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I agree with Stephan's comment regarding making sure that it's pet specific. If you ever get into PPC, you're going to need to do a lot of negative keywords to make sure you're not showing up and paying for people looking for how to keep grandma fit.
Make sure /forum/ is excluded in your robots.txt file then go to Google Webmaster Tools and request a URL removal. You can request the entire directory be removed. Here's a page from their help files about the tool. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=164734
You still have the benefits of traffic for your site and visibility, and people who see the article may also write about you and include followed links.
Google is also known to choose their own title to display and disregard your title. Search Engine Roundtable has reported on that multiple times now, and I've seen many reports in here too.
Eggdaddy, it's Rand's wedding anniversary and one week a year of vacation right now, which is why he may not have answers to everything off the top of his head at the moment.
Sounds like it's time to submit a ticket to the help desk. Email them at help@seomoz.org with the query in question and the destination URL. I know there were some issues with UK rank tracking, I'm not sure about rank tracking otherwise. The help desk would be able to tell you though.
The link: command in Google only shows a small sample of the links to your site. You'll get a better (but still not complete) report by verifying your site in Google Webmaster Tools and looking at your links through there.
Hi everyone. We at SEOmoz are aware of the problem and are looking into it. I've asked an OSE engineer to respond in the thread at http://www.seomoz.org/q/link-analysis so please look over there (we'll also give a brief update on Twitter too) . I'm closing this thread so we can keep things to one thread.
Hi everyone. We at SEOmoz are aware of the problem and are looking into it. I've asked an OSE engineer to respond in the thread at http://www.seomoz.org/q/link-analysis so please look over there (we'll also give a brief update on Twitter too) . I'm closing this thread so we can keep things to one thread.
Here's a post from the help desk about why your site may only have one page crawled. If none of that works, send them an email at help@seomoz.org.
http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/409821-why-isn-t-my-site-being-crawled-you-only-crawled-one-page
Dr. Pete also wrote a good post about this at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many.
Hi Jest,
The help team generally doesn't read the Q&A forums, and only comes over here if one of the associates (like myself) flags the question. Sha Menz is correct in that the best way to get ahold of them is sending them an email in cases like this.
They are aware of this problem, and are working to get it fixed. Watch the Twitter account for SEOmoz, as they will give updates about the status of this issue.
Like Brian and Wayne say, Google does reserve the right to change title tags, and they do so even with big brands like Apple. Here are two posts about that:
http://www.seroundtable.com/google-title-selection-12989.html
There's a fresh post on Search Engine People yesterday about blog commenting guidelines that likely mirrors what many people here would say about commenting. http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/blog-commenting-guideline.html It's a good read for developing a comment strategy that will work in the long term.
Agreed! This could be the basis of a great YouMoz article. Send us an email at editor@seomoz.org if you're interested and I can help you with a few ideas.
Nigel,
I'm so sorry I didn't catch this question earlier. There is a known bug in Linkscape where it is treating binary files as having links and is messing up the data. Please see this Q&A thread with an explanation from one of the Linkscape engineers.
http://www.seomoz.org/q/competitive-edu-research-via-open-site-explorer
Assuming that the user has a blog with several posts. The question says nothing about a blog, but instead references a new site looking at rankings for long-tail traffic.
Hi DittoEffect,
Can you give a little more background on the twitter profile links? The links have had the nofollow attribute for years now, with one of the more "recent" additions being the bio link getting a nofollow (see Sugarrae's post at http://www.sugarrae.com/social-media-sphere/twitter-lays-down-for-google/ as one of many talking about this). I think it would have been huge news had the nofollows been removed, and I haven't seen anyone else talk about this.
I've looked at a few of your questions, and would like to suggest that you look at the Beginner's Guide to SEO and get an good idea of the big picture of SEO and a feel for the SEOmoz approach to SEO. The people here tend to focus on doing things that provide value to the viewer of the site and finding the right way to do things so that your results last, rather than trying to find shortcuts and things that will only work for a short while until there's another update of the search engines.
Wow, it looks like Roger had a little too much fun at the mixer the other night! Letting the help desk know he's misbehaving is the best things to do at this point.
Remember, the moderators are watching (and laughing). 
Or they're links from spammy blog comments on abandoned or hacked edu blogs/guestbooks. I've seen that a lot. Do a [site:yourfavoriteuniversity.edu viagra] query and you'll see this spam on nearly any edu site you choose.
Hi Renaud,
I'm following up on older unanswered questions in Q&A.Did you find a solution, or are you still looking?
Here's a study of 40,000 landing pages that has some data about conversions and number of fields in general. Unbounce might also be a place to look for case studies. Best of luck.
And if that still doesn't work, email help@seomoz.org and they'll help you figure out the right way to let Roger in while excluding everyone else.
I'd also suggest reading the Beginner's Guide to SEO, written by SEOmoz. This will give you a good background on SEO so that you can implement it on your site, and understand how to implement it for your customers as well.
Hi Don,
So sorry to hear about the problems. Check out this help topic addressing what to do when only one page is crawled. If that doesn't solve your problem, send an email to help@seomoz.org
http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/409821-why-isn-t-my-site-being-crawled-you-only-crawled-one-page
This is a known bug in the software. This response from a Linkscape engineer can help explain what's going on. http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-are-our-competitors-getting-these-inbound-linking-domains
Google publishes the same URL in both news and universal search. That will not help.
Just a couple of days ago we had a post in YouMoz about 15 Smart Ways to Find Guest Posting Opportunities. You might want to check that out too.
I attended an SMX Advanced session on using crowdsourced tools, and there was a rep from Mechanical Turk there. They are well aware of SEOs and are active in monitoring the tasks that are written up.
Hi Anthony,
That's a case for the help desk. Please email them at help@seomoz.org and let them know the URL you're getting that on and what browser you're using. I haven't seen a rash of complaints coming in here or on Twitter the last few hours, so I think it may be an isolated issue.
Thanks, and so sorry you're having problems.
Shelly is right on here. Send an email to help@seomoz.org and they'll answer your question for you.
Reading the list of things that violate Mechanical Turk policies is probably a good idea. You can check out a lot of information at https://www.mturk.com/mturk/help?helpPage=policies. Some specific information includes that these types of things are not allowed:
<a name="#violation_examples">What are some specific examples of HITs that violate Amazon Mechanical Turk policies?</a>
900 links and no content, and something called "spintext". This sets off a few warning bells to me that the site doesn't seem to be for users as much as the search engines. Are you able to drop a link to the site? If so, we could give a little more opinion. It does seem to be a bit high for links.
Gustav, the poster is asking how to tell if the visit came from their site being in Google News or in a regular SERP. I don't believe this addresses that question for them.
Hi Diana,
Can you explain a little of what you mean by dynamic SEO? Are you meaning SEO for dynamic pages instead of static pages?
Hi! This is actually a known issue with OSE. With the new deeper crawl that it is doing, it's finding a lot of downloadable program files and is getting confused and saying those binary files are actually links. SEOmoz is well aware of this and working on fixing the way the crawler works. It is nothing your competitors are doing, but a problem on the moz end of things. Carin has a detailed explanation in this thread at http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-are-our-competitors-getting-these-inbound-linking-domains.
Hi! You're seeing something that Google rolled out last month where they put in lists like that in the SERPs. They wrote a post about it at http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/08/new-snippets-for-list-pages.html.
You may be able to more easily find convincing proof that the more fields you add to a form the more you hurt conversion on a general level, then tell the client that it would apply to the "how did you find out about us" as well.
I have never heard of this site before, so I don't know how to judge the accuracy of what they write, but this article looks like what you're looking for to back you up about the "how did you find us" question: http://www.goodusability.co.uk/2010/01/how-did-you-hear-about-us/
There are 36 comments on this post, which can also be helpful for giving your client anecdotal information about how people say they don't fill out those forms, etc.
For me personally, I often find that the choices don't match what really happened for me. Someone mentioned company x on twitter but didn't include a link, so I went to Google to search for company x. Did I hear about them from Google or Twitter? What if I had also heard about company x from people in a group of my friends first, but was never at a computer to investigate company x and it wasn't until the Twitter mention that I remembered I wanted to look at them?
I'm going back to where you said your intent is to be a leader in this space. If you want to be a leader, you need to come up with a new angle on the content itself and have a reason for people to come to your site as a direct visit or rss subscription, not coming there because they found you in a google search for a trending topic.
Mashable, and sites like them, gets their views and is a leader in their field because they are the ones who went to YouTube and sorted through hundreds of videos to find those ten videos, write descriptions about them, select the order that they appeared, etc. If you truly want to be a leader, you'll need to be the one out there doing that, not rewriting copy after another site does the research. It's less about "does this beat a plagiarism detector and can I stay a step ahead of the Google algorithm" than "can I provide some awesome content or way of looking at things that no one else has done yet".
Hi Karthik,
I'd recommend posting a new Q&A question about this, as this is now a few months old and a bit buried. You might hold off until Tuesday US time, since we have a holiday tomorrow and there won't be nearly as many people online.
When you do write your question, it would be helpful to add to your post what types of errors you get when you try to implement this -- just what you have tried, and what the results are.
I also see that your site doesn't redirect non-www to www. If you want to fix that too, now would be a good time to ask about it.
Keri
Hi Marc,
Did the blog post answer your question for you, or are you still looking for a way to segment the traffic?
It's easy to implement. I've broken the content up into multiple sitemaps before as a diagnostic tool as well, to see which sections of the site are getting most of their pages indexed and which sections of the site have few pages indexed.
Hi! So sorry for the late reply. If you're having a problem with the tool like this, the best thing to do is drop a note to help@seomoz.org. I hope it's straightened itself out by now, but if not, the help desk will want to know about it. Thanks!
Hi George, that's an interesting take on things. Can you give us any more background information on this or resources? Thanks!
I'm looking at your post about the Top 10 most Icon Moments from Steve Job's Career at Apple (http://www.gizmocrazed.com/2011/08/top-10-most-iconic-moments-from-steve-jobs-career-at-apple/). At the bottom of the post it says "via mashable" and appears to be the same content as Mashable. That's the type of thing I was referring to, as I saw this on several pages.