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There may be restrictions with paid advertising, but that shouldn't be a problem as you're talking about organic SEO.

Hi! We updated this directory in late September. See the post at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-link-directory-best-practices for more information.

It is limited to three competitor sites right now. We have a feature request section that already has a request for more than three campaigns. Feel free to vote it up and add your comment at  http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345477-can-i-haz-more-than-3-competitive-link-analysis-competitors.

Hi Pedro,

SEOmoz just updated the way they calculate PA and DA yesterday, along with a new release of the OSE index. Check out Rand's post at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/2nd-november-index-update-our-broadest-index-yet-and-new-pada-scores-are-live for more information.

Yes, SEOmoz did change the way they calculate DA and PA. That blog post (and the other referenced in it) give a lot of the background information that'll help explain things for you.

For this update and future updates, I'm going to have a Q&A discussion question that also alerts people to these types of changes, as I know not everyone has a chance to read the blog for those notices.

Hi Francesco,

Can you open this up as a ticket in the help desk? I'm not sure if it can be done, but if it can, they'd be the ones to do it. Send an email with you information to help@seomoz.org. Thanks so much!

That was an issue, but the internal email from the helpdesk said they were all fixed. I'll contact the help desk and make sure they get back to you, so sorry this is still a problem.

Linkscape, which powers Open Site Explorer, only crawls the top 25% or so of the web right now. Also, the crawl is done once a month, so that's why it can take some time to show up. We're working on getting the crawls faster, but that is why things are slower than Google. We have a few less servers than they do at our disposal to make the crawls.

We did just have an update this morning, you might want to check out the blog post from Rand for more information.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/2nd-november-index-update-our-broadest-index-yet-and-new-pada-scores-are-live

The latest update for Linkscape/OSE was this morning, and I believe after you posted this. Can you re-run your report and see if it looks better? Do keep in mind Linkscape crawls only about 25% of the web, so no report is going to be perfect regarding all of your anchor text distribution, but it should be more accurate for you today than it was yesterday given the recent update.

Don't forget to consider how your URL structure can help with effective Google Analytics tracking. Lunametrics has a good post on designing a GA-friendly site structure at http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2010/09/22/designing-google-analytics-friendly-site/

I'd add a comment on the blog post itself asking about it, though it may be something that we don't share because it is proprietary.

Here's a fairly in-depth post about Page Authority last week that should help answer some of those questions http://www.seomoz.org/blog/introducing-seomoz-updated-page-authority-and-domain-authority

Here's a more general overview of Page Authority: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/page-authority

You can do up to two custom crawls a day on any subdomain if you'd like to force a crawl, though they can take a couple of days to finish. Here's the URL that you're looking for. http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test

Have you verified your site in Google Webmaster Tools? Google will send you a warning there sometimes if they see something really bad.

It's a good idea to have an xml site map and make sure the search engines know where it is. It's part of the protocol that they will look in the robots.txt file for the location for your sitemap.

There's more information about robots.txt from SEOmoz at http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt

SEOmoz and the robots.txt site suggest the following for allowing robots to see everying and list your sitemap:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/none-standard-location/sitemap.xml

My husband is here having a good laugh with me over the URL that I brought up just as he came in from the garage. "It's from Q&A and it's work related honey, honest!"

Have you viewed your source? Do you know about the link to an adult site with an H1 about bondage that's in there? Your privacy policy also has a link to car insurance on it. There's an affiliate link to the Socrates theme, too. If none of those are yours, I'd suggest removing them. Might help, certainly can't hurt.

I put one phrase from your site into Google, and found a couple of dozen sites that had that phrase. To be honest, you've got a real thin site without much content, and if the content you do have is not unique, there's not much compelling reason for the search engines to return your site instead of another site. Open Site Explorer reports links from nine different domains, and most of them look like profile links.

I'd first focus on getting some unique content in there, making sure that your site is clean without hidden links or text, get content in there that someone would want to link to, then focus on linking.

Hi Luca,

So sorry you haven't had an answer yet to this question. It's actually a fairly common question, and I think you'll find some of the answers you are looking for in this thread at http://www.seomoz.org/q/do-link-wheel-works. Let me know if this helps! Also, check out the links on the Learn SEO page as there is a lot of great information there too. http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo

It's somewhat hard to diagnose without a URL. If you want to use your private Q&A question credit for the month, you can ask this question and only SEOmoz staff and associates will be able to view the question and URL.

General advice would be to look at Open Site Explorer to see the rest of your backlink profile to make sure that you don't have spam pointing at you, look in Google Webmaster Tools to see if there are any messages from Google about your site being hacked or violating guidelines, and looking at the other sites ranking for your keywords to see if they are ranking because they truly do have better content and links than you.

I can't find the reference right now, but I believe I've seen something about if you have a second page at a lower position that's also ranking for that keyword it can throw off the average position. GWT position data always seems way lower than reality for me as well.

If you know right away what the parameter does, I'd go ahead and tell Googlebot what the parameter is or how to treat it. It's one more signal to help fight against duplicate content, and I'd take advantage of everything I can give Google to help tell them about how I want them to rank my site.

How are you checking these SERPs? Are you using the same computer/browser each time? Are you logged into a Google account with personalization and cache some/all of the time? That can really affect things.

Try consistently checking from a browser that is in private browsing mode, which will help to minimize the personalization used for your search results. The SEOmoz Rank Tracker should also be able to provide you with ranking data that is non-personalized.

Are you able to share with us your URL and three key phrases?

For the record, we did have some issues with the rank tracker, but everything is fixed now.  I didn't update this thread as we were in contact with Diane via the help desk.

We're SEOs. What are we supposed to use Flash for, building websites or something?

Were you thinking of the "How to Create Presentations Like Rand" post at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-create-presentations-like-rand?

Hi Bethany,

Has this and the google analytics connectivity been sorted out? If not, please contact help@seomoz.org and open a ticket and they'll be able to fix this for you. We certainly do want you to be able to get the most out of your free trial! Let me know if there's anything I can do to help.

I think being a genuine member of a forum can be helpful, though it can also be time consuming to become a real member of the community and participate even when you're not getting an immediate link. One helpful part of becoming a member of the community that is related to your client/site is that you get a feel for the questions that people ask, current problems in the field, and can get a lot of ideas for content and products that are needed in that field.

Both Ryan and Stores Direct have helpful answers here. Is there anything more specific we can help with regarding this question, or did their answers get you started in the right direction?

Here's the information about how to file a reconsideration request with Google and let them know that you were hacked but you fixed it.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35843

Both Ryan and Yannick have good answers here. In addition, if you get a notice from Google in your webmaster tools or seem to have a penalty, you might file a reconsideration request and let Google know you were hacked but now have everything cleaned up.

If you look online, you can find several resources that help to keep your Wordpress site from being hacked and test its security.

Hi Judith,

If you're still having problems, send an email to help@seomoz.org and they'll be able to help you figure out why Roger doesn't want to crawl your site.

If I put in facebook.com/1194488854 it redirects to your profile.

I totally agree with Todd that you want high-quality links from trusted sources. Your "free" traffic is going to be worthless traffic if it's traffic that you're getting from low-quality links placed by some outsourced firm that is following your instructions to get immediate traffic and not building you anything that relates to quality or relevance.

Your best bet right now is to contact the SEOmoz help desk with an email to help@seomoz.org. They may (not sure) be able to have your crawl start on a different day of the week so it's ready for you by the weekend, and should be able to answer all of your crawl-related questions in general.

Does your client have customers in Dayton that can be used for testimonials? Then you could put their name or initials along with the city name under the testimonial. That's one way to get nearby cities on the site without seeming spammy.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-link-directory-best-practices This blog post has some link directory best practices as well.

A very late answer to the question, but you want to put in the 301 (permanent) redirects as soon as you know of a problem. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world has some great help regarding duplicate content.

I'm following up on old questions here, and wondering how this ever turned out for you. Are you back to your previous traffic yet? Do you have any hints for others in this situation (as yes, we have seen other people in this situation!). Thanks!

If you're still looking for ideas of what to do with the duplicate content, Dr. Pete's post from earlier this month gives an in-depth look at the different types of duplicate content and solutions.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world

Have you read Dr. Pete's SEOmoz blog post about duplicate content to see if any of that might apply to you? Even if your back-end is showing one page, it could still be generating multiple pages.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world

Zsolt, I believe the reviews are being left on the Google Places page, not on the website itself.

Thankfully we also have some Brits on the staff for Q&A who are helping to cover this weekend while the rest of us travel, shop, or see people in real life for once. I'm the one who assigns private Q&A questions, and make sure we did have some staff on hand. It usually takes 3-5 days for a response, as an FYI.