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It's difficult to say exactly what is wrong in this situation, but here are a couple of questions that might help narrow it down.
Have you tried manually going to the pages that appear to have these errors?
Did you recently change any URLs on your site?
Is the sitemap you submitted in WMT still valid?
I don't see why this would be any different than a normal redirect. Is there some problem you are experiencing that I am unaware of?
Here are a few methods you can use to redirect URLs.
When a page links to another page, it is letting Google know that the page it is linking to is of significant value. When you build a page about new cars, and then you link out from that page to something else, Google assumes that that other page is also about new cars, and that it is a high quality page. Of course, the original page is still seen as more influential, but some of this value is transferred along to the page it links to.
The way that this will increase the value of your homepage is, for example, if there were 10,000 pages all about new cars, and they all linked to your home page, then Google would be strongly inclined to think that your home page was a great resource for things about new cars. So even though the 10,000 pages might be more optimized for the "new cars" keyword, since there are so many, and since they all link to your page as a resource, that little bit of value they transfer to your page adds up, and your home page becomes more important than the linking pages in the eyes of Google.
This is the basic concept of Pagerank, and is a very important factor in how Google determines results in the rankings.
It's probably easier to only use 301 redirects, especially if the majority of deleted posts are not going to be restored and are deleted permanently in a few months.
From my experience, there is always a big discrepancy between OSE and WMT.
First, make sure that when you use the OSE, you aren't viewing only follow links or links that have equity. WMT displays all links, regardless of their type.
Next, you might want to check out the "Just Discovered" section of OSE. Even though it is in beta, it should let you know if it is finding any more links at all, as opposed to new domains.
If you are sure that OSE is not finding new links, verify that the links listed in WMT actually do exist and it isn't a problem with WMT.
If they do, and it is a problem with OSE, then I don't know what the problem is. You should consider contacting Moz directly instead of asking on the Q&A.
That may be because the previous site owners verified that it was a mirror site and have not undone it. You should contact whoever you purchased the domain from and ask if they could double check they still aren't listing it as a mirror site.
It depends what you are using the NAP for. Can you elaborate?
It probably won't help you much SEO-wise, but are these pages showing up in the SERPs (the pages without the meta description)? If they are, you probably want to add a meta description so that Google displays it under the snippet.
Some action is required on their part. Otherwise, you could potentially post your own content under someone else's name and benefit from (or destroy) their reputation.
There are two main ways to connect content with the author.
However, the industry experts who you have content from should want to link to it! If they don't know about Google Authorship, they'd probably appreciate you telling them, so I'd make sure to ask them about it. Google support explains how to set up authorship here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2539557?hl=en&ref_topic=2371375
Best of luck!
That's what I thought they were saying at first, but if you read this line again, "... add a canonical URL of the category archive page to the individual posts..." they mean to add the tag to the posts, not the main page.
A canonical tag is used to signify that a page has the same or extremely similar content to another page. Here I don't know if that is the case, because the cornerstone page would have much more content than the individual post pages.
This is what Google says about the canonical tag:
"Must the content on a set of pages be similar to the content on the canonical version?
Yes. The rel="canonical" attribute should be used only to specify the preferred version of many pages with identical content (although minor differences, such as sort order, are okay)."
From what I've seen, it is a fairly effective tactic. One of our blogs was hacked and redirected to a Chinese xanax selling site, and the hacker link built a ton of xanax related anchor text links to our blog. A year later, we have only improved in the rankings, and our domain authority is higher than ever, despite the artificial links accounting for 90% of our link profile.
This isn't entirely what you asked, though, because the anchor text is still somewhat keyword rich. However, one of our competitors has done something similar to the situation you described. Their unrelated diverse anchor text accounts for about 95% of their inbound links, with many being written in a non-English language (beats me what they say). They are currently ranked third for the main keyword for our niche, although they do have an exact match domain name, so that is also helping them some.
I don't really have a definite answer, but I hope these examples were at least of interest to you! If you manage to test this out in a more unbiased way, let us know what you find.
Did you generate the report using the OpenSiteExplorer or using the Moz report feature under Campaigns and Tools?
For OSE, past reports are located under "recent CSV reports" on the top bar.
For Moz reports they are under the Reports tab in whatever campaign you were using.
These are probably stupid questions, but they've been bothering me. On my profile page it says complete your profile - earn 10 more moz points! However, I completed my profile and it says it is 100% complete with 0 items left to complete. Is there any reason these points aren't registering?
Also, on the header it says my username and that I have 52 moz points, but on my profile page it says I only have 46. Is there a wait time for one of these to update or sync?
Also, is there a way to track how many moz points you have gotten in a particular month? I know there are limits to how many points you can get in a given period.
I think it depends on the niche that you are in and what your competitors are doing. If your competitors have a very small percentage of branded anchor text, that could make you stand out, hopefully in a good way. High percentage domain/brand match anchor text is generally a very good SEO practice.
The little person icon up at the top right should have a drop down menu that includes login.
Just some more information about canonical tags, Matt Cutts has said that self-referring canonical tags like the one you described won't hurt your site. However, Bing said that it could negatively impact rankings, and to not put a tag if it lists its own url. If you are getting the majority of traffic from people using Bing (although it's not likely), you might want to consider removing the canonical tag.
Like Martijn said though, canonical tags are fine when used correctly.
A link like this shouldn't harm your site, and if it is a follow link, could be helping you in the rankings.
Google does not expect every single link to a site to be perfectly relevant and authoritative. There are bound to be a number of irrelevant links to any site, because anyone on the internet can post anything at any time. This site in particular seems to be a high quality, useful site, and even though a dictionary is not relevant to your business, the language you are using on your site IS relevant to text translation.
Unless you are getting many (read: hundreds or thousands) of links from this site, it should have a negligible or slightly beneficial effect on your rankings.
This is (unfortunately) a big issue with blog sites. How are you attempting to find sites to publish your content? When we first started searching for blogs, we would look for the top blogs in our niche on the SERPs. We would Google terms like "top HR blogs" or "best HR blog" and then check out the results. If they are a good blog, they are going to rank well in the SERPs, so they are fairly easy to find. You can also specify your search by adding modifiers such as intitle:keyword.
Most of these sites, however, are very high quality, and don't readily accept submissions. They are still worth trying though, because if you can submit content you get a powerful, trustworthy, relevant link back to your site. From my experience it seems that posting content under a high ranking strictly <your niche="">blog is better than posting under a <your niche="">category of a bigger, more general, all-purpose blog.</your></your>
If you don't find any sites you want to and are able to contribute to, you can also use resources such as BloggerLinkUp or HelpAReporter, which try to help connect the content publishers with the writers.
Our rankings have dropped considerably since the 5/22 Penguin update.
Improving your MozRank is not a guarantee of improved rankings in the SERPs. While the MozRank is fairly indicative of PageRank, it is by no means the same, and something that affects MozRank may affect your Google rank differently. Also, changes to your site may not be initially recognized by Google as Chris said, whereas Moz can detect those changes immediately. Finally, if you make too significant of changes to your webpages, Google may recognize that as a sign that the site has changed (as opposed to slight content modification), and your rankings will be more easily affected.
In the latest links CSV dating back to 2008, only about 20 links from Yahoo are displayed. Some are from dir.yahoo, and some are from marketplace.news. A search for inurl:yahoo.net websitename shows almost 3,000 results.
Google WMT says I have over 33,000 backlinks from Yahoo.net, linking to 4 different pages on my site. I am not sure if these are nofollow or not, but I would assume they are. It also says I have almost 4,000 links from feedblitz. Should I be concerned or do something about either of these two things? I am pretty unfamiliar with RSS feeds.
Well, with more pages you will have more opportunities to go after different keywords and offer new original content. As long as the content isn't duplicate or spammy, I can't imagine you would be hurt for simply expanding your website. Even if you added a bunch of internal links to your new pages, as long as your pages still look natural it shouldn't be a problem.
I am currently getting links to my site where the anchor text is, say, domainx.com. However, my website's url is domainy.com - the anchor text is the url of another website. Is this hurting my website in the SERPS, or making my link building look unnatural? The link is on the blog roll of another website, so it has produced hundreds, maybe thousands of copies of this anchor text link. Does that have any impact on my ranking as well?
I would like to follow-up with a question on this. If we already have a blog, that is currently a completely separate URL - should we transition the blog back to the main site?
The blog is currently only about 10-15% of the traffic of the main site, we do update it frequently. I am thinking we might be better off moving it.
Anyone been through this? A few years back, a separate URL worked well, but I realize this does not help use much these days with google...if we were starting from scratch there would be no way we would be doing this.
Thanks community!
blog. subdomain version /blog after main domain name
While i posted something contrary a few minutes ago..MANUAL directory submission cannot hurt. However, I doubt it helps much these days.
At this time, we have many 1-5 ranked keywords, and have given up directory submission altogether on it.
Recommendation (that we are still trying to figure out..)Write articles, post blogs build a Tribe that follows you - its a new world! Forget the tricks.
Hi. I am not sure anyone knows the answer to this..yet. However, we have dropped most 'spam/scam' techniques and now simply getting on forums/blogs and answering questions (like this!), that make sense and are on track. This truly is grunt work but worth it in the end. You want evergreen content, and want folks to track down your site and what you have to offer. My opinion is that the 'art' of link building and those that do not have domain knowledge in areas is a rapidly dying profession.
One thing...We focus on hiring writers (zerys) that can write on our topics (original content) that we post on article sites, and write GREAT original content on our site (at least we think so).
We are just dabbling in video, motion graphics etc but not seeing the benefits yet. TBD
Finally, we definitely try our best to get our 'info graphics' and guest blogs out on good PR/ranked sites, offering 'hey your link is broken' etc...not much there but a few here and there which we believe add up.
I know this doesn't help much, but having lived through the old school (techniques that used to work), we definitely know this is not the case anymore.
Best!
Guys, I have an interesting dilemma that the team here is discussing and wanted your input here is the situation:
1. We had our home page rank for a key word 4-5 on google for the past 2 years.
2. About 5 weeks ago, the home page and a sub page began ranking on top 10 for the same term.
3. Today, the sub-page a "What is page" ranks 3-5 on google and the home page is dropped somewhere like 22 or so now
** I believe I should begin redirecting that anchor text to the sub page, and maybe even some or all of our internal anchor texts to this page...
Any recommendations? The home page is optimized to help get conversions, so we hate to 'give up' on that term, but any one run into this? What did you do?
Thanks Community SEOMOZ! for any input...
Thanks! I appreciate the responses. Now on to more quality content!
Hi, we put up a page 2 years ago (available from our home page) that is currently ranking in top 5 for a few of the key words we built it for. The challenge is we did this quickly and know we can (and actually have) built out a better quality, informative page.
The content while similar is completely rewritten. Does anyone have experience in rewriting low quality pages that are ranking well?
Essentially we are trying to step up our game and build up our quality from a human perspective, but unsure what/if any would happen with our SEO and keywords we are currently ranking for.
Thanks!
Recently I discovered an opportunity for a link on the Better Business Bureau, but it cots $600/yr. In my niche I want the link for nothing more than link building. Is the link worth paying for? (I read the YouMoz post on the subject, but still no definitive answer).