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That's a 28 character domain (including periods) which is a bit long. Also, a four word phrase is fairly long. I agree with John in trying to find a shorter name. Also, exact match domains won't always have a boost, so you want something that's brandable and easy to use after an update changes the boosting.
The site looks really low-quality to me right now (not sure what it looked like two months ago), with lots of ads and just snippets of content from elsewhere. Ask yourself if this site ads value to the user for their particular query. I couldn't find any pages that did.
Hi Ryan,
I'm going through the older unanswered questions. Were you able to find a tool to meet your needs? if so, is it anything you can share with us for the archives?
Hi Francois,
I'm looking at older questions that are still unanswered, and wondering if you're still looking for advice, or if you took some action here. Really interested to hear what happened with this site!
Sorry to be so late to jump in here. If you're still having odd numbers, email help@seomoz.org and they'll be able to look at your account and give you a better answer about what is happening. Thanks!
If the site were still up, you could verify it in Google Webmaster Tools, put up a robots.txt for that subdomain that excludes crawlers from crawling anything, then go into GWT and request the entire subdomain be removed.
A bit of a late response here, but yes, there is usually a reworking of things at each update. Rand has said that it's best to use the metrics to compare your site to a competitor each time, rather than your site to itself over time.
Good answer from Ryan here. Also, see Rand's post about what to do if the "wrong" page is ranking in the results at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions
Right now, there's not a way, though it is on the list of eventual features. There's more information in this help desk thread at http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/20199538-is-there-a-way-i-could-add-another-user-to-access-my-pro-account
I gave you a thumbs up! Glad you solved this, and I'm sure it'll help someone in the future. Thanks for posting the answer!
Hi Melissa,
Did John's answer answer your question, or are you still looking for some more advice?
Hi Lisa,
Did you ever get this straightened out?
Number of URLs alone independent of anything else shouldn't be a reason to randomly deindex a lot of your site to an arbitrary number. Can you offer any more background on your suggestion?
Hi Matthew,
Did this answer your question, or are you still looking for some more advice?
I haven't seen this before myself, and just now saw this question. What happens if you set the date period to less than a month? Do the numbers look better then? What about if you show things by day instead of week -- is there a day that is out of whack?
Did the client ever notice this and ask?
The question you maybe need to ask is 'Should I submit my articles to article directories in the first place". Many on here will tell you the answer is no, that you should put the content on your own website and not on another website at all.
Here's how I dealt with a similar situation in the past.
Robots.txt on each of the dev subdomains and on the live domain. Dev subdomains robots.txt excluded the entire subdomain, and subdomains were verified in GWT and removed as needed.
Made live subdomain robots.txt read-only so it didn't get overwritten. Should have made dev subdomains robots.txt read-only as well, since they sometimes got refreshed with the live content (there was a UGC database that would occasionally get copied to a dev subdomain, and we'd have robots.txt get copied over too and dev subdomain indexed).
Set up a code monitor that checks the contents of all of the robots.txt daily and sends me an email if anything is changed.
Not perfect, but I was at least able to catch changes soon after they happened, and prevented a few changes.
Out of curiosity, why do you want to do this? Usually you want the blog on the main site in a folder, as this helps get all of the linkjuice pointed at the same domain rather than splitting your efforts into two domains. I'm just wondering the use case here.
If Roger is still not listening to you, send an email to help@seomoz.org and open a ticket with the help desk. They'll try to figure out why he's misbehaving and how to get him to listen to you again.
Also make a notation in your analytics program about the day that each of these ads hit the general public. Like I mentioned in my earlier response, my experience was people would just type in the abc.com and ignore the /GQ or /Esquire. Having a notation in your analytics account can help you account for some of the direct traffic that just goes to the home page.
From personal experience, I found people stripped off the stuff I added to a URL. At Maker Faire one year we distributed a couple of thousand postcards with our URL and /make at the end. Hundreds of direct visits over the next couple of days, but all to the home page -- I think fewer than five went to the /make.
Also keep in mind that Open Site Explorer represents the top 25% of the web; it is not a full crawl of the web (more information at http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/about).
Two things to try. One is to put in the domain for where you know you have links into OSE and see if it's even indexed. The next is to be patient and try again in a week, since the next update of OSE is scheduled for next Tuesday -- they may get picked up in the next crawl.
Google views the canonical tag as a hint, and reserves the right to ignore it if the pages don't look to be virtually identical in content, so it would depend in part on how much of the content is duplicate. If it's your own site, you can always give it a try and see. If it's a client site and they're depending on both pages ranking for conversions, I'd warn them first that you might lose the rankings from Page B.
Reading our replies and reading the Beginner's Guide to SEO at http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo should really help you with this site, and some of the others that you work with too.
Whatever happened here? Were you able to make your case to them at all, or are you stuck with the question?
Sorry for the late reply. It doesn't look like too many people here use that technique. If you want a deeper evaluation of if that would be helpful in your situation, you can consider making this a private question and asking SEOmoz staff for an opinion.
Hi Andre,
Did you find an answer, or are you still looking for a solution?
Another way to get authentic mentions of other areas without being spammy is to have testimonials from clients that include their city names.
"I had a wonderful experience using Joe Smith as my real estate lawyer. Blah blah blah
You could also talk about how you are members of the greater Newark Chamber of Commerce or Newark Area Real Estate Lawyers who Lunch or how you support the Nearby Town Little League.
Hi Paul,
I'm going through and seeing if questions are ready to be closed out. It's a little hard to tell in this case. Is your question answered, or should I leave it open?
Did the author's reply in the comment of the blog post answer your question, or do you still have this question?
I didn't do an in-depth check of your site, but as long as you're still getting your Google organic traffic I think you're fine. It is hard to get into news, and the appearance of the site really shouts blog and not news site.
If you haven't already, it's always a good idea to verify your site in Google Webmaster Tools. If you have some type of problem with your site, you'll often get a notice there. There's also lots of interesting tidbits of information you can find in that account that you can't see if you're not verified (more information about incoming links, for example).
When I do a site:vistastores.com, I see about 2300 results indexed in Google, which indicates Google is both indexing and crawling your site. How many pages do you have?
So sorry you are seeing this. It is a known bug that is being worked on, and a lot of it should be taken care of by the October 18th update. Like Ryan suggested, emailing help is a good step. For more information, see the response from a Linkscape engineer in this thread: http://www.seomoz.org/q/weird-behaviour
Hi Alan,
So sorry you're seeing problems. Could you please send an email to help@seomoz.org? They'll best be able to help you out in this, and would want to know any problems so it can be fixed.
If you've noticed this anomaly in SEOmoz tools, email the SEOmoz help desk. If you've seen it in Majestic SEO, email their help desk -- SEOmoz and Majestic are two separate companies with two separate tools.
Hi David,
I'm following up on older questions that are still marked unanswered. Are you still seeing this discrepancy, or has it sorted itself out now that you've had the site up longer? Are you still looking for advice about this issue?
The tool is updated about once a month, with the next scheduled update being a week from now. http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/about gives more information about the crawling and why it can take up to 60 days for your links to show. The calendar for updates is at http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345964-linkscape-update-schedule.
I went to that URL listing the stop words in the Internet Archive, and it's had the same content for at least five years now. Years ago, Google did have a notice when it ignored common words, but I don't remember it as being this restrictive even a long time ago. I would consider that list vastly outdated.
Here's some information from Google itself:
http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=136861
Words that are commonly used, like 'the,' 'a,' and 'for,' are usually ignored (these are called stop words). But there are even exceptions to this exception. The search
Yahoo's Smushit.it is a tool that can do some lossless compression on your images and may be of use. If you use Wordpress, there's also a smushit plugin that will compress your images on upload.
Page load speed does have an impact both for users and search engines. It's certainly something to consider.
You might double check on the errors. I'm getting multiple errors on interior pages and using Firefox 6.0.2.
No, it's not possible for a user to see who has made thumbs up and thumbs down.
There was an interesting discussion about thumbs down on Twitter the other day. Rand said (and I agree) that it does help minimize some flame wars, especially in the comments. Rather than a ton of people saying "that's stupid" or "I can't believe you said that", a thumbs down is a way of more politely expressing disagreement.
I agree, it's never fun to see something you've written have a thumbs down and have no idea why.
There's also a problem that's happened in the last couple of days for third-party reporting of toolbar pagerank that might be affecting what you're seeing. Check out the post at http://mz.cm/rjPAwc.
Here are a couple of SEOmoz blog posts about promoting your infographic and creating link bait that should help you with ideas.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-build-links-with-infographics
There are sites out there that will show you which sites share the same Google Analytics code, http://spyonweb.com/ is one. Google knows, trust me, as I've had them shut off adwords for multiple clients when one client refused about $36 in charges (five years ago, no MMC, but all in same GWT account).
I don't have an educated opinion on the impact of ranking that this may or may not cause, and will defer to others about that.
I personally create separate Google Analytics Accounts for each client, with only their profiles in that same account. It's less about Google knowing all and more about being able to hand off the GA account to another business and give them admin access without handing over the rest of my clients.
It is a best practice, and it will have the additional benefit of helping you get the links back to the correct version of the site (since people often copy and paste the link from the browser, you're giving them the correct version to copy and paste).
Just make sure that when/if you copy over the staging site to the live domain that you don't copy over the robots.txt, htaccess, or whatever means you use to block that site from being indexed and thus have your shiny new site be blocked. 