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I'm going to write my response for a generic local eatery/coffee shop/donut shop, and hope some of it works for you.

I'm a contractor for SEOmoz, and work from my home. I regularly search Yelp for nearby places that have wifi where I can escape the heat in the summer, or work by a fireplace in the winter, and enjoy some food and a change of scenery. I care less about the pretty pictures, and more about making sure the home page comes up quickly on my mobile phone, that you have hours and directions easily listed, and that there's a menu with prices. I'm overjoyed if I do have some information about the establishment -- is this a place that has wifi? Can I come hang out for a couple of hours and work? Is there a special on a certain day where I might decide to make Thursdays my day where I treat myself to a late lunch at your business? If I find a good place, I will get on Yelp and leave a review and let others know as well.

If you're more of a manufacturer of the product and not a direct retailer, do you offer a gluten free product? Anything vegan? If I'm shopping for a donut that a relative with a specific food allergy can eat, will I find that information on your website? If you did make a gluten free donut, you could reach out to blogs about gluten free diets and have those bloggers review your donuts and link to you.

I don't do local myself, so I haven't tried this, but I have seen the suggestion of getting testimonials from customers and including the customer's cities next to their names in the testimonial.

Much of the time, you can tell just by reading the article. You'll find nouns and adjectives that don't sound quite right, and idioms are often broken. I once saw "think before you beverage" in an article about alcoholism.

Sadly, we see spun articles come into YouMoz on a regular basis. Because several words will be swapped out, searching a long phrase won't always show you another copy of the article. Often the subheadings of the article are more intact and less likely to be spun, so I put them into Google. I'll also grab several short 2-3 word phrases and run a search on that, looking for the same content elsewhere on the web.

With a robots.txt blocking it, you can then go into Google Webmaster Tools and request removal of that particular page or folder from Google's index.

Hi Zsolt,

There isn't a way to currently see this, but the team right now is looking at things we can do to improve the Q&A experience, and I'll forward this thread to the rest of the team  as a suggestion. Thanks for writing about it!

Google will also pick up on dates on comments, and sometimes it seems to randomly pick dates. Graywolf has done some testing around this and WordPress.

Stefano, I'm assuming that you're using xxx in place of your real URL, and that you're not running a porn site? This question was flagged because someone was upset about the site they landed on from your example. If you could edit the URL to example or something else that would be helpful. Thanks!

These are not real links, but a bug where OSE thinks pdf files and downloadable programs are links. The problem is in the process of being fixed. Rand has some more information in today's blog post at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/november-linkscape-update-is-live

Yes, go ahead and ignore those warnings. There was another recent question about this and the help desk said they could be ignored.

The help desk generally doesn't just browse Q&A, as they keep busy enough with the help forums and the tickets submitted to them. If there is a problem that might be affecting a large number of users, then I'll flag a Q&A question and ask them to come and take a look at things.

That's an interesting one. I'd email that to the help desk at help@seomoz.org to let them know about it. If there's some kind of cause of it that would be helpful for others to know, it'd be great if you could post more information back on this thread.

Someone else mentioned BMR in a thread a few days back at http://www.seomoz.org/q/first-attempt-at-local-seo. I looked at BMR then and had this concern:

On their How It Works section of their site (http://www.buildmyrank.com/how-it-works) it says "We publish your article randomly on 1 of our high page rank, aged domains. You control how many articles are published daily for each of your domains." They only require 150 words for articles, so it seems you're looking at a ten sites with collections of random short articles.

Do the users have a chance for an expanded question beyond the 64 characters, or is that the proposed entire question limit? If that's the entire question limit, I would certainly say to not limit it so much.

The question at http://recessionitis.com/what-is-the-lowest-fare-roundtrip-to-atlanta-from-oakland-california/ is "What is the lowest round trip fare to Atlanta from Oakland, CA?", which is 63 characters. There's a response asking what dates, yet the OP never responded.

My gut says that by limiting the question so much you're going to limit the amount of information the person is able to give, and thus limit the amount of answer a person can give without knowing more detail, and you may never be able to get that detail out of the OP in time. Or, you'll have someone answer, only to have the OP come back and say "oh, but I don't want any layovers" or "I refuse to travel on airline xyz". You're still likely to get people who don't make complete questions, but I would say don't hamstring those who did want to give more information just because you don't want to trigger the "..." in the SERP.

Here's the information for private browsing with Firefox: http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Private%20Browsing

Or, you might just want to install Safari as an additional browser that you can use to check rankings, check how a page renders, etc. Since it wouldn't be your main browser, it'd be easy to reset everything when you wanted a fresh check of things.

It's a warning, not an error. It means "hey, make sure that you really want this stuff blocked" not "you made a mistake". And yes, you really do want those annoying osCsid parameters blocked!

Yes, your search history in a browser can skew your rankings. What I often do to check them from my browser is either start a private browsing session (which doesn't retain search history), or use Safari and go to Edit -> Reset Safari which clears all cache, cookies, history, etc. and makes it look like you just installed the browser. You'll still get localized results based on your IP, but it will help. Also, the SEOmoz rank tracker will be able to track without those personalizations.

If you block the pages from being crawled, you are also telling the search engines to not index the pages (they don't want to include something they haven't looked at). So yes, the traffic numbers from organic search will change if you block the pages in robots.txt.

Actually, this is most likely a bug in Open Site Explorer. A lot of the problem has been eliminated, but there are still some cases when the crawler spots a downloadable file and thinks it's a link. We had an update mid-day yesterday to Linkscape that removed many of these links (so if you were looking at data from a couple of days ago, you'll want to rerun the data). The December Linkscape update should take care of most of these downloads that get classified as links.

You certainly don't want to block this content!

One thing I'd consider is the if-modified-since header, or other headers. Here are two articles that explain more about the concept of using headers to tell the search engines " this hasn't changed, don't bother crawling it". I haven't personally used this, but have read about it in many places.

http://www.feedthebot.com/ifmodified.html

http://searchengineland.com/how-to-improve-crawl-efficiency-with-cache-control-headers-88824

I haven't done a move like this, but my first thought is some may question why you want to move a site that you have control over now to someone else's platform and give them control over it.

I think the tool died a slow/quiet death. You can see a long thread over at http://www.seomoz.org/q/seomoz-lda-tool-experience from July. I did just confirm with someone at the Mozplex that it is gone.

I don't have any experience with them, but you might check out CodeGuard to see if it would meet your needs. https://www.codeguard.com/

Have you explored some of the resources SEOmoz has regarding link building? They might also provide you some advice. Check out the following:

http://www.seomoz.org/article/the-professional-guide-to-link-building-2011

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

and the link building category of the blog at

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/4

Another advantage of not having a technology extension is that if you change technologies and go from .html to .asp, you don't have to change all of your URLs and worry about redirects and lost link juice.

There's a good discussion about this in a very similar post from a few hours ago at http://www.seomoz.org/q/should-i-make-all-my-non-money-pages-no-follow. The short answer is that a couple years back it may have helped, but not anymore.

You do want to index them, as you want the search engines to see that you have a privacy policy, and both the privacy policy and about us help the engines trust your site just a tad more.

Ryan's spot-on here. The feature request forum is available at http://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums/293194-seomoz-pro-feature-requests and you can add your comment over there, if someone hasn't already requested this.

I just did this for my site (strikemodels.com). We bought bderc.com and did a 301 redirect over to the appropriate pages of Strike Models. If I go into OSE and look for only links with a 301, I see a bunch of links from bderc.com. I need to put bderc.com into OSE and to see who is linking to bderc instead of me.

So if you do this for onemainfinancial, you're going to see a ton of 301 from citibank -- not sure if you were wanting that, or those who were linking to citibank before it was 301'd.

It's nlpca (with an L) not nipca (with an i) I think is why you oculdn't see the site. It shows up fine on this end.

But there are still some displaying, correct? It can take up to 60 days for OSE to show links after discovering, and it doesn't discover all links. Have you checked OSE to see if it indexes the pages where you have your link?

You've verified the link is still there. Google makes a much deeper crawl than OSE, so if the linking pages are indexed in Google and the links are clean, then Google will see it, and I wouldn't get too worried over things.

In my case, there's an MIT link out there to my competitor's site that's not showing anymore, and I'm sure the link is still there. It's just from a faculty member's website that is mostly abandoned.

I'm now seeing several links to that exact page in Open Site Explorer. Take a look at this link: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=www.qubesys.com%2Fpsd-to-joomla-template%2F&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=0

Grayloon, were these responses enough of an answer for you, or are you still looking for more information?

That domain is now in OSE so you can take another look there to see if your question is answered.

Have the links displayed in the new OSE release? Is your domain one that you can list publicly here for us to look at and help determine what is happening?

Hi Ashley,

I'm following up on older questions. I'm seeing you at 16 for loose diamonds, and 46 for engagement rings with the URL you've shown. Threads on Q&A don't get bumped with new activity, so if you'd still like some advice, I'd suggest opening a new question with current information and seeing what people have to say. The Q&A section is a lot more active now than it was in March, so you're likely to get a few new viewpoints.

This YouMoz post also covers some ideas for "boring" industries. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/3-steps-to-social-seo-for-your-boring-ass-clients.

We also just published a YouMoz on the main blog today that deals exactly with this subject. Check it out at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/3-steps-to-social-seo-for-your-boring-ass-clients

One method of doing this is following the first part of this YouMoz for using a crawler to see what Google has indexed.

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/solving-new-content-indexation-issues-for-large-b2b-websites

You might check out the backlinks to their own site in Open Site Explorer at http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=simplybacklinks.com%2F&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=external&target=domain&group=0

Here are two examples from the first few on the list:

http://www.theflyunion.com/huf-x-diamond-springsummer-2011.html

http://www.brooklynvegan.com/archives/2007/10/more_photos_of.html

Hi Brian,

So sorry that you didn't get a response before now. I've seen another report of this in Q&A as well. The help desk staff generally doesn't hang out in Q&A, which is why you didn't get an answer from them here. Can you please email them at help@seomoz.org with this information and open a ticket so they can work on fixing this glitch? Thanks!

Martijn Scheybeler does report in the other question that

What "worked" for me was waiting for a minute and re trying to download the export. Most times the second attempt was successful. It's just a work around eventually.
I would also recommend reporting this to the Moz team so they will have more user data to solve this problem.

No worries! Associates and staff don't show up on the top users list anyway. Besides, I can always endorse my own answers if I want to really increase my score! (I've actually done that in one instance when there was a long thread and needed to get my answer that something was fixed to the top of the thread).

Actually, Google has explicitly commented on this. See this post at http://www.seroundtable.com/google-subdomains-webmaster-tools-13968.html where they say:

Dear webmasters: A lot of people have seen the recent announcement about the recent reorganization of backlinks in Webmaster Tools and are saying it's a reflection of a new way that Google handles links for ranking purposes.

Wrong.

This change is only for how Webmaster Tools displays link data to help webmasters understand their links a bit better. The most common use case is for links to both www and non-www versions of the same site, even if these two different hostnames are canonicalized correctly. Previously, Webmaster Tools considered the links to each separately even though webmasters (and everyone else) considered them to be the same site. That situation was not ideal and so this change helps simplify things quite a bit.

Google has also said that the GWT change does not reflect in any way how they value subdomain vs subfolders; that this change doesn't indicate that they have changed their way of thinking, just their way of presenting.

As far as I know it's accurate. Send an email to help@seomoz.org with a couple of examples and they can help you sort it out.

My first thought is that rank isn't the same as performance for the site owner! You can pay them a lot for ranking for keywords that are not going to make you any money or have no competition and are so long-tail that nobody will search for them.

This sounds like something for the help desk, since I don't see anyone else jumping in here saying they have the same problem. Email them at help@seomoz.org and give them the email associated with your account, and they'll help you figure this out.

For the future, I'd suggest using something like Code Monitor (https://polepositionweb.com/roi/codemonitor/index.php) to monitor for any changes to your live or staging robots.txt. I've been in situations where too many people had access to the site that didn't know what they were doing, and getting an alert within 24 hours that someone changed something in robots.txt really saved us.

It's probably best to send an email to help@seomoz.org and ask the help desk specifically about this. They all know more about how it works than we do here in Q&A, and they can also reprimand Roger if he made any mistakes in this latest crawl.