That is fantastic to hear! So glad we could be helpful. Congrats on getting off the ground; the first steps are the hardest ones. Thrilled to have you here at Moz
Posts made by randfish
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RE: Additional links + Sinking DA
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RE: Additional links + Sinking DA
Hi Catherine - Wayne's responses were great, but I just wanted to jump in with another voice.
I'd say that if you think the links are actively hurting you in Google/Bing or could be perceived by someone on the search quality/webspam team as manipulative, go ahead and get rid of them. But, if they're editorial links that send you traffic or are just good in quality, don't sweat it!
Remember also that we just updated the PA/DA models - discussed here - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/introducing-seomoz-updated-page-authority-and-domain-authority - which might be responsible for the scoring changes.
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RE: Can someone explain how a site with no DA, links or MozTrust, MozRank can rank #1 in the SERPs?
There's a few likely explanations, but it's hard to know for sure which of these (or what combination) is at work.
#1 - They redirected other pages/sites to this one recently and Linkscape hasn't yet seen it (or they're hiding it from all bots except Google/Bing). That could explain the fast rankings on a low quality site, and why we haven't seen any links to it.
#2 - The site recently started gaining links that are helping them rank that Linkscape has yet to catch. This is certainly possible, as the latest index launched earlier this week with data crawled the first 2.5 weeks of November. Lots of spammy sites will often get ranked based on crap links for a few days or weeks before being caught and pushed out of the SERPs. The next Linkscape update (likely mid-end of December, possibly as late as early January) should show it. You might also check Majestic's "fresh index" which doesn't offer metrics, but does have pretty fast updates.
#3 - The site's doing something very shady (cloaked redirects as mentioned above or links that only the engines' bots can see).
Hope that helps!
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RE: SEO Audit "Hybrid Site"
Thanks Steve - thrilled to hear it!
Re: the web crawler - it might be an IP-based or a requests/second type issue. The Moz crawl is usually fairly good, but even we get blocked sometimes. If that's the case, you might need to ask their team internally to run it or specifically allow it. You can also try the single custom crawl tool here: http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test
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RE: SEO Audit "Hybrid Site"
Hi Steve - sounds like a big challenge (particularly if you can't get access to analytics or WM tools). You could certainly start by getting crawls through SEOmoz PRO just to check for errors/issues/etc. Screaming Frog is also a good tool for this one-off type crawling that doesn't need tracking over time.
There's a few good posts on site audits in particular:
- http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-do-a-site-audit
- http://www.seomoz.org/blog/4-ways-to-improve-your-seo-site-audit
- http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-site-audits-getting-started
- http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/do-your-very-own-site-structure-audit/
Best of luck!
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RE: How should directories be set up on ecommerce?
It depends a bit on the depth and breadth of the products/categories you've got, but assuming the site has only a few dozen categories and maybe half a dozen brands/types, I'd go with option 2 and use subdirectories. They can help you in your analytics to sort and see what's happening in specific areas, can show up in Google with the category > subcategory delineation in place of the URL (which can help enhance CTR), and provide more detail (and a tiny bit more keyword relevance) for anyone looking at the URL in a browser, in email, in social media, etc.
However, I'd stop before going overboard, e.g. site.com/laptops/thin-light/samsung/series-9 is fine, while site.com/laptops/thin-light/black/gray-highlights/samsung/series-9/make140/model2334 is not Use good judgement and you'll be fine!
This post is still a reasonably good reference: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/11-best-practices-for-urls (though I should probably do a rewrite sometime soon)
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RE: Will errors on a subdomain effect the overall health of the root domain?
Hi Greg - short answer is, it depends... Which means, of course, there's a long answer
In Google's eyes, subdomains are often, though not always, treated as separate entities from the main domain, meaning if content or issues on them is giving Google trouble, that won't necessarily extend to the other parts of the domain. However, this isn't always the case. We've certainly seen times when having spam or manipulative behavior on a subdomain meant the root domain and content on it suffered as well.
In the case you're describing, if the crawl issues are things like missing meta descriptions or long titles or other less-than-critical errors, I wouldn't be too worried. But if it's lots of 404s or duplicate content or infinite redirect loops, those could cause issues.
If you're really not worried at all about what Google thinks of the subdomains or the content on them, you could always use robots.txt to block them from accessing it, which should cause Google to not weight that content when judging the site as a whole.
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RE: Rand's blogging graphics
Donnie's spot on. A decade ago, I used to build Flash websites and became familiar and fast with the software. Thus, I still use it to create diagrams, flowcharts, wireframes and most of the graphics you see in my posts. It's certainly not professional quality, but it's quick and effective for simple blog illustrations.
That said, I probably wouldn't recommend Flash as an actual graphics tool to anyone. Most designers I know cringe at the thought of using an animation program to make simple 2D diagrams.
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RE: Can someone at the mozplex please update that antiquated directory listing you offer? Most of them are pay to play, reciprocal, or just plain dont exist anymore. Thanks
Long term, we definitely want to reward those who participate and help, but we'll need to expend some engineering effort to build a system that does that in a scalable fashion. In the meantime, though, I can promise we'll keep coming out with big improvements like the social analytics, new PA/DA models, improvements to OSE, the web app, etc.
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RE: Can someone at the mozplex please update that antiquated directory listing you offer? Most of them are pay to play, reciprocal, or just plain dont exist anymore. Thanks
Fair points. We've got a ton of items that need regular maintenance at Moz, so we tried here to build an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) to replace the antiquated list and still provide some value.
In terms of some of those directories being gone, less useful or pay-to-play, it's a tough line to walk, but we'll keep searching for ways to make this scalable, more accurate and more useful. We've got a bunch of ideas, but they require dev work, which means they're in the pipeline behind a lot of other projects.
Thanks Todd!
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RE: Yahoo Site Explorer died. Does DA and PA Seomoz parameters have all it takes to replace YSE?
Just figured I'd toss in my $0.02.
As others have noted, Y!SE offered no metrics as to the importance/influence of a site or page in its index, so there's really nothing to compare it with. Google offers PageRank, which Linkscape also has (mozRank). But PA and DA are designed to be predictive algorithms with tons of inputs that try to best reflect how Google.com (US) values links and link metrics.
Matt Peters, our data scientist, has a blog post going up in the next few days with details about how we do this and what PA/DA are from a technical standpoint, but you can basically think of them as the best correlated query/content-agnostic metrics for Google rankings (at least, we've never measured something that could better predict rank position).
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RE: Should we be bracing ourselves for a YSE to OSE mass migration?
Just FYI - our data scientist, Matt Peters, has written a great blog post about PA/DA that's launching in the next couple days, and that might help with this question.
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RE: Should we be bracing ourselves for a YSE to OSE mass migration?
We've been noodling on some ways to make the on-page tool support multiple keywords. I think it's possible, but right now it's sitting behind a number of other priorities so could be a while. In the meantime, you can just hack it by running the tool for multiple keyphrases on a page
Not entirely sure what you mean by the second question... The ways the tool runs is precisely the same whether you're "in campaign" or using the "one-off" version. If you're asking which gets more runs, it's definitely the "in campaign" version.
Hope that helps!
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RE: Should we be bracing ourselves for a YSE to OSE mass migration?
Are you getting inaccurate rankings in the web app? Or just the old rank tracker tool? If it's the latter, we haven't yet switched it to the upgraded version of rank data but if it's the web app, please write in to help@seomoz.org and give them examples of what you're seeing so we can try to sort out the problem.
Thanks!
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RE: Should we be bracing ourselves for a YSE to OSE mass migration?
Ha! We'll see. Glad you're enjoying it; we certainly are planning to continually invest in data quality, index size/freshness and functionality.
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RE: Should we be bracing ourselves for a YSE to OSE mass migration?
Funny you should mention this. On a thread with some engineers last night, we noted that the shutdown could bring a lot more traffic, and they're planning to scale up the infrastructure (we're in the cloud so it's pretty much all on-demand anyway) to make sure no one has a subpar experience
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RE: "Iffy" Question
I wrote about this topic a bunch here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/white-hat-seo-it-fing-works-12421 but basically, I ask myself a number of questions:
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What are my goals in web marketing? Is it purely to make the most money possible? Am I trying to build something bigger than myself? Something that will make people happy? Something that can last even if I'm not around?
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Do I want to prioritize the short term or the long term? Can I afford to make more revenue, get more traffic in the next 6 months, if it means the 5 years after that might suffer?
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Do I want to work on building a brand and a company and a product or just a website that gets traffic?
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How much stock do I put in Google's webspam team vs. my ability to outthink them? Do I have the mental discipline to withstand the nervousness, doubt and fear that comes with spamming/manipulation the engines?
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Do I think that spam and low quality sites can convert at the same rate as a high quality brand? If not, does the delta make spamming non-viable, even if my only goal is revenue?
The answers to those questions for me are clear, and they're what's led me to always pick white hat for the projects I do.
Hope that helps!
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RE: Any Seattle SEO Events/Meetups?
Honestly, I don't know of any, but I'd check meetup.com, lanyrd.com and Craigslist. If I hear of any, I'll post them here!
On edit - see Carl's meetup above!
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RE: Purchased an expiring domain, Now the pagerank has gone.
Thanks for the feedback Umit. We obviously have different views about what constitutes manipulation (and about the simplicity of the all-caps statement you've written above). That said, if the Moz community can be helpful to you on white hat types of tactics and questions, we'd love to be a resource.
Re: WB Friday - sorry to hear it. If you ever have suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or drop us a line.
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RE: Purchased an expiring domain, Now the pagerank has gone.
Umit - I just wanted to chime in and note that Ryan's correct on the guidelines and focus of the community here at Moz.
Your question is OK, but it does push on the boundaries of our community. While we'd love to have you as a member and you've clearly got some great ideas and experience to share, we don't generally support or try to provide advice/help to those attempting to manipulate search engines with black/gray hat tactics.
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RE: How do I speak to Rand ?
I don't know if I'd particularly recommend my beard style - I do it because I have no jawline
Certainly cool with the blog post, though I might have to do a follow-up on some real SEO heroes and why I'm not sure I belong in that group; have made plenty of mistakes, failed to scale a consulting business in SEO, had years of debt, etc.
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RE: How do I speak to Rand ?
He's evil and bad! Don't try to contact him or you'll be turned to the dark side, too!
Oh no wait... I'm thinking of a different guy.
Just email me! My email's all over the web and I respond to 99% of real emails I get - rand@seomoz.org
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RE: Opensite explorer issues still there
Hey LL - totally hear you on both fronts. With Linkscape, Ryan's precisely right. We went crawling deeper on large sites, and, as I noted in the blog posts around this issue, encountered these binary files. We attempted a fix for the past index using a blacklist of file types. It only caught about 40% of them. We were hoping that would be closer to 90%.
We've got two new indices running. One that launches mid-November that will have more of these files removed but not all, and another in December when we think we'll have them all cleaned out.
In terms of Google's search query data in Keyword Difficulty, that does suck. Google turned off our API access and we've been going back and forth with them to try to turn it on. We, along with a few hundred other tools, got shut off all together and trying to get back in has been a long, painful process. However, the tool does not rely on this data to get accurate reports (difficulty doesn't care how many times something's searched, just how competitive the top results are, which is what we look at). Thus, the tool's still fully operational, and you can still grab the KW data from Google's AdWords tool or your own API access (not as convenient, I agree).
TL;DR - We're fixing the OSE binary files issue by December (maybe sooner) and working with Google to try to get the Adwords API data back in KW Diff (but no guarantees).
Hope that helps and a million thanks to Ryan for jumping in and helping out on this. He's not an official rep or a Moz employee, but seriously appreciate him going above and beyond.
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RE: Choose domain name! Question..Help me.
Message received
Emailing you now - and a huge congrats sir! Thrilled to have you here.
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RE: What would be a really good reason to pay for SEOmoz Pro service?
Hey Robert - really appreciate both the kind words and the constructive feedback re: the member level structures for campaigns and sites. I'll talk to the team about the potential to allow for larger number of smaller sites. In the meantime, feel free to drop a line to Andrew@SEOmoz.org, who's working on projects around customizable pro memberships (it's a work in progress and requires a bunch of engineering stuff, too, so it's not available immediately, but is something we're working on).
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RE: What would be a really good reason to pay for SEOmoz Pro service?
Hey Z - totally fair question. A lot of folks use the membership for the free trial to simply do a site audit or get some data, then leave, but we often get those folks back (especially if they continue to do serious SEO work for their own sites or those of clients).
The most used features are (relatively in order):
- http://www.seomoz.org/users/pro - the PRO campaigns that track crawl, rankings, on-page and competitor link profiles (and we add new features here every 2-4 weeks)
- http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ - which provides access to in-depth link research
- http://www.seomoz.org/seo-toolbar - Firefox and Chrome toolbar for watching metrics and quickly getting key SEO data as you surf the web
- http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/keyword-difficulty - for comparing the competition for various keyword phrases
- http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-best-kept-secret-in-the-seomoz-toolset - inside the KW difficulty tool and also available from inside the campaign app; a way to determine why/how another site is ranking ahead of yours
- http://www.seomoz.org/webinars - IMO, some of the best content on SEO in webinar/slideshow format
- http://www.seomoz.org/labs - a bunch of tools that aren't fully supported but can often provide interesting data and highlight some things we're trying before they go "live"
- http://www.seomoz.org/toolbox/pagerank - one of my personal favorites that lets you see PR back in time, often helpful for spotting penalties/manipulation
- And, obviously, this Q+A section (note: this is not the least used feature, I just put it at the end. I think in usage numbers it would fit right near the webinars)
Hope that helps!
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RE: Duplicate Content | eBay
Agree with Stephan here - eBay's extremely unlikely to give you control over the rel=canonical on their product pages, but generally, the content duplication by having the product info on their site shouldn't harm you.
If you're really worried, provide more detail/depth/content on your own site than what you do on eBay, and possibly consider having different title/product name conventions. There's lots of good ways to describe the same product.
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RE: Is this Directory Guide by SEOmoz still accurate?
Since the full-fledged version is very significant, I've asked the team to come up with a mimimum solution; possibly just another list without comment/submissions functionality. I hope to have that up very soon (possibly even just as an Excel download or Google Docs accessible with a password.
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RE: SEO w/o Social Webinair experiment - how can RTs of a URL of a google search possibly affect the position of one of the search results?
Hi Chris - totally understand your question. The key is that the brand name is included in the search query and the test (in that particular case) was less about using the social networks for rankings, but to see if search volume itself and CTR could influence rankings (which it appeared to do).
You can read more about the experiment on search volume and CTR here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/experiment-google-rankings-w-search-volume
And more on the experiment to influence rankings with Google+ and Twitter here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/do-tweets-still-effect-rankings
Those should help clarify.
Cheers!
Rand
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RE: A suggestion to help with linkscape crawling and data processing
Thanks a ton Sean! We have considered distributed computing as a way to help crawl, index, process, etc. It's so flattering and humbling to hear that you'd be willing to help out and that the community would, too
For now, we believe we can get to the index size/quality/freshness using our hosted system, but the engineering team will certainly be encouraged to hear that folks in our community might contribute to this. Distributed systems present their own challenges, and we'd have to write that code from scratch, but if we find that we can't do what we want with our existing network, we might reach out.
BTW - I wanted to let folks know that the team here does feel very confident that come December/January, we're going to be producing indices that reach exceptional quality bars. The problems we face are largely known, and we now have the team and the solutions to tackle it, so we're pretty excited.
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RE: SEOmoz LDA tool experience?
Hey there - sorry for my delay. Just got back to Seattle.
Basic story is - there was fluctuation and that downgrading on successive runs even from the start. Ben explained it to me, but I could never fully wrap my head around it. From memory, I recall that it tries to sample a subset (as calculating across the entire corpus would be too computationally expensive). An artifact of that process is that the scores tended to vary wildly. Ben made some changes, and this produced the less wild, but now declining scores on successive runs.
Unfortunately, there's no one at Moz right now with the time to invest in understanding/fixing/repairing. We think we've got bigger/better plans for something much more useful along this trajectory once the Linkscape work is done, but that won't be for some time.
In the meantime, we maintain the tool "as is" in Labs. If you find it useful, great, but Labs is an area where we don't do maintenance of have guarantees on availability/accuracy.
Hope that helps!
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RE: SEOmoz LDA tool experience?
Yeah - there could indeed be issues with it. Right now, the team's focus is all on Linkscape - improving quality/size/freshness of the index. Afterward, however, we do plan to return to LDA (or other topic modeling projects). I suspect by end of 2012, we'll have something out.