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What does your content look like? Do you have information out there about Acne that other sites don't have? Do you have a reason for someone to go to your site as opposed to another site?

Here's a great YouMoz we posted (and promoted to the main blog) last week that talks about attracting links rather than building links. Instead of looking for places you can drop a link to your site, have you tried building the content on your site so people will want to link to you?

If it's not related, it's not useful. The domain authority is for the site as a whole, not for that teeny tiny section. I have an edu link from Stanford. It's at ldt.stanford.edu/~myusername. The URL has been there since 2001, yet that page still has a page authority of 1 and no metrics, despite the domain authority of Stanford being huge.That subdomain has been having intermittent problems and is not always online, but my ranking does not change with whether that link is online or not.

I wouldn't go for the link. It's just not natural.

I've seen plenty of spammy EDU pages with 5000 spam comments and link drops. That's going to have no value for Google, and I wouldn't want my link on a page like that. I doubt the page itself has a toolbar pagerank of 6.

If you really want to investigate, look at the page itself in Open Site Explorer and look at our metrics for an idea if the page on which you want the link is trusted. Based on what you said, I wouldn't go for it or I'd get it removed. Can you share the URL here?

Hi, and welcome to SEOmoz! Have you checked out our Help Hub? We have a bunch of getting started guides there, including this one for on-page report at http://www.seomoz.org/help/on-page-reports

Joram is correct here. We don't crawl the web as deep or as fast as Google. Our crawl updates about once a month, so right now we're showing you data from before you made your URL change. It'll be 1-2 updates before we see the new URL and start reflecting accurate information about its metrics.

I'm not sure of the timing on the traffic numbers right now. Those you can get by going directly to Google Adwords, however. I'll keep this updated as I know more.

Google looks at URLs, and not pages. It's the same content, but on different URLs.

If Google delivered mail, it would think the following were all different houses:

123 Main Street, Los Angeles, California 90210
123 Main St., Los Angeles, California 90210
123 Main Street, Los Angeles, CA 90210
123 Main Street, Los Angeles, CA 90210-1234

If you're able to use a canonical tag in your custom CMS, you can effectively tell Google that one specific URL is the "right" one, and that all of the others should be treated as if they were the "right" one.

Ben S, Ben W is asking why other sites with search result pages are ranking above his product pages, and how he might get his search result pages (from search within his site) ranking. The noindex and canonicalizing won't help him in that case.

Ben W, I don't have a good answer for you on that. It's frustrating, especially when Google says they don't want to see search results from a site in their search results. I remember removing the noindex from some pre-generated keyword result pages on a non-profit site about three years ago and watching our traffic greatly increase, and wondered why I had followed what Google said for so long before that.

We maintain a calendar at http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change that might help you out.

Hi Marc,

OpenSiteExplorer does not crawl every link available, as we just don't have a server farm big enough. Google likely sees these links, but they just haven't hit our radar yet because they may be new or not have many links to them.

And Google has additional ways to identify sites all related, such as everything in the same GWT account, sites having the same Google Analytics master account, etc. Doesn't mean they use it for ranking, but they have ways beyond just IP to see things are related.

Can you look at your analytics and see if there's one particular browser that is or is not converting? Maybe IE is throwing some type of security error, and the devs only tested in Firefox and Chrome and don't see that error?

Our guide to linkbuilding at http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links can also be of help.

Beer nights are Wednesday, so he wasn't out drinking last night. I don't think that would have been Roger in any case.

Hi Ben,

Just to clarify, our bot is not identical to Google. We don't crawl as many pages as Google does, and don't have the server farm that they do. We crawl in a similar manner, but we may see some links Google doesn't index/count, and Google certainly indexes and counts links we don't see.

I had a similar situation once, and determined that it was not 100+ visitors each visiting one internal page by a direct visit, but one visitor going to 100+ pages and something with the browser configuration was not passing the referral information to Google Analytics. I happened to have a secondary analytics program on the site that showed it was all from one computer. Really threw off my stats though.

You might look and see if all of those have the same version of flash/javascript/os/screen resolution. If there's a bunch of "identical" browsers, it might actually be one computer.

If he answers those questions once on his website via an FAQ, then he doesn't have to go back and answer them time and time again in email and phone!

Google Webmaster Tools also has a remove URL function where you can remove an entire directory, which may be of help to you.

Generally, buying traffic isn't recommended and you often don't wind up with traffic that converts. Can you give a little more information about what you're thinking about so we can give you some more targeted feedback?

Thanks for letting us know Jeff, that's great to hear!

We should have an update later today or tomorrow regarding Rank Tracker. So sorry about this!

Here's a help page about our DA calculations that may help http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain-authority. The short answer is that DA can change because of the way we calculate DA and because our index changes each update.

If you are commenting on a blog for links, you're commenting on a blog for the wrong reason. If it's not held in moderation by software, usually a good admin will spot it and remove it -- and if it's not removed, it's likely that the link isn't very worthwhile in the first place (such as an abandoned blog on an .edu domain that has 8000 comments with link drops).

If you are commenting on a blog to be part of the conversation, you would want to either subscribe to comments by email or bookmark the comment so you can come back and be part of the community.

FYI, your keyword targeted link is a nofollow link, as are all hyperlinks in Q&A and blog comments on SEOmoz.

Another similar thing to do is open up a private browsing / incognito browser window and try the search.

OSE will download up to 25 links from a single domain. Are some of those site-wide links in a footer perhaps?

We're aiming to have it out next week!

Have you seen this post by Rand about things you can do when the "wrong" page is ranking?

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions

Hi!

I just talked with the help team about this. There are a couple of things happening, and we're not the best on making everything clear.

First, the 589 total links are both internal and external links. You're probably only interested in external links if you're wanting backlinks, so you'll want to select links from only external. That gets you to 214 links.

If you hover over where it says 1-50 of 214 External Links, you'll see a message about us showing only 25 links from an individual domain. You can see a similar message on this screenshot at http://www.screencast.com/t/hal5LMxT.

So, you should actually be able to get nearly all of your links. We know this is a bit confusing, and we're working on messaging.

Using the private / incognito browsing in a browser can also help, as it means it's not using search history from the browser or anything stored in cookies. You're still getting geography in your queries (people in different areas see different results for the query 'pizza' for example), but it is a start.

You'll first want to go into Google Webmaster Tools and see if you have any notices from Google.

This site http://www.mytrafficdropped.com/ has some helpful information to walk you through figuring out what may have happened. If you take a look there and come back and let us know a little more info, we can help you better.

How about a 302 is when you go off to college in another state (you still keep your voter registration, your permanent address, your license plate, etc in your home state), and a 301 is when you are moving for good to another place and you're setting up residency there?

Do you think the graphic that Dr. Pete created might help at all?

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/an-seos-guide-to-http-status-codes

Sanket, the poster of the question understands what link juice is, and why a 301 is needed. He's looking for a way to explain it to his clients to convince them.

No search volume is a known problem right now, though you can also get that straight from Google AdWords. Since you have heard from the help desk, I'd suggest working with them regarding the keyword difficulty.

That didn't auto-update, but we're working on getting the date updated. The data is good.

Hi Tom,

Are you sending an email to help@seomoz.org, or somewhere else? If you sent it to help@seomoz.org you should have gotten an auto-reply with a ticket number. PM me that ticket number and I'll investigate for you.

This may be a good case for a private question, as the SEOmoz staff and associates are under NDA and you can share a few more details.

If it's to avoid orphaning, does this mean that they otherwise have nothing internal linking to them and that it's expected for people to go to the site map of 5000 URLs to find them?

We did roll out last night, then had other problems so we needed to roll back. We're hoping to release the new index today. We'll tweet when it's up and have a blog post as well.

I agree. Don't leave blog comments just to get links. The ones that will let you do that easily are not the blogs you want links on. The good blogs will have humans reviewing comments and systems put in place to make sure that you don't sign up for an account and drop links.

Have you checked out our Help Hub that has some more information about the crawl report? It's at http://www.seomoz.org/help/crawl-diagnostics

Some of the answer also depends on the cause of the error. Is the duplicate page title because you have five sort options so you're getting five URLs for essentially the same page and they all have the same title? That's one type of fix, versus you just have your company name as the title tag for all of your pages, which is a different type of fix.

Regarding the too many links on a page, check out Dr. Pete's post for some more information at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

I'd first verify your site in Bing's Webmaster Center and see if there are any notices there for you. They're like Google in that they've got a good webmaster tools program that will point out problems/penalties/crawling errors that they find.