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Rand also made a post about what to do if the "wrong" page is ranking last year at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions

Yes, the fix for now is to use the AdWords Keyword Tool for this information. The rest of the keyword difficulty tool (the stuff you can't get form other sources) works just fine.

Good question Thomas. I'm not sure about this, so I've assigned this question to the help team and will have them come over and give an answer when they have a chance (they normally don't visit Q&A unless an associate or staff member flags a question).

When I go to google and search [costumemachine.com] your site is the first result and it has six sitelinks.

When you are looking at your metrics for the last year and comparing it to times prior, what is it that you see has changed? Are you doing OK in organic Bing and Yahoo and just having problems with Google?

That said, I'm having a very hard time finding 15 pages of original content, much less 1,500 pages of original content. Like others have mentioned, the tags and filters seem to be off. When I'm looking at 1st Birthday Costumes, the list of other 1st birthday costumes includes a hot dog adult link, as well as links that have no results (covenant slayer faith). Correction: now that I look more carefully at the page, it says nothing found for 1st birthday party theme, even though I clicked a link there, so it's just showing me random stuff for adults.

Like the others mentioned, I'm having a hard time seeing the value of this site to a user. Google wants people to have a good experience when a user finds a site, and there are other sites in this area that do a better job.

Your site looks more like a blog and less like a news site. In the Google News Forum Publisher FAQ (http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=151309) Google has the following:

Can I suggest my personal website for inclusion in Google News?
At the moment, Google News tends not to include articles from personal websites and blogs.

That would be my guess is that it looks like a (very nice) blog about the area, but not necessarily a news site.

OpenSiteExplorer can tell you that information if the URL in question has been crawled. It doesn't look like onemainfinancial.com is in the index yet, but you can try again in a couple of weeks when the Linkscape index has updated. I'm not sure of other methods, but other people may know.

Thanks for jumping in with an answer Sha. I second that this is something you'll need to work with the help desk directly to solve, if it can be solved.

Marie, feel free to send me an email if you want to bounce any ideas off of me about YouMoz, I'm currently the primary person reviewing submissions and can give you some pointers about what tends to do well on the blog. keri at seomoz dot org.

The Q&A forum is available just to Pro members, so if someone is in here asking, that means they also have a pro membership.

Thanks for the compliment about the Pro membership Robert!

Agree on the looking spammy.

I would get the company name in any case so that someone else doesn't get the name and make you settle for a lesser name / have them tweet out stuff that's against your brand.

Here's the YouMoz post that might help.

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/improving-page-speed-with-amazon-web-services-a-beginners-guide

My gut tells me that the press release option has a lesser chance of having spammy or rogue links pointed at you. If it were my site and I had only those two choices, I would go for the press releases, presuming they were well-written and met the standards of places like Yahoo and would actually get included. My argument is going to fall back on the content here -- use the method that contains the best content and is the most on-target for your business.

Link building is not a bad idea in and of itself. But six months of having someone halfway around the world post comments in blogs and forums that show up for search queries is NOT where I would spend my money.

edited to add: does the overseas firm chose the search queries? Do they have domain knowledge about the real estate industry in your country? I wouldn't even have someone from a different state or different region of the US write real estate content for me without researching how things are done in my area, I wouldn't want someone who had no concept of the way things are done here to try to decide for themselves what is relevant.

Two of the three links look like they're in javascript and wouldn't be picked up as a straight link. For all of the links, keep in mind that Linkscape only crawls about the top 25% of the web, so your count in OSE may not reflect all of your links. Also, the links are updated about once a month, when you account for the time it takes to crawl the web then process the links.

How long have you had the links in place? It can take up to 60 days for Linkscape to find the links if it is crawling those pages.

Tomorrow morning (Seattle time) I'll be posting a YouMoz blog post at http://www.seomoz.org/ugc that deals directly with setting up a CDN on Amazon. You can read through the steps given in the article and see if that answers your questions, and if not, you can ask a question in the comments.

Good answer from Ryan, and I caution that even then you may not get a direct answer. It might be similar to asking Google just how many servers they have. SEOmoz is fairly open with information, but that may be a bit beyond the scope of what they are willing to answer.

Send an email to help@seomoz.org and they can give you an answer.

I need to check internally, but I think Moz has set this up for several of their authors and yet Rand seems to be the only one whose image consistently shows in the SERPs despite everything else being the same.

Just went through and redacted the URL and site name.

I'm not involved with the technical setup of this forum, but as a user not logged in, right now one can only see the question.

A correction to that Ryan. After two weeks, non-members can see the answers, but cannot reply. Only pro members and those with a certain threshold of mozpoints can answer after the two weeks. (I believe it is still two weeks, that's what it was initially at least).

Does anyone search those terms? Do those terms convert?

To answer your question, one of the ways one ranks is to have the light colored text on the light colored background on each page with the following in a spammy footer:

Orlando Pool Service - Orlando Pool Cleaning - Orlando Pool Repairs - Orlando Pool Remodeling - Orlando Pool Renovations - Winter Park, FL - Winter Park Pool Service - Winter Park Pool Service - Winter Park Pool Remodeling - Orlando, FL - Maitland, FL - College Park - Windermere, FL - Longwood, FL - Casselberry, Fl - Lake Mary, FL - Goldenrod, FL - Heathrow, FL - 32825 - 34786 - 32750 - 32779 32714 - 32810 - 32751 - 32707 - 32835 - 32828 - 32801 - 32803 - 32806 - 32789 - 32746 - 32712 - 33880 - 33881 - 33884 - 33801 - 33805 - 33803

vishalkhialani, a quick note that only higher education institutions can get a .edu extension, it's not available to just anyone who wants to pick one up.

Are you wanting to see just when a new question comes up so you can come look at it, or how do you want to use the RSS feed?

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for jumping in here with a quick and helpful response.

We do expect to see an improvement (though not a complete solution) with the release of this month's index. We use our own tools, so we encounter these problems as well, and understand your frustration. We are working as fast as we can to get this issue resolved, and do thank you for your patience.

Likely the primary reason they do this is to comply with Google's wishes regarding paid links, outlined at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66736. They do not like to see links sold to manipulate pagerank, and adding a nofollow tag complies with their guidelines. They are doing it so their site doesn't get hit with a rankings penalty.

Things should be working now. On Friday OSE and Linkscape (and lsapi) were down, but that came back about 5pm Pacific time on Friday.

If re-adding the extension doesn't work, it's time to email the help desk at help@seomoz.org.

If you were to pre-write him comments and posts that made perfect sense, then you are either a) writing comments that make perfect sense but are so general that the person reading them knows that they could apply to hundreds of posts out there or b) you're reading the post and writing the comments so why are you bothering to hire him?

I agree with the advice that EGOL and Sha have given, and would add that reading through the Beginner's Guide to SEO could also be helpful.

Though the questions themselves are publicly viewable, and actually indexed within a couple of hours of being asked. This sounds like a helpful idea, and I'll also pass it along to SEOmoz internally. Thanks for the idea Vishal!

Here's a brief post about it on Search Engine Land. http://searchengineland.com/confirmed-google-panda-2-5-update-arrived-this-week-95222.

Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Roundtable has commented on Twitter that he'll be writing up a post about it for Monday. Here is the SER page for everything tagged Panda, it can be a handy reference. http://www.seroundtable.com/tag/panda

Here's a post from the help desk with a couple of reasons for that. http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/409821-why-isn-t-my-site-being-crawled-you-only-crawled-one-page. If that doesn't take care of the problem for you, email help@seomoz.org and they'll work with you on getting the rest of the site crawled.

I'm looking at a site:dozoco.com search in Google and all the URLs I see look like http://dozoco.com/#!/store/us-pets. The #! may be the cause of the problem; I'm not exactly sure how Roger deals with crawling that.

Hi Mike,

Just wondering how this turned out, and if you're still looking for advice. Your question came through when we had a hiccup with the Q&A section and didn't get the visibility that it normally would, which is why you didn't have much in the way of answers.

I'd take a look at the Panda tag for Search Engine Roundtable to keep up with all of the latest Panda update news. Barry's quick with covering things, and does talk to Google to confirm if there is an update.

http://www.seroundtable.com/tag/panda

Hi Francis,

I hope you've had more than one page crawled by now. If not, check out the help desk article about what to do if only one page is being crawled. http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/409821-why-isn-t-my-site-being-crawled-you-only-crawled-one-page.

If that doesn't fix things, it's time to email the help desk at help@seomoz.org.

I believe Stephen is trying to say spending $6000 to buy art will do about the same for your site as 20 useless press releases. I'm not saying they're useless, though I vote with Egol about investing in content. But I believe that's the point Stephen is trying to make here.

Are you asking if you should have a footer link to your firm since they're a client, or are you asking something else?

Hi Bryan,

Did you ever find someone for this, or are you still looking? I know plenty of sources for DIY information but don't know who to refer you to offhand.

If you're still looking, you might try asking in a fresh thread. I believe when you asked this is when we had the Q&A outage and a bunch of new questions didn't appear right away and people didn't see them.

Are you able to pass along a URL for this? It's a little hard to troubleshoot without knowing more details. If you're still having this problem and don't want to share the URL here, drop a note to the help desk at help@seomoz.org and they can also try to sort it out for you.

I don't know that there is one best answer for this. For a given site, I'd try a couple of things.

1. If I'm using a CMS for shopping cart, look at the documentation and see if it references parameters used. A shopping cart often uses parameters, as does anything that involves sorting results in different orders.

2. I'd do a site:domain.com search on the site and look at the URLs that are indexed and see if any are indexed with parameters, and determine if those need to be indexed or should be excluded.

I haven't heard of this happening either, and sorry that you didn't get any other comments on the post. Now that it's been a couple of months, what's happened with the cache date? Did things straighten themselves out?

I'm seeing another place where Google doesn't reference the Gdata in code.google.com. Check out http://code.google.com/apis/storage/docs/reference-headers.html#etag.

In API changelog documentation for their calendar http://code.google.com/apis/calendar/changelog.html they say "If a client wishes to retain version 2.0 error behavior, then it can either send a request with the Gdata-Version: 2.0 HTTP header or append ?v=2.0 to request URIs. In this case, no error will be provided if an outdated updated-min parameter is provided or if a gCal:eid conflict occurs when inserting a recurrence exception. However, the server response docuement will still conform to version 2.1 and contain a Gdata-Version: 2.1 header."

It seems like you're fine, as most of the references I'm seeing Google made don't include that GData info.

Even with a second cup of coffee this answer isn't making sense, and yours normally do Stephen. Was there a copy/paste fail somewhere, or did the editor eat the rest of your reply?

Adobe has a huge #1 ranking that I doubt gets them any traffic, other than SEOs using it to prove a point. Same with Apple Quicktime, Yahoo Maps, and almost anyone else who ranks highly for "Click Here". An extreme example, but one that's useful to show that traffic and rankings aren't the same.

It's looking like a lot of the content was removed from their site in the past couple of days (it shows up in Google cache but not on the site itself) so it's kinda hard to judge. Looks like at one point they were doing copies of your content on a subdomain. This is two years old, but here's a Q&A question that gives some details about what they did two years ago (so take it with a grain of salt, but was hard to find more current information). http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/23547/altruikcom-automating-the-process-of-search-engine-visibility

Abe Lincoln is quoted as saying "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe."

I think you need to sharpen the axe here, or at least mention more details about your site. Do you have any killer content for the people to come see? Have you made sure that everything works so that people can easily do the desired action/conversion on your site?

What's in it for the users?

[OK, EGOL now you can come in and say to spend all $6000 on content and none on link building, I've done the initial part of adding option C as something to think about ]

But if you have 20 sites linking to you, and they're all from the same Class C IP address, and those are pretty much your ONLY links, that looks a bit fishy to the search engines. It's a signal to the search engines that "hey, this person can only get links from sites that have a high probability of the same person being in control of all of the sites".

That's why you'll see people talk about linkbuilding and wanting to do so from different Class C IP addresses.

What about using the allintext: query, so that your keywords appear in the text of the page? More information at http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html#allintext

Just wanted to leave a quick note saying that SEOmoz has upgraded our Link Directory! You can view a post Cyrus wrote with more information about the directory update and link building via directories at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-link-directory-best-practices

Just wanted to leave a quick note saying that SEOmoz has upgraded our Link Directory! You can view a post Cyrus wrote with more information about the directory update and link building via directories at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-link-directory-best-practices

Just wanted to leave a quick note saying that SEOmoz has upgraded our Link Directory! You can view a post Cyrus wrote with more information about the directory update and link building via directories at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-link-directory-best-practices