Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Will this be on your own blog (as in you are writing a post on your blog), or are you trying to get links from other blogs by leaving comments? If you are trying to get links from other blogs by leaving comments, be aware that many of them will not allow you to put in links, or the links will have a "nofollow" attribute that tells the search engine "don't trust this link".

Here is how to create a link in plain html http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_links.asp. Often you will see a hyperlink icon that looks like three links in a chain. You highlight the anchor text, then click that icon, then enter your URL.

This is more of a question for the help desk. Email them at help@seomoz.org with your login name and this question and they'll get back to you real soon. Thanks for using SEOmoz!

Hi Jake! This sounds more like a question for the help desk as it may be a bug. Email them at help@semoz.org with this question, and they'll get back to you.

I need to dig up threads, but you're not alone on this. I've seen mention of it here and I believe on Search Engine Roundtable. I'll come back with references in a bit.

Yahoo would be giving much more help than Hotbot in this case.

Have you read Rand's recent post about the SERP Analysis tool? That may help you in looking at you and your competitor and finding out reasons the competitor is ahead of you. It's at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-best-kept-secret-in-the-seomoz-toolset

The part you asked about is great. I do notice some other URL issues you might want to take care of. The home link goes to http://www.highstreetvouchers.com/gift-vouchers/index (note the index at the end), so you have a duplicate there. Your special occasions link has a .jsp at the end, where most of your URLs don't have the .jsp. I do see some pages that are duplicates and show both with and without the .jsp.

On the dmoz site, they state a couple of weeks to several months, but that page was last listed as updated in 2004 (http://www.dmoz.org/add.html). A high-level user in the Google Webmaster Help forums had this answer  earlier in 2011:

"DMOZ produce an updated rdf file every month for downstream users to update their directories. There is no pattern to when Google does this.  At times they have done it monthly; recently they went over 9-10 months before they updated. Your guess is as good as mine as to when it next happens." (http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=52726d7f6beba62c&hl=en)

So, best answer that I know of, based on what I've seen on other threads here in Q&A and on the web, is it'll take a while. It'd be great if you updated this thread when you do make it in the directory so we have an idea of the current timeline.

Can you share with us the topic of this content, or how tech savvy the users may be? If the metered content is about PPC best practices, then you're going to have an audience who certainly knows how to delete their cookies. If your content is for people who flew airplanes in World War II, you'll have a much lower percentage of people hacking their cookies to get to your content.

I haven't done this myself, so I'm unfortunately not able to offer you any advice other than to consider how tech-savvy your customers may be.

If it's the topic you've talked about before, I know nothing about that, so I would not be the one to write about it. For ecommerce, check out Rob Snell. His site is at http://www.robsnell.com/, and I've seen him speak at Pubcon, and listened to him on an interview at Webmaster Radio (probably in their ecommerce experts show). He talks about how he gets content for his brother's product pages. IIRC, he sits down with a tape recorder and has his brother tell him all about why you would want this particular product for your hunting dog, what makes it great, what are some of the questions that they get on the phone all the time, and then goes and writes all that up for the site.

Do you mean a paid directory listing, or getting your site included there, or what? I don't know that anyone uses it these days. Just glanced at the last 30 days of traffic for a site with 45k visitors for that time period, and there wasn't one referral from hotbot.

Hi Brian,

Did the PPC landing page gain any links? Were there any other changes made to the structure of the site?

Rand did a post about a year ago regarding several reasons why you may have the wrong page in the results. Do any of those reasons seem to fit?

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions

Hi Al, I've asked the help team to come over and respond to your question, in case others are having the same issue everyone will know the answer. They should respond here in a day or so.

If you don't know the type of redirect, you can use a server header checker (search that via Google) and put in your home page. The tool will tell you the type of redirect. Or, you can share your URL here and we'll take a look at it for you.

Product reviews are a great source of content. If you're not the manufacturer, rewrite the description and enhance what the manufacturer provided. Make your product page the ultimate source of information on that particular product.

Why would I choose this product over another one? What's the best use for this particular product? What type of people use it? Is it for beginners or for advanced people? What is the product made of? Is it made in the USA? Has it won awards? etc. etc. etc. All the stuff that's a lot easier to sit here and write about doing than actually taking the time to sit down and do (which is why there are product pages on my site that are nearly empty ).

Ryan is correct. The help desk staff is busy responding to questions from the help desk. It's a small percentage of the questions in Q&A that are related to the SEOmoz software, so it makes less sense for them to spend time over here instead of in the help desk.

Do send a request to the help desk (as easy as emailing help@seomoz.org) and if you want you can tell us where what they've said.

Thanks so much!

I'm with Marc on this one. Why do you need 100 articles? I would rather have one or two great articles than 100 spun, crappy ones.

It often seems that neither the software nor the human using the software recognize idioms or commons phrases, nor distinguish between nouns and verbs. I've seen "Think before you beverage" and "thank deity that I didn't crash". It sticks out like a sore thumb, and makes the reader question all of your other content when they see something like that.

When I go to http://search-engine-upgrade.com/default.asp it's not removing the default.asp or rewriting to add the www, just wanted to let you know as you might want to double check the htaccess.

What about removing the unneeded columns while you have it in the spreadsheet, then save as html? You can then open that up in the browser and everything is hyperlinked. Or dump it into Word then save that as html.

This will be about the only time in my life I ever recommend using Word to save as html, but it should do for your purposes here.

Hi Anthony,

I've asked the help desk to come in and comment on this when they have a chance. I've also copied another Q&A here that may help you until they can come in and add any updates. This is from the help desk, in a response to a question about UTF-8 input for Juicy Link Finder.

http://www.seomoz.org/q/juicy-link-finder-doesn-t-support-hebrew-utf8-input

Hi Kevin

I feel like I've got to be honest with you. It's an old tool and we're not very proud of it anymore. It doesn't take advantage of our awesome web index, or all the cool analysis we've done around powerful links. We're working instead to replace it with more powerful link tools. Our newer tools are built to support Unicode, but most of our older ones don't. Sorry about that!

For example, I think you'd be much better off trying our Competitive Link Research Tool (it's in Labs and therefore sometimes gets overloaded, but it's so cool when it works!), or even running your competitors through Open Site Explorer.

www.seomoz.org/labs/link-intersect
www.opensiteexplorer.org

The bottom line is that Juicy Link Finder is unstable and doesn't support Unicode (because we're deprecating it in favor of new technologies), and it doesn't give you very sophisticated results.

Hi Justin,

SEOmoz aims to update the API and Linkscape every month. The most recent update has had a two-week delay, and is now due out on Wednesday, July 20th. The update calendar is available at http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/w/page/25141119/Linkscape-Schedule.

If it's a new link, it's not going to show up in OpenSiteExplorer just yet, because OSE crawls about once a month. The new crawl data is coming out next week I believe, but the crawl may have been already made before your link was in place, so you may need to wait until August to see that link.

Maybe ask on Twitter with the hastag #mozcon if anyone is looking for a roommate to cut costs? I've done that for some conferences and made some great friends as well as saved money. I've either known the person in advance, or had multiple other people that I've known vouch for them.

I stayed at the Mayflower Park Hotel for SMX Advanced for $180 a night plus tax, and had a great stay. http://www.mayflowerpark.com/

I remember talking with an SEO copywriter who gave an example of a loan company that wasn't allowed to use "bad credit" as part of their advertising, yet it still drew a lot of keywords. The copywriter would write text like "Have other companies told you that you have bad credit?"

I also like the idea about writing articles. You could do something about the history of the term, or myths associated with that term. Another idea might be any quotes from patients or families that could include "I didn't want to go to a nursing home when I got old, I'm so glad my family found Blue Hair Acres for me instead."

Remember you can try to work your phrase in across two sentences. "So and so has a degree in nursing. Home-like care is a goal" (cheesy, but it shows what I'm talking about).

I'm glad you'll be joining us dmac!

Ryan, I've now gotten a couple of weird looks here in the library as I giggled at my computer.

If you haven't asked a question in private Q&A yet this month, you can ask there and share your URL, as that is private and available to only SEOmoz staff and associates.

Have you gone into GWT and requested removal of the site? If you verify the site, and then have the site/directory blocked via robots.txt, you can use the removal tool to request removal rather than waiting for things to drop out of the index.

Is this a package you're buying from someone, or something you're doing internally? It could be great, or a great failure, IMHO.

If you have 12 awesome articles produced each month, and you find 200 blog posts each month that are high-quality and relevant and you craft relevant, unique comments on each one, that's a real good start. If you get someone else to write 12 blog articles, run those through a content spinner so they get to be 24 different articles, and then put that on article directories and auto-submit spam to a list of do follow blogs that make the bloggers consider turning off comments on their blog, you're better having done nothing.

A quick note that if you're not logged into SEOmoz when you visit the home page you'll find two areas with H1 tags.

I don't have any insider knowledge of why SEOmoz chose Wistia, but there is some information in this post about the Top 10 Web Apps We Love. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/top-10-web-apps-we-love

Wistia is video hosting on steroids. Not only does this video hosting platform support HTML5, which makes your videos viewable on a slew of non-Flash enabled devices, but the platform is inherently designed for SEO.  Try searching Google for "Top 10 Web Apps We Love" and you'll likely see the above Wistia-hosted video that's included with this blog post. Their tracking and analytics are also the best we've seen in video hosting.  See a sample report here.

Thanks for sharing! If this is something you've implemented successfully and you can build upon those other two posts, it would make for something interesting to submit to YOUmoz for sure! In fact, something saying "here's what I've done" with a case study fits better in YOUmoz than it does in a question and answer forum. One question I can see people may have that you'd want to address is does it help the bottom line? Are your followers interacting with you? Is everything (Twitter, FB, LinkedIn, etc.) just a copy of what's on the blog, as it appears on the second link? YOUmoz readers will want to know real value and they'll go beyond just the follower count.

This is an oddball one! Have you yourself typed the phrase into Google to see if you can get any hints? Like maybe something where there was a trivia contest? Have there been any other searches that were similar but not quite exact to this search?

Do all of the searches come from the same city, and perhaps the same exact revision of Java or Flash? That might indicate they were coming from the same computer, and the same person kept typing the same query. I see that on one forum I run. The query won't be super-long, but it'll be the same query from the same city and the same software revisions on the browser each time.

Hi Julian,

Ryan's correct. Please email help@seomoz.org with this and include your username, and they'll get back to you right away.

Thanks!

Keri Morgret
SEOmoz Associate

An overlooked use for directory structure is for your analytics. Lunametrics has a great post that will get you thinking about this over at http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2010/09/22/designing-google-analytics-friendly-site/.

Building on what Ryan said, the PageRank reported in the toolbar is updated infrequently -- this last time it was six months since the previous update. Matt Cutts has said they don't worry about making sure what is pushed out to the toolbar is a perfect representation of the true PR of that page, either. And, the data you're looking at in the toolbar is already a few weeks old by the time it's pushed.

So, has anything important to your metrics changed? What does your organic traffic from Google look like for the past six months? Has that changed?

For the directories, I'm betting Ryan took your site and put it into Open Site Explorer, and spotted things like the General Garden Web directory. I also spotted links from similar sites that all have the same type of formatting and look and feel -- you might have a bit of a duplicate content problem going on as well. I see mortgagecalculatorcanada.com and canadianmortgagecalculators.net that look like they're virtually the same site.

Have you read Google's blog post about high-quality content and sites? http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html

Just in case some people aren't familiar with Google's recent post about high quality sites, I'll throw that into the mix. I've edited the list, and selected things that focus more on an individual article than the site itself.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html

• Would you trust the information presented in this article?
• Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
• Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
• Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
• Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
• Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
• How much quality control is done on content?
• Does the article describe both sides of a story?
• Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
• Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
• Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
• Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
• Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
• Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
• Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?
• Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?

Your SEOmoz profile has a link to your Twitter page, which is quite clear about your niche.

Hi Eric,

I'm so sorry you haven't gotten an answer by now, I'm not sure how this slipped by everyone. In my understanding, yes, it would be like moving to a new domain.

If you're still in need of an answer, go ahead and create a new question and I'm sure you'll get commentary (and I'll go ahead and close this question if you do so).

Are you using a content management system at all? There might be an export feature in there you can use for getting a list of your current pages. You can also use something like Xenu Link Sleuth to spider your current site. If you've already moved pages, keep a close eye in Google Webmaster Tools and the SEOmoz tools for 404s, and redirect those as you find them.

If you're using Wordpress, I like the Redirection plugin because I can create redirects from the list of 404s that it has and fix pages that way.

Have you looked at the Wikipedia article that is a list of search engines, broken out by categories and countries?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines

Are you running MoveableType by chance? I see something about entrylink in their documentation. http://www.movabletype.org/documentation/appendices/tags/entrylink.html

Also, look at your source code and see if you can find anything creating and appending entrylink to your URLs (do a control-F for find when you're in the code, and look for entrylink).

Remember, SEO isn't everything. You can send all the right signals to the search engines to get people there, but you need to have the page optimized for converting the user to do your desired action. So a site may be well optimized for search engines, but it might not necessarily do your business any good.

No answers for you at the moment, but a couple of more questions.

1. Is there anything at all similar happening in Yahoo/Bing, or has their traffic been normal this whole time?

2. Have you checked Google Webmaster Tools for any notices from Google about possible penalties or hacking of your site?

3. Anyone in the company tried to "help" by buying links?

4. Any downtime with servers?

Hi Juan,

This is a question best answered in a help desk ticket. The easiest way to contact them is to copy and paste this post and put it (along with your username) in an email to help@seomoz.org.

Thanks!

How long has the robots.txt file been in place? If you added it just a few days ago, it takes time for things to get out of the index. Other thoughts are looking at the source code of the pages on the mobile site -- is there a robots parameter on the page that is overriding robots.txt?

Have you gone into GWT and used the robots verification tool there to make sure nothing was amiss?

If you can give us your URL, the community can take a look and see if they can figure anything out.

Your question also makes me realize that we don't have an area for ecommerce. It may be a bit before the categories are changed, but I will suggest both ecommerce and shopping as possible categories when that time comes.

Hi! I've asked for another associate with more Panda experience than I to come in and comment on this question.

Byork, knowing a little more about your trailing slash issue could help out. Do you have trailing slash redirects in place for all of your pages? Were they put in at a particular time, where you might be able to look at data from just after that date?

If the trailing slashes are in place correctly and always have been, and it's just some weird artifact of GA that is causing these pages to show up with 0 visits, can you ignore those pages that don't have the trailing slash and focus just on the metrics for those with the trailing slash?

The best solution is to do a 301 redirect to your preferred URL (likely the one without the index.html). That way people never see the index.html URL, never link to it, and all the juice goes to the other URL.

To be able to give you instructions for this, it's best if you can tell us what type of server you are on (such as IIS or Apache), or if you can give us the URL we can figure it out from that.

If you're not able to do a redirect, the canonical tag is the second best choice. Users will remain on the /index.html page, but at least Google then knows that it's the same page as /,

Hi! Since several of you had this question, I'm asking the help desk to come over here and give an answer so it can be on file. You should hear from them soon. Thanks for letting us know of this, and sorry for any confusion!

Is your site verified in Google Webmaster Tools, and Bing's Webmaster Tools? If not, get it verified, then look at your account. There's a wealth of information there, including any notices from the search engines about anything they find that might be suspect (Google now even sends a note for buying/selling links), and you can get some better statistics about your site when it's verified.

I would first look in your webmaster tools, and see if the engines have flagged anything for you. If so, then you know what to work on first.

Second, step back and think about what purpose your website has for your business, is it meeting that purpose, and what are useful metrics for you.

In May, Matt Cutts did a video response to a person asking why toolbar PR isn't updated more frequently (available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZ9pFUSVG9g) and mentioned that while they internally keep a close eye on correct PR, they're not as worried about what shows up in the toolbar. They have some flags if something with super-high PR goes down to super-low PR in the toolbar, but a move from 4 to 3 doesn't fall under that.

So, it's probably good to be thinking about your site, but think beyond the toolbar PR.