Our one-off rank tracker: https://moz.com/researchtools/rank-tracker and the rank tracking inside Moz Analytics: http://analytics.moz.com/dashboard/overview/ seems to be working fine. We have an early warning detection system on the engineering side that goes off if we're having trouble, and there hasn't been a blip today.
Posts made by randfish
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RE: Did Google Turn Off the Rank Tracking API ??
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RE: Source? Google says having an author photo increases CTR by 15% on average.
Hi Project Labs! Glad you liked the interview. There are a few sources, but http://searchengineland.com/is-google-authorship-affecting-rankings-today-168230 is one of the best (note the 15% average across the sites). Unfortunately, I can't seem to find the reference to Google's formal statement, but I believe it was also via a SELand post (or possibly from an SMX conference stage discussion).
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RE: How does Google index pagination variables in Ajax snapshots? We're seeing random huge variables.
I agree with Federico. I've seen Google go fishing with URL parameters (?param=xyz) and I've seen it with AJAX and hashbangs as well. How far they take this and when they choose to apply it doesn't seem to follow a consistent pattern . You can see some folks on StackExchange discussing this, too: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/25560/does-the-google-crawler-really-guess-url-patterns-and-index-pages-that-were-neve
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RE: What makes a "perfectly optimized page" in 2013?
Hi James - I've been meaning to write an updated version of that post. I've got an email in my inbox with the task on my to-do list and will do my best to get to it soon. Sorry for the delay!
In the meantime, the comments above are very kind, but also accurate. It's still a pretty solid guide to on-page optimization.
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RE: Does SEOMOZ planing to restructure OSE metrics?
Hi Jason - we do have some continual improvement plans for OSE and for our metrics. Obviously, the Just Discovered links feature was one of the most recent and valuable ones. We also do refactor and recalculate Page Authority/Domain Authority on a regular basis to make them better correlated with changes to Google.
On the longer-term horizon, we're planning a webspam metric, and we may be using more data from social and fresh web to improve PA/DA.
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RE: What's the most effective web marketing tactic you've seen or used that very few people know about?
Brilliant! Had never thought of that
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What's the most effective web marketing tactic you've seen or used that very few people know about?
I wanted to start a thread to share some of the really cool marketing tactics I've seen on the web that I think few folks are using, AND ask the community here what you've seen, too!
Some of my favorite undiscovered or less-used tactics include:
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Making smart use of bios for conferences, events, interviews, etc. where folks ask you or your team members for a "bio" and you get to control the links, link targets, and anchor text. This is super powerful in my experience, so long as you have a moderately strong profile or regular participation in this type of stuff.
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Price anchoring on conversion pages, e.g. http://www.trackur.com/options - note how they start with the highest price to help "anchor" the audience to bigger numbers. A great principle of psychology in action.
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Using re-marketing to draw people to content rather than just purchase/conversion pages. The effectiveness of these is, I've heard, dramatically higher than the usual re-marketing campaigns that take you to a squeeze or purchase page. I can't share the example I'm thinking of, unfortunately, but I'd urge you to try it!
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Get more social shares and clicks by SHARING MORE THAN ONCE! A lot of folks feel like they are burdening their audience on Twitter/Facebook/G+ or frustrating them if they post multiple times, when in fact, very, very few of your followers are online at any given time. I've tested this myself and I get almost no negative feedback but can triple or more the number of shares/+1s/likes/visits/etc I get just by sharing 2-3X! The key is not to be too repetitive or annoying, and to acknowledge past shares (at least for me). e.g. I'll say "my blog post from last night on XYZ" and get a ton more clicks.
What are your favorites? Please share!
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RE: SEOMoz Software
It's on the to-do list, but there's a lot of stuff ahead of it, so it might be a little while.
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RE: Google shutting down Rank Tracking Software? - Raven and AHREFS close down ranking results.
Hi James - this change won't impact SEOmoz rankings. We're planning to maintain that data long term (as many other companies do. You might be interested to read my previous responses to this question a couple times at the URLs below:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/are-seomoz-ranking-in-jeopardy
http://www.seomoz.org/q/so-apparently-seo-moz-will-get-us-de-indexed-according-to-a-seo-company
Let me know if I can answer any other questions about this for you!
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RE: So apparently SEO moz will get us de-indexed according to a SEO company!
All of these software products offer rankings and/or backlinks data:
- SEOmoz
- Hubspot (which Google Ventures has invested in)
- Ginza Metrics (which Matt Cutts is an investor in through YCombinator)
- Brightedge
- RankAbove
- SearchMetrics
- Conductor
- AuthorityLabs
- Majestic SEO
It's hard for me to imagine that anyone who uses any of these products would suffer a penalty or de-indexing from Google. The only time we've ever seen anything like that in the SEO world has been with paid link building services, where sites using a network or a product to articificially inflate their links have been put on notice or sometimes penalized/banned. SEOmoz has never offered a product like that, and won't in the future. I'd chalk it up to bad information (or possibly a complete lie to get business, but I hope that's not it).
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RE: SEOMoz Software
I'll ask Dr. Pete to put it on his calendar to show the distribution of flux in further-back results. I suspect it may be a while, though, as he has a lot of other stuff on his plate already!
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RE: SEOMoz Software
Hi Kyle - yes, we had to change to individually fetching the top 10, then 11-20, then 21-30, etc. This could have changed ranking positions in the 11+ range more significantly, though we haven't seen widespread reports of this. I would note that results past 20 are usually far more volatile than those on the first page.
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RE: Are seomoz ranking in jeopardy?
Hi Matt - I don't think it's paranoid - it's a reasonable concern. That said, I can say that SEOmoz's plans for the long term do not include removing rankings data. We will be running a survey next week to gauge the relative importance of this data to our community, and then considering this over the next few weeks, at which point, I'll likely have more info to share.
Regarding Raven - I totally empathize with their tough situation and decision and I wish them all luck and success. They've been a great competitor for years, constantly pushing us to get better, and I hope that doesn't change.
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RE: Keyword Difficulty Tool
Danny - see my responses above to your questions.
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RE: Keyword Difficulty Tool
Permission is different than an API, IMO. Does Google have "permission" to crawl all of the world's websites and serve advertising alongside the results? No. But it's also not illegal or explicitly against those sites' terms (and they can opt out by keeping info behind a registration wall or robots.txt).
Everyone who collects rankings data - us, Raven, AuthorityLabs, Searchmetrics, Conductor, Covario, etc, etc. - does so in the same fashion. There's no special deals or APIs with search engines (Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu - any of 'em). Anyone showing rankings data is transparent about this simply be virtue of having it.
Sadly, I do agree that nothing we do here will ever be 100% reliable - it's a tough problem, but we believe it's one worth fighting for. This information deserves to be in the hands of marketers, and we're willing to work hard on their behalf to get it (just like our competitors and colleagues in the space do).
In terms of the bet - I'll be happy to just take the losing side now and donate to Movember Will send $99 when I'm back online later today!
In terms of "The degree to which my use account usage has been affected is an irrelevance. A chunk of the $99 you receive every month from me includes the use of tools that are reliant on ranking data to function. By not issuing automatic refunds to all pro users you are simply charging money for a service that was not available."We're more than happy to issue you a full refund, but you and I disagree on the issue of automatically refunding users who didn't use the tools or for whom the service didn't break. I'm happy to chat about that more offline - you can feel free to email me at rand@seomoz.org
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RE: Keyword Difficulty Tool
Hi Danny - sorry for my delay. Been a very busy week. You asked:
"Can you please confirm for me the exact reason why the Google ranking data and the Google search volume data in KDT has always been so unreliable."
Yes, I can. What we do is adversarial analytics data. The source of data (the search engines) are not stable providers on information with SLAs and promises and deals. In fact, they are constantly changing and in some cases working actively to prevent the collection of this data. Hence, our attempts to gather this information are sometimes thwarted, as they were this past week. You can see rankings data instability in virtually every other product/software/tool that tries to collect this type of data as well (a continuing problem for all of us in this field over the past 9 years - since Google stopped providing a rankings API).
We currently have a primary system, an early warning alert system, and a backup system. Last week, we lost our primary system, our early warning system alerted us, and we moved to the backup, which had some instability and some trouble catching up to the volumes needed, but eventually did so. I believe 95% of campaign rankings were caught up as of yesterday, and it should be 100% today.
I certainly apologize for the downtime - it sucks and I want to do better. We're building a third and fourth backup system (they were actually already in the sprint for the production engineering team this month, but had to be pushed back to deal with this emergency), and we hope that will help make things more stable in the future. However, until and unless there's an API with a true guarantee, this data's reliability will always be in question.
You also asked about refunds. We always want to be very generous with our refund policy - if your account and usage has been severely impacted by this outage, please write to our help team and we will issue a refund. However, we treat refunds individually, not on the overall level, for temporary outages of individual features.
For many folks, rankings data was on time (as I noted, only a percentage of rankings collections fell behind thanks to the backup). And ~25% of our users will use the keyword difficulty tool in a month (that tool was back up and operational earlier this week, and had less downtime that some of the campaign rankings).
If PRO went down entirely, or if a tool like Open Site Explorer (used by 70%+ of members monthly) was down for a long period, I think we'd need to re-examine the individual-based refund policy, but I'm hoping it never comes to that. The worst we've had so far was a period in September where several services were throwing frequent errors and issues.
I can tell you that over the next 3 months, uptime and reliability is a HUGE focus. The production engineering team has 4 fulltime engineers, 2 contractors, and 2 open full time positions. These folks do nothing but worry about our backups and how to make sure customers get data.
Thanks for sticking by us in tough times, and if you'd like a refund, please do email help@seomoz.org.
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RE: Is this Directory Guide by SEOmoz still accurate?
I would do it only for the most trusted of brand name directories - Yahoo!, Better Business Bureau, and maybe Best of the Web, but probably very little else.
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RE: SEOMoz Software
Weird. KW Difficulty should be functioning as of yesterday afternoon. Can you try again and if you encounter an issue, send it to help@seomoz.org with your account info?
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RE: SEOMoz Software
Ranking data should be nearly done for every account - I believe our engineers said worst case was tomorrow for all accounts to be caught up. Keyword Difficulty is being worked on now.
We're also meeting this week to devote resources to a 3rd backup system (when the first two backups we've already built simultaneously fail, as happened this go around). Tragically, when you rely on third parties for data (e.g. Google search results) and they change things around constantly without telling you, staying on top of it is incredibly hard.
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RE: SEOMoz Software
Sigh - now I feel like a total ass. On Wednesday night, Google changed some markup, and our engineers didn't discover until this morning, and much of our team is out for the holiday. Thus, rankings collections in the app, rank tracker and keyword difficulty/SERPs analysis are temporarily throwing problems. We hope to have this fixed in the next 24-48 hours as Moz engineers get on top of it.
We're working on a way to have fallbacks even on holidays - I'm meeting personally next Friday with some folks.
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RE: SEOMoz Software
Hi Kyle - really sorry to hear about your experiences. I'm not certain you're an anomaly, but it definitely sounds like you've gotten very unlucky to have such a rough combination of outages. In September, we did have rank tracking broken for a couple weeks. Crawl data has been accurate for 95%+ of campaigns and on time, but there have been a few that needed those manual refreshes (perhaps you've been caught in that bucket several times somehow, which must totally suck - I'm really sorry for that).
AdWords pulled their API from Hubspot, Raven, and SEOmoz all around the same time, so none of us have that access anymore. Thankfully, you can just click over to the public tool and grab it, but I know it sucks not having it right in the KW Diff tool.
The weird one is KW Difficulty itself - that should be returning results successfully. We've had an odd few hours each month where it's busted due to SERPs changes or hardware issues, but it's showing 99%+ uptime on our end. Rank tracker's odd as well - we've been seeing a few odd results, but it's working for nearly everyone (I get my report every week without fail).
In any case I can tell you that there's a whole team dedicated just to making sure that our uptime is high and that as problems/anomalies arise, we fix them fast. That team's called "production engineering" and there's 4 full time engineers there. We also have a larger engineering team that's working on a new version of the software that we believe will be A) a big step forward in features/UI/UX/etc and B) much more reliable and consistent - we're aiming for 99.99% uptime as a goal on all services, even when engines make weird changes on us. I can't guarantee we'll hit that right out of the gate, but I know this team can eventually get there.
To wrap up - it flat out sucks that you had to deal with this. We should be better. We're working on it, and I really appreciate all the effort you've given to stay with Moz. If you do choose to go somewhere else, I'd totally understand and empathize, but if you stay, I promise that we'll have continual improvement.
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RE: Changes at Raven Tools!
We've only received notice that we can't use it, even if we pay. I suspect that many other tool providers like us and Raven also had access revoked, but I can't say for certain.
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RE: Loss of Google AdWords API
We could probably do something that allows folks to upload their own AdWords data, but the issue, unfortunately, isn't related to account stuff, but to keyword research and search volume numbers (which are on-demand). For that, we'll need to find a different solution.
Way to be creative though!
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RE: Changes at Raven Tools!
A few folks on this thread asked how this might affect SEOmoz. As you've probably noticed over the past couple months, our AdWords API and data access has also been intermittently down (and is now down again). This affects the keyword difficulty tool (though not the difficulty scores, as those don't use AdWords data), and it affects the keyword pages in the web app.
The basic story is that we're expecting Google not to give access back, but you never know. They're hard to communicate with, inconsistent, and don't have any guarantees, even though we pay for this data. Thus, my best guess would be that they'll be shutting it off for lots of organic tool providers (like Moz & Raven). If you want AdWords search volume data, you'll probably have to go direct.
Our plan in the short term is to start using data from Bing, and then eventually to see if we can build a good metric that correlates well with search volume as reported by AdWords (like we do with PageRank->MozRank or Page Authority->Google Rankings). It's gonna be a slog, but this appears to be how Google wants it.
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RE: How can the search engines can crawl my java script generated web pages
Hi Jose - I'd suggest reading http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/can-google-really-access-content-in-javascript-really which lays out what Google is picking up in javascript files. You might also want to try some of the tactics specifically designed to make JS content and hashbang URLs more accessible:
http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2011/09/27/searchable-dynamic-content-with-ajax-crawling/ and http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/proposal-for-making-ajax-crawlable.html (Google's original post on the subject). Folks like Twitter and Rapgenius have been making use of these for a while now, and they can help to make that dynamic data directly indexable.
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RE: Cross-Domain Canonical Showing as inbound links?
I actually like it - think it makes sense for what you're describing, and I don't think I'd change it. The other option might be a 301 redirect or simply linking to only one site, but then you'd be changing branding/domain and possibly losing the customer.
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RE: Keyword Density in Body in one page report.
Jonathon - you can manually count just by looking at the source code, and then compare to SEOmoz vs. others. If we're off, please let us know via an email to help at seomoz dot org.
Also, just FYI - density and frequency are very different things The former refers to the total count of words/phrases divided by the number of instances of a particular keyword and isn't a very useful or used metric: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-myths-that-scare-seos-but-shouldnt-whiteboard-friday has more on that.
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RE: Cross-Domain Canonical Showing as inbound links?
Yeah - I've seen it to (only had a single site cross-domaining). We're actually working to count these as links in OSE/Mozscape, because that appears to be how Google treats them. My guess is that they're actually more powerful than just a link (probably pass 90-95% of a page's link juice type metrics vs. some small fraction for an individual link), but in many other ways, very similar.