Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Rodrigo,

In twenty minutes (at 10:00 Pacific time) we'll be doing our weekly welcome webinar that will help explain the SEOmoz pro tools, and give you a chance to ask questions. We have more details at http://www.seomoz.org/dp/welcome-webinars. Hope you can make it!

Google, Bing, SEOmoz, and Majestic all have their own programs that crawl the web, each having their own priorities and algorithms and limitations. Google is generally best for showing you links to a site you have verified in Google Webmaster tools. The other three will show you links for sites that are not your own. For Open Site Explorer (the SEOmoz tool), our index is not as large as Google's (I think they have more cooks in their cafeterias than we have employees altogether at Moz), but we do offer the additional metrics that you can't get from Google.

Google Analytics will show you which links bring visitors to your site that use javascript, and your log files will also show referring sites. If there's a link to your site that no one clicks on, it won't show in your log files.

The exact number of links may never be known, especially if you have links from an intranet behind a firewall that none of the bots are allowed to crawl. That's when you'll see something in GA that you won't see in any of the other tools.

I know this may not be the easy answer you were looking for, but I hope it helps. Let me know if I can do anything to help clarify things for you.

As Malcolm said, it's most likely the recent Mozscape update that came out Friday evening. That index was about half the size of the previous index, so a lot of your links could not be showing.

We are aiming to update Open Site Explorer data on a monthly basis. The data isn't real time, but instead lags behind a few weeks (we crawl, then process, then publish). We just had an update, and there should be another update on August 3rd -- see our handy dandy calendar at https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345964-linkscape-update-schedule.

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.

Also look in all of the tabs for different views of information, and at the advanced export tabs. There are lots of ways to slice and dice the data.

Hi Tommy,

Did Ben answer your question, or would you still like some more help with this?

For checking spelling, there are sites out there like http://checkdog.com/ that will do a spell check of the site.

On a forum I run, I've exported Google Analytis of page titles and dumped those into Word to scan for spelling errors in thread titles and fixed those (though I've left the copy of the page intact, but that's just because it's a forum).

You could also look to Blekko or now Bing for some of that link data, in addition to SEOmoz, and run it through a status checker like Eppie described.

Howdy! Did this responses help answer your question, or are you still looking for some more assistance?

Hi Pedro,

Were you able to get things working if you manually instructed Excel to use a comma as a delimiter?

Thanks for your feedback everyone!We really appreciate hearing how you use Q&A and how you'd like to see it improved.

I do go back at times and ask if people have had their question solved or if they're looking for more help. An automatic way to ask the person this after a certain number of days would be a great feature to have, I agree. Our system does notify people when they get a new answer, and suggests to them to mark an answer helpful.

Even though I don't comment on many of the questions, I do read nearly every question and answer that comes into Q&A. I flag questions that have no answers or questionable answers for another Associate to come and review, I give lots of thumbs up (and an occasional thumb down), and endorse good answers (and need to do that more).

One factor in some of this is that if a person came in on a free trial, asked a few questions and took time to implement them, by the time they figured out if their problem was solved or they needed more help their free trail has expired and they can no longer comment on Q&A questions. When I have extra time, I start looking through questions that are still marked as unanswered that are either 7 or 30 days old, and follow up to see if there is an answer to the question and the OP just didn't mark answered, ask if followup is needed, etc.

Please do continue to give your suggestions here, both for the software system and for the administration. We are looking even if we don't comment, and really do find the feedback helpful.

It looks like he did get what he wanted done for now. Thanks everyone!

Specifically in this post, Rand says "Because this update is much smaller in total URL size (~50% of the prior, 165 billion URL index), your link count totals will likely be much smaller, even if you've grown your link building efforts."

It's not you, it's us, as part of the balance between deeper indexes and faster indexes.

This is an old thread in Q&A -- your best bet for this technical problem is to send an email to help@seomoz.org and they'll be able to help you on Monday.

Hi Diane,

Have you checked out the post from Stephanie about what to do with expired content? she has suggestions about redirecting to the home page versus category pages that might be helpful. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-should-you-handle-expired-content

Your best bet there might be to find someone you know who works in IT at a company that's really picky about what their employees see.

The problem I've run into is (I believe) a filter on a keyword in the URL for my site that won't let people at Vandenberg Air Force Base go to strikemodels.com. The site is about model warships battling each other, not about people modeling, but I'm pretty sure it's keying on the word model in the URL. Other sites from that host can be viewed from the base, and other sites with the same WP/Thesis framework can also be viewed.

Pinging is not the same as submitting your post to a social bookmarking site. There are other tools to do that.

Are you submitting to bookmarking sites now? Are you seeing any traffic from them in Google Analytics? If you're not seeing any traffic, I wouldn't worry too much about finding the perfect solution and I'd just spend your time focusing on the content itself.

Aside from the domain name, is the URL structure identical between the two sites? If so, there should be a real easy redirect to just say "if person hit oldsite.com/page123 take them to newsite.com/page123". I don't know that exact code, but can get someone on here who does.

That would be nice, wouldn't it? Unfortunately, there is no API with the search engines where we send over a keyword and they send us back why the rankings for that keyword changed.

Right now, it's manual work. Look at you and your competitors and see have inbound links changed? Have you or your competitors changed content on the pages that were ranking? Added new pages? Consolidated pages? Has there been an algorithm update? and so on.

Is this for one of your Joomla sites? Have you searched in the extensions directory for Joomla? A search for [joomla bing] turns up plugins that will automatically ping services when you publish an article.

I searched the name from your profile along with the words lose weight, and I think I found the problem. Are you actually asking about loseweight-longterm.com ? I think we were all looking at the wrong website.

Here's what the site loseweight.com looks like in my browser. Did you mis-type the URL perhaps?

P6c9D.jpg

I wonder if you're seeing something different on your end. When I view that site, I see an exact copy of diet.com, with all of the source code being identical.

Have you verified your site in Google Webmaster Tools? There's an option to set the country you're targeting in there.

Do you have parameters in your URL? Trailing slashes? some with .php and some without .php? If there are multiple URLs (either via parameters or completely different pages) with the same title tag it would account for this.

If I search site:loseweight.com on Google, your site is indexed.

However, your site looks to be a duplicate of diet.com. The search engines generally frown upon duplicate content. If diet.com has been up for a long time and this copy of the site just went up, the search engines will view diet.com as the authoritative source for that content and not view loseweight.com as the authority.

Can you give us a little more background about the site and the duplication with diet.com?

Hi Rory. Most of our help desk is on holiday today, since it's the Fourth of July in the states. We do have a record of your ticket and one other person who is having a slow starter crawl, and a help desk specialist is looking into this now. Sorry for the delays.

Keri

Hi Rick,

To the best of my knowledge, smushit compresses what it can while keeping the quality exactly the same. Saving for the web will lower the quality to "looking good on screen" from "good enough to print and hang on your wall".  I also looked at the most recent post about Noah standing, and saw that the original size was 1900 pixels wide -- you certainly want to resize that to the 1170 wide before uploading it.

Being a photographer with a portfolio, Coltaire can give you a lot more details than I can, and help guide you with settings to use in Photoshop to get pictures that still look great on the web but aren't bigger than they need to be.

Keep in mind that DA and PA are scores that are developed by SEOmoz, not Google. Google does not come and look at OSE when deciding how to rank sites.

Actually, a DDOS attack took Zendesk down today, it wasn't us.

Their site talks about how they rely on content spinners. My question to you:

In three months, do you want to go to the trouble of tracking down sites linking to you with content that reads "think before you beverage" and "thank my deity" and ask them to remove the links?

There is no free lunch. There is no free content or endless quality free links. It's your choice, but I'd rather not have links than be a part of that network. I care too much about the reputation of my brand online to have stuff like that pointing to me.

Have you looked through the SEOmoz blog for posts on link building? The link building category at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/4 has lots of ideas, including a recent excellent post on link building using events that may help some of the small business clients much more than a link from Digg where it has just one vote.

Some social sites, such as Digg, don't host the content, they just provide a link to where the content is hosted.Given that you're new to this, you might consider getting familiar with some of these concepts on some sites of your own that you can afford to mess up on before learning on client sites, unless the clients are aware that you're expanding into this area and learning as you go.

Duplicate question, closing this question so all answers can be given at http://www.seomoz.org/q/site-being-indexed-by-google-before-it-has-launched-2

We were scheduled to update last Friday, but have had a delay that we wrote about at https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/21655043-mozscape-index-update-temporarily-delayed-until-july-6th. You can always check out the update calendar linked from the OSE home page as well to see when the next update is scheduled and the date of our last update.

One thing nobody has brought up is what your time is worth, and the opportunity cost of trying to do so much yourself.

If you are spending four hours doing something that someone else could do in an hour, that's four hours that you've not been earning income by having appointments with clients, or four hours that you could have spent writing content where you're the expert.

One thought for a cost-effective way to do things yourself would be to go take classes at the UK equivalent to the community college. Take a class in Joomla and learn how to put together a site from a professional, and learn how to set up a development site for testing so people don't see the results of a test gone bad on your live site. Take a class in photoshop and digital image techniques so you can have professional-looking images on your site.

Hi Wales, and welcome to SEOmoz! We have several aspects of the site, and a big goal is to help you learn more about your website and how it can interact with search engines, people, and the web as a whole. You can read blog posts on our blog that cover a wide variety of topics, you can learn SEO at our Beginner's Guide to SEO, you can ask questions here in our Pro Q&A, and you can go to your PRO Dashboard where you can put in your website and our tool will help you identify ways to improve your site and help it be better found in the search engines.

Do feel free to ask questions here, or to ask questions in a private message. Again, welcome and thanks for joining SEOmoz!

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.

If you're looking on forums for opinions, you'll likely find that the opinions vary depending on the forum and the type of people that frequent each forum. I don't use Warrior Forum myself, but the people that go to that forum generally have a different viewpoint than the people who go to the SEOmoz forum. Around SEOmoz, some of those types of link building tactics might get you the same type of response that a sales rep for Omaha Steaks might get at a vegan supermarket.

Hi Greg,

Open Site Explorer did go down last night when severe whether in Virginia caused Amazon to lose power to some of their data centers. Netflix, Pinterest, Instagram, Raven Tools, and many other sites were also down because of the outage. We were up by 3:00 am Pacific time Saturday morning, and we had people working on it overnight.

I'm sorry to hear that you've been having problems accessing the site both before and after the outage that we had. If you can contact our help desk at http://www.seomoz.org/help, they'll get back to you and help you find out why you're not able to access Open Site Explorer.

OSE being down was actually not related to the delay in the index. It was related to the severe weather in Virginia that took out some of Amazon's cloud servers (the same reason Instagram, Netflix, Pinterest, Raven Tools, and a bunch of other sites were down last night).

We did update our Twitter feed as soon as we were aware of the outage, though I see we didn't update the known issues page (which has a link from the SEOmoz pro dashboard). I'll mention that to the team as we do our evaluation of this downtime.

Typically we keep Twitter updated when we're having any type of outage, maintenance, or see anything wonky possibly going on.

If you search for Angela Paul backlinks you'll find info about a backlink building service. It's not usually of the type often recommended on the SEOmoz forums, but a search will tell you a little more about it.

Given that you're new to everything, I'd suggest reading through the Beginner's Guide to SEO at http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo, especially the sections on links, and read blog posts here as well. It'll help give you an idea of what works and what are cheap shortcuts that may bite you.

We've had to delay the update until next week. We've just published a post with the details at https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/21655043-mozscape-index-update-temporarily-delayed-until-july-6th.

I wouldn't do it, as I would only put the content in one place. In another question, I listed some resources regarding link building that may help you instead of placing duplicate content for links.

Hi Craig,

Be very careful of using other people's material in your blog, both because of the search engines and because of the law. Much of the content that is out there is copyrighted, and you really want to avoid getting into a legal battle because of copying content from others.

Search engines want to present users with a variety of content, and don't want to show users ten results that all have the same content. They're going to look for who published the content first and which site is generally more of an authority, and then generally give credit to that site.

You might also want to review the section of the beginner's guide to SEO that talks about links at http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links, and the link building section of our blog at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/4.