Welcome to the Q&A Forum

We had a problem with a cookie, and rolled out a fix to it late yesterday afternoon. If you could click the logout button then log in again it should be fixed, as that will force the new cookie.

The tool is updated about once a month, with the next scheduled update being a week from now. http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/about gives more information about the crawling and why it can take up to 60 days for your links to show. The calendar for updates is at http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345964-linkscape-update-schedule.

As well as Google Analytics and Google Adsense IDs.

I believe this has to do with how Google groups things. A few years back people talked about using this trick in reverse by changing num=10 to num=9, num=8, etc. If the first result had two domains, one that was indented, the second indented result might actually be at result 10, but since they were from the same domain, they were grouped together. If it was result 10, and you should just nine results, suddenly you'd see that "second" place link disappear.

My guess is this is what's happening here. Some of those results are in places 11-50 and showing up in the indented results.

I've got a question back for you that's more of a meta question. Why would the search engines want to index your pages? If all the page is doing is grabbing information from another source, your site isn't offering any additional value to the users, and the search engine algos aren't going to see the point in sending you visitors.

Those are a separate system right now, which we realize isn't the easiest way to manage things, and we're working on improvements. You can unsubscribe from the bottom of each newsletter, or drop us an email at emailmarketing@moz.com and we'll get everything switched over.

Hi Eduardo,

I'm sorry you're still having problems. At this point, it'd be best for you to send an email to help@seomoz.org and have our help team look at it for you. They'd be the ones who could give you the most advice for diagnosing this.

Keri

Dana, just a quick note that it wasn't an instant recalculation on DA and PA. You happened to check right as we rolled out the new OSE index today (see the main blog for a post about that).

Have you verified your site in Bing's webmaster tools and looked for any messages from Bing there?

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable has posts where he's seen people talking about this in the Google forums as well, so it's not just happening to you.

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-title-selection-12989.html

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-titles-match-12779.html

I don't know if there is anything you can do about it, but these links should provide a little more background information and let you know you're not alone.

Hi Thomas,

This is a known issue. We have a writeup at http://health.moz.com/ that should help fix this. Let us know if that doesn't work!

Here are some common reasons why only one page of your site may be crawled http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/409821-why-isn-t-my-site-being-crawled-you-only-crawled-one-page. For more specific help, sending an email to the help team at help@seomoz.org is the best way to get your particular issue looked at.

Thanks!

Keri

Don't forget to add processing time. The data from this latest update is from crawls of mid-September to mid-October, then it takes another bit of time to process.

...but in any case, so glad to hear the good news!

No, it didn't change how the metrics were calculated, but as the index size and contents varies each time, the data that is put into the metrics changes each time. What you're doing is what we recommend -- pay more attention to how you compare to your competitors each time rather than how you compare from crawl to crawl.

I haven't heard that one from a developer before (only redirecting deeper into a site), and I do see online people being able to do the redirects. I've used ISAPI rewrites on IIS servers before just fine to handle this, though with a different site architecture.

Just one URL for each page is the best practice. However you redirect, make sure that you use a 301 (permanent) redirect.

There is a bug where that message is showing sometimes, even if things were properly saved. I'm seeing your custom URL as http://www.energieleveranciers.nl. Is this correct?

There's a known bug at the moment that we're investigating that has some crawls suddenly dropping down to only a page or two. I believe both of you have sent your information to the help desk, and they'll help you from there. I'm making this comment so anyone else searching the forums in the next couple of days can see this answer as well and just contact the help desk directly.

Could you give us a little more context or an example of what it is that you would like to do? Also, could you let us know if you care about what the search engines think of this practice?

I don't have hard data, but my understanding is that Google doesn't look at meta descriptions for rankings but they are important in helping CTR when they're shown in the SERPs.

Here are two posts that may be helpful in both explaining how to set up a robots.txt for wordpress, and the thinking behind setting up which parts to exclude.

http://www.cogentos.com/bloggers-guide-to-using-robotstxt-and-robots-meta-tags-to-optimise-indexing/

http://codex.wordpress.org/Search_Engine_Optimization_for_WordPress#Robots.txt_Optimization

The wordpress link (second link) has a link to several other resources as well.

Hi Davinia,

So sorry to hear you're having this problem. I'm not aware of a bug with that part of the system. Since this is a billing issue, could you please send us a note at help@moz.com? We'll be able to help you directly that way. I apologize in advance that there might be a delay in response, due to the holiday weekend.

Keri

Hi Rusty,

With regards to the Q&A community, you are correct -- only pro members can post to the community. With your pro membership, you also get one private Q&A a month. This is a private question that goes to the SEOmoz Associates, which includes employees from SEOmoz, Distilled, and select other contractors. The Associates will answer your question, are under NDA, and that question is not made public anywhere. Even Rand goes in and answers questions. That's another big value of the Pro membership.

Here's a blog post Google made about this in 2009 that may help.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/04/one-line-sitelinks.html

As far as Google choosing their own title tag, they've been doing that for years now, even to sites such as Apple.com. Barry Schwartz has written about it a few times, including at http://www.seroundtable.com/google-title-selection-12989.html

This doesn't address ranking, but the YOUmoz post does talk about best practices for optimizing PDF content and may help you. http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/how-to-optimize-pdf-documents-for-search

Yes, it is a known issue. We have details about it at http://health.moz.com/ that should help get it working for you. If that doesn't fix it, drop us a note at help@moz.com. Thanks!

It's not supposed to be nearly that long. We've had a couple of glitches with it recently. Your best bet is to email help@seomoz.org, which opens a ticket with the help desk and they can get things fixed for you. I'm so sorry you've had a problem.

Keri

SEO5, can you add some more information about how to use Google Webmaster Tools to do a 301 redirect for URLs? I'm not sure that this is possible. 301s usually require server access, and GWT doesn't control your server. You can set your preferred domain in GWT, but you would still want to do a 301 for users and for other search engines.

Looking forward to seeing what you find out!

Go ahead and link to the post -- seems quite appropriate and on-topic.

We don't have an estimated time at the moment, per Megan's comment at http://moz.com/community/q/can-i-add-another-user-to-my-seomoz-pro-campaign#reply_09021. We'll keep everyone updated when we do have more information.

Hi Omri,

Open Site Explorer usually updates once a month. We've had a delay this month, so it'll be a little later than initially expected. You should see the update on February 29th however.

Is using a smaller image in the description with a link to (and warning about) the higher-resolution image a possibility? That way you're not loading a huge image on every page load, but it's still there for users who want more information.

Other people are seeing this too. Barry did a post on it at Search Engine Roundtable. http://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-17328.html

Also verify that sandbox domain in Google Webmaster Tools and the other search engine webmaster tools. Once you do that, you can remove the site with the URL removal tool.

Yes, the DA did drop by about two points beyond normal for this last index, and should be fixed in the next index.

Just to let anyone else watching the thread know, the solution has been started, but it may be until Monday before things can be finished and this fixed -- but it has been started.

Hi! This post by Dr. Pete explains more about the "too many links" concept. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

I'm working from home today and trying not to wake up my husband because I'm laughing so hard. Time to move downstairs before I read any more replies!

Thanks for replying and giving us a status update. It's always great to know what happens with the advice so we can all learn. Glad to hear you're getting such good results!

We're releasing the monthly reporting right now, and it'll be available to everyone within the next couple of days.

It really depends on what your hosting company has done. Basically, you need to choose if you want a www in front of your URL or not, then make sure you set up your redirects properly. Your hosting company can help with this, or you can search for information on how to do this on apache, or there may be a Joomla plugin to help too.

And remember that the toolbar pagerank reflects the PR of that individual page. Heck, you could have a link from SEOmoz on your profile page that has no PR at all and is no followed and nobody visits it and it won't do you a bit of good.

Also to look at -- are those 20 websites all connected in some fashion? On the same server farm? Have the same footer links? Have the same Google Analytics code? If they're all part of a network, it's really not going to do you any good.

A quick question first -- you've verified that Google Analytics code is on all of their current pages, right? Discovering way later there was a glitch in code implementation and half of their URLs don't have GA code would be a major headache, as would finding that a good part of the dip was because they finally pulled the code off of the development server. I've seen both happen.

From your Campaign Dashboard, go to Manage Campaigns. You can archive or delete campaigns from there.

There was some kind of bug where it was showing one or two votes up and a couple of thousand votes down for each URL. We took it down while we figure out where that was coming from. I'm not sure, but I think it will be back up when it's fixed. Glad you found it helpful!

This would not be the best way to go about obtaining links. There is no mention of if the links are relevant, if they are permanent, etc. It does go against Google's guidelines of buying links with the intent to pass pagerank and boost your rankings.

Hi Daniel,

You've gotten some good responses to your question. Do you have any additional questions or comments you would like to add?

A reconsideration request is fine, as long as you're sure that nothing else is bad about your site. You're telling Google that "hey, I want humans to come look at this site and look for anything they may find wrong about it, not just the stuff that I think I found". So as long as you think everything else is good, I think it should be fine. It's when you've only cleaned up half of the paid links coming into your site, and have a few pages of hidden text lying around still that it's not the best thing.