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You're welcome. I hope that the numbers are large!
The section should be there anyway - even before you link (just without data). It is now called "publisher" and can be found under behaviour.
Hi again!
Despite how much people say SEO is changing, I'm not sure I would change my answer much from the one I gave just under 3 years ago. Let me update one statement at a time:
I don't think that there are many categories where the traffic sent warrants $299/year any more. In fact I would say that in most cases the referral traffic from a Yahoo directory listing is close to zero.
The above is still true, but even more so now. Do you get any traffic from it?
As you say though, it has a lot of authority. It is also well established, tightly curated and is certainly known by those building engines. Therefore inclusion could at least been seen as a check that the site is not utter tripe. However, logically at least, a link in their directory shouldn't lend much more weight than that.
Any value on this front has probably diminished even further. If it was seen as a special case that highlighted quality sites, I don't think that would be the case any more. The overall quality has diminished, great sites don't bother listing any more and Google has had another 3 years to work that out.
I have not seen a measurable result from either adding or removing a site from the directory in recent years. It may well bring benefit as part of a bigger picture, who other than Google can really say?
No change there. I probably haven't added a site to Yahoo directory since then though.
However I wouldn't expect to see an increase from adding your site - even factoring in the additional links from directories who use it as a seed.
People aren't really creating directories like that any more, and if they did then links from them would likely be more damaging than helpful. I can't imagine that anyone would use the Yahoo directory as a seed for a quality site any more anyway.
It's worth mentioning that it is technically a different directory now, but I still don't think it is worth it. Wouldn't you have rather spent that last $900 on something more tangible?
Links are essential to ranking in competitive areas, yes.
If people do not want to link to your current content and you need links then you need to be thinking about what content you can add to your site that relevant sites will want to link to. A salary survey of Cisco engineers, maps of world-wide demand and the like could be really interesting and valuable.
I think that there is a slightly bigger question here. Rather than "How can I stop Moz flagging these up as duplicate?" you might want to ask "Are these duplicate pages harming me".
Thin pages, particularly those ranking on desirable terms, are something I try hard to avoid. They send pretty poor quality signals to Google and create poor user experience signals as well. If there is a term that I want to rank for I would ensure that pages are strong enough to deserve ranking before letting them get indexed.
It can be painful to deindex a page that ranks. However if those pages are giving off bad signals that could be your best chance of long term ranking success.
A compromise might be to fill them out in the mean time. How effective this might be will really depend on your niche and your website. Lots of stores do this by just adding a load of low value text to the page, but a better approach is to try to put something useful there until the products arrive. Do this right and you could even be building links into those pages before the products arrive.
One example of this that I have done in the past is to build out a great coming soon page that featured a competition to win the item when it launched, As well as ensuring that there was a page worthy of ranking (particularly against the competition who were using stub pages!), it brought some other key advantages:
That's fairly involved, so won't work for everything, but the principals are sound. If you were Google which would you want to rank? That or an empty page?
I think this is different:
offering customers discounts for adding links to their site to Overstock.com.
That is straight forward link buying. "I'll give you X if you link to me" isn't the same as "I see you have a page about X. We do that!". It's a good example of what to be cautious of though.
Offering student discounts is a great thing to do. From experience I can say that many of them come with nice links attached 
.
This is definitely one of those "open to interpretation" areas. A few years ago I would have said that Google wouldn't expect links on a discounts page to be no-followed. It's harder to tell these days though. On the flip side I don't that they would be too impressed by student discounts being used as a way to game links. Student discounts bring referrals, raise profile and bring business. Do it for those reasons and enjoy any nice authoritative followed links that come with it. (no harm in targeting those with the best links first though!)
If you have set them up for removal and no longer want them in the index then go for it. That is what the tool is for.
There was some suggestion from John Mueller some time ago that lots of removals could be seen as an issue, but it seems that is an exception.
I think that John Mueller confirmed that they are not using social signals as a factor as well.
I believe personally believe that to be strictly true. That doesn't mean that at good social presence can't help you rank though. A successful social presence will create other positive signals. For instance if Google considered repeat visits to be a positive signal then this is a signal that comes as a by-product of a strong social presence.
That all said, it probably isn't a brilliant use of resources to "do social" just for rankings. Social media can bring targeted traffic and conversions, build brand loyalty, increase your reach etc. These are all good reasons to use social media. If you are using it for those reasons then any benefit to rankings is a free extra.
It took me a while to come back, but I made it.
Link building is all about leveraging your assets. You have a great blog with great images, so this opens up a number of strategies that you can follow to maximise the links that come back your way. The ones that interest me in your case do involve giving a little something away, and that can be uncomfortable at first as it can feel like devaluing your work. However quality links have value, so there is a return to be had.
I'd be tempted to start by thinking about what you might be prepared to give away for the right credit. For instance would you be happy for people to use smaller versions of your images on their website if they linked back to you? How about if that only applied to some images? Would you let "the right website" use a full sized image in exchange for a credit?
Consider what you are comfortable with and then communicate that. Having a link to "use this image on your website" that explained the rules would encourage more to do it. You could even upload specific images to Flickr as creative commons with the required attribution being a credit link.
On a smaller scale you could target high quality sites that have poor imagery and just offer them the use of a relevant image in exchange for a credit. That can be a very effective way of getting some very high quality links. My photos are rubbish, but I've done this successfully for even related things in the past.
If you are not doing so already I'd also look at something like imageraider. Imageraider will monitor the web for places where your images are used and alert you. This can be equally useful for protecting your IP as it is for link building.
Links are essential to ranking in competitive areas, yes.
If people do not want to link to your current content and you need links then you need to be thinking about what content you can add to your site that relevant sites will want to link to. A salary survey of Cisco engineers, maps of world-wide demand and the like could be really interesting and valuable.
It might be helpful to think more in terms of what a link actually offers rather than what format it takes. If there is a website that people use to find organisations like yours then it makes sense to be there whether that website is in directory format, blog format or any other format. If a website has no apparent value in itself move on.
The problems with directories really came about from two issues:
1. Directories that only existed in order to link to websites.
There are still thousands of sites with names like seolinksbymat.com that quite clearly are only ever used to get links. Why should being listed there demonstrate any authority/validation for a site?
2. People went a bit mad for it
People love shortcuts. When presented with the opportunity to either work hard to get valid links or just submit them to directories lots of people did the latter. Before long services appeared that submitted your site to thousands of them, which i turn caused more directories to be created. Big old mess and Google got bored of it.
Avoid those two things and actually there is nothing wrong with a link from a website that happens to be in directory format. If those links are just a small part of a bigger picture and come from sites that have inherent value then you shouldn't be scared of them.
The SEO industry loves to see things as black and white. It's easy, it's lazy and it is wrong. Everything is bad when it is done badly. Directories are very easy to do badly, but you should never be worried about getting a link from something like Yellow pages.
It isn't hard to fake this at all I am afraid. Spotting it will depend on how sophisticated the person doing it is.
My personal preference would be not to use analytics as the means of counting it. Doing that you are going to be slightly limited in the metrics you have available and will always be "correcting" data and looking for problems rather than measuring more correctly and having problems spotted.
I'd have a script on page that logs that checks for a referrer and it if matches the pattern for website B creates a log record instead.
You then have the ability to set your rules. For instance if you get 2 referrals from the same IP a second apart would you count them? What about 10 per hour 24 hours a day? You can also log the exact timestamp with whatever variables you want to collect, so each click from the referring site might be recorded as:
Analytics doesn't give you access to the data in quite the same way. I'd definitely want to be logging it myself if the money involved is reasonable.
They definitely crawl more than that, and it's easy to prove as well.
Pick a long page, such as the Wikipedia page about London. Choose a block of text from near the bottom of that page, I've selected this:
in the south-western suburb of Wimbledon.[252] Other key events are the annual mass-participation London Marathon which sees some 35,000 runners
If you search for that text you will see the Wikipedia page in the results. If they only crawled the first 200 words they wouldn't have been able to find that result.
Prioritising is harder to demonstrate (and probably also to define!). However it is generally believe that greater importance is given to text towards the top of the page. That is logical if you consider how the majority of documents are structured.
Another one I'd add to Egol's response is to consider some kind of tool if it is suitable for their market. Strictly it's still content, but online tools fall outside of what most people think of. A well thought out and useful one can generate quality links for the long term.
Remember to leave budget to get traction for whatever you build too.
It's still relatively early days for Penguin 2.1 so it is hard to give concrete advice. However, the best approach would seem to be a familiar pattern:
Personally I think that #4 is where most people should be focusing most energy. I think that a lot of what looks like penalty is actually just a "correction". Links that were previously passing value no longer do, leaving sites without the authority to compete. Removing more links doesn't fix that. Obtaining new ones will.
Good luck with it. It's not easy, but the rewards are there to be had.
Both are quite different, so it really depends on what you are after. I'm actually a big fan of majestiseo (just to confuse things further). OSE is good for understanding the big picture. However I find that its crawl isn't anywhere deep enough for the stuff I work on - particularly in terms of deep pages on large authority sites. Example: links from the bbc are almost the holy grail for some of the projects that I work on, but OSE often misses them.
Ahrefs is better, and majestic goes deeper still. The down-side of that is that you get a lot more low quality stuff to sort through.
In terms of majestic v ahrefs, ahrefs definitely wins in terms of interface / tools. I'm an excel guy though, so it is all about the data for me - hence majestic being my "weapon of choice".
As Adam suggests, responsive design seems to be the preferred route at the moment.
This is different in that you have a single URL for everything. Whatever platform the end-user users all content is sent to their browser and then it is rendered differently for different devices.
This requires a slightly different mindset as you are effectively building one version of a site, but changing the way it appears to different users. Therefore, if you want a "stripped down" version of the site then it is best done by serving up different navigation.
However - if you are committed to desktop/mobile versions of the site and they are utilising the same content then I would use a canonical from teh mobile to the desktop site. I think that the domain choice is pretty subjective. I'd prefer m.domain as it is less likely to get confused with your overall site structure.
However, if you are not yet committed down one path and the intention is to serve the same content - definitely look at the responsive option.
Run another report using something like ahrefs or majestic. OSE concentrates on the "better" links. A tool with a larger crawl might find more of the junk that can cause problems.
I'd particularly look for for sitewide keyword links. I've seen those causing quite a lot of problems. They are also easier to fix, which might be nice post-sale.
Check a few sites like alexa that estimate traffic volume as well. Whilst the numbers given them all are next to useless the trend data can be useful.
Easy - View the page source:
See how many times the string href appears in the text - those are the links. The quickest way is often to cut and paste the source in to something like word then do a search and replace. It'll tell you how many it removed.
However - don't focus too much on that "error". It is absolutely fine to have more than 100 links on a page - as long as they are all needed. Modern navigation often has more than this and does it in a way that is usable and search friendly. Personally I think that Moz.com tool should be updated to stop so many people worrying about this.
The problem used to be that Google would stop following them after 100, but that is no longer the case. It can sometimes be an issue in that it creates a lot of code that adds to download times, but that is a tenuous link really.
6/7/2013 When we recently decided to revamp an old side project of mine we found ourselves needing to promote a new site with no real budget to speak of. Using a bit of lateral thinking and one smart trick, we managed to get the site launched and hit our traffic targets. Here’s the story.