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Is it similar to what I saw one time where we were bidding on (fictionalized here, but close to reality) "coleman campers" and we saw thousands of impressions with just one or two clicks for the phrase "coleman campers & motorhome rvs"? Our AdWords rep wouldn't believe that anything was fishy, even though the original search query was for a type of product that the manufacturer did not even make.
Are you getting any clicks from it? Is it a reasonable query? Is it making you any money?
I don't know of such a tool, but one thing to try would be to set your location in Google to the city you want to target, and see if that site (blog in question) ranks when your city is set to that location.
The comment was for irldonalb, asking for more information about how it could be said that it wouldn't happen again.
Could you elaborate a bit on your opinion, or add a notation that this is sarcasm?
You might check out this other Q&A thread, as there have been recent changes to GA. http://www.seomoz.org/q/has-anyone-else-noticed-a-jump-in-google-analytics-traffic-since-session-parameters-were-changed
Hi Wayne,
Are you still looking for more information, or did the responses so far meet your needs? Let us know if you'd like more input, or mark this thread as answered. Thanks!
Hi Diane,
I haven't seen a response from you in this thread. Do you still need a hand, or is everything taken care of? Let us know so we can either look into it more, or mark this question as answered.
Thanks!
Hi Jeff,
If you could mark this question as answered and/or add a comment when you've found someone, that would be great. Thanks!
It's been a month or so since this was posted. Do you have any updates? Have your rankings changed? Did you figure out what might have happened? Anything for us to learn from or clues to try to help you more would be great.
Before you even ask them for what they want, see if they already tell you what they want. Search the website for information about guest posting and what they're looking for. You won't make points asking how to guest post when there's a post pointing everything out. Here's what Copyblogger looks for, for example. http://www.copyblogger.com/guest-post-guidelines/.
Can you list the page that used to rank? I'm asking because I do see some directories excluded in the robots.txt file. If the ranking page was in the folder that was added to the robots.txt file, that would be the very simple explanation. 
(though you do say it's "indexed almost daily" -- do you mean crawled almost daily, or what? kinda unclear on that point).
The search engine crawlers don't always get to all of the pages on your site at the exact time. The one page may get crawled more frequently than the other, so the other one may take a bit before it shows the updates. Google crawls the homepage of Amazon and eBay much more frequently than they would some obscure interior page, for example.
I'm not sure how they're better than any other link exchange. It's just a big link exchange network from the looks of it. I don't personally have any experience with it, but I don't see anything particularly wonderful about it.
Hi! We're wondering how your project is going, and if you made a decision and can share any results, or if you're sill looking for advice. Thanks!
I'd email help@seomoz.org with your account information and treat this as a bug report and see what they can figure out.
This YouMoz post about setting up complex advanced segments for brand names might give you some ideas. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/guide-to-setting-up-advanced-segments-in-google-analytics-for-complex-brand-names
That post focuses on how to look at just branded or just non-branded queries. You might find it useful to take a similar approach but instead of branded filter for keywords that include location, hours, etc.
Can you tell us the URL of the site in question? That can help us to help you, because we can look at the site and maybe spot something like an improper robots.txt or site architecture that makes it hard for a robot to crawl.
It looks like they used to be ARAcontent and recently changed their name. http://minnov8.com/2011/03/14/minnesota-brand-storyteller-changes-name-to-brandpoint/
I don't have any experience with them, but am including the above link and note in case people have experience with ARAcontent they can add, since the name change was just a few months ago.
The link can be helpful for other reasons though. My husband and I run a business about model warship combat -- RC battleships and other warships that shoot and sink each other. Very few people have heard of the hobby. There are a couple of people that have popular YouTube channels with videos, and they've added a link to our business site. The YouTube channel is great for exposure, and for getting qualified people to our website.
Here is how Graywolf (Michael Gray) sets up his categories and tags, it may also provide some insight. http://www.wolf-howl.com/blogs/how-to-use-tagging/
It was two a long time ago, but not recently. If you PM me the articles, I'll pass them along to the team and flag them for possible updating.
If you find that example again, email help@seomoz.org and let them know so they can either see if it's a bug or let you know why it's happening.
Don't forget to think about maintenance friendly and user friendly. It doesn't matter if you have the best SEO out there if people come to your site and the shopping cart software is so confusing they never order, or if the backend doesn't suit your needs.
I use Foxycart with Wordpress and the Thesis theme, and have outgrown it a bit but don't have the time to do an overhaul right now. For me, shipping is a big deal (an order can include a three foot long piece of balsa wood and 20 pounds of ball bearings in the same order). What may work for one person may not work for another, depending on their needs.
Can you give us a little information about how many products you have, and if you would like any advice about other features or just SEO?
My mistake, it's the Redirection plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/), not Redirect. I use it on my site, and use it to redirect incoming links from another domain that's blanket 301ing to my site, and it was never on wordpress. There's an easy way to look at the 404s to your site and set up a redirect from the 404 page (handy if someone did a typo on a URL to you, accidentally added a period to the hyperlink, etc.)
This sounds like it might be a bug. The best way to get an answer for this particular question is to email help@seomoz.org and they'll get back to you right away. There were some upgrades and changes made recently that could be the cause of this problem.
Advanced Segments can change prior data, which may be more helpful for the OP in this case.
For advanced segments, this post below can be helpful. It shows you where to go to create an advanced segment, and even includes an example of exactly what you are looking for (Non-Indian Visitors = Country/Territory Does not match exactly India). Advanced Segments are retroactive, and can be modified on the fly. The downside of advanced segments is that you sometimes can't combined them with other types of advanced segments.
http://www.markcregan.com/advanced-segments-in-google-analytics-examples/
It's suggested you do so with permission from the site owner, or make sure the content is not copyright. If you're just copying the contents of another site to your site, that's not OK. I believe there are any number of software plugins that will enable you to do this, but first step back and make sure that it's something that will add value and not just be duplicate content.
Hi! I see you haven't received any response here. If you're still having a problem, email help@seomoz.org as it sounds like it might be a bug. Thanks!
I don't know the answer on this one. If you don't get any responses in Public Q&A, consider using a Private Q&A credit to get an answer from an Associate. A bonus there is that it is private and not indexed, and you can share the URL if that helps you at all.
Not a direct answer to your question, but I personally use and like the Redirect plugin for Wordpress. Have you tried something like that? I'm not an htaccess expert, so can't help you out otherwise.
If the vanity URL is a brand new domain with no content, there shouldn't be any SEO value passed from the keywords in the URL in the scenario you describe.
Hi John,
I think you might be seeing a known bug in OSE about links coming from documents. I'm going to ask one of the Linkscape people to come in and comment, but these might not be real links.
Hi everyone,
I've been away from the internet for a bit, but from the SEOmoz twitter account stream it looks like this was a hardware problem last night that has been resolved in the past couple of hours. If you still have a problem accessing your campaign, send an email to help@seomoz.org. Thanks, and sorry for the troubles!
I don't know how frequently Google will index new links. For OSE, the linkscape release date was the 25th, but the crawl was done probably a couple of weeks before that. It takes some time to crawl, then some time to process those results.
I copied text from your site and pasted it into Google and searched. I found http://www.chesterhypnotherapy.com/ which has a lot of similar/copied content, as does http://emperortrainingsolutions.com/.
I'm not sure I understand your question John, and the second URL is a 404. Could you expand your question a bit? Thanks!
I don't have much else help to add to this question, but wondering how things are looking now, and if anything has changed in the past couple of weeks.
Agreed. You can change technology without changing URLs or having to do rewrites, which is a big benefit. Another benefit is that your URLs are shorter by four characters, making them a little easier to share.
And it's not allowed by Mechanical Turk, either.
https://www.mturk.com/mturk/help?helpPage=policies
<a name="#violation_examples">What are some specific examples of HITs that violate Amazon Mechanical Turk policies? [excerpted]</a>
Actually, since you have access to the site, you can leave the robots.txt at disallowed -- if you go into Google Webmaster Tools, verify your site, and request removal of your entire site. Let me know if you'd like a link on this with more information. This will involve adding an html file or meta tag to your site to verify you have ownership.
The domain authority has changed for many sites, though I'm not sure how much effect it's having on MozRank. Check out the answer from a linkscape engineer on this thread at http://www.seomoz.org/q/domain-authority-decrease-after-open-site-explorer-update-reasons. Let me know if that provides enough of an answer for you, or if you'd like me to research this more.
Pam Lund has a good post on the Blueglass blog about PPC optimization in under 30 minutes a week. It's aimed at helping make sure you don't throw money out the window, even if you don't have a lot of time to work with PPC. Her post is at http://www.blueglass.com/blog/ppc-optimization-in-under-30-minutes-a-week/. Be sure to check out some of her other posts on that blog as well, she's a great writer about PPC.
Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable reported seeing this in April of this year at http://www.seroundtable.com/google-sitelinks-jumbo-13324.html. I think I've seen them on occasion, but not often.
Looks like they're being real selective at this early stage. http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/05/comparison-ads-now-part-of-new-google.html "At this time, AdWords Comparison Ads remains available only to a limited number of advertisers. Over time, we hope to increase the availability of Comparison Ads to additional advertisers. You can find more information about AdWords Comparison Ads in our Help Center."
I can't find anything more specific than that. Barry at Search Engine Roundtable keeps a close eye on things like this, and would be one to blog about it when it's opened up for more people.
Hi Diane,
I'm in Seattle, and I see 135 pages indexed when I run the query http://www.google.com/search?q=site:clairehegarty.co.uk. When I put in long phrases from your site, I do see pages coming up in Google for your content (though it appears you have some duplicated content on another site).
Have you checked Google Webmaster Tools for any notices from Google? Have you made any changes to your site lately?
Linkscape is updated about every four weeks (rather than the more frequent crawl of Google), so it can take a bit longer to show up in OSE. You can check the release dates for the Linkscape crawl at http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/w/page/25141119/Linkscape-Schedule. It might take a couple of cycles to show up in OSE, and keep in mind that Linkscape only crawls about 1/4 of the web that is out there.