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I’ve been using Moz (and SEOMoz) for almost 3 years.  During that time, I’ve found them to be very engaged; however, during the last several months, I’ve found a shift in this philosophy—which is a bit disheartening:

• SEOMoz used to have a very simple contact-us page that listed an email to the help desk as well as the office.  Now, they have the locations of the two Moz offices, with no phone numbers or emails.
• Moz’s help hub, used to have a form that could be completed when you were having issues.  Now, there is only a list of community-managed resources to access.

The only way you can find the way to contact their help desk is if something breaks & the website gives you an email help@moz.com.  However, this email account seems to get overloaded quite often and you will get a “Delivery Response Failed” message because their inbox is full.

Does anyone know how to get a hold of Moz directly?  I'm having some issues accessing Moz Analytics and really need help from their support team.

Michael,

Great question.  I always look at Google's Keyword planner to see how it treats it.  Couple things I noticed.  1) Google doesn't see a difference between lower-case and uppercase "E" in e-file.  2) Google lists 30 exact match searches for 1099 e-file software and none for 1099 efile software.

I would probably go with "e-file" as the target keyword, and perhaps use "efile" in the text and alt-image text, just as a backup.

Eric

I think the best course of action depends on what you are trying to achieve. If you are trying to avoid search engines from indexing the paginated pages (since they do not contain the unique content) then a rel canonical should do the trick. If you are trying to associate all the content that is provided on all pages as one, like in your example of the 3 part article, then the rel next/prev is your best bet.

Does your site have a "view all" option?

I was reading this article http://adwords.blogspot.de/2013/05/introducing-keyword-planner-combining.html that says that Google is going to be sunsetting it's popular keyword tool.  As an SEO specialist, I use this tool daily, so I'm concerned about it's impact on my keyword research efforts.

I reviewed the keyword planner (albeit quite quickly) and it doesn't seem to work as efficiently for SEO keyword research.  I'm curious to get others thoughts on the following:

• The new keyword planner tool
• Will the new keyword planner tool be effective for SEO keyword research
• Are there other tools that you've used that have provided good keyword research data (and are they free or paid)

I think it's pretty clear Google is more interested in doing whatever they can do convince marketers that PPC should be the most important tool in your digital arsenal.

Hopefully, bing will overtake Google in the next five years.

While I haven't used the new tool much, what I have used has shown me that it won't be very effective for down-and-dirty type searches. (i.e., quickly doing keyword research for a specific page).  This is because you no longer have the ability to click a checkbox and download options.

I believe that the best options will be to use the Keyword Planner when doing comprehensive research.  For those who can afford it, using a paid service may be a good option.

I think that this is more proof that Google wants to steer more people towards paid advertising.  And while they won't admit it, Google doesn't see the value of offering a free tool that is focused on improving organic rankings.

Thank you Michael.  I skimmed that post when it came out, but need to look it over more thoroughly.

Eric

My client, www.warehouse-lighting.com, has all the links to its category pages on a left-side navigation structure.  Their competitor, www.prolighting.com has all of its category-page links listed under the drop-down menu of the top-level navigation.  I’m wondering if one way is better than the other for SEO and why?

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the update; just to clarify, Moz states on the link labled "here" that you included that they take email; however, it is spotty at best.

Eric

Bing Webmaster Tools offers a similar tool.  While it isn't as good as Google's previous keyword tool because there aren't as many people searching on Bing; it works very much like the old Google Keyword Tool.  The chief differences IMO are that you can't easily select certain keywords to download (however, you can download quickly), and Bing Uses "Strict" search rather than Exact/Broad/Phrase match.

I think Duane Forrester and the people at Bing appreciate what SEO'ers do and want to help them create a better search environment.

I really think the main issue is with the robots.txt. If you think about it, all of your blog posts that are not featured on the home page would be inaccessible to Google (since the pagination at the bottom and the main navigation URLs to browse posts all contain "/search"). So once the posts leave the homepage, you're telling Google they shouldn't see them anymore.

I only brought up the issue with "cloaked" text because the second link I saw was to a credit company and a red flag went up in my head screaming SPAM! But it looks to be legitimate.

I would advise you update the robots.txt and create an XML sitemap for all your posts/pages and submit that to Google Webmaster Tools. Should clear things up!

Depending on the CMS you are using, you may be able to add a dynamic element to the URL when more than one filter is being used, for example noidx=true. Then utilize your robots.txt file to disallow all URLs with noidx=true. This should allow pages with one filter to get indexed and crawled, but when a user (or Googlebot) enables another filter, that page would not be entered into the index.