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Hi Peter,

SEOmoz and Google use different crawlers. We're not quite the size of Google, and the server farm we have doesn't quite match theirs either. Simply put, we don't crawl as many URLs as Google, so we won't show as many links.

We DO try to crawl the higher-value links, and we show links for more than just the sites you have verified in Google Webmaster Tools. We also have some nifty metrics along with our links that you won't find at Google.

Things won't ever match up, but looking at the variety of sources for link data will help you get a better idea of the big picture.

Welcome to SEOmoz! The crawl tool includes looking at links to your own website as well. If you count in your internal links, does that add up?

If you need more help, let us know your URL, and we can take a look. Thanks!

Hi Rich,

Did these answers help you, or are you still looking for some more insight?

For a good laugh, take a look at what Google's captioning system thinks Ross is saying. I don't think it handles non-American accents as well.

Ross, for the people who cannot view YouTube videos or have audio at their workplace, could you include at least a brief summary in your answer in this forum? Thanks so much!

Toolbar page rank only updates a few times a year. Usually the best use for it is selling or links. Otherwise, a much better metric to look at is how is your traffic doing, are you getting visitors, conversions, etc.

Paul,

I'm so sorry that "general slowness" came across as a pretty silly response but it is the honest truth.

I was working on some things for the transition with the manager for the transition project, and we both saw how slow things were. She looked at the status monitors for the system, and there was not one major thing that had failed where we could say "ok, it is process X that is not responding, if we restart that then everything will be better".

Things in general are running slowly. No, we're not happy with it. We know that it's a pain. We are monitoring to make sure there aren't specific failures that happen that compound the current problems, and we are doing final testing on the upgrades to make sure they will have the performance and stability we all desire.

Keri

Jeff, it's actually a different situation here. A couple of weeks ago, a large number of links stopped showing for many people in GWT, but their rankings stayed the same. In this poster's case, the actual rankings are changing.

Dr. Pete goes into some detail about the canonical tag at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/which-page-is-canonical.

It's basically telling Google that "I can't fix this with a 301, but domain.com/page1, domain.com/page1/, and domain.com/page1.php are all really the exact same page even though it has three different URLs, and the canonical URL is the one that I want you to show as the real URL"

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.

We updated MozScape yesterday, so all of the metrics were updated as well. That should account for the change!

Matt Cutts answered that on a YouTube video a couple of years back at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qigo05nAqKw. I've copied the transcript of his answer below.

In general, we don't promise that site colon queries will rank in the exact same order that other pages would rank in. So we do use a few different factors. We do use some version, roughly, of page rank, but it's not exactly in page rank order. We also look a little bit at, for example, maybe how short the URL is, and those tend to be URLs at the root page or one directory down, and those tend to be the pages that would attract the most links anyway. So it's kind of a combination to sort of trying to surface the pages that we think are useful, either according to page rank, or interesting in terms of being relatively short, so it's something that's pretty important or pretty close to your root page.

But I wouldn't necessarily say that, and it's not the case, that it's strictly in page rank order or anything like that, at least the last time that I checked. So it's a relatively good proxy of the pages that might be kind of interesting, but I wouldn't treat it as a perfect list. You can always go through your server logs and figure out which pages are driving the most traffic, and sometimes those are going to be deep URLs, for example, that might get a very specific link or that rank for some other reason.

Publishing a video on YouTube does not make the content public domain.

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/.

We have some other reasons for only one page being crawled at https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/409821-Why-Isn-t-My-Site-Being-Crawled-You-re-Not-Crawling-All-My-Pages- as well.

Charles,

I took a look at the home page and two random pages of londonescape.com. All three had meta descriptions. Were you by chance referring to a different domain? Making that clear would help.

Rather than stating something is horrible, it's more helpful to state that it is difficult to use because a production description is in one place and the order button is on another page (an example from one of my own sites).

I'm looking at content pages from the main navigation of londonescape.com, such as Guest Information and Short Term Apartments, and see plenty of internal linking.

In a context like this, PR generally means public relations.

That post talks about Google crawling javascript, but doesn't address presenting one thing to Google and another to users.

Here's what Google has to say, and would likely be the reason for your thumbs down:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66355

Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines. Cloaking is considered a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines because it provides our users with different results than they expected.

Some examples of cloaking include:

• Serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images or Flash to users
• Inserting text or keywords into a page only when the User-agent requesting the page is a search engine, not a human visitor

If your site uses technologies that search engines have difficulty accessing, like JavaScript, images, or Flash, see our recommendations for making that content accessible to search engines and users without cloaking.

I believe the original poster has just one site and is taking about individual pages within the site.

So, the link is there, but not showing up in either Google's Webmaster Tools or Open Site Explorer?

Right now, GWT is not displaying a ton of inbound links, it's a known bug that happened this week.

For Open Site Explorer, we are not able to crawl all the web, so we may sometimes miss links on a particular crawl.

If you can give us a couple of more details we can help answer your question a bit more. Thanks!

Do you mean how to report to your company or clients how you are ranked, or how things are showing up in an SEOmoz tool?

Diane,

In another thread, you mention Google had problems accessing your site. Could this be a symptom of Google having access problems is that they couldn't find the verification either?

Also, it's just a notice, not a warning or error. More of a "hey, this is here and make sure everything looks OK" type of thing.

Is it on its own domain or subdomain? You can exclude the entire thing in robots.txt, then verify the site in GWT and request exclusion of the entire dev site.

I'd also bet that Matt Cutts and some of his team have an account there as well. In a recent post, he says:

I keep an eye on what flavors of spam snake oil are being marketing to newbies on various forums ("I know Google pulled apart my last link network, but now try my Social Rank Tout Suite product! It will automate 100% of all of your link building!"). And lots of people at Google keep an eye open themselves and alert me if they see issues. http://www.seroundtable.com/matt-cutts-emails-16308.html

I wouldn't do it myself, that's for sure.

Actually, I believe that Google doesn't do local results for the query of web design.

If it was just today that you noticed, it might not be just your site. In the past day, there have been a bunch of people reporting a lot fewer links in GWT. See the post at Search Engine Roundtable http://www.seroundtable.com/google-webmaster-tools-link-count-16315.html. There's also been several threads here in Q&A about it, too.

A bunch of forums are talking about it. Here's a post mentioning several of the places people are talking about it: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-webmaster-tools-link-count-16315.html

Here's a link to Bing's help page on the tool. http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/crawl-control-55a30302.

You might check out this YouMoz from Movoto Real Estate and look at some of the work they've done for inspiration. http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/getting-down-to-basics-building-a-blog-from-the-ground-up

I know Bing has a way to do that, but I haven't heard of Google releasing a similar tool.

Lots of people are reporting this in the forums. Barry Schwartz writes a post about it on Search Engine Roundtable at http://www.seroundtable.com/google-webmaster-tools-link-count-16315.html.

This section from the managedlinkbuilding page gives me pause:

"Accounts that go into arrears (non payment) for more than 30 days are subject to termination and removal of your links pages from your server without notice. Managed Link Building will send you email advising you if your account has been suspended for non payment. Accounts that go over 30 days for non payment are subject to termination without further notice."

Sounds like it's renting links?

My guess is the reason people do it is because it's easy and they think it will do them some good.

I understand wanting to get links. But you also don't want to wish you could remove those links two months down the road. For example, you'll see sites and gigs that advertise getting a bunch of .edu links, which may initially sound wonderful, but may actually end up looking like https://drupalsites.purchase.edu/journalism/index.php?q=node/52. No human is going to read that and buy from you, and a search engine isn't going to give your site any positive value form that type of link.

Here are a bunch of posts in the Link Building section of the SEOmoz blog about how some of the experts go about getting links. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/link-building

You can also check out the Beginner's Guide to SEO section on links at http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

Those two haven't been discussed much specifically on SEOmoz, but in general this crowd isn't in favor of submitting the same piece of content to tons of blogs you've never seen before, having link/blog networks, or having a bunch of spun content. It's funny to talk about "Think before you beverage" being in an article about alcoholism, but less so when that's what has been done to your content to make it unique.

Hi! The term you're looking for is called Sitelinks. Here's what Google has to say about them, and how you can demote links you'd prefer not to show.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=47334

The link: command in Google is an inaccurate estimate (Google themselves have said so). The information in Google Webmaster Tools is closer to reality, but still incomplete.

Google and Open Site Explorer use different crawlers, so they will report different amounts of links.

This question is duplicated at http://www.seomoz.org/q/are-these-doorway-pages-2, so I'm closing responses on this question.

Here are some common reasons why only one page may be crawled in your SEOmoz campaign. Let us know if one of these isn't the cause and we'll dig deeper!

https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/409821-why-isn-t-my-site-being-crawled-you-re-not-crawling-all-my-pages

You do need to make sure you do a 301 redirect to the pages without extensions.

You can crawl up to 3000 URLs on demand from http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test, which should help you get started.

Here are some of the common reasons at https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/409821-why-isn-t-my-site-being-crawled-you-re-not-crawling-all-my-pages. If that doesn't fix things, send an email to help@seomoz.org. Thanks!