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You might want to put in one of your URLs here http://spyonweb.com/ and see just how easy it is for anyone to spot the servers that are on the same IP or that use the same Google Analytics or Google Adsense code. If we can do it that easily, so can Google.

What is your content like on these? Do you have enough content to make each site unique and standalone? Or is it worth the thought of combining some of them like others have mentioned?

Another idea I had for a useful piece of content depends on how small your town is. If it's 800 people like my dad's hometown is, it's not going to work. But if it's 20,00+ people, try writing a guide to the neighborhoods the way the locals talk about them.

I lived in the Orcutt area of Santa Maria, CA for over 20 years in the "old oak knolls" area. Everyone local knows what it means, but you won't find that area on any map. There's only two Google results for that phrase, one of them being a real estate agent who lists a lot of her properties by the development name that's now 20-40 years old and has no sign marker anywhere. When I had a friend who had moved there from Oklahoma and was looking to buy a house, I sat down with her and gave her a list of division names that were in the area that she was looking for, and divisions to avoid. There was no map or resource to go to for that. Think of how many searches you could come up for if you went through and collected some of that type of information.

Another thing to do in larger cities would be to give a translation guide to the traffic reports for that area. I have lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for over ten years, but have never been able to find anything that tells me where "the foot of the maze" vs "the parking lot" "top of the incline" etc. when it comes to backups on the bay bridge, but that's what the traffic stations call things, how stuff gets tweeted, etc. If there were someone that mapped out all of this stuff, imagine the links they could get.

Oooh, that's a big footer, with a lot of similar content on each page for each city. Those are being counted, and I'd work on reducing those. When I look at your page, it looks like it's being written for the search engines and not the user. On the city-level page, there's a bunch of content that's below the fold and the video. If I didn't look at my scroll bar, I wouldn't have known that was there.

Have you exhausted the links from your own town first? Do you sponsor a little league team? Do you volunteer for anything? Are you a member of the chamber of commerce? Of your local real estate group? How about creating the best piece of content you can about relocating to your particular town so that it naturally grows links?

All of those seem a much better ideas than going to another state and looking for links.

Here are some reasons why just there may be trouble crawling a site. http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/409821-why-isn-t-my-site-being-crawled-you-only-crawled-one-page. My suggestion is to open up a help desk ticket (email help@seomoz.org) and let them know which campaign you're having trouble with. They can go take a look at your site and see if there's something preventing Roger from crawling.

The greater question is..do you even want the test subdomain indexed? If that's there for you testing stuff in development, then redirecting is going to mean that you can't test anything.

If that subdomain shouldn't be in the SERPs at all, what about putting a robots.txt on it to exclude it from being indexed, then go verify the subdomain in Google Webmaster Tools where you can then remove the entire subdomain from the index?

But the URL is just a small factor in the greater scheme of things, and for humans, having a readable title tag would influence the CTR so much more than the URL missing a dash.

Can you clarify if you're talking about Google Analytics, or about the google bot crawling the site itself?

The best thing to do now is contact help@seomoz.org and let them know your account username and the campaign that is having problems, and they can look into it for you.

I don't believe this is generally a problem, because traditionally googlebot doesn't use javascript that would trigger GA in the first place.

Hi Damien,

Did this solve the problem, or are you still having issues?

A bigger question would be have you seen a change in the amount of quality traffic to your site? In the amount of conversions? If those haven't been negative, I wouldn't worry about the toolbar page rank update.

Hi Diane,

Can you give us any more information here? Did this happen to just the one page, or many pages? Has it stayed the same since your original question, or has it returned to an A grade?

Steve,

Did this answer your question, or do you need some more help? We're happy to help, especially if you can give us the URL in question.

Aviva, were you able to see these links in Google Webmaster Tools? What did they say?

I'd put the links out there straight. I don't see anything for you to worry about at all. You're curating the links, you feel they are valuable, let Google know they are valuable and trusted links.

Hi,

It's probably best to look at the actual links in OSE and not just the root linking domains. If you go to http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=www.anglianhome.co.uk&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=external&target=domain&group=1 you can see that the Apple link is from iTunes, the Wordpress link is from a free blog on Wordpress (a subdomain), and the bravenet link is also a user's page on bravenet that is a links page. So no worries here, they are just ordinary pages on user subdomains for the second two domains, and an iTunes app link for the first domain you have listed.

Khellar, your best bet would be to email help@seomoz.org, as the help team doesn't regularly go through Q&A.

Google's Webmaster Guidelines at http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769 states "Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines."

So, they frown on having search result pages in the index in the first place.

Hi Rick,

Regarding this being public, the public Q&A forums recently had just the question visible to anyone, with it being two weeks before the answers were visible to everyone. This recently changed so that the answers are immediately viewable to everyone. That's likely what Thomas is referring to, that he noticed it's public for everyone (correct me if I'm wrong Thomas).

Welcome to the community Rick, I'm really happy that you're here.

Can you share your URL with us at all? Were there any messages in GWT about your site? Have you done anything different with your site lately? We can give some general ideas, but some additional details will really help here.

Also feel free to create a private question and ask for a second opinion from the Moz staff and associates. Those questions aren't indexed, and they're not viewable to anyone who is not Moz staff or associate, and you can share your URL and other details there if you would like.

You could very well damage your rankings. They are asking you for the keys to your house (the folder you make and give full write permission to) and telling you to drink this magical potion (upload a script that we don't tell you what it's about) and you're going to be all skinny because of all of the wonderful stuff we do. You're giving them access to your server and letting them do things without consulting you or giving you any control over things.

Hi David,

I'm so sorry you're having problems with this. The best thing to do is email help@seomoz.org and open up a ticket with them. There's no way to connect the help and Q&A system right now, otherwise I'd do it for you.

Hi Simon,

I'm seeing some differences as well. Could you email help@seomoz.org with this information and open up a ticket with them, so we can track it and add it as a bug if need be? Q&A and Help are two different systems, and I don't have an easy way to turn this into a help ticket.

Thanks, and so sorry for any trouble this has caused.

A quick clarification. The private questions are private, and always stay that way. SEOmoz Associates that answer the questions are under NDA and we don't share the details of those questions. Period.

Public questions and responses are now viewable and indexed right away (there had been a two week waiting period for the responses to be public, but that has changed), though only Pro members can ask and answer questions.

I hope this helps! Do feel free to ask this question in private with more details if you would like. You can create a new question and leave this one here for additional community input if you would like.

Also keep in mind that Open Site Explorer does not crawl the entire web, just the top 25-35% of it. That page is buried a bit deep on the site, so it the OSE crawl may not get that deep on the site. OSE and Google are two different crawlers, so Google may well see the link when OSE doesn't.

Hi Jeremy,

I have a forum in the RC space as well, running on DNN Active Forums (www.rcnvavalcombat.com). My top five most common keywords in GWT are posts, private, combat, ship, forums, and admiral (a user rank). Ryan gives good advice to not sweat it.

Keri

Great answer from EGOL! I'll add in my two cents as well, based on a little personal experience.

I'm a California girl, I've lived here all my life and have never lived in snow. I don't know how to deal with it, what questions to ask, etc. My parents have retired to Virginia, where they do get varying amounts of snow in the winter. At Christmas I often look for things that could be helpful for them to have around the house, what could make things easier for them, etc. I need the explanation as to why this will be helpful, what conditions it's helpful in (great for Minnesota snows, but not as needed when you only have a couple of inches), is it good for someone in the AARP age bracket, can I use it on a slate roof, etc.

I'd also have someone look over your pages and make sure there are no spelling and grammar errors. On one page, I spotted a sentence starting with "His" instead of "This". If you copy and paste your pages as plain text to Word, it can help with spotting some of these typos. This will help your user trust a bit more.

A final note about your roof rake. On the roof rake page itself, I don't see how to order extension handles, yet the video (which really helped me understand how it worked) talked about you can order them to extend the rake up to 40 feet.

Hi Simon,

I think what you're seeing is that you have 44 links to the exact URL, and 219 links to all pages in your domain, no matter the URL. If you look at the drop-down options in Open Site Explorer, you can change it to look at root domain which should show you all 219 links.

Often if there's a glitch just doing a hard refresh will work. If you encounter a problem again with things looking funny, take a screenshot and send an email to help@seomoz.org. The help team doesn't actually monitor the Q&A forum unless an associate specifically flags a question, so emailing the team will help you get a response from Moz faster, and give us some information on what may be misbehaving. Thanks!

Hi Miranda,

If you download the CSV of your errors, you'll see a column in the export labeled refer and you'll be able to see where these links are coming from.

Here's a blog post on the history of SEOmoz. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-history-of-seomoz. Rand writes that in 2004, "In an attempt to grow my skillset, I participate vigorously on half a dozen SEO forums and eventually build SEOmoz.org as a site to host my thoughts, struggles and discoveries."

I also watched Rand speak last week, and he stated that he never intended it to be this type of business site, it was originally a blog to write about what he was going through.

Hi Soumendra,

Is this resolved? if so, how long did it take to get resolved? Or do you still need some help?

I'd also start off by reading the Beginner's Guide to SEO. That will give you enough of a background to help improving your traffic, and to help understand the reports from your SEOmoz campaigns that are giving you tips as to how to improve your site.

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

I'd look at making the title tags more for your site more descriptive than "Home" and "Battery", and also verify your site in Google Webmaster Tools to get a bunch of helpful information from there.

Can you give an example where SEOmoz and OSE are different? I'm not quite sure I follow you, since Open Site Explorer is an SEOmoz product.

I think Raven has something like that. I remember seeing this post from Sugarrae a while back, and you can see other reviews as well if you search.

http://www.sugarrae.com/link-development/organizing-link-development-raven-tools-review/

Hi Jason,

Can you share your URL with us or give us a screenshot so we can take a better look at what is happening?

Thanks!

I also notice that there is the following line in the code on the home page. I don't know if that's screwing anything up, but it's not a standard command as far as I know:

You might try removing that and see if it helps. Simon also has a ton of good advice here.

Also read Dr. Pete's post about "How Many Links is Too Many?" at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many. This is just a warning and not an error, and his post helps explain some of the origins of this guideline.

I'd put both URLs (the www and non-www) into OpenSiteExplorer and see which has the better stats in terms of rank and inlinks, then redirect to that version of the site.

I wouldn't worry that it's missing a title tag; I'd just work on making sure that it's not indexed.

Let me see if I understand. You want to take a new domain with no authority or history and put machine-generated text on that and have it outrank real sites that have original content and established history?

I'd stay far, far away from doing that if you actually want a defensible site that will survive against algorithm changes that focus on low-quality content. There are other forums that may give you more help with this, but the focus SEOmoz staff and community members generally have is making your sites for the users, not to outsmart the search engines.

What's the value proposition for your users? Take another look, and think about why should the search engines deliver your site as a result, when the search engines want to deliver sites that make users happy with the engine.

Sha has a good response here. You might also be interested in reading Dr. Pete's post about "How Many Links is Too Many" on the SEOmoz blog earlier this year at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many for some more background information.

What type of website do you have? What platform is it on? A pinging service is usually built into WordPress. If you're not getting any pages indexed, before looking at a pinging site, I'd take a look and make sure that I had a clean xml site map, good URL structure, etc.

Can you share how this has worked out for you? I think EGOL has the better idea here -- make something that's valuable for the users and gives a natural reason to link. The straight reciprocal link proposed is really only for the search engine and gives no value to the user, and the engines generally don't encourage that type of thing.

Just a warning that not everyone will go to the /tv URL after seeing the commercial. I once distributed a couple of thousand postcards about our RC boat site at an even and got a nice spike in direct traffic, but fewer than 1% of the people actually typed in the URL listed on the postcard (it was /make for Maker Faire), they just went to the home page.

You'll want to make a note of some type in your analytics of when the ad is aired, as not everyone will go to the special URL, and six months later you'll want to know why you had a spike in direct visits to your home page.

I don't know the policy, but I did send an email to the team asking if your trial could be extended.

Do send an email to help@seomoz.org about the crawl, as there was a problem with some campaigns not having a next crawl date. So sorry about the troubles!