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When you put your own URL into Open Site Explorer, we're looking at that URL (such as mycompany.com) and the FB likes that URL has.
What you've given me here is the URL for your Facebook page itself, which is actually a completely different site.
Hope that explains things!
Hi Nathan,
Right now we don't have a way to add multiple users to the same account; everyone needs to use the same login. That functionality is on our wish list, but just isn't here yet.
We do know about the 406 errors, and we uploaded a fix for that on Tuesday. Your next crawl should not show these errors again.
Keri
Hello Lesley,
I read your post, and wanted to make sure you had seen our blog post about the Just Discovered Links at http://moz.com/blog/announcing-the-just-discovered-links-report. Tela makes a couple of important points in it:
"This index includes valuable links that may be high-quality and topically relevant to your site or specific URL but are new, and thus have a low Page Authority score. This means they may not be included in the Mozscape index until they have been established and earned their own links. With this new index, we expect to uncover high-quality links significantly faster than they would appear in Mozscape.
I want to clarify that we are not injecting URLs from the Just-Discovered Links report into our Mozscape index. We will be able to do this in the future, but we want to gather customer feedback and understand usage before connecting these two indexes. So for now, the indexes are completely separate."
I don't see comments enabled on your blog, so I am not able to make a note of this over there. Could you perhaps amend your post with this information?
You should start to see some changes in the next OSE update.
Google isn't going to endorse either of those tactics. Heck, they even just reinforced that if you have any advertorial content on your news site you need to make sure that's not in your site map or they may not index our news site at all.
However, people are free to write whatever they want online. Google isn't the police, but if you want to be included in Google, you need to follow their rules.
It may be too late for this, but this is a useful post about what to do if you know in advance you need to take your server down. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-handle-downtime-during-site-maintenance
Here are the most common reasons why only one page is crawled. If this doesn't answer it, send us a note at help@moz.com. Thanks!
A couple of notes here first.
Google has really clamped down on private blog networks. Your effort might be better spent in other areas than developing a network.
Domain Authority is a Moz metric, and the search engines don't use our metrics for rankings. We approximate, to a degree, how we think the search engines might value sites.
How the search engines treat an expired domain may depend on what you do with the site itself. If it had information about Ford Explorer tires and now it has information about hot air balloons, they can tell that something big has happened.
Duplicate question, so closing this thread. Please respond at http://moz.com/community/q/would-adding-a-news-page-hurt-my-site-ranking-2
I'm going to respond from a human point of view and not a technical point of view.
I've been searching for houses recently on Craigslist. There are a couple of real estate agents who post ads on CL with a link to their site. When you click the link, you get a lightbox requiring that you fill out the lead form to be able to see the details of the house. I do one of two things:
I open up IE in private browsing mode and paste in the URL. The private browsing mode has something that prevents this script from running and I can see the house details just fine.
If the house address is not provided in the CL ad, I'll copy the image URL of one of the CL photos and put that into a Google reverse image search. I'll find a different website that has posted the same house and use their site that doesn't require me to register. (I realize this may not happen in your scenario above).
I agree what the other people say about not wanting provide one thing to Google and another to users, and wanted to add that people will try to find ways around the registration. I don't have a solution for you, sadly.
I believe the Followerwonk team has said FB is an entirely different beast from Twitter because of all of the privacy involved, and it'd be real hard to do something similar on FB.
Hi! The page authority is different because those are actually two different URLs. You probably have more backlinks going to one URL than to the other. If it's not already set to redirect from one version to the other site-wide, I'd set that up (tethering right now and don't have much bandwidth to check).
My first stop would e to talk to the person (or people) who answers your phones. What questions do they get? What do people want to know about the product? What do they get tired of answering all the time that you could write about?
Stephanie Change of Distiled wrote a good post about dealing with expired content and lots of 404 pages, and what you should do with those pages. It's at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-should-you-handle-expired-content. She talks about where you might want to redirect these pages to, how it should look to the user, etc.
Moz currently doesn't have any type of spam score when looking at the DA of a site, so that could be another factor -- Google has dropped the toolbar PR because of spam, yet we don't take that into account.
Great answer here from William. Thank you!
Google talks about this in their blog post at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html, which is a good place to start.
Given your title, are you only slipping in google.com for your search? How is Bing doing? If overall search from all engines have declined, then you'd want to check that you hadn't blocked something in robots, for example.
If you're not able to give out many details in a public Q&A, consider using your private Q&A question for the month. Those questions are only viewable to you and SEOmoz staff/associates, and we are all under NDAs to not share your URL or any other information about the question.
Hi Ryan,
Welcome to Moz! I noticed your profile has Report Pro in it. If you're affiliated with a product you're recommending, it's a good policy to please disclose that in your answer. Thanks!
Have you downloaded the CSV of your crawl report? You can look at the column for the referring URL and see what page is pointing to the 404 error.
Hi! Would you care to share more information about the source of that number? It's always helpful to know background for this type of information.
Keep in mind that with an image, you're taking away from some of the accessibility of the text for anyone with a visual impairment. I don't know if the OP's target market is racing wheelchairs for people with only lower leg impairment who are in their 20s, or if the target market might be one that you should be concerned about having the site be more accessible by a screen reader.
The crawl frequency is weekly and cannot be changed. What you can do is run a crawl test from http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test if you need a crawl on demand.
There is a column to the far right that should show the referring URL. Be sure to scroll until you find that, and then you will see where we found those URLs.
Clarification: this is in the crawl test report. I'm not sure why you're seeing 404s in the link analysis page.
It's best to look at the terms of use of the site. Our terms say something to the effect you can republish, but we need credit. Sadly, many people ignore that, and try to make it look like they wrote the post.
I took a quick look at the first site. I don't know about triggering any type of warning, but are you aware that there are multiple pages with lorem ipsum text still? http://artistalaska.com/about.htm You might want to clean that up for a better user experience. Also, some pages are indexed that you probably don't want viewable, such as http://www.artistalaska.com/$_alternate1.htm.
Just those eight sites got targeted, and not the others that you also did (via http://spyonweb.com). Look and see if you can find something in common with those that the others don't have? I noticed this page http://www.whitegyr.com/using_free_link_exchange_directo.htm and while the Google notice doesn't mention linking, I'd maybe clean that up as a preventative tool.
Right now I'm on limited bandwidth and time, but if this were me I'd go through and do a site: on each of the sites and see what google has indexed and see if anything jumps out (like the default text, see if there's evidence of anything being hacked, etc). I'd go into open site explorer and look and inlinks and look to see anything fishy is there. I'd look at the source code to see if something looks off there (like a bunch of hidden text). I'd look to see if I was using unique content on the site.
If you go to the URL in my first response, the instructions there will explain how it works. Have you tried visiting that URL?
Hi! We are in the process of updating the index right now, which is why you haven't seen the metrics change yet. We're on the west coast of the US, so it's still fairly early in the morning on this end.
There's a free tool at http://smallseotools.com/plagiarism-checker/ that will check up to 1500 words. It takes about half your content, chunks it up into 3-7 word phrases, and searches Google for the text. You paste the text in, it doesn't need to be live already. Quotation marks in the text will sometimes lead to false positives, so be aware of that.
You'll want to check the entire piece, even if you need to break it up into parts to check it, so that you can check for both outright duplicate content and for spun content. Sometimes there will be just one phrase in all of the text that is identical and not spun, then you'll see the result and see that you're looking at a reworded version of a post that's already live. I turn down many YouMoz ever week because of spun content.
Copyscape premium will also check pasted content for $0.05 per check USD. It's quite fast. I've only recently begun using it, so I can't speak as much to the accuracy, especially with spun content, but it is also a nice tool to have.
People who do that are often ones who don't know about SEO or wanting to optimize anchor text and the ones who haven't been asked for specific information for a link. They're the ones who help contribute to a natural-looking link profile. If all of your links have anchor text that looks like someone coached them about what to write, it looks a bit suspicious to the engines and less like someone linked there on their own and more like they were prompted to do so.
This post is five years old, and I haven't worked as a Moz employee in over two years. If you email help@moz.com, they should be able to help you.
Hi Vivoweb,
Thanks for pointing this out. I've taken this back to the company and we'll be sure that we're clear on this point.
I'd take the domain authority of blogger out the this equation. That is one downfall of DA, is that it'll show a real high domain authority for a blogspot.com domain, even though in this case it's really the authority of the subdomain that matters.
I totally agree with the other two responses. Ask what they mean by running macros, and be sure you understand what they are doing for you, and ask for regular reports. If they're building any links, you need to get the list from them about the exact links they have built.
Mike, I'm getting a 404 when I try to visit that page and find out the context of the example. Their example doesn't make much sense, as having subfolders like "direct" really aren't telling you if the traffic is direct.
I agree that it is better to not have a site 10 layers deep, but it's also beneficial to not have 20 parameters on a URL.
However, considering the OP is on Wordpress, I imagine we're talking about the post structure where you have the date as part of the URL. If the site in question is the recipe site from your profile, the following URL doesn't seem too horribly bad.
http://www.copykat.com/2009/02/07/cheddar-chicken-spaghetti/
However, if you're redesigning anyway and want a cleaner URL, you may want to consider a structure that does not include the date. The date really doesn't hold a lot of meaning in this case. I honestly don't care if your spaghetti recipe is two weeks old or five years old when I'm looking for a recipe. I use the Redirection plugin on my Wordpress site, and that plugin has been updated a bit more recently than the other plugin listed so might work a little better with the newer versions. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/
Would love to see other comments and opinions.
Moz, Ahrefs, and any other site all use their own crawlers, and don't use Google's index. None of us also have the number of computers that Google does to crawl. We all have our own ways of crawling and looking for links, and at Moz, we try to focus on the highest quality links.
The part where you state that you have made 10,000 links on 45 domains is of a bit of concern. That's a lot of links from just a few sites, and the fact that you made them could mean they're not of the same quality as they would be if you had gotten them as an editorial reference from another site.
Can you tell us more about what these links are like? My first guess is that they don't have much quality, and thus aren't helping you much in the search engines.
We're certainly not afraid to decline posts. In the past several weeks, we've been averaging about 50 spam posts a week (pure spam, such as horoscope predictions), declining 20-30 posts a week, returning 5-10 back to the user for edits, and publishing 1-4 posts a week.
I've been doing this for about two and a half years now. We've never let pure spam through, but we were more lenient on anchor text in the past than we are now -- today, you're not going to get away with Springfield SEO company as the anchor text for a link back to your company in a post.
Last year, I wrote more details about the YouMoz process at http://moz.com/blog/inside-youmoz-how-to-guest-blog-for-moz. This is still what we do, though a couple of the people have changed.
Hi Steven,
A notice is just that -- it's a notice that "hey, this is here, make sure you want it here" and it's not a warning. Feel free to ignore it if it's set up the way you want it to.
Not a direct answer to your question, but from a user's perspective, when I click the "read more" I'm expecting to see more regarding maintaining the exterior wood decking, not the entire intro sales pitch repeated again -- more like the page on How to Clean a Deck that you also have linked from the home page. If you did it that way, you'd only have the paragraph of duplicate content at the above question would be a moot point.
DA and PA are numbers that help you see how you're doing relative to competitors, and they can change with each update, depending on our index. They are something interesting to look at and can give you a rough idea of how you're doing, but they are numbers that Moz developed, based on our crawls. The search engines don't use our metrics, as they have a much bigger dataset, more statisticians than we have employees, and many more factors they take into account. EGOL does have a good approach here.
I've actually approved a YouMoz that did link out to a gambling site. The post was about how to do white hat marketing for shadier industries, and linked out to a legitimate example of what the author was doing. It was a relevant link in the context of the post.
I've only made a couple of guest posts myself, but I do have a lot of links from Moz, Search Engine Roundtable, and other SEO-related sites to our business about model battleships. These have usually been attribution for liveblogging (on Search Engine Roundtable), or just mentions of my name in some other form, with a link to the site. If you look at my link profile for that site, it is not solely from sites about model warships or electronics, but I have yet to have any type of notice from Google, and some of those links have been there for years. That said, I didn't get any of them through blog comments, and most of them are just my name or business name for anchor text. This is my personal experience, and yours might vary.
Hi! These domains that no longer have links to a site should drop off the report in a couple of crawl cycles. Our data isn't live, but can take a few weeks to crawl, process, and display. I suggest re-running your report, since we just pushed out a new index yesterday, and seeing if anything looks better. You can also look to see what Google and Bing report in their webmaster tools for your website.
Many reasons. You don't want the admin pages of your site indexed, for example. You may not want all of the search queries that people perform on your site search to be indexed. You don't want or need your cart checkout being indexed for an ecommerce site. You don't want a print version and a web version of the same document indexed, so you exclude the print version from being indexed. Your site is in development, and you don't want it being indexed before it is ready.
For robots.txt in particular, some search engines now respect wildcards and you can exclude some session IDs via robots.txt. OSCommerce is real bad about creating session IDs and getting those indexed, then you have tons of different URLs indexed for the same page.
http://www.cogentos.com/bloggers-guide-to-using-robotstxt-and-robots-meta-tags-to-optimise-indexing/ is a post that explains some of the reasons to use robots and no-index on a Wordpress site.
You might find some interesting points in yesterday's Moz Blog post about getting reviews the right way for local businesses. http://moz.com/blog/getting-reviews-the-right-way-for-local-businesses
We're just about to go into a quarterly all-hands meeting, so I can't write a long reply to this. I'll add my comments tomorrow morning. Looking forward to the discussion!
I haven't done this in a long time, but I used ISAPI Rewrite, and did what is talked about in this thread at http://www.webmasterworld.com/microsoft_asp_net/3951672.htm. An alternate method is discussed at http://www.stepforth.com/resources/web-marketing-knowledgebase/non-www-redirect/#microsoft. Hope this helps you get started!
Barry Schwartz has written about the last part (when it's not a DMOZ listing) at http://www.seroundtable.com/google-title-selection-12989.html. There have also been several comments in Q&A about Google not using either the site's title tag or the DMOZ entry for the title in the SERP.
I'd check the terms of service on the site, and see if you're allowed to use the reviews on your own site, too.
Can you add some context as to where you'd like to use this spun content, so we can help you better?
Generally, content that has gone through a spinner isn't of the best quality. I've seen an article about alcoholism that was spun. Instead of "Think Before You Drink", it had been changed to "Think Before You Beverage".