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ScreamingFrog will also let you see External HTML links from a site. Plus it works on Mac.

I wrote an article on this exact topic awhile back. Bottom line, don't use the meta keywords tag. It's a waste of time for rankings and might be a good way for your competitors to know exactly what you're trying to rank for.

Thanks for responding so quickly. Upon further thought, I think what I'm seeing is less about Title and H1 matching, and more about providing variety within the SERP when compared to other results. I'm trying some things on a low risk site so we'll see what happens.

Almost 4 years later, I'm curious what your current thoughts on this are EGOL? I too have seen great results with exact match title tags, but I've started to notice more recently that it doesn't work like it used to. Especially in cases where many other results in the SERPs also show results with exact match (or very close to exact) title tags. My untested suspicion is that Google doesn't want a SERP chalk full of results that all look the same (neither would users for that matter), so a better SERP would show more variety.

Anyway, the world of SEO is ever-changing and I was curious to see how your answer from 2013 stacks up in 2017.

It's been about 4 months since you've noted this problem. How is it looking for you now? I'm curious if your rankings came back and whether or not you took action to get them back.

You can use Moz Open Site Explorer (https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/) but Majestic and aHrefs have similar functionality too. In Moz, play with the filters. For Target you can choose "this root domain". For link type, you can filter by "only follow". This should give you a more well-rounded picture of the entire domain, not just a given page.

Yeah, in the end I do the same. I use the competitive analysis to clear any low-hanging fruit. There's always a "well that sucks" moment when I find one of these, but then you ultimately move on. It would be really cool if we could filter on some of these other attributes so that we don't have to spend time looking at those pages in the first place. Maybe I'm dreaming.

Are you only looking at the data for just this particular page? I took a look at the entire root domain and it looks like they've got some pretty high-value followed backlinks. For example, here's a followed backlink from the BBC: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-34157367.

The subpage is probably seeing a combination benefit of high Domain Authority paired with strong on-page keyword relevance (and over 200 other things). Domains that already do well in search tend to get their new pages to rank even more quickly, and in some cases that can be true even before those pages have many backlinks.

I want to start a discussion about assessing the true value of a backlink. Here's a scenario:

I've just started working on SEO for a new client. Once I've got the strategy stuff out of the way, I like to start by looking at backlinks that competitors have. I use Moz OSE (and other tools) and filter by followed links to the root domain. This gives a good starting sense of where competitors are getting links from. As I start to explore those links, I see some black-hat (or grey-hat) practices at play: display:none links, footer links, sidebar links, comment spam, etc.

The problem I have is, there seems to be no way of knowing whether or not those links are responsible for boosting the competitors rankings. They come from sites that have good DA and PA, yet we're told that tactics like display:none and comment spam will either get those links devalued or may cause some sort of manual action.

My question is, how do others evaluate the full spectrum of the value a link has that goes beyond trust, authority, and citation flow?

I wish I had a solution for you, but I'm still using SNI via standard CloudFlare so I'm not able to leverage the Moz crawl at all. If you find a solution, it'd be great if you can post it here for myself and the others.

You can use Moz Open Site Explorer (https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/) but Majestic and aHrefs have similar functionality too. In Moz, play with the filters. For Target you can choose "this root domain". For link type, you can filter by "only follow". This should give you a more well-rounded picture of the entire domain, not just a given page.

I want to start a discussion about assessing the true value of a backlink. Here's a scenario:

I've just started working on SEO for a new client. Once I've got the strategy stuff out of the way, I like to start by looking at backlinks that competitors have. I use Moz OSE (and other tools) and filter by followed links to the root domain. This gives a good starting sense of where competitors are getting links from. As I start to explore those links, I see some black-hat (or grey-hat) practices at play: display:none links, footer links, sidebar links, comment spam, etc.

The problem I have is, there seems to be no way of knowing whether or not those links are responsible for boosting the competitors rankings. They come from sites that have good DA and PA, yet we're told that tactics like display:none and comment spam will either get those links devalued or may cause some sort of manual action.

My question is, how do others evaluate the full spectrum of the value a link has that goes beyond trust, authority, and citation flow?

I too am using CloudFlare and have the same error. I'd like to be notified when you have an update.

Thanks,
Adam

Are you only looking at the data for just this particular page? I took a look at the entire root domain and it looks like they've got some pretty high-value followed backlinks. For example, here's a followed backlink from the BBC: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-34157367.

The subpage is probably seeing a combination benefit of high Domain Authority paired with strong on-page keyword relevance (and over 200 other things). Domains that already do well in search tend to get their new pages to rank even more quickly, and in some cases that can be true even before those pages have many backlinks.

Yeah, in the end I do the same. I use the competitive analysis to clear any low-hanging fruit. There's always a "well that sucks" moment when I find one of these, but then you ultimately move on. It would be really cool if we could filter on some of these other attributes so that we don't have to spend time looking at those pages in the first place. Maybe I'm dreaming.

Thanks for responding so quickly. Upon further thought, I think what I'm seeing is less about Title and H1 matching, and more about providing variety within the SERP when compared to other results. I'm trying some things on a low risk site so we'll see what happens.

ScreamingFrog will also let you see External HTML links from a site. Plus it works on Mac.