Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
If the Structured Data Tool shows that your pages are set up properly, I wouldn't worry about it. Google plays around with their algorithm and I've seen authorship images show up next to my SERP listings on and off. I attribute this to Google tinkering, and possibly my personalized search having something to do with it.
I've ran searches for my own content while logged into my Google profile and gotten different authorship results than when running a de-personalized search.
If all you plan to do is drop your links in social bookmarking sites, you're probably just wasting your time. It's not likely that these links will be worth anything to search engines - even if they are followed links. The time you spend building these links could be spend developing great content, or working on other link-building opportunities that would be more worthwhile.
As far as blog comments go - if your goal is to get backlinks, it's not a good idea. These links are nofollowed and too many of them will look spammy to search engines. If you are commenting to engage with the content author, that's a different story. I often comment on other sites to engage with the content author and start a conversation. I sometimes choose to include my website as a reference, but I often choose to leave it out.
The login button does not show when you are currently logged in (which you are). You see the button to your Moz Analytics campaigns.
If you hover over the silhouette figure you get options to view your profile page, settings, logout, and more.
It's probably something that the Moz dev team can look into. I know that GWMT keeps track of when they first crawled a new link to your site, and you get get it by exporting your list of links.
My understanding is that the Mozscape index is unique every time it's generated. Each time a new index comes out, it is a new craw of your inbound links, and the old index is trashed. At MozCon, it was alluded to that the development team was looking into ways of determining which pages are updated less frequently, and re-crawling those pages less often - allowing the Mozscape index to complete faster and use less resources.
In short - everything you see in OSE was crawled recently (in the 30 days leading up to the last index update).
Facebook Page Likes are not the same as the Facebook Like number that OSE shows. The Facebook Like number that OSE shows is for "Likes" for that specific URL.
For example, if you put a Facebook Like button on your site - it would increment the number of likes for that URL, not the number of likes for your Facebook Page.
If your Facebook Page is set up with the correct URL, search engines will associate the two with one another.
The sitemap for your site doesn't reflect your latest post. The WordPress plugin you use to generate the sitemap can be manually rebuilt so you don't have to wait for it to do it automatically. Now that I'm looking at it - it doesn't appear to have been updated in quite some time...
Go into Settings > XML-Sitemap then click "rebuild the sitemap" in the middle of the first section. Check your sitemap again to make sure that it's been updated.
I ask myself the same questions, why would anyone invest in such a marketing campaign? It seems to me that it would be a huge waste of time.
But, to quote one of my favorite sayings, "If you throw enough shit against a wall, some of it has gotta stick." The people that send out these email are probably not concerned with quality or conversion rates.
On a side note, you could remove your email address from your profile, but Moz does a great job of masking it already. If you don't have Javascript on (a lot of bots, scrapers and crawlers don't), then the email address won't be displayed. Also - do a quick Google search for your email address - I found it on several other sites.
It's not Penguin. As Jesse stated, the link profile doesn't really set the site up for success. I count 8 unique linking root domains.
1 of the links is on a "links" page.
3+ of the links are some form of a on a directory page.
Another is on a members profile page.
Another is on a Free Advertising forum.
The Flash on the home page probably isn't helping either.
The site needs content (like Jesse said), and content that others in that niche would be genuinely interested in.
Think of some creative marketing campaigns you could do with "concrete repair." Maybe run a video series on the dangers of degrading concrete, create an infographic on the degrading process that concrete goes through, write a post about how to keep moisture out of concrete (or other general concrete maintenance), etc., etc.
Also - if the company would consider it, I would suggest they do a site-wide redesign. It looks like it's been a few years.
It seemed to have fixed the problem for me as well, but I believe you get a warning that doing so will cause you to lose historical data. If that matters to you, perhaps the OP should contact Moz for help.
I encountered this problem today with a brand new campaign I created yesterday. I double checked the settings page but there was no where to connect or reconnect the connection - so since the campaign was new I just removed the connection and reconnected it - this probably isn't a good option for you however.
I initially thought that it had something to do with me going between Moz Analytics and back and forth to the old Moz Campaign Manager. Perhaps someone from the team can comment?
Thanks for your response 
I've been pushing to take back the root domain, but have so far hit resistance. Perhaps I can convince people to at least give it a try.
As far as moving everything into sub-folders of the root domain, as opposed to an obscene amount of sub domains, we could give that a try for some of the sub domains, but not all of them. Unfortunately, several of the sub domains are _extremely _large sites that require a lot of processing power on the server. Nearly every single one of these sites has it's own dedicated server. I think it would be heinous to move them all - but I will see what we can do about moving some.
Thanks again!
BJS1976 is correct. Take a look at Google's cached page and view the source:
The meta robots tag is not there, so Google hasn't re-crawled your site since this line of code was added.
Hello everyone!
I manage 3 large eCommerce sites that sell textbooks, digital learning solutions, electronic teaching resources, etc., to three different markets in the education space (K-12, College, and Post-College/Career Search).
Currently, the 3 sites live on three different sub domains of the companies main domain. Is this best practice? I assume we want all three under the same domain to consolidate domain authority. But...
What if I told you that we have dozens of sub domains of the companies main domain? Some are for marketing sites, some are for digital products, some are customer-specific sites, etc. We probably have close to 100 sub domains that are used regularly.
Then what if I told you that the company doesn't hardly even use the root domain (other than a handful of old pages)? Even the root domain redirects to a sub domain.
Just looking for some insight on this, as I will be doing an SEO/marketing/conversion overhaul going forward.
On a side note, we use Magento as an eCommerce platform, and it's rampant with duplicate content, duplicate page titles, pages with too many links, and so on and so forth. That's another problem for another day...
Their permalink structure is awful for SEO. These pages provide very little use for search engines, and should probably be set to "noindex".
As Charles pointed out, Joomla! is not a great platform for a heavy eCommerce site like this. I would also suggest Magento (although with it's advantages comes disadvantages - for one it's a processing beast and you'll likely need to upgrade to a better hosting company).
Out of the box, a self-hosted WordPress site is flawed when it comes to SEO. Your permalink structure will be poor, there is rampant duplicate content and titles, frankly it's a bit of a mess.
With a little work though, you can turn WordPress into a very SEO friendly platform. WordPress SEO by Yoast is an essential plugin in my mind, and makes things a whole lot easier.
Check out this very helpful Mozinar on the subject: http://moz.com/webinars/advanced-wordpress-seo
It's hard to say, and I admit that I would have also expected them to reindex the pages by now.
A while back I was working for a client who accidentally turned on noindex, nofollow in their WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin site-wide. I didn't catch it for a week, and after I turned it off it took an additional 3 weeks before a single page of the site was reindexed. Granted, this was a low ranked site, and it probably wasn't high on Google's priority, but it did take much longer than I hoped to recover from.
Unfortunately I think you just have to wait it out. Just keep doing what your doing, creating new content, etc. Maybe if you build a new link to the page, Google will recrawl it then?
If the page was set to "noindex" for a long time, Google may have flagged the page as such and chosen to skip over it when it was crawling your site.
You can ask Google to crawl your page: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1352276
Ask Google to crawl a page or site:
- On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
- On the Dashboard, under Health, click Fetch as Google.
- In the text box, type the path to the page you want to check.
- In the dropdown list, select Web. (You can select another type of page, but currently we only accept submissions for our Web Search index.)
- Click Fetch. Google will fetch the URL you requested. It may take up to 10 or 15 minutes for Fetch status to be updated.
- Once you see a Fetch status of "Successful", click Submit to Index, and then click one of the following:
- To submit the individual URL to Google's index, select URL and click Submit. You can submit up to 500 URLs a week in this way.
- To submit the URL and all pages linked from it, click URL and all linked pages. You can submit up to 10 of these requests a month.
It's probably just Google slowly making their way around to re-crawling these pages. I would fetch the page, and just wait a little while longer.
Companies that offer services like Moz Analytics, Majestic, Raven Tools, and others probably aren't helping the situation for individuals
I have found it much easier to find projects and clients when presenting myself as a web developer/designer with a strong knowledge of SEO and marketing, rather than just a developer or just an SEO. For me, SEO is just another tool in my belt.
I think that it will become harder and harder to get strictly "SEO" work, as companies with access to the plethora of online tools (free and paid) will begin to bring a lot of that work in-house.
Yes the presence of BingSiteAuth.xml or the lack-thereof doesn't really give you a definitive answer, but it does give you a little insight into the situation.
There is really no way to know for sure if they have activated or are using Webmaster Tools accounts unfortunately, unless you have access to their email accounts.
It does look the same, I just cropped out the rest.
You went one level deeper than I did. I suggested you change the URL at the Property level, but you could also do it at the Profile level. If you have multiple Profiles for each Property though, I suggest you do it at the Property level.
It's definitely possible, I would consolidate your efforts in one Google Places account and encourage people you know to promote you there.
You can change the domain and keep your historical data. In Google Analytics, when you are ready to make the change, go to Admin, then click on the appropriate Account, click on the appropriate Property, then click the Property Settings tab.
Rename the Property at this time, and change the Default URL to reflect your new domain LTD.
I don't see a presence for your site on Google+, which might explain the drop in traffic.
David Mihm did a great Whiteboard Friday about "How Business Listings Are Made": http://moz.com/blog/how-business-listings-made-whiteboard-friday. I would run a search for your target keyword in your location and see if your business is listed. If not, consider creating a Google Places account for your business, and encourage friends, family, and customers to promote you and give you positive reviews there.
I am not aware of anyway to determine if a site has implemented Google Webmaster Tools or not, as they could have verified it with by uploading a randomly named file, or through Google Analytics. I would say if they are fairly large site and have Google Analytics (which you can determime by viewing the source code of the site) they probably have GWMT as well.
To determine if Bing Webmaster Tools are in use, you can go to http://example.com/BingSiteAuth.xml (replace the domain name) and see if the file exists. If it does, then they activated Bing Webmaster Tools. If the file does not exist, it either means that they never activated Bing Webmaster Tools, or they did and were smart enough to delete the file from their server.
Hope this helps!
I would first confirm that you have authorship set up correctly by using the Rich Snippet Testing Tool: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets.
If Google shows you that everything is set up properly, then you shouldn't need to worry about it. It's possible that Google hasn't updated its index since you added the authorship link, so that could be why some people don't see your Google+ picture in the SERPs, but Google also could just be choosing not to show it for some reason.
I've seen some of my own pages with authorship set up properly on not display my Google+ picture in SERPs before, and I was logged into my account as the author. I'm not sure what causes Google to choose to not display the image, but it does happen sometimes.
For #1, you should choose whether you want www or non-www, not both. Set up a 301 redirect so that search engines don't confuse your the two and think you have duplicate content.
If you are running an Apache server, you can use this .htaccess 301 redirect to only have a non-www version of your site (entering www will redirect to the same page without www.)
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(.)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]
If you have old pages that still exist but are no longer relevant - you'll definitely want to 301 redirect them to the new page or new content. Check Open Site Explorer to see what type of inbound links these pages have, so you know what type of Page Authority you'll have pointing at your new page.
If the pages no longer exist (404 as Mike suggested above), there will be no benefit from 301 redirecting them to new pages, as Google has long since removed these pages from their index. It won't hurt you, but it won't benefit you either, so it's probably not worth the time.
Moz has published a lot of posts on Link Building: http://moz.com/blog/category/link-building most of them have some solid advice.
As Chris stated above, many in the SEO community feel that guest blogging will be the next target for a Google update, so while short term it may pay off to put some time in and find a site to post your content - in the long run your content might be better off being posted on your own site.
I've always felt that if my content was good enough to be posted on some other site, then I would rather it be on my site in the first place. This is unfortunately the only real future-proof method, as it's hard to say what will happen to guest blogging as a link-building tactic.
I'm not sure that I've ever got a false notification before, but I got the exact notification you are describing a while back. It seemed as though there was a problem with the robots.txt file. Turns out the domain didn't have a robots.txt file, so rather than guess Google decided to stop crawling it until I created one.
If your site doesn't have a robots.txt file, make sure you create one. If the site already has one, look over it for syntax errors that Google may be tripping over.
I don't know why you would want to 
Go to https://mza.bundledseo.com/users/xgrade and click Cancel Subscription.
Using tables in your HTML will produce a poor mobile experience. Because the world is moving more towards mobile everyday, we can't ignore it, and neither can search engines.
I don't think search engines will punish you for having table tags in your HTML, but if your site is consistently producing high bounce rates from mobile users - you're not really winning are you.
You can get a pretty complete list from Open Site Explorer by changing some of the filter settings.
Set Show to only 301 Set **links from **to only external Set pages to pages on this root domain
This should show you a significant portion of your inbound short URLs.
It's more of a warning than a real problem, but it is possible that search engines will see the pages and consider them duplicate content. It's possible that one of those pages won't be indexed.
I've come across this problem before writing for my own blog. I was writing some tips for Apache and .htaccess and found that every post I wrote was tagged to both categories, so the category pages were being flagged as duplicate content. I remedied this by consciously writing a post that only fit into one category, and the warning was removed from my Moz campaign report.
If you're not great at HTML, then perhaps you should consider having your site converted to WordPress. The initial cost will definitely be outweighed by the long-term benefits.
WordPress will allow you to edit and add new content with little or no HTML/CSS knowledge. You'll be able to use a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface to add text and style it however you see fit.
If you install the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin, you'll be able to update the title tag, meta description tag by post, set up open graph meta tags, the meta robots tag, and much much more - again - all without any HTML knowledge.
I don't see how this could be beneficial to your site in any way.
I would be extremely careful buying services like this. Any black-hat or paid link-building scheme out there that go against Google's guidelines could potentially harm your rankings.
Google tends to "think" for you when running searches. They often assume like words mean the same thing, so running a search query for "funny images" and "funny pictures" will likely produce very similar (if not the same) results. You should take this to your advantage, rather than worrying about it too much.
I see this used a lot when I search for "web developer" and get results for "web development" and "web design." The keywords are bolded as if Google assumed that is what I meant. I don't think it's a problem, just something to account for in your keyword research.
Looking at the graph you posted the traffic from May doesn't look like it dropped all that much, especially given the variability of your traffic over the past few months. Your post is unclear if the graph is overall traffic or organic search traffic - so it's hard to say what exactly is going on, but it could just be normal fluctuation as some posts get more attention than others.
The traffic for June is low, but it's only a weeks worth of traffic. If you average it out over the entire month, it will probably be similar to May's.
I would run a quick Open Site Explorer search on the site to see if your inbound link profile looks fishy at all. If it does, you may have been hit by Penguin. If you see any fishy links, you can consider disavowing them.
The post excerpt is likely the first paragraph or so of your post, and often times doesn't include your target keywords and is not a good preview of what the post is all about.
You should tailor your meta description to potential readers. Give them a reason to click through and read your article.
Your Open Graph description should also be tailored for social networks to promote sharing. This description is likely different than your meta description and probably much different then your post excerpt.
As Chris stated above, the page is certainly there. Some CMS' will create duplicate pages and it might be as simple as determining where the page is coming from and removing it. I couldn't find any inbound links for this page, so you would probably be ok removing it.
On the other hand, 301 redirecting the page would probably be a cleaner option. If you are running an apache server, you would write a 301 redirect in your .htaccess file like below.
RedirectMatch 301 /extra-services/transportation--car-rails--146.html /extra-services/car-pick-up-service-146.html
This should take care of the problem, and GWMT won't bother you about it anymore.
%0A is the line feed character, so it looks like your CMS may be spitting out links that browsers and crawls interpret as relative links.
If your link appears like this:
[The link will be interpreted as relative and result in the link that you found on your Moz error report.
It's probably a problem with how the CMS is spitting out the href attribute, but it's hard to say without knowing more information.](%0Ahttp://www.yoursite.com/resource.html)
Out of the box it has to be Magento, but you can extend it even further with modules.
I personally choose not to use them, and I know others do as well. In some niches, information gets stale so quickly that linking people to your old content may be counter-productive.
If you do choose to have archives linked to from your site, you can choose to noindex them with the WordPress Yoast plugin.
It depends on what you are trying to get out of it.
If you are using local directories to improve your SEO and inbound link profile, then no - I don't think they are worth the time.
If you are using local directories to get your brand in front of potential customers, then yes, it is definitely worth your time.
Why not try to avoid the problem altogheter? I assume the below line is site-wide:
If you remove the index, follow meta tag, your pages will still be indexed and followed. Then allow your authors to decide on a post-by-post basis if they want to noindex or nofollow the page.
Local directories will help you with expanding your reach for local search. Having a listing on Google Places, Bing, Yahoo, Yelp, FourSquare, etc., will get your brand in front of potential customers faces. Isn't this the ultimate goal? Whether or not this helps you rank in search engines, you still want to turn leads into sales.
If you are looking at local directories as your sole source of inbound links to improve your SEO, you should probably look elsewhere, but if your interested in getting your brand out there for people to see, local directories are essential.
Looks like you missed "http://" in some URLs so the browser is treating them as relative links. There are more.
On this page: http://www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/?Tag=Business+Leader and others like it, I found several URLs that start with "www." which is your problem. This page has a relative link on the anchor text "keep on improving"
