brian,

In a nutshell, what you'll hear most here is to build content that people want to link to, build content that is valuable to your readers/customers, do natural outreach, etc. We have a good article on linkbuilding on SEOmoz, I just don't have it at my fingertips at the moment and am on my way out for the day. In the meantime, you can check out the beginner's guide to SEO section on linkbuilding at http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links to get an idea of what I'm talking about.

I see a number of pages indexed, including the home page. I notice that you're running on an older version of WordPress. While likely not related to your question, I highly suggest that you make a backup of your site, and upgrade to the current version of wordpress to prevent attacks on the site from security vulnerabilities (that can end up killing your rankings).

I also suggest logging into Google Webmaster Tools, if you haven't already, and seeing what information is there about your site that could help.

I agree that the sub-pages seem a bit keyword-stuff and repetitive.

We're working on supporting https websites, but don't have that online at the moment. I'm asking the help desk to come in and comment on this post and give some more details.

If you're adding links from external sites yourself, those links aren't quite natural.

Thanks for all of the suggestions everyone! We're aware that there are old questions that tend to linger, and we're working on some solutions.

Dunamis, why wouldn't an email work for you? I had thought an email might be one of the more effective ways of letting people know there had been answers to their questions, so I'd like to hear why it wouldn't work for some people.

Some of the people who asked questions were in a trial membership, and are now basic members, so they can't mark something as answered. I am either marking those as answered, or a discussion question. I'm also leaving notes on questions asking people if this has answered their question, but not everyone is subscribed to their own questions by email, especially on the older questions. When Q&A first launched, it wasn't as active, so my hypothesis is that people didn't get a response right away and didn't sign up for email notifications, then just stopped checking for answers.

The last time I looked, you can request removal of an entire directory as well, which should work for the OP.

I looked at the URL in your traffic report, and went to a random page. I chose this one on finding business accounting software. http://www.urhowto.com/business-finance/accounting-small-businesses/

The inline ads are for umbilical cord banking and baby bags, the suggested websites are for solar power, and the most recent comments are for articles on babies, fashion, and relationships. Maybe looking at making your recent comments and ads and things more related by category? If I'm in a business section, show me only comments from business?

Do you have your analytics set so you can see where people are clicking out? Are they going to the resources you're suggesting in your text? Are they clicking on ads? ie are you actually making money, even if they leave?

There should be something about switching back to Pro. If you don't see it, send an email to help@moz.com and we'll help you out there.

Michael, check your PMs, I just sent you a quick note there.

Hi Geoff,

This is best answered by opening a help desk ticket at http://seomoz.zendesk.com/anonymous_requests/new or emailing help@seomoz.org. They'll get back to you over there about this issue.

Thanks so much for using SEOmoz!

Hi Michelle,

You need to verify the subdomain itself as its own site in Google webmaster Tools, then you can request removal of that entire site (subdomain).

My husband is here having a good laugh with me over the URL that I brought up just as he came in from the garage. "It's from Q&A and it's work related honey, honest!"

Have you viewed your source? Do you know about the link to an adult site with an H1 about bondage that's in there? Your privacy policy also has a link to car insurance on it. There's an affiliate link to the Socrates theme, too. If none of those are yours, I'd suggest removing them. Might help, certainly can't hurt.

I put one phrase from your site into Google, and found a couple of dozen sites that had that phrase. To be honest, you've got a real thin site without much content, and if the content you do have is not unique, there's not much compelling reason for the search engines to return your site instead of another site. Open Site Explorer reports links from nine different domains, and most of them look like profile links.

I'd first focus on getting some unique content in there, making sure that your site is clean without hidden links or text, get content in there that someone would want to link to, then focus on linking.

Right now we only integrate with Google Analytics. We do have a feature request forum, where you can add your vote for Piwik integration. There's already a thread started at https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/20870741-Piwik-Integration.

To help find things to write about that won't waste your time, spend a moment to think about what will save your time. What questions do you get on the sales floor? What questions do you get emails about? What questions do people call in about? That's what your customers want to know.

In your analytics, when you segment out by source, how is direct and referring traffic? Have either of those taken a hit, or is it mainly search traffic? And is it just Google, or have all of the major engines taken the same nose dive?

I know Google Places doesn't allow PO Boxes, and this might be against their terms of use too. I'm asking our local expert to add to this thread with some more information.

Google trends has this. Check out http://www.google.com/trends/?q=unpasteurized+milk.

There is not a way to change to Google, as they've no longer made that data available, unfortunately.

The OP stated that these are keywords drawing traffic to the site, not referral traffic. Therefore, people are typing these keywords into a search engine and finding the site directly via the keywords.

It could be that the search engines are seeing a hacked version of the site that visitors don't see. Look at the landing pages for these keywords, then fetch those pages as Googlebot from Google Webmaster Tools.

Hi Jennifer,

Rand just made a comment today on another question in Q&A that addresses some of the differences between the figures from OpenSiteExplorer and Magestic. http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-there-is-no-even-close-correlation-between-majesticseo-data-and-open-site-explorer

Hope this helps!

SEOmoz looks at the code on the page when it looks at duplicate content scores. My hunch is that there's a lot of identical code on those pages, which is causing the warning.

Today's YouMoz is also about this subject. http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/not-freaking-out-about-the-eu-cookie-legislation

The upgrade hadn't yet happened when you posted this. I'm not aware of a criteria change, but will ask to see what could have caused this.

This might be a tough niche to break in to. There are tons of wallpaper sites out there already. You'll need to find a reason that people will want to come to your site. What's different from the other sites that have been on the web for years? What are reasons why people should link to your content?

Right now, I'm only seeing seven wallpaper designs. I don't know if I'm missing something obvious, or there's just not much there yet. If there are a lot more than seven images, you may want to make it more clear how to see the rest of the images.

Also think about the user's perception of this site. How do I know the images are OK to use on my computer? What can I do with the images? How can I submit my own images? Who are you? Why this site? There's a contact us form, but nothing that tells anything about you.

I'd also suggest reading the Beginner's Guide to SEO at http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo. Some of the techniques you're using are outdated, such as reciprocal links, and directories can often be low quality and not helpful.

Could you email help@seomoz.org? They might have an answer for you, since nobody has chimed in here. And if they don't have an answer, they can add it to the queue of suggestions for future improvements.

I don't know if it does anything more than an offline copy. I haven't encountered your use case before, so haven't looked for that. You might look to see if that program or others has those types of options that could help you.

That explains US and Canada, but the OP is actually asking about the UK. I'm not aware of a partnership there.

Edit: there is an agreement for the UK as well. Details are at http://www.mediaweek.co.uk/news/1083306/Yahoo-UK-searches-switch-Bing-results/.

That is correct. OSE doesn't have the server power that Google does, and we can't find all the backlinks, but we do try to find the most valuable links.