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I noticed in Open Site Explorer, I have several incoming links going to dead urls because i re-organized my site. For example, there might be an incoming link to: sample.php?ID=8 The problem is that I moved the file to /subdir1 so it would be nice if it could link to /subdir1/sample.php?ID=8 BUT, on top of that, I have also changed the url to seo-friendly urls. So, really, it should link to /Category_Descripton/ProductName/8 and then get re-written to /subdir1/sample.php?ID=8 So, what are the implications of having these incoming links to dead urls other than the bad user experience. What are the implications from an SEO standpoint? What's the best way to fix this? Thanks.

Hi, Many times, when I look up a keyword in google using their Keyword Tool, the competition might be low or medium, but, it doesn't seem close to the keyword difficulty on SEOMoz. For example, I looked up fantasy sports. It's low competition on Google. I thought, wow, that's amazing. How can that be when it's so popular? Huge search volume, low competition. Then, SEOMoz says 76% difficulty. It sort of shatters my enthusiasm all of a sudden. Maybe I have to change the order of how I look at it 🙂 What is the difference that's going on? What would be considered low keyword difficulty on SEOMoz? How about medium and high? I know someone might argue that for some guru, what's hard for one person isn't hard for the guru, but, for the average webmaster who does some seo, uses SEOMoz, and some other SEO tools, is there some general breakdown? Thanks.

Hi, Can someone tell me if there's a way using htaccess to say that everything in a particular directory, let's call it "A", is gone (http 410 code)? i.e. all the links should be de-indexed? Right now, I'm using the robots file to deny access. I'm not sure if it's the right thing to do since Google webmaster tools is showing me the link as indexed still and a 403 error code. Thanks.

Hi, I'm going to describe a scenario on one of my sites, I was wondering if someone could tell me what is the correct use of rel="canonical" here. Suppose I have a rewrite rule that has a rule like this: RewriteRule ^Online-Games /main/index.php So, in the index file, do I set the rel="canonical" to Online-Games or /main/index.php? Thanks.

I've seen many websites on flippa selling twitter followers, FB fans, or Youtube subscribers. Any caveats about doing so? Thanks.

Somehow my website is indexed by it's server location. So in addition to www.[example].com, it's also indexed like this: server123.[server name].com I have no idea how that happened. But, I was wondering, does anyone know how to de-index all the urls like this? I have a lot of urls indexed using my server's address. Thanks.

I am working on a friend's site and I've optimized his on-page stuff. It's pretty much perfect from SEOMoz analysis. I reduced his Errors from 150+ to 3 and his warnings from 50+ to 0. Notices are at 5. Now, a month has gone by and I've added 3 backlinks in what appears to be reputable sites PR7, PR7, and PR3. His site has dropped  from the 2nd listing on the 2nd page to the bottom of the 2nd page now. Now, I realize other sites may be doing seo as well and trying to move to the top, but, seems peculiar. I put in a bit of work to revamp 3 of his pages as well b/c each one had over 300 html validation errors and I reduced it down to 6 or so. The competitor I'm aiming for has these stats: DA: 16 MozRank 3.14 MozTrust: 2.73 My friend's site is: DA: 19 MozRank: 2.21 MozTrust: 2.64 Subdomain metrics is 0 for everything, whereas his competitors have good stats for subdomain metrics. What is that? And what can I do to improve his ranking in Google? Is it just more backlinks? Thanks.

Also, is this correctly called a link directory or link farm?

I see on sites like scriptlance where webmasters post a project for SEO services and bidders offering their services to get you to the top of Google in 30 days. Is that out of the question or is it reasonable because they use a service like SEOMoz?