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Hi AutoGlassRescue,

The report you have made available here does not provide sufficient information to make an informed decision on your backlink situation...this report provides only the domains that link to your site.

Within this list I see root domains that may well be hiding large numbers of hosted sites that might have been created for manipulative purposes.

For example:

1. wordpress.com could host just a few subdomain.wordpress.com blogs, or perhaps hundreds or even thousands. Without the actual URL list, (as you would get from the most recent links report in Webmaster tools), it is impossible to know.
2. yahoo.com could be playing host to some harmless posts from answers.yahoo.com, or it could be concealing an orchestrated effort to manipulate search results via bogus posts on the groups.yahoo.com subdomain. Again, there might be just a few, or hundreds, or even thousands.

There are a number of sites that offer individuals the option of claiming a subdomain which is essentially independent of the domain owner. These also include blogspot.com (and a range of country specific duplicates), tumblr.com and more.

This Link Removal flowchart from the Bruce Clay blog will give you an idea of what to look for when analyzing your backlink profile, but you will need to be looking at individual URLs to get a clear picture of your situation.

You could also take a look at our October Webinar recording and slide deck which focused on link analysis for some more information.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Charles,

Sorry to see that your question hasn't been answered yet!

I just stumbled upon it way down in the list, so am assuming that you still need an answer.

First, you are absolutely correct in deducing that the default Traffic Data report is based on weekly data from Google Analytics.

You can also see Monthly data by going from the report you see in the campaign overview to the Traffic Data page (either click See Full Traffic Summary, or click Traffic Data on the Pro App menu bar).

Once on the summary page, you will see that there is a selector at the top which allows you to change the filter to monthly instead of weekly.

It is important to remember that these Analytics results are for the preceding period (ie the past 30 days, not month to date).

Hope that helps,

Sha

hmmm...I went looking on your profile to see if you had listed a URL and having run your domain through Open Site Explorer, I can see that it is very likely that the bulk of your problems are coming from your site's external link profile.

Here are a few more blog posts that might help you to get a clear picture of things:

Penguins, Pandas and Panic at the Zoo by Dr Pete Meyers.

Anchor Text Distribution: Avoiding Over Optimization by Geoff Kenyon.

Bad Backlink Checking by Richard Baxter

and for something a little less intense, but that can help immensely if you are trying to get a picture of your own situation, Link Removal Flowchart by Bob Meinke.

Hope that helps,

Sha

P.S. The Google Algorithm Change History can also be very useful in checking whether changes in site traffic, rankings etc coincide with changes at Google.

Hi Kevin,

Just a few things to think about...

1. The best thing you can do to improve the situation is to move your client's focus from "Rankings" to "Results"... Is the new site getting traffic? Clearly the UI you have built should be much better for conversion. Does the new text stack up on the conversion front? Whatever the rankings, if the client starts seeing trackable conversions from the new site, the tension will ease quickly.

2. Have you taken advantage of the "Fetch as Googlebot" feature in Google Webmaster Tools and the Bing version in Bing's Webmaster Central to get the pages of the new site crawled and indexed quickly?

3. A 301 is called a Permanent redirect. It is not intended to be reversed at will, but it is intended to inform search engines that the old URL should be de-indexed  and replaced with the new.

4. I would be looking fairly closely at the backlink profile of the old site for two reasons. 1) To see whether there are local citation links in the mix so you can make a more informed decision about the need to use a 301 2) To see if the old site is in line for a penguin slap in the near future

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hey Dr Pete,

The Googledocs reference comes out of Matt Cutts' specific advice not to provide external links to the Webspam Team as they have security protocols which mean they will be unlikely to look at them.

It is included in the Webmaster video embedded on this page: http://www.rmoov.com/google-reconsideration-request-checklist.php

Unfortunately, the little advice that comes from Googlers varies wildly, so in the end, site owners need to apply a good measure of careful thought and common sense.

See you at Mozcon

Sha

Hi Anthony,

If the issue you have is related to the fact that you have both www and non www versions of the pages, then you can implement a 301 redirect within the Yahoo Stores system to take care of this.

If you go to this Yahoo Stores 301 Help Page you will find a detailed explanation of the various ways that you can implement redirects.

The part that applies to this situation is in the following paragraph:

You can also choose to redirect all hostnames and domain to your selected domain so your non-www address (acme.com) points for example to your www domain (www.acme.com). This setting also redirects your index page (for example www.acme.com/index.html) to your selected redirect setting (for example www.acme.com). This allows you to have one url (also known as a canonical url) rather than multiple so search engine relevancy factors will accrue to one url rather than being spread out across multiple urls.

The instructions are directly below that paragraph and the diagram shows you where to choose the redirect you want to use A.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hey James,

Welcome to SEOmoz

It's a wonderful community and quite addictive too!

Here's a post that I made a while back that might help you find your way around ... a couple of extra resources in the comments too.

Look forward to seeing you around in the future.

Sha

Hi Anderson,

Just took a very quick look at your source code and my first reaction would be that there is something "unique" happening with the naming within your site structure

To be more precise ... you have multiple instances like this in the code:

http://www.tile-pompanobeach.com/sites/tile-pompanobeach.com/files/logo.png

since the keyword you are targeting for that page is tile pompano beach, it is not much of a stretch to think perhaps the repetition could be an attempt to manipulate rankings.

Given that you are saying rankings have plummeted to as low as page 10, I would guess that the repetition of your keyword term (exact match domain) in the source code is being seen as keyword stuffing.

It would be interesting to know exactly when the rankings went into freefall, but my guess would be perhaps around the end of April.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi,

As everyone else has mentioned, nofollowed links are not passing PageRank and therefore should not be influencing search visibility as assessed by the Google Algorithm. If there is no manual action in place then there should be no reason to disavow them.

However, I look very differently at nofollowed links in the backlink profile of a site that has a manual action in place. In that case I ask two questions:

1. Is the site one that is in any way undesirable?

2. Are the nofollowed links part of an obvious large-scale manipulative effort?

If the answer to either or both of these questions is yes, then I choose to both attempt to get the links removed and also disavow. The reason for this: of course I don't want links from dubious sites which even though not passing PageRank could be doing damage to my brand and reputation  and; when asking for reconsideration (judged by a real human being conducting a manual review) I believe that ignoring links that were obviously placed with the intention of manipulating search rankings simply because it didn't work, hardly shows a commitment to the "good faith effort" expected by the Webspam team. So, I go to the extra effort to try to remove and also disavow.

Marie is quite correct in suggesting that there are cases where links on some pages are followed and on other pages nofollowed - in fact we see instances at rmoov where URLs that contain multiple links to a site are actually a mix of followed and nofollowed links as well. As suggested ...you have no control over those links at all, so once you have decided which ones really need to be dealt with disavowing is the safest option available unless you can actually get them removed.

Again, I think the point has been fairly well made above ...Local directories are not all bad. Check for compliance with the Webmaster Quality Guidelines (which for paid directories includes a clear statement in their terms of service which indicates that you are paying for a site review and not for inclusion). The most relevant Guideline is the one about what Google views as "Link Schemes"

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi,

It is quite possible for Page Authority to be higher than Domain Authority as the two are independent of each other. PA is essentially a measure of how likely an individual page is to rank, while DA applies across entire domains & sub domains.

To understand how PA & DA are calculated and what they actually mean, take a look at these resources Page Authority and Domain Authority.

SEOmoz recently introduced an update to the calculation of PA & DA which has brought a higher level of accuracy. You can read this post about the improvement - Introducing SEOmoz Updated Page Authority & Domain Authority. This one goes into some depth as to the reasons & methods used in calculating both.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Lee,

Some good information here from Marie.

You might find it this Reconsideration Request Checklist helpful too: http://www.rmoov.com/google-reconsideration-request-checklist.php

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hey Dana!

See you in Seattle

Sha

Hi Kevin,

The problem you are seeing is that Google does not recognize Instral as a highly sought after term and since they pride themselves on being "oh so helpful", the results returned are for the term "instaloans"

If you click the link to say "no, I really did want to search for instral" then you will get the result you were expecting.

Time to get a few dozen of your mates searching for your name and clicking the link from all over the place (oops, did I suggest that??)

Sha

Hi Henning,

There is an issue in play from the latest Linkscape update which was released today. The issue is affecting PA & DA in Open Site Explorer.

The Moz team are working on the problem now.

If you want to keep updated and find out when the issue has been resolved you can follow @SEOmoz on Twitter (or check the SEOmoz Twitter stream from time to time).

If you have issues at any time and think there may be a problem, you can also email the Help team direct at help@seomoz.org

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Marc,

The fact that you did not receive an unnatural links warning does not mean that you don't have a manual penalty.

Despite comments from Matt Cutts and John Mueller that suggest otherwise, I have personally dealt with almost 100 site owners through rmoov support who never received any communication from Google until we suggested they lodge a reconsideration request because the effect in the SERPS looked like more than algorithmic adjustment to us - sure enough, in each case back came notification of a manual penalty.

I would do as Mark suggested: proceed as though you are dealing with a manual penalty and continue to document all of your link removal activities meticulously, then lodge a reconsideration request. After all, that is the only way you will know for sure whether there is a manual action in effect or not.

Sha

Hi Bob,

The term you referenced "the 4 step belief change" appears nowhere else but in the Title.

The shortened term "4 step belief change" also appears in the meta description.

Neither term appears anywhere within the text on that page.  So the primary issue seems to be that there is nothing on the page to signal relevance for that term to search engines

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Leigh,

On-page report summaries in all of my campaigns are functioning normally.

If you are seeing no results at all in the summary for on-page, then there may be a problem with the campaign itself.

You will need to email the Help team directly and ask them to check on the campaign for you. It might help to attach a screenshot of what you are seeing to help them identify the issue.

Email address for the Help team is help@seomoz.org.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Tim,

We just opened free Beta during this last weekend on a link removal management service that we developed.

The free trial will allow you to run a campaign including the domains you mentioned in your post.

The tool allows you to drop in a list of URLs, pull contact information from ICANN (the whois data mentioned above)  for each of the domains, customize emails, send follow-ups, receive notification of cleanups from webmasters etc.

Hope it helps,

Sha

Hi lucidsoftech,

The site is definitely indexed, but without knowing the specific URLs you are waiting on, it is a little difficult.

I ran a quick crawl with Screaming Frog and there are actually quite a few pages on the site which have the noindex meta tag in place - have you checked that the pages you are wanting indexed are not excluded with a tag?

Just a thought,

Sha

Hi Jeff,

The 301 Redirect is not reported as an Error in the Pro App, but a Notice.

You can see this in the Crawl Diagnostics Summary where you see the big Red, Blue & Yellow buttons.

Notices are listed in the yellow section.

For each of the sections there is a short explanation and the Notices section reads as follows:

Notices are interesting facts about your pages we found while crawling.

So what this means is that items listed in the Notices section are simply highlighted to ensure that you are aware they exist. The 301 redirect from the non www root domain to the www sub-domain is normal practice to ensure that the pages in your site are not seen as duplicates of each other by search engines. So, there is no need to be concerned about the 301 redirect highlighted in your Pro App Report.

The Errors(red)  and Warnings(blue) are the issues that can have an impact on the SEO health of your site.

The explanatory notes explain this:

Errors - Pages with crawl errors are often difficult for search engines to crawl, index and rank.

Issues listed as Errors should be dealt with and eliminated as quickly as possible.

Warnings - Pages with crawl warnings are often penalized by search engines.

Issues listed as Warnings may be a problem for your site, but in some cases (for example where you know that you have added 302 Redirects for a specific purpose) you may just say to yourself, "yes, that is the way I want it to be" and choose to ignore them.

When you are looking at each individual page in the Pro App reports, you will find a tiny blue Help link  at the top right of each page (directly above the export link) which will take you to an in-depth explanation of that particular Pro App feature.

Also, if you are ever concerned about something in your reports, you can always ask a question here in Q&A or email the Help team direct at help@seomoz.org. Those guys are awesome and always happy to help out, as are the many members & Associates who lend a hand here in Q&A.

Staff also cruise through Q&A from time to time, but with so many questions posted each day, if you have an issue that needs staff input it is a good idea to email the help team and make them aware of it as soon as possible.

I hope that helps.

Sha

Hi,

There is so much opinion out there about Link Removal and Google's Disavow Tool, but it's really hard to get hold of reliable data about what people are actually doing in this area.

Through my involvement in rmoov, I've become really interested in participation and cleanup rates when it comes to Link Removal campaigns.

So, I've put together a quick survey aimed at getting a real indication of what is happening out there. The survey is here

The recent introduction of Google's Disavow Tool has opened up another area I'd  really like to understand more, so there is a question on this included.

I'd love to pull together a blog post with a decent snapshot of participation, success or failure for those trying to remove links and hope Moz Members might help out by answering this quick survey.

Sha

P.S. I'll update this post once results are available for those that are interested.

"A sitemap should only contain links to active pages."

Hi shawn81

Alex is absolutely correct there.

In fact, Duane Forrester has said repeatedly that Bing absolutely does not like to find such pages in a sitemap and that you should make sure there are never 3XX, 4XX or 5XX status pages included because it will stop Bingbot from crawling your site.

While Googlebot is not so sensitive, the reality is that all search engines allocate a certain amount of crawl capacity for your site...if your sitemaps include a load of pages that are not likely to be indexed, the result is twofold:

1. you are wasting capacity on useless pages and the crawler may never get to the stuff you really want indexed 
2. if the crawler encounters a lot of non-active pages when it crawls, future crawl capacity (not to mention trust) is likely to be reduced  

Replace the old URLs with the new and give the bots a little thrill of adventure 

Hope that helps,

Sha

I have seen changes like this where it appears that a competitor has been spurred by being pushed out of the number 1 or 2 spot to take a look at their optimization for that particular term.

Something else that could possibly affect just one keyword is the mix of anchor text in your link profile. There is some great discussion of this in the latest Whiteboard Friday - [Beyond Exact Match Anchor Text to Next Generation Link Signals.](Beyond Exact Match Anchor Text To Next Generation Link Signals - Whiteboard Friday "Beyond Exact Match Anchor Text") It might be worth taking a look at your link profile to see if there is any obvious difference in the mix of terms for the keyword that has changed.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi dseo241,

Given that your question specifically relates to Roger's ability to access your sites (both dev & production), I think you would be best to email the SEOmoz Help Team direct - help at seomoz.org.

I use the stand alone Crawl Test tool to run a base crawl of our dev sites, which are noindexed, but not behind an htpassword, so you would still need to ask the Help Team about accessibility. Incidentally, the SEOmoz User-agent is rogerbot.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Kate,

Good call

The nofollow tag will eliminate any unnatural linking issue and in your case the potential to bring qualified traffic to your site by far outweighs any value the links would ever bring in terms of visibility.

Sha

Hi Karen,

There are a long list of URLs in your site which, although they do (eventually) load in a browser, appear to be returning a Status of 0 - Connection Timeout.

It is well recognized that Bing crawlers are very sensitive to URLs in sitemaps that return significant numbers of errors. In this case it appears that the crawler may be encountering pages in the site that it sees as unfetchable.

The majority of these URLs are in the following format - http://www.showme.com/sh/?i=36999 (this is one of them), although this one also returns the same result http://www.showme.com/topic/Geography

If you download the Screaming Frog tool from screamingfrog.com and run it, you will see the list of files that are returning this status.

It appears that the amount of time these pages are taking to load is causing a problem for some crawlers.

Hope that helps,

Sha

hmmm...all good comments, but have you thought about the possibility that you may have a problem with keyword stuffing?

I count 58 instances of "Tampa" in the home page code, 172 instances of "DJ" and 18 instances of "Tampa DJ"

What is perhaps more important from the Search engines' point of view is that the reason I noticed the over use of these terms is that the text flow and usability has been quite severely impacted.The text doesnt flow naturally when you read it and by the time I got to the end of the footer menu I really didn't want to ever see the word Tampa again 8(

It is a very easy thing to get so caught up in finding ways to use your keyword terms that you lose track of how many times you have already done it. There are a couple of tools you could use to help sort this problem:

• If you have a campaign running for the site in the SEOmoz Pro App, make sure you have your chosen keywords loaded and then use the On-page feature to identify and correct problems. (If you don't have paid Pro you can always check out the SEOmoz 30 Day Free Trial)

• OOPS! Scratch that next bit - Ryan just pointed out that the highlight feature is now in my beloved MozBar...YES!! One less bar I need to keep installed 8). I keep the SEOBook Toolbar for Firefox installed so I can use its Use the keyword highlighting feature in the MozBar (Check Ryan's post below for how to find it). Basically, you type your chosen term into the toolbar, click the highlighting pen and UH OH!! now you can see that there might be a few too many instances of your term on the page...  This is actually a tool I find really handy and easy to use - it's actually the only thing I wish was in the Mozbar (HINT, HINT Mozzers!!)

Hope this helps,

Sha

Hi SEOscar,

Your question sounds very much like a feature request that should be highlighted for SEOmoz staff.

If you go to the Feature Request page and add it, staff will most likely see it more quickly and you can check back every now and then to see if there is any news.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hey Alan!

...and we miss your awesome answers, but it puts a smile on my face when you are able to drop in

Sha

Hi Mirco,

The SEOmoz Help Hub is the place you need to visit

Check the menu at the left of the page to find the Getting Started Guides for all of the different features and tools available.

You will also find some great posts in both the SEOmoz Daily Blog and Youmoz User Blog that provide explanations and real examples of how to use specific tools.

Here are a few that are great value:

The Best Kept Secret in the SEOmoz Toolset - Rand wrote this great post when the tool was first developed, but has updated it as features have been added and refined.

Announcing Fresh Web Explorer - This post from Matthew Brown explains SEOmoz newest tool and it's an awesome tool!

Using Followerwonk to Grow Your Twitter Account - This one is a Whiteboard Friday with Rand and makes it easy to understand how valuable this tool can be.

...and for more Whiteboard Fridays try this list

Also, don't be afraid to ask a question here if something seems difficult to understand ... there are some pretty awesome people here in Q&A who hail from Italy, so I'm sure help will always be at hand.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Dana,

I believe SEOmoz utilizes Amazonaws services for crawling, (or at least they did a few months ago) so that may well be your problem.

The best (and quickest) way to confirm this is to go to the SEOmoz Help Hub and click the button at the top of the page to contact the Help Team directly.

Hope that helps,

Sha