Thanks!

Whats going on with Dmoz? Last time I looked the site was still live but I remember submitting some clients around 4 years ago and still haven't got a response!

Thanks! I'll take a look at those. Exactly what I needed. If you remember any others let me know

Hey Mozzers,

I am doing some research and wonder if you can help me out?

Before Moz, Hubspot, Majestic, Screaming Frog and all the other awesome SEO tools we use today what were the SEO tools / software / websites that were used for aiding SEO?

I guess we can add the recently closed Yahoo! Directory for starters!

Thanks!

Hi Antonio,

Sorry to hear you have had the same problem, due to our clients nature this error by the developer cost them a load of lost revenue.

In answer to your questions:

1. It took 19 days in total to recover

2. We took everyone's advice and implemented them but I am unsure what actually helped. I think working work GWMT is the best thing for it. Make sure you submit for a re-crawl as soon as possible and see what is still blocked

I know how scary the situation is but things will go back to normal. Its just a matter of playing the waiting game really, sorry I couldn't be of more help.

Rikki

Hi guys,

Thanks very much for the responses. I guess my gut feeling was right that everything would come back to normal but just needed some reassurance.

I have made real progress with this client going from an online brought in revenue of £15k per month at the start of the year to £105k last month but it is all phone based so at the moment his call centre is like a ghost town - its a shame that can happen when a developer is trying to block his own dev sub domain and ends up blocking the whole thing. Just hope it doesn't take too long.

We will certainly try the social media route to see if that speeds things along.

Hello,

A client of mine is going through a bit of a crisis. A developer (at their end) added Disallow: / to the robots.txt file. Luckily the SEOMoz crawl ran a couple of days after this happened and alerted me to the error. The robots.txt file was quickly updated but the client has found the vast majority of their rankings have gone.

It took a further 5 days for GWMT to file that the robots.txt file had been updated and since then we have "Fetched as Google" and "Submitted URL and linked pages" in GWMT.

In GWMT it is still showing that that vast majority of pages are blocked in the "Blocked URLs" section, although the robots.txt file below it is now ok.

I guess what I want to ask is:

• What else is there that we can do to recover these rankings quickly?
• What time scales can we expect for recovery?
• More importantly has anyone had any experience with this sort of situation and is full recovery normal?

Thanks in advance!

Thanks for your help all. Decided not to buy the domain and keep going with things as they are!

Thanks THB. You re-confirm what I was thinking really but it's just when they are offered I think they make you think about it a bit more. Would be interested to hear any other views on this?

Hello, Someone approached a client of mine to sell a exact match domain name for a very competitive and high converting keyword. Would this be of any use and what are the best tactics to employ if it is purchased? I was of the opinion that the 'power' of exact match domain names are dying fast but would be interested to hear what people with experience in this think and what they have done with them (i.e. set-up a website on that domain or re-directed it)? Thanks, Rikki

I think the most important thing is that the most relevant page for the keyword is shown. In most cases this is a deeper page than the home page and will usually have a better chance of converting.

Question says it all I guess. What would your recommend as the best free tool to check internal broken links?

Hi Dan,

Thanks for that tool. It works great and especially like that it works in Chrome.

Do you however know of a tool which would do this site wide rather than per page?

I think the most important thing is that the most relevant page for the keyword is shown. In most cases this is a deeper page than the home page and will usually have a better chance of converting.

Hi Antonio,

Sorry to hear you have had the same problem, due to our clients nature this error by the developer cost them a load of lost revenue.

In answer to your questions:

1. It took 19 days in total to recover

2. We took everyone's advice and implemented them but I am unsure what actually helped. I think working work GWMT is the best thing for it. Make sure you submit for a re-crawl as soon as possible and see what is still blocked

I know how scary the situation is but things will go back to normal. Its just a matter of playing the waiting game really, sorry I couldn't be of more help.

Rikki