Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

If you suddenly got a really good bounce rate of 1% or 2%, I'd take a look at your code and make sure that there's not two analytics instances there that are both firing, or some other code that's firing twice. The doubling in pages a visit would make me want to look there. I had the same issue on my site -- had a WP site and put in a custom analytics script in the footer, but still had the regular analytics in there via a WP plugin.

Is there a reason why you're putting content on other sites instead of building up your own site? Original, quality content that earns incoming links will beat putting out spun text and questionable backlinks any day.

You might want to start your own thread here in Q&A with specific questions. If you can give a URL, that'd be even better, then we can all take a look at it and give you some advice.

Roger's helpers have been falling down on getting the tshirts and trophies out, but it's on their task list to get busy on this again and get a bunch of shirts out to everyone.

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

I just spoke with the help desk. They can look into your account from there more easily. In general though, some of the difference in this last report may be because Panda refreshed again on Friday and there have been some major changes in the SERPs. If you report ran on Wednesday, and you checked on Saturday, that could be on explanation.

Hi Diane,

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to come across that way. I had read the question, but had not seen mention of which Google address you were using, where you had your geotargeting in your browser set, nor where the geotargeting was set in your campaign. While I waited for that information, I was mentioning as an aside that I saw your other site at the fifth place in Google US from Seattle.

Our help desk is probably the best to help you with figuring out why what you are seeing is different. They'll want to know the same information I've asked regarding how you are checking (logged in/not logged in, what Google location you're using, etc) and they can look into your SEOmoz account and get more information there, too.

Have you checked out the link building section of the SEOmoz blog at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/4? The ten best link building places for your site are the ones that matter to your site. What's going to do well for your new website (in whatever niche it is) is going to be different than what would do well for my site about model battleships that shoot and sink each other. For me, a link from Geek Dad or ThinkGeek would be golden. If your site is a B2B site for city streetlamps, those links are going to do nothing for you.

How do you know Google is not considering these paid links? The site owner does believe Google is considering them paid links and that his traffic is reduced because of it.

Please read his post at http://www.seroundtable.com/sponsored-links-12978.html for background on his view of the links on his site and Google.

Hi Diane,

What geo settings do you have for the rank tracker, and what geo settings are you using in your browser? Which Google are you using?

FYI, for google.com and a geo of Seattle, I'm seeing the Claire Hegarty site in fifth place for that keyword right now.

This is an older thread, but just making sure you did get your starter crawl and things got squared away for you. It should only take a couple of days. For anyone looking at this thread later for help, feel free to send a note to help@seomoz.org with questions about the starter crawl and they can give you the status on things. Thanks!

Google will often display a different title tag in the SERPs than what you have selected. They do this even for Apple. In some cases it's so that it better matches the user's query, and in other cases it's because they think the title tag is spammy or not relevant.

Are your ranks bouncing around in the SEOmoz ranking report tools as well? Those are generally good about keeping personalization out of the reports.

I don't have an answer to this question, but I'd approach it by looking at the major forum software providers and seeing what the default text is that they use for private forums to show to non-users, then search for that text. Some people will change the text, but that may be a starting point for you.

If you can find these lists, and if you can find a tool doing this -- Google can easily do the same. Do you want your first links to your brand new site in a competitive field to be ones that the search engines recognize as easy to get and where there are literally 500 other people writing comments on the same site with links back to their blog?

I'd suggest looking through the SEOmoz blog in the link building category for ideas about building valuable links instead. Takes more time, but is much better for your site.

I'd like to address the "boring" comment. I'm in the middle of buying a house right now. I don't need a mortgage site to be cute or have fuzzy animals or be funny. I want the information to be clear and understandable. I want to know if I should care about which title company I select, or if I should just go with the default title company that my real estate agent selects.

I'm looking for useful information that is well-written, has a lot of content, links out to the appropriate government sites where I can go for the full legalese, and will help me at two in the morning when I can't sleep and am wondering something and I can't call up the loan agent or I want a second opinion.

I may not come back in six months after I have my house and my loan is all settled. But if I remember your site as being a great site where I could get the information I need, I'll recommend it to someone who is talking about buying a house and needing a mortgage.

OSE only does crawl a portion of the web. We are trying to crawl more URLs, but also make sure our data is fresh. It's a bit of a massive undertaking to try to amass data at this scale.

Check out the blogpost for our May update at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/may-mozscape-index-update164-billion-urls for some more information about OSE, where we're at, and where we're going.

I think you meant Bing has a relationship with FB, not with Google? Just checking.

I just checked with the help team. Rogerbot does not execute javascript and should not be showing up in your Google Analytics account.

One of our associates wrote about handling expired content, especially for ecommerce stores, at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-should-you-handle-expired-content. This may help you some too.

This isn't a direct answer to your question -- but first you might want to think about if that long list of directories is valuable and worth your time. I don't know the manner in which you intend to use the list, but we're beyond the days that submitting your site to a thousand directories would help you.

We just published an analysis of 2,678 directories and found that about 20% were penalized or banned by Google. You can read the blog post at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-directory-submission-danger for more information.

Dr. Pete wrote a post about this warning a while back at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many that should also help you.

There is a difference between keywords they rank for, keywords they get traffic for, and keywords they make money from. I rank number one for the phrase "People usually build battleships, battlecruisers, and cruisers" and all kinds of other exact phrases from my home page -- but it doesn't mean that anyone is searching that, or that it's making me any money. Adobe Reader ranks for "click here" but it's not a converting phrase for them.

My gut says you'd need expensive tools where they have access to a ton of data at an ISP level to see what queries people are typing for sites you do not own.

No, we don't offer any article writing software. We do have a lot of resources regarding creating content, including our blog section on content at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/1 and in our beginner's guide at http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/how-usability-experience-and-content-affect-search-engine-rankings.

One idea off the top of my head is to look for mentions of your brand or URL where there are not links, and ask them to link. I'd also read through the link building posts from SEOmoz at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/4 and get some ideas from there.

Open Site Explorer isn't a live crawl, and the data there can be a little old. There is an update scheduled for tomorrow, so I'd wait a day and check for your links tomorrow -- the data will be a lot fresher then, but still a few weeks old.

Keri

Ryan Kent has some experience with this, and shared it in this Q&A at http://www.seomoz.org/q/does-anyone-have-any-suggestions-on-removing-spammy-links

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

So sorry that you're running into problems. Could you email our help team and help@seomoz.org? They'll be able to look at your account and figure out what's happening. Thanks!

spyonweb.com is what I use for that.

I've asked for people with more experience to comment, but I remember reading something similar in Q&A a few months back, though that company was using a more questionable way to execute things. You might want to check out the thread at http://www.seomoz.org/q/contacted-by-an-seo-company for opinions about that implementation and what you wouldn't want to do.

We made some tweaks to Roger, and he got a bit more sensitive and started displaying that error when he shouldn't have. We released another update today, and your next crawl should look OK again.

I'd drill down to look at the keywords and see if it's a particular keyword that spiked or if it was Google traffic as a whole that spiked. You can then look and see if there was a news event or something like that.

I have a similar head-scratcher that I didn't catch in time. I saw a spike in queries from Yahoo for [uss iowa], but not from Bing, and my site isn't in the first four pages for that term. My guess is that Yahoo featured something on their home page that included a search for that term (the USS Iowa left the SF area this weekend and did make the news). This was just a one-day thing and then it disappeared again.

I believe the cause is on our end. We made Roger more picky about this type of thing, but are telling him to loosen up today and he should stop bugging you about it as much on the next crawl.

Keri

I'd also check out Meathead Movers at http://www.meatheadmovers.com/. I can't speak for all of their tactics, but I know one thing they do is create local content for many of their areas. For example, the Santa Maria page (which is my hometown) http://www.meatheadmovers.com/movers/santa-maria.aspx  includes a video they shot about Santa Maria style BBQ, information about the city in their own words, resources, etc.

They sponsor local athletics, especially at Cal Poly, and also work with the battered women's shelters to help move women out of bad situations for free. I don't know if they get any links from this, but it's something that they could go after that would be very natural.

I'm not affiliated with them, beyond using them as a case study for a blog post and talk about negative keywords earlier this year, and having read about them in the local paper when I still lived in the area.

I'm looking at the URL and going off of memory -- I think that's just for the search appliance and not for Google in general. You might want to look further at the documentation, but I think that's just for their search appliance and not the web as a whole.

Dr. Pete also wrote a post about this at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many that helps explain things.

Hi Ryan,

I suggest creating a new Q&A question for your specific question, and include what details you can about the errors you are seeing and the URL of your site, if you can.

I remember several years ago working on a site for my brother, and we did actually have a higher toolbar page rank on a couple of interior pages than we did on the home page. I don't know how you would search for that or why you would want to, however.

I can tell you how I believe it happened to this site. My brother had had a personal site that evolved into a business site. He kept his product information on that personal site, and had an oscommerce store set up on the business domain in a subfolder. For years, the home page was just a placeholder, or even a redirect to the subfolder (I can't remember which).

We took the business portions of the personal site and redirected them to the appropriate pages and subfolders on the business site. For a while, those pages and subfolders had a higher toolbar PR than the homepage itself did. People linked directly to those product and category pages, and there was the redirect from the personal site, yet the home page had little attention.

Hi Gigs20,

It looks like what you wrote is directly from Google's announcement at http://analytics.blogspot.com/2012/05/expanding-google-analytics-social.html. In Q&A, please list your sources, and make it clear when you're saying something from your own experience versus quoting someone else.

Thanks!

Hi Khem,

This question is over a year old. Your best bet is to start a new thread with just this question. Thanks!

Ian, thanks so much for sharing that experience from a friend of yours. Great to see you here in Q&A!

Hi Joel,

It looks like your question was answered by an SEOmoz associate in this other question at http://www.seomoz.org/q/seo-friendly-wordpress-templates. Should I close this question?

Rand also has some advice in his post about this at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions

This post from YouMoz also has some helpful advice from someone who has created many infographics. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/indepth-guide-to-content-creation-with-infographic