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I'd first get a better definition of "top performing" SEO keywords. The ones that get the most visits? The ones that rank highest? The ones that get the most conversions? The ones that drive the highest-priced sales?

Have you logged into Google Webmaster Tools and looked for any notices?

Having a duplicate website isn't a great thing, but let's make sure that there's also not some other cause. Was anything done to the code of the site? Any robots.txt or meta robots changed? Are you still fine in Bing/Yahoo?

You can do a crawl of up to 3000 URLs from http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test, which would let you know if the site is still giving off 404s. Also, you could run a server header checker tool to see what header codes the URLs give and make sure they're not returning a 404 even though they're loading fine.

I have a couple of suggestions. If you're on a PC, download Irfanview. It's free and allows you to resize images before you upload them. If you're on a Mac, check out Gimp. There are a lot of free editors out there that can help.

For Wordpress, I like using the smushit plugin.

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.

Some of that really depends on the industry. For one person a link from Vanity Fair in a directory would be awesome, and for other people it wouldn't help at all but a link from Geek Dad would make their day.

Hi Paul,

Thanks for following up! The OP is no longer a PRO member, so there won't be a response from them. We're working on some upgrades that will automatically send a reminder note like this to the OP after a week or two, encouraging them to mark a good answer or write more about their question.

Have you read the Link Building section of the Beginner's Guide to SEO at http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links ?

You may want to step back and remember that search engines do not buy from you, they don't fill out your forms, sign up for your newsletters, etc. Real people are the ones who will be visiting your website. Do those 16 pages answer their questions? Do they convince readers to take a desired action?

Before you start doing everything for search engines, make sure that your site is set up for people. After that, as Eblan suggested, the Beginner's Guide to SEO is a good resource (as well as the other suggestions).

If you have access to the site, verify it in Google and Bing webmaster tools and get the list of links from each of those sites. Bing will also give you links without being a verified site owner. Both are free.

Diane, I think this was a case of it you went to the auto repair shop to replace your tires, and your rear bumper was falling off. Even though you didn't go in about the fender, or even ask about it, it's something that stands out from the ordinary and is noticed fairly easily.

People in Q&A are generally trying to be helpful, and if they spot something else that looks like it could be a problem, they tend to say something. People come and go here, so they're not aware if previous conversations have occurred on the same topic.

I would recommend SMX (as well as MozCon, of course!). Things I appreciate about SMX:

• They seem to work hard to add new sessions and make sure that it's not always the same speaker talking about the same thing.
• There are ample break times between sessions. You have time to network with people, time to ask questions of the speakers, use the bathroom, check in and respond to messages from your office, etc. I have found this to be more important if you're trying to attend as many sessions as possible, less important if there are only a few sessions that interest you and you're willing to skip a session to have a break.
• Delicious food! I do think Mozcon beats SMX for food, but in my experience SMX beats the other large conferences for food. There's enough food for breakfast if your hotel doesn't provide any, well-stocked snack breaks, and a good lunch.

I would also recommend MozCon, though as an employee of SEOmoz, I have to admit my bias here. We are a bit more reasonably priced when you factor in the discount for being a PRO member, which can help make up for being in the opposite corner of the country from you. We have three days of keynote-style presentations. We don't have panels, but instead have 45-60 minute sessions with one presenter giving an awesome presentation. We also have all of the 2012 Mozcon available on video for $299 for pro members (see our announcement at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/2012-mozcon-videos-are-here) that can allow you to virtually attend MozCon and make it to SMX in person perhaps.

It's the way the system is configured right now in that the original poster didn't mark any good answers. We're working on improving what's considered a featured question in the next couple of months.

Thanks for updating this question!

I've changed this to be a discussion question. Could you give us some more context regarding this question and what type of information you're looking for?

You might also be interested in the 2011 ranking factors report that SEOmoz did with experts in the field. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/new-edition-ranking-factors-for-2011-live

For your question, you didn't state what type of importance -- I'm guessing importance for SEO in general, but it could also be taken to mean importance for conversions, importance for Google, etc.

Is there an increase in other types of traffic? My first thought is that email marketing may have gotten tagged, and instead of links showing up as direct traffic they're now showing up in their own source area in analytics.

Also, look back to your older direct traffic and see if there was an artificial inflation. I had a site with this happen, and it turns out we were seeing direct traffic from a system uptime monitor. I looked at the network source, screen resolution, etc. and saw a lot of visits from seemingly identical systems.

Has there been any offline promotions that have ended, where people would stop typing in your URL?

Direct traffic could also come from email or twitter clients that don't pass referral strings. Did anything there change?

Google's not real keen on having just search results for other content in its index.

For people, you'll need to convince them why to link to your site instead of the source site you index. I couldn't get any of the links on the homepage to go anywhere, they just brought me to the home page, and I tried in two different browsers.

There are lots of ideas for getting links on the SEOmoz blog, but they generally center around having good content. I'll be honest with you that SEOmoz may not be the place to get the type of answer you're looking for. It does tend to be a fairly white hat crowd around here.

As Google has stated in their guidelines, they are not supportive of people having virtual locations or using PO Boxes for their local listings.I'm going to have our local expert chime in with more information as it related to Bing and Yahoo, and if they are at all moving in the same direction as Google.

Hello Dhee,

This might be a tough one, due to the nature of the content. It looks like the intent is to let people download copies of materials that might be copyright, which is going to be a hard sell to the search engines and to encourage other legitimate sites to link to.

Is this subdomain also a campaign in SEOmoz? If it is, and those pages aren't being detected, could you drop a note to our help team at help@seomoz.org and let us know? We'll pass it along to the engineers so we can make sure our tool is properly detecting that type of content.

Hi Jake,

Thanks for the reminder, and I'm so sorry I didn't respond earlier. This had gotten overlooked in my inbox. The delay in response was my fault, not the fault of Miriam.

I'm looking at the tags for this post -- you're wondering about how to set up your SEOmoz campaigns, right?

Do try again -- we've had about five questions submitted in the past four hours, so it's working right now. If there's still a problem, email help@seomoz.org and they can help get the question submitted.

Thanks!

Keri

Have you review your backlinks in Open Site Explorer? Some of them look a little fishy, especially the ones for kriskris with the anchor text "lose weight fast" from sights that are mainly in Chinese and also have links to viagra and other such sites (http://www.xshz.com.cn/shownews.asp?id=220 for example).

However, if you use absolute URLs, if your content gets ripped off you have links back to your own content now, and people can know it's your content. It can also help to force http or https.

Because I'm staff and Q&A is one of the main parts of my job, this forum is obviously the place in which I spend the most time. After that, my must-read is Search Engine Roundtable. Barry watches many of the forums and will gather the best tidbits and write about them on SER. I scan inbound.org and my twitter feed for interesting information.

We update the index every 3-4 weeks, so that would account for much of the variation in the links -- we find sites that no longer have a link to you, or we don't crawl a particular site in that crawl, etc.

SEOmoz has a few blog posts on this that can be helpful. Take a look at our search results at http://www.seomoz.org/pages/search_results#stq=infographic&stp=1

Ok, that makes a lot more sense now! If you do see errors though, drop us a line. Here's a post we did when we updated the directory last year that can also help give you some context. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-directory-submission-danger

We had an update to Mozscape last week, so everyone's numbers got updated. You'll see small changes like that when we update, it's nothing to worry about.

We did change the way we detected duplicate content earlier this month. Here's a blog post about it at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/visualizing-duplicate-web-pages.

Hope this helps explain things for you! Let me know if you have any more questions.

We do maintain that list, and updated it in the past few months. Could you drop the help team a note (help at seomoz dot org) and let them know about the porn chat directory you saw? That's not the type of thing we would include on purpose!

Dr. Pete has a good post about this at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

It really depends on the quality and the relevance of the site. If you sell politically-themed merchandise and have a chance to guest blog as often as you want on the Huffington Post, go and take it. If you sell bathing suits and get a chance to blog on a site about raising pet turtles, your efforts would be better spent elsewhere.

Do you know if they're really getting much traffic if they're not ranking much until the fourth page? Most people don't go beyond the first page of results.

Yes, you do need to redirect. They are actually different URLs. It's like you moved from 123 Fifth Avenue to 123 Fifth Street.

The one thing I would check with is making sure that your contest follows the rules of FB for a contest. The last thing you want to do is bring more attention to it and then discover that it's against FB's rules.

You're right on that count. Google doesn't exactly open-source their algos and share them with everyone. We did just change the way we detect duplicate content, and made a blog post about it yesterday. Fewer false positives should exist regarding duplicate content, but things like this will probably still get flagged.

Could you provide some background on the statement about not being spam? I'm more familiar with the statements that urge caution, such as this one from a Google employee (Maile Ohye) at  http://maileohye.com/html-text-indent-not-messing-up-your-rankings/.

Though a quick hack would be to put a number in front of the campaign and use that to force the order you want to use.

Hey everyone,

I wanted to highlight today's blog post in case you missed it. In short, we're using a different algorithm to detect duplicate pages. http://moz.com/blog/visualizing-duplicate-web-pages

If you see a change in your crawl results and you haven't done anything, this is probably why. Here's more information taken directly from the post:

1. Fewer duplicate page errors: a general decrease in the number of reported duplicate page errors. However, it bears pointing out that:

• **We may still miss some near-duplicates. **Like the current heuristic, only a subset of the near-duplicate pages is reported.
• **Completely identical pages will still be reported. **Two pages that are completely identical will have the same simhash value, and thus a difference of zero as measured by the simhash heuristic. So, all completely identical pages will still be reported.

2. Speed, speed, speed: The simhash heuristic detects duplicates and near-duplicates approximately 30 times faster than the legacy fingerprints code. This means that soon, no crawl will spend more than a day working its way through post-crawl processing, which will facilitate significantly faster delivery of results for large crawls.

I would comment here that it depends on the blog as to whether it looks natural to have the link drop there. If you submitted a long, detailed post that was a case study of how you got rankings, complete with screen shots of analytics, details of what you did, your successes, your failures, analysis of what you would do different next time -- you might be able to get that link. If you submitted a post that was generic reworded information from a similar post with nothing new, you wouldn't get the link or the post approved at many sites.

Also, you might ask yourself would you find it natural to read about hemorrhoids on a technology blog? I wouldn't, and I feel many editors at technology blogs that accept posts also would not.

Could you give us a few more details? Is this for a builder, who is selling homes in a particular community? Or for an established community?

Thanks!

Hi Michael,

If you download the SEOmoz report in CSV format, there is a column that says where the link is coming from. Hope that helps!

Keri