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I did a google search just on your domain name, and found a couple of things you will want to stop doing if you're looking for legit ways to get a good ranking for you site.

Your site isn't an art gallery in New York, and Yelp has filtered that review, and I would think they'd remove the entry before too long.

I noticed a popular viral video reposted under your account on YouTube with a link to your site. Those links are nofollow, and again, this isn't your target market, and the video isn't related to your site at all (and it may be a copyright violation to repost it, I'm not sure).

Most blogs have nofollow turned on for their comments, including some blogs that have comments for your site in them (Moz Q&A and Moz comments are also all nofollowed). These links from off-topic sites really don't help you, either.

Hi David,

Can you send an email to help@seomoz.org with this information? They'll be the ones able to help you. If this is an issue affecting a number of people, they'll also come over and add a comment here to let people know, but they'll work with you via the help desk to get this figured out.

Thanks!

Hi Alex,

Were you able to get this resolved? If you still have this problem, you might want to drop an email to help at seomoz dot org and have the help team look at it to see if they can figure it out. Thanks!

Keri

You might find the Beginner's Guide to SEO at http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo helpful for some of this information.

We don't have that right now, but it is something we'd like to add down the road. Miranda from Moz addressed a very similar question at http://moz.com/community/q/does-moz-analytics-allow-for-goal-tracking. Let me know if that answers your question. Thanks!

Sounds like you've been busy! Will be interesting to see how all of this plays out over the next few months. Keep notes of what you've done, could make for a good blog post.

Hi Mike and Cesar,

I've asked the help desk to come in and answer this thread here, so it can be on record for other people who may have similar questions. You should be hearing from them in a bit.

Keri

Excellent advice here. If it's on a subdomain, the subdomain can be claimed in GWT as its own site. You can put a robots.txt on the subdomain then request the entire subdomain be removed from the index.

You may want to go one step further and use something like PolePosition's Code Monitor that checks the code of any page once per day and alerts you if there's a change. In a similar situation, I had it monitor the robots.txt for the live and all development sites for where I was working, so I knew if the developers changed something and could react quickly.

Hi! Generally, the Q&A forum is a place to get advice. For specific SEO work, we recommend that you hire someone to help with this.

From your campaign, go to Search (under dashboard), and go to Crawl Diagnostics. There you will find a list of all of the crawl errors and notices, including duplicate content.

TAGFEE stands for our core values of Transparent, Authentic, Generous, Fun, Empathetic, and Exceptional. I perhaps should have instead linked to our Community Etiquette page at http://moz.com/community/blog-disclaimer.

In short, let's keep this Q&A discussion related to the question -- what to do when the disavow file is uploaded to the non-www version of a domain instead of the www version in GWT.

Hi Juan,

This is a question best answered in a help desk ticket. The easiest way to contact them is to copy and paste this post and put it (along with your username) in an email to help@seomoz.org.

Thanks!

It's actually almost two years old, though I don't run across it in the SERPs too often. Here's the post Google made when they released that feature: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/understanding-web-to-find-short-answers.html

For a funny example see http://imgur.com/gallery/uXZ7o

Is the customer not appearing at all in Google, or just not appearing in the first position? Are there any notifications in Google Webmaster Tools? Are things OK in the other search engines?

As a side note, we now have http://health.moz.com/ where we list trending issues like this, and in the case of the GA connection, the solution. We hope this will make it easier in the future when events like this happen.

I'm about to run out the door, but take a quick look at this thread and the update he links to. There's a known issue out there with IE7 direct visits being really funky right now.

https://www.seroundtable.com/direct-traffic-ie7-analytics-18897.html

Hi! Don't panic! This is part of the OSE algorithm update. The OSE engineers will be over here in the next few days to give some more explanation here, but wanted to let you know now that it isn't your website that had a big change.

Hi! I see that a good part of your reply is based off of this October 2010 blog post at http://sixrevisions.com/content-strategy/seo-for-bing-versus-google/. I'd love to see any more recent information that you might have, as well as personal experience.

A few more questions.

1. Are you aware this forum is indexed? If your client searches, they may be able to find this question. Perfectly fine for some clients, not for some others.

2. Have you checked in Google Webmaster Tools for any messages?

3. Have there been changes in the other search engines in rankings?

4. Are you checking with a browser in incognitio mode, so that you're logged out and getting results that are as depersonalized as possible?

5. Has there been any change in traffic or sales? Anything else in Google Analytics of interest?

I took a quick look at your account. The URL and Duplicate URL are ALMOST the same, but if you look closely, you'll see that you've got both non-www and www in there. A simple redirect at the server side to your preferred version will take care of this quite nicely. If you need a hand with that, let us know and we'll help you with the right htaccess file.

The first thing I would do would be to look at the copyright on the Formica site to see their policy on copying their content.

Hi Anthony,

I've asked the help desk to come in and comment on this when they have a chance. I've also copied another Q&A here that may help you until they can come in and add any updates. This is from the help desk, in a response to a question about UTF-8 input for Juicy Link Finder.

http://www.seomoz.org/q/juicy-link-finder-doesn-t-support-hebrew-utf8-input

Hi Kevin

I feel like I've got to be honest with you. It's an old tool and we're not very proud of it anymore. It doesn't take advantage of our awesome web index, or all the cool analysis we've done around powerful links. We're working instead to replace it with more powerful link tools. Our newer tools are built to support Unicode, but most of our older ones don't. Sorry about that!

For example, I think you'd be much better off trying our Competitive Link Research Tool (it's in Labs and therefore sometimes gets overloaded, but it's so cool when it works!), or even running your competitors through Open Site Explorer.

www.seomoz.org/labs/link-intersect
www.opensiteexplorer.org

The bottom line is that Juicy Link Finder is unstable and doesn't support Unicode (because we're deprecating it in favor of new technologies), and it doesn't give you very sophisticated results.

Hi Joel,

It looks like your question was answered by an SEOmoz associate in this other question at http://www.seomoz.org/q/seo-friendly-wordpress-templates. Should I close this question?

Marty Weintraub from Aimclear has talked about doing this via Facebook. You might look at Aimclear's site or ping him on Twitter to get a bit more info.

As a staff member, I can easily change it, if you give me the URL to the question. If an admin or associate answers the question, we have the option to mark the question as answered, which also might have happened, or if an answer is endorsed by staff, it's marked as answered.

Thanks for your answer! There's no need for a signature line on Q&A answers, however. Interested people can click through to your profile page to see your contact info (and all of our links in Q&A are nofollowed in any case).

Signature lines tend to make the answer look a bit self-promotional and can result in thumbs down by some users.

Hi Jake! This sounds more like a question for the help desk as it may be a bug. Email them at help@semoz.org with this question, and they'll get back to you.

I'd drill down to look at the keywords and see if it's a particular keyword that spiked or if it was Google traffic as a whole that spiked. You can then look and see if there was a news event or something like that.

I have a similar head-scratcher that I didn't catch in time. I saw a spike in queries from Yahoo for [uss iowa], but not from Bing, and my site isn't in the first four pages for that term. My guess is that Yahoo featured something on their home page that included a search for that term (the USS Iowa left the SF area this weekend and did make the news). This was just a one-day thing and then it disappeared again.

I agree with EGOL. The people who are in a position to know what makes a perfect landing page for your area are your competitors, and they are certainly not going to give that information to you.

Your question is quite broad, and as it's written you may not get help information. You might consider narrowing the question and adding some more details. It's often said that you should consider every page a landing page. You've also not said if this is for a PPC campaign or for organic traffic, or for an offline campaign that direct to a specific URL.

There was a great post today in YOUmoz regarding PPC landing page optimization, with resources that are also applicable to organic landing pages. You might check it out at http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/6-essential-ppc-landing-page-optimizations.

I think I figured out the question you had in mind, and changed the status. Having it as "answered" doesn't keep other people from responding to it, thankfully.

Hi Cees,

I would actually wait until Tuesday (US time) and re-run your metrics. Open Site Explorer is updating as I type this, so in another few hours there should be fresh information. Run your reports and see if there's still the same problem. If there is still the problem, open a ticket with the help desk either through the web or by emailing help@seomoz.org.

Thanks!

I've asked for people with more experience to comment, but I remember reading something similar in Q&A a few months back, though that company was using a more questionable way to execute things. You might want to check out the thread at http://www.seomoz.org/q/contacted-by-an-seo-company for opinions about that implementation and what you wouldn't want to do.

Hi! I've asked for another associate with more Panda experience than I to come in and comment on this question.

Byork, knowing a little more about your trailing slash issue could help out. Do you have trailing slash redirects in place for all of your pages? Were they put in at a particular time, where you might be able to look at data from just after that date?

If the trailing slashes are in place correctly and always have been, and it's just some weird artifact of GA that is causing these pages to show up with 0 visits, can you ignore those pages that don't have the trailing slash and focus just on the metrics for those with the trailing slash?

We aren't able to provide access to the Google numbers, but you should be able to get that via AdWords / Keyword planner through your individual Google account.

Hi! It is a result of the OSE update. Rand talks about it a little in the blog post at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/brand-new-open-site-explorer-is-here when he says:

In addition to all the amazing new features in Open Site Explorer, Linkscape's index just updated using a new infrastructure that's allowed us to crawl much deeper on large, important sites. For many pages/domains, this will mean an increase in the total number of links we report, but likely a lower count of linking domains (unless you've gained a lot of links in late June/July) since we're excluding many domains that are low-quality/not-well-linked-to. We'd love your feedback on this index, as it's the first one of its kind, and will continue to see tweaks/improvements over the next few updates.

Open Site Explorer isn't a live crawl, and the data there can be a little old. There is an update scheduled for tomorrow, so I'd wait a day and check for your links tomorrow -- the data will be a lot fresher then, but still a few weeks old.

Keri

Here's a brief post about it on Search Engine Land. http://searchengineland.com/confirmed-google-panda-2-5-update-arrived-this-week-95222.

Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Roundtable has commented on Twitter that he'll be writing up a post about it for Monday. Here is the SER page for everything tagged Panda, it can be a handy reference. http://www.seroundtable.com/tag/panda

Hi! I've asked our help team to come and take a look at this and investigate. Thanks for your patience!

Hi Carla,

You can't choose the anchor text for your profile links. Congratulations on being near 200 MozPoints!

I couldn't find it in the first 15 pages of Google either. It could be that it's someone in your social circle that has shared it and that's what is pushing the results up higher.

One thing I like to do before I panic too much is fire up Safari, go to Edit -> Reset Safari to set everything to like it's a fresh install (clear cookies, history, etc. in one easy step), then search when I know that I have a minimum amount of personalization.

One of our associates wrote about handling expired content, especially for ecommerce stores, at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-should-you-handle-expired-content. This may help you some too.

See this post from Rand that has a section on Keyword Density. Short version is that it doesn't make sense to look at a specific percentage, but make sure that you at least use your keyword on your page, it's readable, and you don't stuff the page. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/some-opinions-on-the-seo-myths-realities-fight

This looks like something we should dive in to and check out! If you could each open up a ticket at https://moz.com/help/contact (just click any of the sections and a contact form will appear), then we can get more details from you, and pass this along to the engineering team (which we can't do via Q&A). Thanks so much, and sorry that this isn't working for you.

It's a bug that we're working on. So sorry for the spam, to those of you who received it!

Hi Ryan,

Send an email to help@seomoz.org with this question since it sounds like a bug, and they'll get back to you within about a day. Thanks!

Howdy!

I understand that some of this stuff can sound like gibberish if you don't understand what's going on. If you can tell us your site's URL that would help us out. If not, can you let us know if you're using something like Wordpress or Joomla? We can tailor our advice to you a bit better if we know more about your site. Just like it's easier to give instructions about changing your oil if we know what kind of car you have and we can tell you exactly what to look for, rather than giving more general information.

Keri

I don't do local myself, so I haven't tried this, but I have seen the suggestion of getting testimonials from customers and including the customer's cities next to their names in the testimonial.

I'm a Moz employee, so I'm biased, but here's some additional information that may help.

Google will give you a lot of your own links -- but not the information about links your competitors have.

For Alexa, I see they have more information now than just traffic info based off their toolbar, but I'm not entirely familiar with all they have to offer. Honestly, when people are looking at tools, I almost never hear someone talking about Alexa. It's usually Raven and other tools for this space.