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I don't know if it is harming your rankings, but it looks like you've got two or three meta description and keyword tags on most of your pages, including your home page. Probably an easy fix worth doing using your site's CMS or template files to remove any unnecessary meta tags. Didn't really see anything else that stood out.

New year, same old problems...

Thanks for the heads up though. I don't think any of us actually thought the index would be released on time anyway, but it's good to know ahead of time there's going to be a delay. Hopefully the issues get sorted out before the 29th. You guys are going to run out of excuses here soon! J/K

I thought this thread was in reference to the MOZ Open Site Explorer index update that was originally scheduled for the 2nd, then got pushed to the 9th (I believe), and currently says updated on the 14th. I was looking at the category where this was posted. Was there supposed to be a big update from Google on the 14th too?

It says the data was updated on Dec 14th, but I don't see any changes for sites I'm tracking. However, I think they only pushed back the release date of the index two weeks this time, which, if you're looking for something positive, is an improvement. I think I'm going to start taking bets on how many times they push back the release date. I'd be willing to bet at least two times next month. My guess, next month's excuse is that the dog ate my computer. Hey, it worked for me in grade school too!

Matt,

Thank you for taking a look at my site. I really appreciate the feedback.

I had noticed the search results with parameter tags being indexed as well. I tried limiting Google's crawler to non-parameter pages about 8 months ago, but didn't seem to do much. I was afraid one of my settings was messing things up so I deleted it and selected let GoogleBot decide for all of them. Not sure why the paginated pages are being indexed too. I thought I'd read where the paginate tag was similar to the canonical tag and Google would treat it as a signal not to index. I would think if GoogleBot can crawl and index the paginated search pages, it could also crawl the listing results on all those pages. I do have a large portion of listing pages on my site no-indexed since they don't fall within my service area and I used to get a ton of calls about them. Maybe that is causing issues for all the listing results pages to not be indexed.

In regards to Screaming Frog, which settings did you use? I use the preset user agent GoogleBot Regular and have thousands of pages that it crawls. Wish I could replicate your scan to see what might be holding things up.

Regarding the Wistia sitemap, I put it in the robots.txt file to try and get the videos embedded on my site indexed. I didn't realize this was hurting more than helping.

Thanks again for your feedback and taking the time to review my site.

Sorry, I was checking the site listed in your profile. However, I checked http://www.quercusliving.co.uk and it took even longer to load. Actually timed out at 60 seconds on Pingdom.

I've been working on creating content and optimizing my website for the past 18 months, and have seen decent gains in organic traffic. Recently my keyword ranking increases have slowed dramatically, despite adding additional content. I'm hoping a fresh set of eyes can spot something that may be holding me back. I appreciate any feedback the MOZ community is able to provide.

One area of concern/confusion is the number of pages indexed according to GSC. The number tends to go up and down, and I can't figure out why. Of the roughly 8,000 pages that are submitted through the sitemap, it says only around 1,100 are indexed (sitemap page). The index status page says I've got 7,500 pages indexed. Kind of confused on that one.

Anyway, my website is MetroAtlantaHome dot com. Thanks everyone!

Your site took a very long time to load the homepage, definitely something to check. Seemed like it was the load time for all the images that was slowing it down. Try testing your site with http://tools.pingdom.com to see where the problem might be. I'd start there.

Btw, Open Site Explorer shows less than 20% of the backlinks to my site as well. The MOZ index is much smaller than Google's index, plus it hasn't updated in a few months, so any recent links will not show anyway.

It happens almost every time they set a date to release an Index Update. Usually they just push it back a week or two, then do it again, finally releasing the updates weeks after it was initially scheduled. This time they took a different approach and cancelled it all together.

I love MOZ for keyword rank tracking, keyword difficulty, etc, but have almost given up on their Indexes. There seems to be no consistency with the bank link data from one index to the next anyway, so you're really only able to measure relative changes in backlink profiles against competitors. Getting index updates when they're scheduled seems to be a rare occurrence these days, so you may want to get used to not getting data when expected, and I highly doubt there will be any compensation.

I understand we are talking about huge amounts of data... a huge undertaking that can't be easy. My advice to MOZ on the index updates, under promise and over deliver, not the other way around. Just tell us the next Index Update will be in two months, then release it in a month and a half (or on time) and everyone will be happy you came out with it early. Much better than stringing everyone along with expectations of an update then hearing another excuse the day after the update is cancelled/postponed.

Hopefully they can get this figured out and prevent future issues with index updates and customer frustration with this part of the product.

Thank you for the responses. I figured it can't be a good thing, but they made it sound like it wasn't impacting user experience because the switch to the available nameserver was immediate. It still seems to me that if Google Search Console is flagging 503/4 errors daily, as well as Bing WMT, there may be an issue. If it were only Bing, Google or MOZ I wouldn't be as concerned. Heck, I even ran a ScreamingFrog scan last night and got a handful of 504 errors. Going to be reaching out to them today to see about a fix. Thanks for your replies.

The Mozscape Index update yesterday includes even fewer urls, root domains, subdomains and total links than the previous Index from May 5th. You can compare the size of the Indexes on the Mozscape API Updates page. Most likely, you've built additional quality/relevant links as you have mentioned, but with the smaller Index these new links, and even previously indexed links, are not being picked up. Therefore, less links are being used to calculate your domain authority score. I would say the drop in your Domain Authority is due to the size of the index. Try checking out your competitor's sites to see if their domain authority dropped as well. I know mine went down slightly yesterday. You don't have anything to worry about, just keep earning quality links. I know it is tough to see your domain authority drop when you work hard to earn/build links, but the data used from one Index to the next has not been consistent, so don't worry too much about the increase/drop in domain authority from one index release to the next. If anything, track your domain authority over time and compare it to the size of the index to get a better idea of how your link building is performing. Unfortunately, that is the best answer I can give at this time.

New year, same old problems...

Thanks for the heads up though. I don't think any of us actually thought the index would be released on time anyway, but it's good to know ahead of time there's going to be a delay. Hopefully the issues get sorted out before the 29th. You guys are going to run out of excuses here soon! J/K

I don't know if it is harming your rankings, but it looks like you've got two or three meta description and keyword tags on most of your pages, including your home page. Probably an easy fix worth doing using your site's CMS or template files to remove any unnecessary meta tags. Didn't really see anything else that stood out.

These options allow you to view backlink results from a single page level up to the entire domain level.

If you only want to see what backlinks OSE has for a specific page on your site, select "This Page"
ex: (yourdomain.com/single-page.html)

If you only want to see what backlinks OSE has for an entire subdomain on your site, select "This Subdomain"
ex: (**blog.**yourdomain.com)

If you want to see what backlinks OSE has for any page on your entire site, select "Root Domain"
ex: (yourdomain.com*)

Hope this helps.

I don't know if it is the reason but I noticed the sites that showed up as backlinks to my site after yesterday's update were much different than those from before the update. After the update my site showed fewer backlinks but my domain authority actually went up. It's possible the Mozscape index crawler visited different sites than it did previously and fewer/lower Domain Authority links were discovered for your site. Either that or your site lost some quality links since the last update.

Have you been monitoring your links with other tools? That could help determine if it's a loss of links or just different links being used to calculate your DA. Either way that seems like a big drop in DA.

It sounds like you may be better off targeting the long tail keywords that pertain to your online store. If you're looking at putting together a "complete guide to main keyword" and it's going to take you a few years, imagine where your already strong competition will be by then. Seems to me that writing shorter articles on a regular basis about the subkeywords would be more effective, especially if those keywords are not near as competitive. If topics are hard to come by, that means there should be less competition and you've got a chance to create unique content that provides value to your customers. Does your store have a blog? Would hate to see you put all your eggs into one keyword basket so to speak, and nothing happens.

It appears to be some issues with the Moz rankings tracker, although it hasn't been confirmed. It has happened on my site and I noticed another thread earlier where someone was having the same issue. Not 100% sure this is the case based on the screen shot you provided but since others are seeing similar issues I would say it's not an issue with your site.

http://moz.com/community/q/is-anyone-seeing-consistent-fluctuation-in-geolocated-search-rankings

Thanks for the information. I don't know how to and don't think I have access to change those settings on my sitemap with my current website provider. I'll send this information to them and see if they know what the problem is. Google seems to update daily, so there must be a setting that Bing doesn't like.

It says the data was updated on Dec 14th, but I don't see any changes for sites I'm tracking. However, I think they only pushed back the release date of the index two weeks this time, which, if you're looking for something positive, is an improvement. I think I'm going to start taking bets on how many times they push back the release date. I'd be willing to bet at least two times next month. My guess, next month's excuse is that the dog ate my computer. Hey, it worked for me in grade school too!

I seem to have the same issue on my site. I get a sudden influx of visitors within minutes all coming from direct traffic. How did you discover the traffic was from Miami? The only identifying factor I could find in GA was that the Network Domain for the traffic was 1e100.net. Not sure how sending direct traffic would benefit a spammer.

Have you experienced an overall drop in traffic on days you get the huge spike in direct traffic? I feel like I do, maybe the high bounce rate is a problem and signal to Google?

Would be nice to block the traffic but possibly just filter it from GA to avoid skewed data if it is not affecting your site.