Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thank you, Joshua. Just to clarify this is not the initial crawl (that happened a couple of weeks ago). This is the third week for me. I am pretty sure the first two were way quicker than this,

Thanks again.

Mark

Mine started yesterday afternoon and it's now almost 11pm on Sunday. 30+ hours and still not finished (and no progress indicator). 438 pages quoted as being crawled. That's not normal - right?

I have made a bunch of changes based on last weeks crawl so I have been eagerly waiting for this to finish But 30 hours?....

Thanks.

Mark

Thank you, Kate. Yes - that's exactly what I was after. A good, thorough explanation of the challenges involved and a response we can all use, not just the original poster of the thread. Thanks again - much appreciated.

Mark

Thank you for the response. But doesn't that rather downplay the overall value of SEOMoz?

Another example - beyond keywords rankings - are the crawl diagnostics. SEOMoz did a great job of highlighting some issues with my site and I've been tackling them iteratively However, it's really irritating to have the "beat a deadline" to make any changes by a Saturday - and if I miss it have to wait two weeks to see the results.

I am not sure just switching to another service is the answer I'd to see a more responsive SEOMoz service.

Thanks.

Really quite disappointed with the response to this thread: http://www.seomoz.org/q/possible-to-force-the-seomoz-ranking-report-to-update

Three of us expressed an interest in this but the response was for (only) the original poster to create a ticket and the question was closed to any further discussion.

Might I request that SEOMoz folks read the thread? There is a general question and three of us have requested some feedback. It is very clear that more than one person is interested in the answer Just asking one of those individuals to open a ticket and get a response for himself doesn't seem very customer-centric (well, beyond that first customer).

I'd really appreciate an open and public discussion as to whether SEOMoz can support updates more than once a week and, if not now, whether it intends to in the future.

Thanks.

Mark

I a kind of guessing that this is something of a FAQ but as a trial user right now this is one of the more frustrating elements of SEOMoz. Like you, we just added a bunch of keywords (80+) and it's pretty frustrating to wait a week before we can see any form of results.

Similarly for the crawl diagnostics. SEOMoz did a good job of identifying a bunch of issues and we've made changes but having to wait a week to verify things are fixed seems a great shame.

Thanks.

Mark

Thank you, Ryan (and Malachi). Strangely, I thought I had the redirect for non-www pages in place and I am not sure how that got broken. I do have the preference setting in Google configured. Anyway, I've fixed that and I really appreciate you checking this out.

I will investigate the traffic loss further. It's encouraging to know that my logic is sound here though.

Thanks again.

Mark

Thank you Ryan. I believe the 301's are just fine - I have used a utility to verify this and I correctly see them flagged as being redirected through 301. So, assuming that is good....

Can you clarify a little how I would verify if I am losing link juice? I am indeed in a compeitive industry (wedding planning).

Here is an example of an article that gets us a good number of visitors but which has fallen by 40% or so since we implemented the redirect (as compared to the .aspx traffic we received before).

http://www.wednet.com/wedding-gifts/wedding-articles/engagement-party-ideas

Before I implemented the 301's I had three versions of this page. The .aspx version was the "heavy hitter" in terms of visitors, with the non-.aspx and lower-and-uppercase versions very low. However, the .aspx version had a much higher readership than I am now achieving with just the URL above. Having implemenrted the redirect, the other two URLs are now "dormant" as expecetd (no traffic at all being logged, due to the 301's directing to the URL above).

So, pretty confused.

Thanks again.

Mark

I recently identified an issue with our site whereby we had three different URL types for each article. As an example, we might have something like:

• /articles/my-article-name
• /articles/my-article-name.aspx
• /articles/My-Article-Name

We've since taken action to address this by implement 301 redirects from the second and third formats to the first (so everything is without the .aspx extension and is in lower case). But the results have been disconcerting.

Before the change, one of our articles receives 150 or so hits per day via the .aspx version. The other two existed but had very low traffic (1-3 per day). We decided the non .aspx and lowercase version was the version we wanted. Sure enough, when we introduced the 301 redirects on September 25th the traffic for the .aspx version just stopped (after a day) and the traffic for the non-.aspx version climbed. But not enough.

After the change, the non-.aspx version is receiving about 60-70% of the traffic that we used to have on the .aspx version. So, instead of receiving 150 per day (to the .aspx version) we are receiving around 100 or so to the non-.aspx version.

This pattern has occured across all our articles and, as a result, our site-wide traffic has dropped by about 40% or so.

Since we are using 301 redirects I had assumed that the search engines would just update to reflect the non-.aspx version.

I am sure I am missing something here. Any help would be most appreciated.

Thanks.

Mark

Thank you. Yes, that's pretty much the plan I am executing now. Right now I'm struggling to get this working with the URL rewriting module in IIS 7 but I am sure it's possible.

Thanks again.

Mark

Thank you, Alan. I want to make sure I understand this.

I have full control of my DNS zone entries. I currently link a CNAME record for blog to the <myblog>.wordpress.com. My hope is that I could:</myblog>

• Update the DNS entry to point to my own server (so, blog.<mydomain>.com would just be directed to that machine)</mydomain>
• Implement some sort of server-side redirect that translates the old format to the new format.

This way I have no reason to keep WordPress.com in the picture (with the redirection service) - I basically just create new links to www.<mydomain>.com</mydomain> and have all old links redirected as above.

Would that not work?

Thanks again.

This is more of a technical question than pure SEO per se, but I am guessing that some folks here may have covered this and so I would appreciate any questions.

I am moving from a WordPress.com-based blog (hosted on WordPress) to a WordPress installation on my own server (as suggested by folks in another thread here).

As part of this I want to move from the format blog.<mydomain>.com to www.mydomain.com\blog. I have installed WordPress on my server and have imported posts from the hosted site to my own server.

How should I manage the transition from first format to the second? I have a bunch of links on Facebook, etc that refer to URLs of the blog..com format so it's important that I redirect.</mydomain>

I am running DotNetNuke/WordPress on my own IIS/ASP.Net servers.

Thanks.

Mark

OK, it looks like I will have to bite the bullet and host WordPress Looking at that now but a few more SEO-related questions...

With WordPress.com I set up the domain feature such that my blog was at http://blog.<mysite>.com</mysite>. The default installation for WordPress (if I host it) seems to be http://www.<mysite>.com\blog</mysite>. Are there any specific SEO-related drawbacks to using the second format? I have no idea how easy it is to modify the installation to support the first format but I am happy to switch to the second if there are no drawbacks.

Also, given that Google, etc has crawled against my WordPress.com blog (so, the first format above) would you anticipate a penalty in switching from the first format to the second? Would this not show up as (yet another) duplicate content hit and, if so, how long would this typically take to work itself out  (once the first format above is no longer available)?

Thanks again.

Mark

Thank you for the response. Yes, that is pretty much the way I've been thinking about this but...

• The perfectionist in me wants to "get to zero". This may not be possible or even necessary but converging on that is something I'd like to consider.
• More importantly, if I accept these issues - and maybe I have no choice - then I have a TON of noise and it's difficult to see the important stuff. So, to my surprise, I have THOUSANDS of errors and warnings. If new ones come up they migh be very important - but if all my "accepted" warnings are still there I may well miss them.

If I come to the conclusion that these issue for WordPress are non-factors (and I am not there yet) then it would be good to be able to "hide" these from the dashboard so that the remaining, hopefully actionable, ones are not hidden in the noise.

Thanks,

Mark

I am in my 30 day trial and very interested in my results. I think I am probably in a small minority in having the same web site up and running for approaching 17 years (registered in January 1995 :)) but only now am I looking at SEO seriously (to the extent that I want to learn more myself, as opposed to having others promise great fortune!)). Anyway, before committing to SEOMoz on an ongoing basis I want to understand just how actionable the information on my dashboard is. With that in mind, here's the first of what is (hopefully) a series questions that about low-hanging fruit I might be able to check off quickly.

I recently brought up a new blog on WordPress.com (note - hosted by WordPress, not a self-hosted implementation). I have had this blog running for less than a month and have just 18 posts. And I am being overwhelmed with thoudands of errors/warnings from SEOMoz. These fall into a few categories:

• Duplicate content: As I understand it, each TAG I associate with a single blog post creates a unique URL. For example, if I have a single post with tags for "flowers", "wine" and "cakes", I get URLs generated such as <blog url="">/flowers, <blog url="">/wines and <blog url="">/cakes. Obviously, tagging posts is a common scenario. Must I just accept these duplicate content warnings?</blog></blog></blog>
• Title element too long: These are self generated by WordPress.com and the default format includes the date the post was submitted (which takes a bunch of characters followed by the title used). Many of the posts are well over 70 and this seems really easy to do.
• Missing meta-description: As far as I can tell, Wordpress.com doesn't give me an option to specify these.

So, must I just accept these issues if I use WordPress.com (which, again, seems like a very common scenario) and how negative is this to me?

Thanks.

Mark