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I think it's the SEOMoz crawler, but what I have found is that the error reports are limited here whereas GWT is much bigger and shows the links leading to the error. My guess is that SEOMoz limit the number of crawl errors they show due to limitations set on their crawler i.e. while their crawl is comprehensive, it's not going to capture what Google does.

This may be a silly question, but have you got Google Webmaster tools installed? That will show you the source of the errors.

If your site is on IIS then you should also use the awesome IIS SEO toolkit provided by Microsoft for free.

Whoa! That was a mouthful!

I have recently switched to Disqus because of the additional functionality like embedding media which I think enhances the "conversation capabilities".

The ability to login from any one of the main social media platforms makes it easy and therefore encourages people to get involved.

I am not keen on Facebook alone because you don't want to be dependent on a single platform and as for the Wordpress comments, nothing particularly wrong with it, but it is quite limited if you compare to Disqus.

To keep your pages and avoid the duplicate content issues i would suggest expanding your product description e.g. 
Dell Color Compatible 3130CN －Magenda with chip 
Dell Color Compatible 3130CN －Black with chip

...those are your produce titles, which is fine, but they are also the in page product descriptions and there is only one word different.

Now the reality... you have over 20K pages indexed so the above approach may not be so practical unless you have a bit of cash to throw at a mechanical turk project that gets all your product descriptions rewritten.

You really ought to introduce something like Disqus that lets people comment on products which in turn would generate a load of unique content, but this would take a long time.

If I was you I would consolidate products like this into a single page with a comprehensive product description and then put a canonical tag on each of the individual product pages so you can still keep them separate, but for SEO purposes you are telling the search engines to pick up one great pages and not loads of poor pages with no unique content.

Hi Andrea,

Thanks for your detailed reply, the problem is not really that this deeper page ranks. Its whether I can leverage the authority this deeper page holds to push the homepage to position 1.

We are about to set a new linkbuilding campaign once we have figured this out, as I want to make sure we have nothing working against us within the site before starting on this.

Thanks again for your help

Hi,

I'm working with a very niche website where only one product is sold. This means there is a small keyword set (just variations of same keyword) that we are optimising for.

Currently the homepage www.example.com ranks in position 2 for target term - "sample". But there is also a required deeper page www.example.com/sample which has lots and lots of internal links targeted to "sample" pointing to it. This page ranks position 8. Effectively this is optimising the deeper page for the same keyword as for the home page through internal anchir text. This deeper page must exist as it has much more detailed information about the product.

We want the homepage to rank highest and I'm trying to figure out if we are confusing Google and splitting authority between 2 pages. Best result for us would be to have homepage in position 1 and the deeper page can disappear (total visits would increase).

So the question is, is there a solution to do this? My initial thought was use canonical tag on the www.example.com/sample page specifiying www.example.com. Can we do this? Its not duplicate content.

Other option I considered is to nofollow links to the deeper page. Again not sure if this will have positive or negative impact. My fear is by removing 40 odd internal links with "sample" anchor text will reduce relevancy of the domain as a whole for the "sample" keyword.

Any help much appreciated!

Thanks

Thanks Hannah. I think we have managed to convince them to go with a separate site on .co.uk which has always been my preferred approach to international SEO.

I'm always worried that even with the right intentions, there is still a risk of Google misinterpreting.

Separate domains means no confusion.

As for overlays, it works very well for another client of ours and makes no difference to bounce rate. One lesson we did learn was to ensure we had first click free activated!!

Thanks Erica... turns out we don't! I will let you know if that has resolved the issue or not.

I have a global site with .com as the US site and then /country for all other markets i.e. .com/uk .com/de etc.

Each site has it's own WMT profile.

Each site has it's own GA profile.

Since Google added Search Engine Optimization to the GA interface, I can't track these sites separately under this new feature.

It seems to me that it can only be associated with a single WMT profile at a time or rather that WMT can only be associated with a single GA profile at a time.

The numbers for the UK and US site are identical, but when I try and link the UK WMT account with GA it removes it from the US profile and vice versa.

Thanks for reply, yes its definietly a hole. The more i research the deeper it seems to get. It wasn't our recommendation for the current solution (decided in house) so luckily its not a hole I've dug even though I'm now in it!

Hi,

We have a new client who has built a brand in the UK on a xyz.com domain. The "xyz.com" is now a brand and features on all marketing. Lots of SEO work has taken place and the UK site has good rankings and traffic.

They have now expanded to the US and with offline marketing leading the way, xyz.com is the brand being pushed in the US.

So with the launch of the offline marketing US IP's are now redirected to a US version of the site (subfolder) with relevant pricing and messaging. This is great for users, but with Googlebot being on a US IP it is also being redirected and the UK pages have now dropped out of the index.

The solution we need would ideally have both UK and US users searching for xyz.com, but would see them land on respective static pages with correct prices. Ideally no link authority would be moved via redirection of users.

We have considered the following solutions

• Move UK site to subfolder /uk and redirect UK ips to this subfolder (and so not googlebot)

• downside of this is it will massively impact the UK rankings which are the core driver of the business - also would this be deemed as illegal cloaking?

• natural links will always be to the xyz.com page and so longer term the US homepage will gain authority and UK homepage will be more reliant on artificial linkbuilding.

• Use a overlay that detects IP address and requests users to select relevant country (and cookies to redirect on second visit)

• this has been rejected by ecommerce team as will increase bounce rate% & we dont want users to be able to see other countries due to prduct and price differences.

• Use a homepage with country selection (and cookies to redirect on second visit)

• this has been rejected by ecommerce team as will increase bounce rate% & we dont want users to be able to see other countries due to prduct and price differences.

Is there an easy solution to this problem that we're overlooking?

Is there another way of legal cloaking we could use here?

Many thanks in advance for any help here

Yes thanks. That is not an option unfortunately because that is without a doubt my number 1 preferred route for international seo.

Did you know that you can also direct sub-folders in webmaster tools so that they are targeting specific countries?

I have a global site targeting many countries including the UK which is the only English language site.

Does it matter whether I use /en or /uk for the UK sub-folder?

If I already have /en in place, but my Google UK listings are struggling, will it benefit me to switch to /uk?

I honestly don't think it matters too much, but given the choice would've gone for the /uk

I'm trying to weigh up whether it is worth the effort of changing it.

Hi Helen,

ironically I was jsut logging in to the QnA to ask about WP URLs and URL structures in general!

If I was you I would 301 redirect them to be safe as this is still the best way to do it according to Google themselves.

You can use a WP 301 add on like this to do it http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-301-redirects/

We have a client who publishes deals that are time sensitive.

Links to the deals expire and so Google's crawlers are picking them up and finding a 404

If I no follow them, will the 404's still get picked up and reported in WMT?

The same question applies to SEOMoz Pro.

if you want to rank competitively in the US and AU then I strongly recommend local domains.

In my experience, subfolders on a single domain are less effective then local domains. The above solution can work and you are at an advantage that your CA site is established and is the "parent" site.

It is more work to maintain separate domains, but in my experience of managing .com sites, we have always faced a challenge because despite the target setting in WMT, Google still struggles to rank the UK site in the UK over the US site in many instances because it is on a .com and because there is a US version of the site.

If you set the targeting in Webmaster Tools to AU only and the others to their corresponding markets then you are unlikely to face any duplicate content penalties.

Additional measures you need to consider are:

Focus the majority of link building and PR to respective markets i.e. try and get a higher ratio of links from local sites
Put local physical addresses on each site e.g. on the AU site have an address in Australia.

Generally speaking, you are still going to have some issues with your non AU sites outranking your AU site on Google AU, as do sites in the UK, but if you take the measures above then you are sending a strong signal to the search engines that you are not trying to spam them.

Thanks. That's exactly what I have told them so I'm glad we agree

As far as the search engines are concerned, the URLs are nice and clean with relevant keywords, but if a user browses the site in IE then the URLs do not maintain their double byte structure and instead convert to ugly URLs like this: mydomain.com/hk/hotels/asia-pacific/-中國-重慶-579-重慶-Sofitel-2-1-晚優惠-連早餐-1025557/

I've seen exactly the same thing and have assumed that this is down to the SEOMoz crawler not being able to pick up the settings in Webmaster Tools.

Have you noticed an improvement in your Webmaster tools reports?

I don't know if there is anything you can do at this stage, regardless of whether you're looking at SEOMoz or WMT. I wouldn't be too concerned about it if you have correctly set parameter handling and backed that up with some canonical tags if appropriate.

Very often, these alerts are meant to flag something for you to check with a human eye, but this and all of the above is my interpretation of what you are describing from my own experience so I guess you need to wait for A Mozzer to reply about the intricacies of what their crawler is telling you.

The client is already on /en and in my opinion there is not much to be gained by switching to /uk

We are doing some optimisation on sites in the APAC region, namely China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan.

We have set the url generator to automatically use the heading of the page in the URL which works fine for countries using Latin characters, but is causing problems, particularly in IE, when it comes to the double byte countries.

For some reason, IE struggles with double byte and displays URLs in their rather ugly, coded form.

Anybody got any suggestions on whether we should persist with the keyword URLs or revert to the non-descriptive URLs for the double byte countries?

The reason I ask is it's a balance of SEO benefit vs not scaring IE users off with ugly URLs that look dreadful and spammy.

i would go with Wordpress if I were you. Avoid joomla because it is clunky and in my experience (with an art supplies website believe it or not!) it gradually falls apart at the seams as you grow the site.

Wordpress is arguably the best of the lot because it is the most widely used and therefore has a broad set of add ons etc to suit just about any site.

I haven't used the others so can't comment on them.

3 cheers for Ryan! Thank you.

We want to track users from a particular campaign to see what they do when they get to the site.

The site generates revenue from clicks out so we want to be able to see whether visitors from a particular source click on multiple deals. i.e. enters from the source and then clicks on 3 different deals that take the user to other sites. Using GA, can I track this by implementing UTM on both the campaign links and outgoing links? Can I see exactly how many deals the average user is clicking on?

As far as I know I can: Track visitors from the campaign Track overall clicks on deals Divide click outs by visitors

But I can't track how many deals the visitors from campaign A clicked on... or can I?

I just experienced something VERY odd and wondered if any of you had an idea of what it might be.

• When I did a search on Google and clicked the top SEO listing I was taken to a competitor of the number 1 listed site i.e. NOT the site I clicked on.
• When I clicked the back button and clicked it again, I was taken to the correct site.
• This happened with two different searches and I was taken to two different sites.

Could this be a clever/sinister cookie implemented by the competitor; a site I frequent regularly?

Could this be malware implemented by an affiliate?

Could this be a Google glitch?

"Mike's Excel for SEOs guide" - wooop fekken woooop!! Thank you

Finding Link Opportunities With Advanced Search Queries | Distilled blog http://ow.ly/1swIgW

White Hat SEO: It F@$#ing Works | SEOmoz http://ow.ly/4xeL4

The Evolution of Google's Rankings http://ow.ly/4fhi3

We have set up each site in the same webmaster tools account and have also used the tool to select which market we wish to target with the site i.e. .com is set to US only and .com/uk is set to UK only.

If you land on the .com for the first time, it will show a lightbox (javascript enabled) that lets you choose which site you wish to view.

This lightbox has a no index, do follow robots tag included to ensure it passes all link juice.

As per my previous comment... I would go for a local TLD over a .com/uk or subdomain approach every day of the week, especially when you have different countries that speak the same language.

Unfortunately we are on a .com/uk however we own the .co.uk which carries a 301 redirect.

Given the choice, I would go with the .co.uk because the .com is an established site and this is proving challenging for the UK site to establish itself in the Google results pages i.e. the US site often outranks the UK site on Google UK.

Thanks for the swift reply

We have a blog on each of our country sites, but the content on the English speaking sites is shared i.e. locally produced in US is mixed up with stuff produced in UK and vice versa.

I'm not concerned about duplicate content because we have taken the necessary measures to let the search engines know that we have a US site for the US and and UK site for the UK.

My question to you is whether we should develop the blog independently in each country or develop one blog to satisfy our global sites.

I believe a local blog for each country is better because the content would speak to the audience better and any reference points or product and price points would be 100% relevant to the audience.

Hosting on a US server is not as much of a problem as it used to be because the search engines have worked this one out.

Where it appears you may have a problem is that the site is already established in the US which will make it more difficult to establish a UK site unless you go for the uk tld.

If you want to make sure UK visitors to the .com are sent to the right site, then a lightbox generated using JavaScript for non-US IP users would do the trick e.g. www.travelzoo.com

Once the user has selected UK then a cookie is dropped and they will always be sent to the UK site.

Make sure your country select page includes a no index, follow tag so that it doesn't get indexed, but does pass any link juice it happens to acquire.

If you are going for other markets with the same language e.g. UK (English) then I would go with a separate local TLD because a .com with a /uk will struggle to establish itself in a new market like the UK.

Believe me when I say that it is not as simple as indicating in webmaster tools which markets you wish to target, especially if you already have an established site in the US on a .com

Go separate. Go local tld.

Yes. It looks like it might be best to consolidate with one outstanding listing. If they are under the same business name and URL then I think you have no choice.

If you list the practitioners at or near the top of the description then you will help the listing when people search for the individuals.

I would get the clinic its own listing and then one for each of the chiropractors because some users may look specifically for a particular chiropractor. Having a listing for both the chiropractor and the clinic they work in probably contributes to the overall "local authority" of the clinic and the chiropractors.

I would also make sure that the content used to describe each is distinctly different.

One catch though... do they all use the same phone number? That could be a problem with verification.

Yes, I would no index them, but it depends on how this would affect the way these pages get indexed because you wouldn't want to create orphan pages in the Google index i.e. pages that have no navigation to other parts of the site.

it might be safer to implement the canonical tag in which case you can tell the search engines which version you want them to prioritize.

If you want to send me a link to the site I will happily take a look.

Hi Ben.

Have you checked to see the articles themselves have been indexed by Google? In other words using the site:search or the article title in ""?

If they are indexed and you are looking for the links themselves i.e. link: then it is probably because Google doesn't show everything, just a sample of links pointing to your site.

If you use Open Site Explorer or MajesticSEO you will get more reliable link figures, but again you should bear in mind that OSE and MSEO don't contain the entire web so may not have picked the links up yet either.

Thanks. We've decided not to go down the no index route because although these pages don't have significant rankings and therefore don't drive much in the way of SEO traffic, they do contribute to the overall authority status of the site and the directories in which they sit.

For example, a hotel deal will sit within the hotels directory/sub folder so to no index all these details we fear would undermine the overall authority of this directory.

I think we are going to go with making the first paragraph visible to the users and search engines... and probably look at combining that with First Click Free

One of my clients is an email subscriber-led business offering deals that are time sensitive and which expire after a limited, but varied, time period.

Each deal is published on its own URL and in order to drive subscriptions to the email, an overlay was implemented that would appear over the individual deal page so that the user was forced to subscribe if they wished to view the details of the deal.

Needless to say, this led to the threat of a Google penalty which _appears (fingers crossed) _to have been narrowly avoided as a result of a quick response on our part to remove the offending overlay.

What I would like to ask you is whether you have any safe and approved methods for capturing email subscribers without revealing the premium content to users before they subscribe?

We are considering the following approaches:

First Click Free for Web Search - This is an opt in service by Google which is widely used for this sort of approach and which stipulates that you have to let the user see the first item they click on from the listings, but can put up the subscriber only overlay afterwards.

No Index, No follow - if we simply no index, no follow the individual deal pages where the overlay is situated, will this remove the "cloaking offense" and therefore the risk of a penalty?

Partial View - If we show one or two paragraphs of text from the deal page with the rest being covered up by the subscribe now lock up, will this still be cloaking?

I will write up my first SEOMoz post on this once we have decided on the way forward and monitored the effects, but in the meantime, I welcome any input from you guys.

Thanks for the feedback folks. The sitemap does hold more pages than the standard one, but then if it comes down to the name not being an issue, I guess we needn't worry. I'm still going to change it though.. makes me yak every time i see it.

Thanks Damion... I have got Google looking at it now so fingers crossed they can find the fault.

Yes... it is a bit like trying to rely less on finger in the air and a deep understanding of SEO so that I can explain it to clients in way that they can understand it.

I agree with Dejan SEO that we should look to maximise the number of linking domains, but I was hoping someone had a way of explaining to clients that sometimes it might be worth investing a little extra on content + placement to get that extra special link from a high PR/MR site.

Hi Marcus, thanks for your reply. So no we are not trying to output a tiered flat rate for our clients.We are trying to show by link a number which takes into account price and quality of the link.

Maybe an example would help.

How do we compare an article placed on a mozrank 3 site @ £100, to an article placed on a mozrank 4 site @ £200?

We are trying to create a formula which takes into account cost and quality, to give us an output which we then make this decision on, and also a number we share with clients by each link on their monthly linkbuilding plan.

I hope that makes sense

I work for a number of clients on linkbuilding campaigns, and I follow and recommend to clients a white hat "quality" linkbuilding approach. This has achieved great results for my clients but I often get questions such as.

Q. What is better for us - £100 for a mozrank 4 placement vs £200 for a mozrank 5 placement?

I am trying to build a numeric way of showing cost of placing a link (via article mainly) vs the mozrank / authority of the site its placed on.

The key to working this out though is knowing how much more value there is between the different quality of sites, and what are the key factors to build into the formula.

Ideally the output we will get is a linkbuilding effect cost which shows the cost per impact of a placement. A highly simplified formula (that wouldn't work)  therefore would be

Cost / mozrank

If we look at mozrank being 8 times higher between levels, how does this correlate with the value of the link from sites at those different levels?

We know that we will never have a correct formula for this but we are striving to get a formula which helps us to plan and evaluate different site opportunities at different costs.

I would love to know anybody’s thoughts on this,

Thanks

When I have "organic only" segmenting on i.e. non paid search traffic, it is showing that the top organic keywords are keywords that i have no top 30 rankings in organic, yet my ppc ad is number one.

Biggest traffic driver - cheap flights - no rankings for this domain, but the sister domain is on page 2
Second biggest - cheap hotels - pos 15-16

I have a bastard of a problem... Google Analytics is incorrectly tracking PPC traffic as SEO which is screwing up all my reporting .

I don't care for rankings, I care for actual SEO traffic and I can't be sure that what i am seeing is correct which is driving me nuts.

Any ideas?

I would argue these topics are easier to build links for because they are so niche and therefore less competitive, so perhaps you should go back to basics and try some or all of the following:

Niche directories - i know directories are old hat and outdated, but if you could get a few links from "eco" sites (toxic waste removal) or indeed government sites such as town councils etc then you will get some benefit. Don't forget it is worth linking out to authority sites too i.e. if you link to the local council site on how to get rid of toxic waste safely then then your link neighbourhood improves.

Niche publications - If you can place articles in these sites with contextual links then you're on to a winner. Case studies and how to guides are always welcome material.

How to guides - Especially when it comes to plumbers, boilers etc. I worked with a plumbing company before and suggested they post how to guides on everything from fitting a tap to what questions to ask your plumber about a new boiler etc. The push back here is often that "if we tell them how to do it then they won't get us to do it", but would you really try and fit a boiler yourself if you had the instructions? Try http://www.e-zine-list.com/index.shtml for a list of niche pubs

Become the expert - sites like Yahoo Answers are awash with people looking for answers on various topics so if your client can put in a little time each day to answer questions they could become recognised as the go to guy on their subject.