Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Moz Community, Are Bing/Yahoo crawlers different from Google’s crawler in terms of how they process client side JavaScript and especially content/data loaded by client side JavaScript? Thanks,

Hi Moz Community, I have a question about personalization of content, can we serve personalized content without being penalized for serving different content to robots vs. users? If content starts in the same initial state for all users, including crawlers, is it safe to assume there should be no impact on SEO because personalization will not happen for anyone until there is some interaction? Thanks,

Hi Moz Community, Is there a proper way to do SPA (client side rendered) and PWA without having a negative impact on SEO? Our dev team is currently trying to covert most of our pages to Angular single page application client side rendered. I told them we should use a prerendering service for users that have JS disabled or use server side rendering instead since this would ensure that most web crawlers would be able to render and index all the content on our pages even with all the heavy JS use. Is there an even better way to do this or some best practices? In terms of the PWA that they want to add along with changing the pages to SPA, I told them this is pretty much separate from SPA's because they are not dependent. Adding a manifest and service worker to our site would just be an enhancement. Also, if we do complete PWA with JS for populating content/data within the shell, meaning not just the header and footer, making the body a template with dynamic JS as well would that effect our SEO in any way, any best practices here as well? Thanks!

Hi Moz community, Our tech team has recently decided to try switching our product pages to be JavaScript dependent, this includes links, product descriptions and things like breadcrumbs in JS. Given my concerns, they will create a proof of concept with a few product pages in a QA environment so I can test the SEO implications of these changes. They are planning to use Angular 5 client side rendering without any prerendering. I suggested universal but they said the lift was too great, so we're testing to see if this works. I've read a lot of the articles in this guide to all things SEO and JS and am fairly confident in understanding when a site uses JS and how to troubleshoot to make sure everything is getting crawled and indexed. https://sitebulb.com/resources/guides/javascript-seo-resources/ However, I am not sure I'll be able to test the QA pages since they aren't indexable and lives behind a login. I will be able to crawl the page using Screaming Frog but that's generally regarded as what a crawler should be able to crawl and not really what Googlebot will actually be able to crawl and index. Any thoughts on this, is this concern valid? Thanks!

Hi Moz Community, We're an eCommerce site so we have a lot of pagination issues but we were able to fix them using the rel=next and rel=prev tags. However, our pages have an option to view 60 items or 180 items at a time. This is now causing duplicate content problems when for example page 2 of the 180 item view is the same as page 4 of the 60 item view. (URL examples below) Wondering if we should just add a canonical tag going to the the main view all page to every page in the paginated series to get ride of this issue. https://www.example.com/gifts/for-the-couple?view=all&n=180&p=2 https://www.example.com/gifts/for-the-couple?view=all&n=60&p=4 Thoughts, ideas or suggestions are welcome. Thanks

Hi Moz Community! We're doing an audit of our e-commerce site at the moment and have noticed a lot of 404 errors coming from out of stock/discontinued product pages that we've kept 200 in the past. We kept these and added links on them for categories or products that are similar to the discontinued items but many other links of the page like images, blog posts, and even breadcrumbs have broken or are no longer valid causing lots of additional 404s. If the product has been discontinued for a long time and gets no traffic and has no link equity would you recommend adding a noindex robots tag on these pages so we're not wasting time fixing all the broken links on these? Any thoughts?Thanks

Hi Mozers, I want to keep the HTTP xml sitemape live on my http site to keep track of indexation during the HTTPS migration. I'm not sure if this is doable since once our tech. team forces the redirects every http page will become https. Any ideas? Thanks

Hi Moz Community, Recently our tech team has been taking steps to switch our site from http to https. The tech team has looked at all SEO redirect requirements and we're confident about this switch, we're not planning to roll anything out until a month from now. However, I recently noticed a few https versions of our landing pages showing up in search. We haven't pushed any changes out to production yet so this shouldn't be happening. Not all of the landing pages are https, only a select few and I can't see a pattern. This is messing up our GA and Search Console tracking since we haven't fully set up https tracking yet because we were not expecting some of these pages to change. HTTPS has always been supported on our site but never indexed so it's never shown up in the search results. I looked at our current site and it looks like landing page canonicals are already pointing to their https version, this may be the problem. Anyone have any other ideas?

I recently filtered query information by week and day. The impression and click totals were different depending on whether I looked at totals by a full weeks or by day. So for example, the impression and click totals when I choose a date range of  monday-sunday are different when I look at impressions and clicks that same week by day and then add up the click and impression numbers to get a weekly total. At first i was expecting a slight difference since I know the data is heavily sampled but the totals were very different. Any explanations for this? Thanks

Currently we have two versions of a category page on our site (listed below) Version A: www.example.com/category •    lives only in the SERPS but does not live on our site navigation •    has links •    user experience is not the best Version B: www.example.com/category?view=all •    lives in our site navigation •    has a rel=canonical to version A •    very few links and doesn’t appear in the SERPS •    user experience is better than version A Because the user experience of version B is better than version A I want to take out the rel=canonical in version B to version A and instead put a rel=canonical to version B in version A. If I do this will version B show up in the SERPS eventually and replace version A? If so, how long do you think this would take? Will this essentially pass page rank from version A to version B

Hi all, I've been looking around at some of our competitors websites and I've been noticing huge amounts of keyword stuffing throughout the pages and also grouped within the bottom of the page. From what I've been taught it's not a good thing to do and you can be penalized for it. What's anyone else's take on keyword stuffing and how it's looked upon in 2017? Is there a max amount of keywords you should have on your page? Here are a few URL's to the websites I'm talking about and their webpage. https://www.walmart.com/cp/personalized-gifts/133224 - Keyword stuffing in the bottom group text  for the word "personalized" http://www.personalcreations.com/unique-groomsmen-gifts-pgrmsmn - Keyword stuffing in bottom group text for "groomsmen" http://www.groovygroomsmengifts.com/ - keyword stuffing throughout page for "groomsmen"

Would anyone know why after adding schema.org markup to a websites products, reviews and ratings why it still isn't showing up in Google SERPs? Does Google pick and choose who's rich snippets get displayed on a random basis or some other criteria?

Anyone interested in a reciprocal knowledge sharing opportunity?  Does your team have experience with BloomReach Organic Services? We’re considering testing it out and are unsure of the long-term payoff given the substantial monthly fees for the SEO add-on.  We're a pure e-commerce shop already using BloomReach’s merchandising solution so the technical integration is behind us.

What do you guys think? What's more accurate? GA queries data or Moz/SEMRush keyword data for rankings? Any thoughts appreciated.

Hi Moz Community, Recently I've been seeing multiple pages from my eCommerce site pop up in the SERPS for a couple of queries. Usually I would count this as a good thing but since both pages that generally pop up are so similar I'm starting to wonder if we would rank better with just one page. My example is the query "birthday gifts" Both of the URL's below show up in the search results one after the other on the first page. The URL on the top is our family page and the one below it is our subcat page, you can find both in the top nav. of our site. www.uncommongoods.com/gifts/birthday-gifts/birthday-gifts (family) www.uncommongoods.com/gifts/birthday-gifts (subcat) Both of these pages have different PA's and the subcat page that currently lives in our site nav is actually: **www.uncommongoods.com/gifts/birthday-**gifts?view=all. ****This url doesn't show up in the serps and is rel=canonicaled to the subcat page without the parameter listed above. We use this page in the nav because we think it's a better user experience than the actual subcat page. If we were to condense all three pages into one would we rank higher? Any thoughts here would be appreciated. Thanks

Hi Moz Community, I wanted to know how reliable the average position data is for queries in Google Analytics search console report. I know this report is fairly new this year and the numbers are calculated a bit differently than they were in the old search engine optimization report. I want to know what the biggest differences are between this search console report vs. the old SEO report in GA. I'm also pretty confused about how GA reports on the average position. Obviously it's an average position of whatever date range your choose. But for instance, if your site shows multiples landing pages for one search query will it roll that into the average or just take the landing page that ranks higher? Does the position average take into account video or photo serp results and is this the average across mobile, desktop and tablet? This number has always been a guess since it's sampled data but I want to know how accurate it is. I read this article in 2014 (linked below) but I'm not sure if it all still applies now that that data might be presented differently. https://moz.com/ugc/testing-the-accuracy-of-avg-position-for-search-queries-in-google-webmaster-tools Any answers or discussions would be great here. Thanks

Hey Moz Community, I've been seeing a steady decrease in search console of pages being indexed by Google for our eCommerce site. This is corresponding to lower impressions and traffic in general this year. We started with around a million pages being indexed in Nov of 2015 down to 18,000 pages this Nov. I realized that since we don't have around 3,000 or so products year round this is mostly likely a good thing. I've checked to make sure our main landing pages are being indexed which they are and our sitemap was updated several times this year, although we're in the process of updating it again to resubmit. I also checked our robots.txt and there's nothing out of the ordinary. In the last month we've recently gotten rid of some duplicate content issues caused by pagination by using canonical tags but that's all we've done to reduce the number of pages crawled. We have seen some soft 404's and some server errors coming up in our crawl error report that we've either fixed or are trying to fix. Not really sure where to start looking to find a solution to the problem or if it's even a huge issue, but the drop in traffic is also not great. The drop in traffic corresponded to lose in rankings as well so there could be correlation or none. Any ideas here?

Hi Moz Community, Our e-commerce site is trying to gauge the opportunity of certain queries for specific countries. I'm trying to use the search console data presented in GA to do this. I'm looking at the top queries filtered by each country and also the top landing pages for each country as well. The non filtered data for queries and landing pages is completely different than by country and some if it looks wrong. For instance, our most popular query by impressions shows 0 query impressions in the US once filtered by country. Our site is based in the US so this doesn't make any sense, the same is true for landing pages. Is the queries and landing page data in GA under search console a combination of all countries? Since our target is set to the USA in search console is this data technically US based? How is this data so off? Thanks for answering!

Hey Guys, I recently noticed that our Christmas Gifts landing page was ranking twice in the Google serps for the query "Christmas Gifts." One of these pages is an old url that has already been 301 redirected to the new url page which is also showing up in the search results. In the results, the following shows up in position 2 & 3 for the Christmas Gifts query: <cite class="_Rm">www.uncommongoods.com/gifts/christmas/christmas-gifts</cite> <cite class="_Rm">www.uncommongoods.com/occasions/christmas-gifts/christmas-gifts</cite>The url with "occasions" in it has already been 301 redirected to the url above it. Not sure why this is still showing up. I know it takes Google some time to index 301s and sometimes they show old urls, but it's been a few months since the old "occasions" url was redirected.The title tags for these pages are different but they are actually the same page. The new "gifts" version of the url was made live in the Navigation of our site just last week and before that it was hidden from our Navigation. Would this be the reason it's now showing up in search?Any ideas on why this might be happening? ThanksExplanations?

Hi Moz Community, We've been implementing new canonical tags for our category pages but I have a question about pages that are found via search and our filtering options. Would we still need a canonical tag for pages that show up in search + a filter option if it only lists one page of items? Example below. www.uncommongoods.com/search.html/find/?q=dog&exclusive=1 Thanks!

Hi Moz community, I've been trying to do some on-site work and noticed that our product pages reviews may not be totally optimized. It used to be that all of the text from the reviews appeared in the actual code of the page, but now none of that text appears, so it may not be getting crawled.  The change was most likely released when we had an item page redesign.  However, when I Google a review snippet, it does seem to come up, so maybe Google is crawling that data despite it not being SEO optimized. Is this really an issue if the review snippets are showing up in search, there's been a lot of talk that Google is now better at crawling javascript. Thanks

Hi MOZ community, I'm hoping you guys can help me with this. Recently our site switched our landing pages to include a 180 item and 60 item version of each category page. They are creating duplicate content problems with the two examples below showing up as the two duplicates of the original page. http://www.uncommongoods.com/fun/wine-dine/beer-gifts?view=all&n=180&p=1 http://www.uncommongoods.com/fun/wine-dine/beer-gifts?view=all&n=60&p=1 The original page is http://www.uncommongoods.com/fun/wine-dine/beer-gifts I was just going to do a rel=canonical for these two 180 item and 60 item pages to the original landing page but then I remembered that some of these landing pages have page 1, page 2, page 3 ect. I told our tech department to use rel=next and rel=prev for those pages. Is there anything else I need to be aware of when I apply the canonical tag for the two duplicate versions if they also have page 2 and page 3 with rel=next and rel=prev? Thanks

Hey Moz Users, Has anyone tried using the WordPress plugin for AMP pages on their blog yet? Here's the link to it: https://wordpress.org/plugins/amp/. The implementation seems pretty straightforward but since there will be an AMP and a mobile friendly version of the posts on my blog I'm worried it will create a lot of duplicate content issues. I've seen a lot of articles pointing to a rel canonical tag that can be used to fix this situation. Not sure if I'm going to have an AMP version of all the posts on my blog, so this seems like it would be a pain to place the tag manually on specific pages with the AMP version only. Has anyone tried this plugin and what have you done to fix this duplicate content issue? Thanks

Hi all, Two weeks ago i noticed that one of our pages which normally ranks in the top 5 of search results dropped out of the top 50 results. I checked to make sure there were no Google penalties and checked to make sure the page was crawlable. Everything seemed fine and after a few hours our page went back into the number one position. I assumed it was a Google Flux. This number one ranking lasted about a week, today I see my page has dropped out of the top 50 yet again and hasn't come back up. again there are no penalties and there doesn't seem to be issues with the page. I'm hoping it comes back up to the top by tomorrow. What could be causing such a big dip multiple times?

Hi Moz Community, I was searching for "Gifts for men" in Google Search on my phone and saw a few results in the 3rd (Nordstrom), 4th (Etsy) and 5th(Grommet) place that had their brand name in the area under the title tag where the green url is usually listed on desktop. One example of the green text under the title tag is Nordstrom which lookes like this: Nordstrom > Shop > Gifts Whereas the first result from UncommonGoods looks like this in the green text: www.uncommongoods.com > by recipient I'm trying to figure out what markup Nordstrom, Etsy, ect used on their site to get their brand name to show up not as a url but as a brandname Anyone know the answer to this? Thanks!

Hi, I've been thinking of placing our brand name in the front of our title tag for brand recognition purposes. While doing research I came across a few sites that seem to have their brand name on every title tag, regardless of whether of not their title tag was too long and getting cut off by Google. Ex: Personalized Cutting Broads & Humidors...-Etsy The title tag for the example above was for a store in Etsy that sells personalized cutting broads, which was what i searched for. Normally a title tag that is too long gets cut off by Google and your brand name no longer shows if you've positioned it at the end of your title tag. Is there a way to get your brand name to show up at the end of every title tag even if your title is long and gets cut off by Google? Obviously, I could just place the brand name at the front of my title tag, but if I wanted something like my example above is that possible? Thanks You

I would like to make a change to the way our main navigation is currently rendered on our e-commerce site. Currently, all of the content that appears when you click a navigation category is rendering on page load. This is currently a large portion of every page visit’s bandwidth and even the images are downloaded even if a user doesn’t choose to use the navigation. I’d like to change it so the content appears and is downloaded only IF the user clicks on it, I'm planning on using AJAX.  As that is the case it wouldn’t not be automatically on the site(which may or may not mean Google would crawl it). As we already provide a sitemap.xml for Google I want to make sure this change would not adversely affect our SEO. As of October this year the Webmaster AJAX crawling doc. suggestions has been depreciated. While the new version does say that its crawlers are smart enough to render AJAX content, something I've tested, I'm not sure if that only applies to content injected on page load as opposed to in click like I'm planning to do.

Here is the message: "Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site: http://www.uncommongoods.com/" Should i try to do anything about this? We are not having any indexation issues so we think Google is still crawling our whole site. What could be some possible repercussions of ignoring this? Thanks Mozzers! -Zack

We have a bit of a conundrum. Webmaster tools is telling us that they are crawling too many URLs: Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site: http://www.uncommongoods.com/ In their list of URL examples, all of the URLs have tons of parameters. We would probably be ok telling Google not to index any of the URLs with parameters. We have a great URL structure. All of our category and product pages have clean links (no parameters) The parameters come only from sorts and filters. We don't have a need for Google to index all of these pages. However, Google Analytics is showing us that over the last year, we received a substantial amount of search revenue from many of these URLs (800+ of them converted) So, Google is telling us they are unhappy. We want to make Google happy by ignoring all of the paramter URLs, but we're worried this will kill the revenue we're seeing. Two questions here: 1. What do we have to lose by keeping everything as-is. Google is giving us errors, but other than that what are the negative repercussions? 2. If we were to de-index all of the parameter URLs via Webmaster tools, how much of the revnenue would likely be recovered by our non-parameter URLs? I've linked to a screenshot from Google Analytics ArxMSMG.jpg

Before 1-2 weeks ago, our G+ posts containing links to our product pages would show up in in SERPs (when searching for our brand name) with a thumbnail of the product image. Now, they do not  (see image below for visual). Our tech team confirmed there hasn't been any coding change that might be to blame and I see that this isn't happening to other sites. Any idea what may be the problem here? tcnhLgy

When we post links to product pages onto our Google Plus account, the image never shows up in the post. Only the name of the product and our domain name appears. Has anyone experienced this problem or have ideas on how to fix? 8nCbk8A

I noticed that our total # of indexed pages dropped recently by a substantial amount (see chart below) Is this normal? http://imgur.com/4GWzkph Also, 3 weeks after this started dropping, we got a message on increased # of crawl errors and found that a site update was causing 300+ new 404s. could this be related ?

Hey Mozzers, I run SEO for a retail site www.uncommongoods.com. We are building a mobile version of our site on m.uncommongoods.com On each of the category pages of www.uncommongoods.com, we have included a few lines of text at the bottom of the page to get some of our target keywords into the body. As an example, if you look at this page: http://www.uncommongoods.com/office/journals-stationery/journals You'll see this copy at the bottom: "Find unique journals and diaries at UncommonGoods. Our creative journal gifts are great for marking special occasions with sentimental keepsakes." We are debating whether or not to remove this copy on the category pages of our mobile site, just to keep the pages as clean as possible. Would there be any risk in leaving this out ? Thanks for your help on this! -Zack

Hi Mozzers, I am an SEO at uncommongoods.com and looking for your opinion on our site nav. Currently our nav & URLs are structured in 3 levels. From the top level down, they are: 1. Category ex: http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden 2. Subcat ex: http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden/bed-bath 3. Family ex:http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden/bed-bath/bath-accessories Right now, all levels are accessible from our top nav but we are considering removing the family pages. If we did that, Google could still find & crawl links to the family pages, but they would have to drill down to the subcat pages to find them. Do you guys think this would help or hurt our SEO efforts? Thanks! -Zack

How would you improve their exposure on Google?

I went to Distilled's linklove conference earlier this week. Many of the presenters showed spreadsheets where they had pulled in Page Authority for a long list of sites. What tool can you use to quickly do this? For instance, I want to be able to copy a list of 100 sites into a tool and have it spit out the PA for every site...anybody know how to do this?

The title tag for this page is the following: "Best Mothers Day Gifts, Unique Mothers Day Gift Ideas | UncommonGoods" However, when you search Mothers Day Gifts UncommonGoods the title tags show up differently. What's up with this? Can I fix it? Is it a problem?

Would you rather have someone +1 your homepage or add you to their Circles? Which one will help you out more in the SERPs ?

A few weeks back, I went to a Distilled meetup here in NYC.  SEER Interactive's Mark Lavoritano did some cool slides on the seasonality of keywords. Basically, his presentation made the point that you should not only think about which keywords you want to rank for but also WHEN they are most valuable. This made me think...we have a lot of moving parts to our marketing efforts. Emails with interchangeable modules, a homepage with interchangeable links, and other dynamic elements for which we have to decide what themes we want to market for the week. Babies or bikes? Kitchen Gadgets or Wine Glasses? Google Insights for Search  is a great tool which allows you to look at keyword traffic year over year. However, for many of the keywords (like the ones mentioned above), on a multi-year timeframe, it can be tough to sift out the specific weeks in which traffic repeatedly peaks year after year. What I really wanted to see was the last 5 years laid on top of each other to find the common peaks. Even better, if I could map 5 years of keyword data to a single row in a spreadsheet and then use conditional formatting to create a colorscale, I could create a sweet forecasting calendar with several keywords and use this to choose the best timing for various marketing campaigns. Here's a link to a screenshot of the calendar I created: forecasting calendar I could have done this in excel, but I've been wanting to try out Python for a while now and decided this was a great time to do it. After some reasearch, I figured out how to import a csv into python and the rest was done with for loops and lists, which is fairly basic python. I've pasted my code below. In a nutshell, the program runs through all 5 years of traffic data and increments a count in a list whenever it sees a peak (according to a threshold called "peakInterestValue" that you set in the code). The output is a list of 52 numbers [0-5] (representing 52 weeks over 5 years). If the value is a 5, it means that all 5 years showed a peak in traffic at that week. If it's a 4, then 4 (out of 5) years showed a peak that week, etc...you can then copy/paste this to a row in an excel sheet with all your keywords, apply a color scale w/ conditional formatting, and  boom! you've got a forecasting calendar. This code works on the exact file that Google insights exports so you don't need to format it at all. It's ready to rock. If you want to see the code formatted and cleaned up, check it out here. If you want to see a hot mess, I've also pasted the code below. You can drop it right into a .py file and run it off a cmd prompt but you'll need to install python first: http://www.python.org has installation info and great tutorials as well. Enjoy! import csv """reads a file from google insights""" """Open the last 5 years of data from Google Insights""" anniversarygiftFile2007 = csv.reader(open("anniversarygift2007.csv","r"))anniversarygiftFile2008 = csv.reader(open("anniversarygift2008.csv","r"))anniversarygiftFile2009 = csv.reader(open("anniversarygift2009.csv","r"))anniversarygiftFile2010 = csv.reader(open("anniversarygift2010.csv","r"))anniversarygiftFile2011 = csv.reader(open("anniversarygift2011.csv","r")) """Combines the data into a list""" anniversarygiftFile = [anniversarygiftFile2007,anniversarygiftFile2008,anniversarygiftFile2009, anniversarygiftFile2010,anniversarygiftFile2011] """counters"""i=0j=0 """flags used to initialize lists""" definedFlag=0 definedFlag2=0 for i in range(0,5): j=0 for row in anniversarygiftFile[i]:         if j<=4: """skips the first 5 rows""" elif j==5: """initialized the list on the first week of data""" anniversarygift=[row[1]] definedFlag = 1 if(i==4): peakInterestWeeks=[0] else: """appends the list with each row""" anniversarygift.append(row[1]) if(i==4): peakInterestWeeks.append(0) if len(anniversarygift)>=52: print("i = ",i) if (i==0): if(definedFlag==1): anniversarygiftArray = [anniversarygift] definedFlag2 = 1 elif (definedFlag == 1): if(definedFlag2 == 1): anniversarygiftArray.append(anniversarygift) break j=j+1       i=i+1 """ Now all of the data is in python lists""" i=0 j=0 """ Lower peakInterestValue to lower the traffic threshold and discover more peaks """ peakInterestValue=90 """ This is a variable to help you tweak peakInterestValue""" peakInterestCnt = 0 for i in range(0,5): print("i =",i) for j in range (0,51): if int(anniversarygiftArray[i][j])>peakInterestValue: """If keyword interest peaks, peakInterestWeeks[] is incremented""" peakInterestWeeks[j]=+=1 peakInterestCnt +=1 print("Peak interest",peakInterestWeeks)print("Peak Interest Count =",peakInterestCnt) """peakInterestWeeks[] is printed out to a row in an excel file""" c = csv.writer(open("anniversarygift.csv", "w")) c.writerow(peakInterestWeeks)

I work at Uncommongoods.com. I ran a big linkbait brainstorming session a few months back. Several ideas came out of the meeting and we just released our first piece of "linkbait" that was conceptualized during the brainstorming session. I think it's safe to say this first piece of linkbait is a big fat failure as it has only received 2 likes and no comments in the past few days. I want to know what I could have done to make this post more compelling so our next post can be better. http://blog.uncommongoods.com/2011/kindest-vs-angriest-cities/ Any thoughts ?

One of our big natural search competitors for gift keywords is Gifts.com. We are competing for many keywords like "teen gifts",  "gifts for him", "gifts for her". For many of these, the Google SERP has multiple Gifts.com pages on the first page. I have never seen more than one of our pages (uncommongoods.com) on  a SERP page. Any clue how/why Gifts.com has multiple pages in search results ? Thanks!

I recently submitted an XML sitemap on Webmaster tools: http://www.uncommongoods.com/sitemap.xml Once Webmaster tools downloads it, how long do you typically have to wait until the pages index ?

I’m starting to notice some interesting behavior in Google rankings. It seems like most days, rankings move around but movements are relatively small. Then, maybe once or twice a month, there are days (like today) where everything seems to shift around in more dramatic fashion. I don’t know if it’s algorithm updates, or maybe they do light crawls every day and heavy crawls a few times a month..?? anybody have any idea what is behind these big waves of ranking changes?

I am starting to miss the old OSE. I've found that for a lot of the pages on our site, the new OSE is showing WAY more links and most of them are garbage nonsense links from China, Russia, and the rest of the internet Wild West. For instance, in the old OSE, this page used to show 9 linking domains: http://www.uncommongoods.com/gifts/by-recipient/gifts-for-him It now shows 454 links. Some of the new links (about 5 of them) are legitimate. The other 400+ are garbage. Some are porn sites, most of them don't even open a web page, they just initiate some shady download. I've seen this for other sites as well (like Urban Outfitters) This is making it much harder for me to do backlink analysis on bc I have no clue how many "Normal" links they have. Is anyone else having this problem ? Any way to filter all this crap out ? See attached screenshot of the list of links I'm getting from OSE. NHXnn

I need a tool that will input a list of URLs and produce a spreadsheet with link metrics for all sites including PageRank, Domain Authority, Page Authority, Social data, etc..i know that OSE will do this for 5 sites at a time but I need to compare more. At lest 50 at a time... I bought Buzzstream thinking this would work, but it doesn't. does anybody have any good advice? Thanks!!

I'm trying to convince my tech dept to take our blog off of a subdomain and move it to a folder on our root domain. Understandably, they don't want to build it from scratch, so I need some good CMS tools to build the blog. Our first choice is Wordpress but it isn't compatible with Oracle. Does anybody know of any good solutions that are Oracle-friendly? Our platform is PHP.. Thanks!!

So I think I've got a good strategy going but wanted to get others feedback on it... I've been link building on a lot of blogs via reviews and giveaways. Frequently, these blogs give my posts limited exposure on the Home Page because the posts quickly get buried by new posts and eventually pushed off the home page to the "older posts" pages. Sometimes, reviews never even touche the home page because they live one level down on a "reviews" page which typically has 0 inbound links and low page authority. In these cases, I will use OSE to find the blog post with the strongest back link profile and request a link on that page instead. Typically, these posts are 2-3 years old so the bloggers are usually happy to give an old page some action. I'm a bit concerned though..Since these pages are frequently old, their content has not changed for years. Essentially, the pages have gone stale. Am I getting any benefit from these links? They typically have the 2nd best Page Authority on the Domain, but I'm wondering if the lack of fresh content kills all the value.

Hey SEO Mozosphere - Working on a link buying strategy. I know it is wise to target not only anchor text links but also branded text links to keep your anchor text distribution looking natural. However, do you think it would be too risky to ask for branded text links only from low PR sites and focus the more valuable keyword anchor text links on high PR sites?

Hello SEO brethren - I've got a mystery I'm trying to solve. I work in house SEO at http://www.uncommongoods.com/ Our home page is a Pagerank 5. All of our sub-pages are Pagerank 0. Even this one below which has 276 links from 57 domains: http://www.uncommongoods.com/product/recycled-wine-bottle-platters Any clue what is going on here? Is a PR 0 typical for a page with this many links / linking domains? Thanks! -Zack

I recently began working at a company called Uncommon Goods.  I ran a few different spider emulators on our homepage (uncommongoods.com) and I saw a 404 Error on SEO-browser.com as well as URL errors on Summit Media's emulator and SEOMoz's crawler. It seems there is a serious problem here. How is this affecting our site from an SEO standpoint? What are the repercussions? Also, I know we have a lot of javascript on our homepage..is this causing the 404? Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks! -Zack