Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Amanda,

I don't think the problem is with the tool. The tool is simply reporting what the crawler sees.

Since you have said "an actual blog page, which I am attempting to analyze as a dedicated campaign for my blog" I am thinking that you have set up a separate campaign for what you think of as the "actual blog" and designated the campaign as a subdomain?

If this is the case, then presumably, you also have a campaign set up for what you think of as the main site. So, as Ryan and Brian mentioned, you have two copies of all content in your blog, but it exists in two different locations on your server, so is being seen by two different campaigns with different URL's.

The 100 links per page is a recommended rule of thumb to protect usability and avoid degrading the value of individual links on the page. So, as both Ryan and Brian advised, it is much more important right now to deal with the duplication issues on your site.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Mike,

Paul Rogers mentioned that he has built a tool that will query the SEOmoz API using Google Docs in a recent post on the SEOmoz Blog - How to Reach Bloggers, Ninja Style.

It might be worth following up with Paul to see if he can help you out.

Hope that helps,

Sha

For updates on this issue, please follow @SEOmoz on Twitter.

Tweet from a few minutes ago:

Good morning everyone. We've seen the tweets and Q&A about OSE and will update here with information soon.

Sha

Hi Michael,

If you have concerns about changes in data with the latest update, the quickest and most effective way of getting answers is to email the Help Team direct using help [at] seomoz.org.

Moz Staff do not routinely read the Q&A,so are unlikely to be aware of issues unless they are specifically alerted to an thread by an Associate who happens to see it.

Sha

Hi Tim,

My point really was that with the right expertise you should be able to improve both usability and seo usefulness of the pages you have without needing to create alternative pages. Even unfriendly URL's can be dealt with by using URL rewrites.

If you have strong page authority for your product pages now, a change of structure would generally be a last consideration for me.

The MozBar is really useful for this kind of page-level analysis. If you work through the page attributes and elements it is easy to identify both tech and optimization issues that may otherwise go unnoticed.

Sha

Hi,

Yes, there is a known issue at the moment. The Moz Team are aware of the problem and working to resolve it. Updates will be provided via Twitter, so if you follow @SEOmoz you will know when it has been resolved.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Olivier,

Moz staff do not generally read the Q&A unless they are alerted to a particular issue by an Associate who happens to have seen a post.

The quickest way to get an answer to your query on the changes you are seeing in the OSE/Linkscape data is to email direct to the Help Team using  help [at] seomoz.org.

To speed up the process, try to provide them with as much information as possible on the domain(s) involved and the specific changes you are seeing in the data.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Mike,

@SEOmoz tweeted a few hours ago that the team had completed the latest Linkscape Update a week ahead of schedule.

Since there is generally a wait time before you can download your Advanced Report from the Keyword Difficulty Tool, it is quite possible that the numbers you obtained from there were Pre-Update, so may have changed in OSE.

There is currently an issue with the Keyword Difficulty Tool producing an error result, but the Help Team are aware of it and working to resolve the issue. If you want to keep up with progress on that you can follow @SEOmoz on Twitter and they will advise when it is resolved. Then you will be able to run your Advanced Report again.

You can run a 5 site comparison in Open Site Explorer using the Advanced Reports to get you through with most of the information if you need to.

If for some reason you don't believe the Update timing was a factor, then the best solution would be to email the Help Team  help[at]seomoz.org.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Wardy,

Check your Private Messages please.

Also, a couple of questions.

1. Is the file called .htaccess?
2. I the page magazine-freebies a static URL or a Wordpress Blog Category Page?

Please make your .htaccess file look like this

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule  ^/magazines.htm$ /magazine-freebies

Just these two lines, and test to see if it works.

Sha

Hi getzen,

The primary problem here is that these links are resulting in 404's which can hurt your site.

If they are just not terribly relevant, but may produce traffic that is useful to you, then you can create a nice "Oops!" page to give visitors options to go to other pages on your site (we call this our "Bounce Page").  This is preferable to a "catch-all" redirect to your home page when you know that the likelihood of a high bounce rate is a concern, since Bounce is now known to be a ranking factor for major Search Engines.

If you are clever with the design of this page you can create ways to keep these non-relevant visitors on the page (rotating banners with funny or clever images, or maybe a video embed could be used).

The primary goal is to eliminate the 404 Errors, but to also be mindful of the impact of Bounce.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Wardy,

I think we are nearly there

This is what the first block of your .htaccess should look like:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On

**RewriteRule  ^/magazines.htm$ /magazine-freebies [R=301,L]**RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (<|%3C).script.(>|%3E) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} GLOBALS(=|[|%[0-9A-Z]{0,2}) [OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} _REQUEST(=|[|%[0-9A-Z]{0,2})
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php [F,L]

The rest remains the same, but you will need to remove the old rule from the end of the file.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Wardy,

The .htaccess file is read from top to bottom and the first Rule which matches is the Rule that will be used. This means that currently, your Wordpress Rule is a "catch-all" and the 301 will never be executed.

So, the 301 needs to be placed above the Wordpress Rule in the .htaccess

Hope this helps,

Sha

If you post the content of your .htaccess file we can see if there is a problem with your syntax.

Other things to remember:

1. Don't qualify your FROM or TO (when you fail over your domain the .htaccess will break the site

2. Remember that your WordPress installation will break when you fail over your domain as it has been installed to your test domain.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Jest,

Yes, there is definitely a problem.

If you notice a problem like this it is best to email the SEOmoz Help Team help@seomoz.org. Help staff should be around in a few hours.

Hope that helps,

Sha

OK, so what you are actually trying to do is redirect from one page on the new server to another page on the new server, regardless of anything that is happening on the old server?

Sha

Hi Wardy,

Are you saying that the domain you wish to redirect to is not yet hosted on that server or did I lose you along the way?

Hi Dylan,

All evidence is that if the URL is not wrapped in an <a href="">tag, then it won't be crawled.</a>

<a href=""></a>

<a href="">Matt Cutts has discussed this and not surprisingly suggested that it would not be a good thing if these URL's were crawlable. If that happened it would be open slather on adding your link to any user generated content such as forums, comments etc. You can view the video here</a> Will Google use non-link references?

There is a post from SEOmofo that suggests in certain circumstances, google may accidentally make links crawlable if it strips out <text area="">code, but once again, the URL's in his demonstration are actually wrapped in the a href tag. You can find the post here</text>

So, as far as I am aware, there is no evidence that URL's wrapped in a SPAN tag would be crawled - but as you will see, Matt emphasises that Google doesn't like to ever take anything "off the table".

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi,

First, when you type "Clear browser cache" in the Address Bar of Google Chrome while on Google, it does NOT clear the cache, but offers you 3 pre loaded Search result pages to choose from - one for each browser. The result page for each provides a list of sites with instructions on how to clear the cache for the browser you choose.

In IE, again it does NOT clear the cache,  sends you straight to the results page for IE, but in the latest version of Firefox it does not work at all. You can easily check this yourself in your own browser.

USER AGENT = Browser type (Chrome, Firefox, IE)

Hope that helps.

Sha

Hi Tim,

If you have the MozBar loaded, you can check the Page Elements for both pages and you will find that they exist on two completely different IP addresses. So, given that there is a significant difference in the information provided by each page (one is much more user-oriented), then duplicate content is probably not something they are particularly concerned about.

Again, if you use the MozBar and look at the SEOmoz Link Analysis for each page, you will find that one is serving as a landing page for the product with a lot of internal links and a few external links evident. As a result of the content and links, it has a Page Authority of 44, while the other has a Page Authority of just 1.

My guess would be that their store setup makes it difficult for them to add content to product pages and perhaps they are concerned by the "unfriendly" nature of the 30 odd character product ID for SEO.

I have a client site where the addition of content to product pages was an issue, but in that case our Chief programmer wrote me a script so that I could edit as I wanted. If we hadn't had that ability, then I guess another option would have been to create content rich static pages as a work around.

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 James,

There are a number of things that can affect results - A few of the things that may be influencing your conflicting results include:

1. It is my understanding that SEOmoz Rankings are based upon non-personalized and non-regionalized results
2. I believe that SEOmoz take into account embedded local results if they appear, but do not include them if they appear in a 6, 8 or 12 pack.
3. There have been recent anecdotal reports that searchers using the Google Chrome browser are receiving vastly higher ranking results than those seen in Firefox and IE.

If you feel that there is a problem with your Rankings Report, the best thing to do is to email the Help Team (help [at] seomoz.org) and ask them to take a look for you. Be sure to provide them any information you have regarding manual checks and results from other tools.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Martin,

You might find it useful to take a look at the Linkscape Update Schedule in case timing is a factor.

I believe Rand outlined the recent changes to the indexing rationale in this webinar

Using Open Site Explorer to Uncover New Marketing Opportunities , but if you still have questions then as Brian suggested, it may be a good idea to lodge a ticket or email the Help Team. help [at] seomoz.org.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Will,

Ouch! That is a lot of money for what should be a straightforward task.

I think you may have missed what I said earlier in that the Unlimited version of XML-Sitemaps is ONLY available as a server install. You do not get a piece of software that enables you to generate the sitemaps externally and upload them.

There are other services around that enable you to generate externally via a web interface and upload. The paid version of freesitemapgenerator.com is one of these, but does require a verification file to be uploaded to the server before it can run. It is a simple text file that verifies ownership of the site.

In the end, if you are not happy with the service you are getting, you have the option to find another web development company who are a better fit for you. If you decided to do that, then the new company should be able to negotiate the change with the old company to minimize disruption.

It makes me a little sad to hear of clients who feel the way you do and I'm sorry that you have had a bad experience with our industry. Thankfully, there are plenty of good companies out there if you should decide that the situation is untenable for your business. For most of us, making things right for a customer who has not had the best of it is a priority.

I hope you can work it out without too much more stress

Sha

Hi Will,

If their preference is to write their own script it is likely that they EITHER have had previous experience with a 3rd party script which proved difficult to configure OR they intend to add features or changes which would require a hack anyway.

As I see it you have 3 options:

1. Accept their offer to write a custom script. Given the fluid nature of your update schedule, the advantage of this would be that they may be able to add a "manual fire" option. This would  effectively give you the ability to click a button and manually generate sitemaps (xml & html) and ping the search engines if you make updates more frequently than the auto-run schedule. If this were the case, the script could be configured to run weekly and you could update as needed.

2. You could ask them to install and configure the 3rd party script for you instead of using theirs. Given their preference for writing their own script, it is likely they may have internal issues which would influence whether they are willing or able to do this.

3. IF your site has less than 500 pages you could run the free version whenever products are updated and email the xml sitemap to your web development company for upload. While the use of the generator is free, the company is likely to set a fee for this service. Although a file upload is a very simple task, it can be very disruptive to production schedules to have to do this if it happens often. As a project manager I well understand the issues that this kind of small task can cause. I generally end up doing them myself because the company resources required to allocate and track the task are more than it is worth. End up with two or three clients who want a file uploaded once or twice a week and the novelty can wear off very quickly!

If it were me I would work from the assumption that the company has valid reasons for preferring to write a custom script and just ask them to explain it for you. What will the script do? How will it work? What are the benefits for you and for them?

In the end, you will need to make a judgement on what will be best for your business. If you can repair your relationship with the existing company there is no danger of disruption to your business through server change etc. Disruption can be avoided or minimized if sites are moved , but this requires co-operation from your current company and parting on a poor relationship sometimes doesn't inspire co-operation

Hope that helps,

Sha

Glad to help.

Have a great weekend.

Hi Will,

You can just pay for the script and have your web company install it on the server. If you want to have it create image sitemap in addition to page structure sitemap there is a $5 image sitemaps add-on. So cost for both would be $24.99 US dollars plus whatever your web company charges to install the script.

To get the XML-sitemaps people to install it, all you have to do is provide them with your ftp login information. The advantage of this is that they know the script and how everything needs to be configured to make it work correctly.

Once the script is installed it will auto generate the sitemaps as scheduled (you would get them to configure frequency when they install it). Each time new sitemaps are generated the script then pings the search engines to notify that new sitemap is available for download.

The unlimited version only works as a server install. If you have less than 500 pages in your site you can run the free version and upload as often as you wish for no cost at all (as long as you have ftp access).

Not sure what the 200 pounds price is for, but my guess would be that they are either planning to write a script for you OR buy a 3rd party script like XML-Sitemaps & install & configure it for you.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Will,

There are several companies out there which provide paid sitemap generation services by installing a script on your server which is set to automatically generate sitemaps and to ping the search engines whenever a new sitemap completes.

Probably one of the best that I know is the unlimited version offfered by XML-Sitemaps.com. The cost is only US$20 and if you cannot install it yourself they will handle installation for an extra $10.

There are others around and may even be some free scripts out there if you have the ability to install on your own server. There are also modules etc available for standard ecommerce platforms like Oscommerce etc.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Kris,

Google's public position on the use of 301 redirects is that it will preserve almost all of the link juice from the old page and pass it to the new. This Google webmaster video from Matt Cutts was uploaded in April of this year and is fairly clear on that.

However, we need to remember that PageRank is basically a measure of the number and quality of links to your site. There is a detailed explanation here.

So, it may be that there has been some change in the the sites that link to yours between PR updates. You can use SEOmoz tools to conduct a little CSI on the sites and check this if you want to.

First, find the sites that are linking to yours in Open Site Explorer. Export the Report to csv to grab the list of sites and open it up in Excel. You can then use the SEOmoz Historical PageRank Tool to check whether there has been any significant change in the PR of the sites linking to you. If you find some, there is your answer.

If you do not find any significant changes...then perhaps the reversal of the redirect has triggered some of that recalculation described in the PR article -and since it is coming back...

On the subject of there being some mis-match issue in Google's Index between the non www root domain and the www subdomain, there is one thing that occurs to me.

Is it possible that you have changed the 301 redirect, but still have an instruction existing in Google Webmaster Tools which is telling Google that your primary domain is the www? This could create some confusion for Googlebot and perhaps influence Google's view of how "friendly" your site is. It shouldn't really affect PageRank, but could affect rankings.

Since it hasn't made any difference to your traffic, I would not be too worried, but would probably take a look at the link profile and see if there is a need to work on attracting more or better links for the site.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Julian,

Since it is competitive analysis you are looking for, you can use the SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty Tool to check your keywords in Google Brasil.

When you add a keyword (up to 5 at a time) there are two selectors to the right of the input screen. The first allows you to choose a search engine. It is set to Google by default. The second selector enables you to choose your preferred Country. Just choose Brazil from the list and then run your analysis.

Rand wrote a comprehensive blog post on the recent update to the tool - The Best Kept Secret in the SEOmoz Toolset.

So far as I know it is not possible to choose a region specific search engine for Keyword Rankings in your campaigns, but if you want to check this for sure you could email the SEOmoz Help Team at help [at] seomoz.org.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Jamie,

Maybe neal is right and you just clicked on your Marty McFly Nike boots ready for the weekend?

but seriously, Roger is obviously having a little timing issue there. I noticed the same thing on my report and have emailed the SEOmoz help team to make sure that they are aware of the problem. It is always a good idea if you notice that Roger is having a bad day to email help [at] seomoz.org and let them know.

Have a good weekend,

Sha

Hi Kris,

An alarm bell rang for me when you mentioned that your focus here is on the effect upon PageRank. You should be very careful in attributing the change in Pagerank to the implementation of the 301 as Toolbar PageRank is updated infrequently and in a very ad hoc fashion. This means that there may have been other things which occurred over the period between PageRank updates which were responsible for the change.

Rand gave a very good explanation of the vagaries of PageRank and the differences between the two types of PageRank in this Whiteboard Friday recently - What is Google's PageRank Good For?

Given the changes that have occurred recently in the world of search, I would be looking fairly carefully at the possibility that some of those changes may be responsible for any negative impacts on the site. Also, has there been a negative impact on traffic and/or rankings? These things are really much more important than PR.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Vince,

Just to clarify, I'm thinking that perhaps the list of links may be 404 (or similar) errors that you want to fix?

If I am correct, and you have found the list of broken links in the SEOmoz Pro App, then you can locate the source URL's by exporting the error report as a csv, then looking at the information in Excel. If you locate the error in the list (by searching), then go to the very last column "Referrer" to find the source page.

Below is a screenshot of the Pro Tip from the help file, which is located on the Crawl Diagnostics help page

Of course, if my assumption is incorrect, then we just need you to be a little more specific about where the list came from and what you are wanting to achieve.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Finding-404s.gif

Oh my goodness Dave,

I just saw your question and then noticed the date you posted!

Do you still need help with your question, or have you resolved the problem? (I really hope so)

If not, let us know.

Sha

Hi Don,

There are some things you can do to optimize your product feeds.

There is some specific information about optimizing feeds for Google in this Q&A thread Does anyone have any tips for optimizing your Google product feeds? 

CPC Strategy are quite generous with information to help site owners who wish to manage their own feeds in their blog. There is some information about Bing feed optimization on their Blog in this Tip of the Day post.

Hope that helps,

Sha

LOL..nice suggestion EGOL, although I fear there might be some pretty significant Bounce as a consequence of disappointed surfers not finding what they were expecting.

oops...did I say that?

Hi Kadira,

If you enter your domain without a trailing slash ( www.yoursite.com or yoursite.com depending whether you are targeting root domain or the www subdomain) then your campaign should launch.

If you have tried this and still cannot get it to work then there may be a problem specific to your account. If this is the case it is best to email the help team  help [at} seomoz.org and describe the problem so that they can take a look at it for you.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Shawn,

It is inadvisable to use more than one method of blocking bots from specific pages on your site.

There is a very good explanation of this in this blog post from Lindsay - Robot Access and Indexation Restriction Techniques: Avoiding Conflicts. Definitely worth reading!

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Gabo,

As Shelley advised, there have been a number of people experiencing some issues with the keyword ranking tool. Best to email the SEOmoz help team  help@seomoz.org and advise them of the problem you are having and the specific campaigns where it is happening.

Sha

Hi Jesse,

Basically, the only significant search volume is for the shorter two word term "minneapolis massage", so there is no benefit in going for the longer term (which also has a negative correlation for rankings).

So, since Ryan advised that the .net version of minneapolismassage is available, if you are wanting an exact match domain that might be a better option.

Since the return you are wanting is quite modest, then the traffic afforded by that term and the little extra you might attract from other terms should work for you if you can get some reasonable rankings.

I would suggest that you put some good effort into local search optimization if you decide to go with that domain.

Hope that is clearer,

Sha

Hi Antonio,

The best way to check if the site is using cloaking is to go into your Google Webmaster Tools acccount and "Fetch as Googlebot", then compare the code to see if googlebot is being shown the same code as the user.

However in this case, I would suggest that your concerns are being prompted by the use of CSS to hide text within the page so that it is not visible to the user.

I located this in your main.css file

#homepage-content {
	position: absolute;
	height: 1px;
	width: 1px;
	overflow: hidden;
	top: 0;
	left: 0;
}

Basically, this is a massive amount of text which has been shoved into a div that measures 1 pixel x 1 pixel in the top left corner of the page. This is a practice which is not viewed kindly by search engines.

As to improving optimization there are a couple of things that are fairly obvious:

• Using Flash for the rotating images is not our preferred option for a couple of reasons.
  First, any user with an Apple iOS device will see only blank spaces as these devices do not support Flash.
  Second, bots are not able to retrieve information from Flash documents in the most cases.

  jQuery is a much better option as the presentation is visible to everyone and also allows you to obtain some SEO value from image file names, alt tags and inserted text.

• The majority of the images in the flash presentation do not really represent what people expect from a  "Resort". If you want people to convert then you need to engage them and I think that the images that are being used now are not helpful in selling the product.

Hope this helps,

Sha

Hi Aaron,

Your 301 redirect is working fine and sending all non www traffic to your www subdomain, so there is no harm to your SEO. The potential for that was explained by Ed in his reponse.

Google has simply indexed your non www root domain before you put the 301 redirect in place and has not picked up the redirect and adjusted the index as yet.

If you have not already done as Nico suggested and advised Google in your Webmaster Tools account which is your preferred domain, then you can do this. It is likely to enable Google to pick up the 301 more quickly, although I have heard Googlers refer to it as a "hint" which means that you should not hold your breath, or be overly concerned if you do not see a change in the results page straight away.

Bing also has the same function in Webmaster Central.

Sha

No probs, anytime

Hi James,

www is a subdomain. The root domain is the non www version.

As far as I'm aware you cannot change the setting once you have created the campaign. There is certainly no option that I can see in the campaign settings screen.

If the definition above does not clarify for you then best to email help@seomoz.org so that SEOmoz staff can take a look at it for you.

If you haven't already caught up with it, there is quite a lot of really good information in the Pro Help Files

There are also a few pre-recorded webinars on the SEOmoz Webinars page as well as a link to register for the Weekly Intro webinar that happens every Friday morning (Seattle time). I found all of these to be very helpful when I started out my Pro account.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Kyle,

Have you manually checked the URL's reported in Webmaster Tools to check whether they are actually returning a 403 for users? I have often seen errors that were temporary or have already been fixed still being reported in WMT for sometime afterwards.

If you have checked and the pages are working fine then the problem is most likely due to a lag in updates in WMT so you can ignore it and wait for it to go away.

If you have checked manually and find that there is in fact a 403 problem on the site, then you will need to investigate further. Since you are relating the sudden flood of 403's to the addition of the 301 redirect, the first thing I would do is check that the code for your 301 is correct.

Hope that helps,

Sha

I copied this from your home page:

Autodesk, Inc., announced that Energizer Holdings, Inc. (Energizer) — a company whose portfolio includes such globally recognized and trusted brands as Energizer batteries and Eveready flashlights — has adopted Autodesk Vault data management s is oftware to more efficiently manage its product design and manufacturing

Paste it in to Google and check the results. You will see that the same article appears on many other sites.

Sha

OK,

Here's 3 alternatives off the top of my head.

1. We are Online Media Direct, a UK based Internet Marketing company. We pride ourselves on being a specialist in online marketing.

2. We are specialists in online marketing. Our UK based Internet Marketing company is Online Media Direct.

3. Online Media Direct is not just another UK based internet Marketing company. We pride ourselves on our outstanding record as a specialist in online marketing.

Only guessing at the precise keys, but hope that helps,

Sha