Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Sarah,

Thanks for writing in and sorry that your ranking report is looking off. I took a look at your account, but it seems that you have a large number of campaigns so it would be helpful if you could let me know which campaign you are having an issue with. If you prefer not to mention your campaign name in this public question for privacy reasons, you can email us the information at [email protected].

I look forward to hearing back from you soon.

-Chiaryn

Glad to help, Simon!

Hi Simon,

Great question! Unfortunately, there isn't a way to determine when we will crawl your site. The campaign crawls are put into a general queue set for the next scheduled crawl date when the previous crawl finishes and we crawl your site when it is the next campaign in the queue for that date. The time of day can depend on the number of other crawls scheduled for that date and the length of time required to complete those crawls. We don't have a way to schedule the crawl for a specific time.

I'm really sorry for any inconvenience this causes. Please let me know if you have any other questions.

-Chiaryn

Glad to help, Samuel!

Hey Samuel,

Sorry for the confusion about this feature. The On Page Tool only automatically runs reports on pages that are already ranking in the top 50 of your default search engine for one or more of your keywords. Thus, your On Page Rankings Reports update after your rankings update each week. If you have no pages ranking in the top fifty, then you'll have no automatically generated On Page Reports. If you have 30 pages ranking in the top fifty, then you should have 30 On Page reports.

You can always manually generate reports for any URL and one of your keywords. Simply go to the Report Card tab in the On Page section, and cut and paste or type a new URL into the URL drop box. Then select your keyword from the drop down and select "Grade My Optimization." After that, you can tell the Web App to start tracking that combination in the future, and you should start seeing weekly reports.

I hope this helps! Please let me know if you have any other questions.

-Chiaryn

Glad I could help, Charlie. Let me know if you have any further questions.

-Chiaryn

Hi Charlie,

Thanks for writing in and sorry that some of your campaign data is looking off.

We aren't having any general issues with traffic data at this time, so I am going to give you a run down of how to double-check your organic traffic in Google Analytics so you can see exactly the data we pull from the Analytics profile.

Log in to GA and select the profile that the campaign is connected to
Click 'Traffic Sources' in the left navigation
Click 'Sources' in that sub-menu
Click 'Search' in that sub-menu
Click 'Organic' in that sub-menu (after clicking organic the graph & data refreshes)
Click the down arrow next to the date range in the top right corner (expands a date picker)
From the Date Range dropdown select '1/21' to '1/27' (for example) and click 'Apply' (graph & data refreshes)

If you are seeing traffic in that data once you follow the list above, please send us a screenshot so we can look into why we aren't pulling the data in on your account.

As for the duplicate content, our engineers recently made an update to the crawler that made the check for duplicate content more accurate and it seems that your campaign has been affected by this change. I checked a number of the pages that we are listing through the similar page checker here: http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php and all of the pages that I checked that our crawler is reporting as duplicates and it looks like all of those pages are showing as 100% similar in that tools, so it does seem we are accurately reporting your duplicate content pages.

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any other questions.

-Chiaryn

So glad I could help figure out the issue! Let us know if you need any other assistance.

-Chiaryn

Hey Tim,

Thanks for writing in! I took a look at your crawl diagnostics and it looks like one of the notices we are returning is that there is a nofollow directive in the source code of http://www.trustworthycare.com/. I checked the source code on http://www.trustworthycare.com/ and I am definitely seeing that directive in there, as well (http://screencast.com/t/FGF29en2). This directive means that we are not allowed to follow through any links on that page, so we crawl trustworthycare.com which redirects to www.trustworthycare.com and then we can't go any further into the site due to that directive.

I hope this clears things up. Please let me know if you have any further questions.

-Chiaryn

Hi Martin,

Thanks for writing in with a great question. It looks like our developers are expecting to have that functionality released for OSE around March of this year, but I don't have a specific date yet. I would recommend subscribing to this forum: https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/20770156-open-site-explorer-to-crawl-https. That is where we will update when we have more news or when the feature is released.

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any other questions.

-Chiaryn

Hey Str8,

Donford is correct. You would need to specifically block our crawler from the mobile pages in your robots.txt file. Unfortunately, we don't currently have a way to disregard specific pages or errors in the web app, but we are looking to add that function sometime in the future.

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any other questions.

Hi Yoseph,

I'm sorry that you are having some trouble accessing the anchor text in Open Site Explorer. This doesn't seem to be a widespread issue and I was able to access that data when I logged into your account, so this may be a cookies issue on your browser. You should definitely make sure that third-party cookies are activated in your browser (I know it seems basic, but it really does help). This is how you do this:

Firefox: http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/enabling+and+disabling+cookies Chrome: http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=95647

After you enable all cookies, including third-party, and save the settings, restart your browser and log back in to the SEOmoz.org site. After that, go to opensiteexplorer.org and make sure you are logged in (it indicates if you are logged in on top of the page). You should be good to go!

If you're still having problems, you may want to clear your cache and cookies as well. Here's how:

Firefox: http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Clear Recent History#w_how-do-i-clear-my-history (clear at least your cache and cookies) Chrome: http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=95582

After it's all cleared out, try restarting the browser again and then logging in. You should be set.

I hope this helps! Let me know if it doesn't work.

-Chiaryn

Hey Teemu,

Thanks for writing in and sorry that you are having some issues with the Historical PageRank tool. Unfortunately, this is an older tool that we don't no longer support so it can sometimes be buggy. We do keep this tool available because sometimes the tool can still provide data with great value, but I'm afraid that it oftentimes does not work properly. I'm really sorry about that!

I just tested out the tool for a handful of URLs. For some it brought up data on the first try, but others required submitting the URL a few times, but I did eventually get data for all of the URLs so I would recommend retrying the tool a few times if you don't see an update immediately.

If you’d like to leave feedback about the tool, a great place for that would be in the SEOmoz Feature Request Forum. That is the forum our product team uses to prioritize tools and requests.

Thanks for your understanding! Please let me know if you have any other questions.

-Chiaryn

Hi Angelos,

Thanks for writing in. Unfortunately, at this time, we are only able to track competitors at the subdomain level within the campaigns and we can't limit it to just the specific subfolder or page. I'm really sorry about that!

If your competitor only has one page that is relevant to your business, you may still be able to get valuable information by adding the subdomain, since we will only report on the URL from their site that is ranking for your specific keywords.

I would recommend adding a request for the ability to limit which pages of the competitor subdomain we track to our feature request forum. Here's the feature request forum we use to collect ideas: http://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums/293194-seomoz-pro-feature-requests

You can add your request there and vote for other features you'd like to see, both of which help our product team in deciding what to build next.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any other questions.

-Chiaryn

Hi Mathew,

Thanks for writing in with a great question.

We actually use different parameters than Adwords to rate the keyword difficulty. We find our numbers with Mozrank, Moztrust, Domain Authority and Page Authority to calculate the keyword difficulty. These metrics are calculated by our own crawl and algorithm and we use them to calculate the Keyword Difficulty score based o the first 20 results so the number that they display can sometimes be different then what Adwords shows.

If you want to know more about the metrics we use, you can take a look at this resource: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain-authority

I went ahead and marked this as a discussion questions so that others can recommend the tools they use.

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any other questions.

-Chiaryn

Hey Dave,

Thanks for following up. I can't really give any SEO advice, since the Help Team is really here more for product support and I don't actually do any SEO. This is more of a question for the broader SEOmoz community. You may consider posting it as a separate question to get more of a response, since the actual product part of your question has been marked as answered.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Chiaryn

Glad to help!

Hey Dave,

Thanks for writing in.

There are a few reasons why you may be seeing slightly different results than what we are showing in the web app. Since the search engines all maintain multiple indices that run across multiple datacenters, you can get somewhat different ranking results from different queries for the same keyword. Other elements, such as personalization, geography and search history (even if you're logged out of your Google/search engine account) can also influence ranking positions. There can definitely be a lot of variation in what different people, searching from different computers/locations might see in the rankings. We try to provide ranking information for what most users searching in your specified search engine would see.

I actually ran the keyword "plus size lingerie" through Google in an incognito window and I am seeing www.plussizeplum.com on the 5th page of search results in position 46 (http://screencast.com/t/vp6laUxQO).

It is also important to note that, when looking at that far down, the results can be unstable and experience a lot of fluctuation.

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any other questions.

-Chiaryn

Hi Adam,

Thanks for writing in with a great question. I do see that the total number of linking root domains isn't included in the Top Pages CSV. I'm not certain if this is a bug or the expected behavior, so I am going to have to migrate your question over to our email support system so I can have the engineers look into it. You will receive an email from our system that covers the issue and I will update you their once I receive an answer from the engineers. You should be seeing that email shortly.

-Chiaryn

Hi Laurance,

Thanks for writing in and sorry that your crawl never completed. I'm afraid the issue is that all crawlers are being blocked in the robots.txt file of the site and we aren't able to fully access the site to complete a crawl. If you were to update the robots.txt file to allow our crawler to access the site, we would than be able to get the crawl completed for you. You can use the user-agent rogerbot to specify our crawler or you can remove the disallow: / directive from the robots.txt file to allow us access. Once you've done that, let me know and I will have our engineers complete the crawl for you.

I look forward to hearing back soon.

-Chiaryn

Hi There,

William is correct. We recently had an issue with our rankings and our back up solution made it difficult for us to provide universal rankings for a time. A fix for the universal results was released on Thursday, January 3rd. I looked into your account and all of your campaigns that updated on Thursday or later are showing universal results now.

Please take a look and let me know if you still have any questions.

-Chiaryn

Hey Chris,

All of the data for both the Mozbar and OSE comes from the same index, so you shouldn't really be seeing different information between the two. Can you please let me know the URL that you are on when using the Mozbar and then the full OSE URL that the Mozbar directs you to when you click the link for the root domain stats? I am looking for the actuall opensiteexplorer.org URL, i.e. http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.seomoz.org. That information will help me investigate if you are experiencing a bug.

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

-Chiaryn

Hi Alexandros,

Unfortunately, we do not currently have an update on this issue. It is a very complicated process to correct the formatting in the web app, so it is taking us some time to resolve the problem. I'm very sorry about that.

We will update the entry in our Known Issues form when we have any further information:

https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/21080226-encoding-issues-with-non-latin-characters

-Chiaryn

Hi Harry,

I'm really sorry for your frustrations. While we are still working with Google to get our access to AdWords data back, we are also investigating other options to provide search volume data that would not rely on AdWords, but it will take some time for us to research our options and develop code to provide that data.

The good news is, we don't actually use the Google AdWords data in our calculation of keyword difficulty; that is just supplimental information used to give some context to the difficulty score, so those reports are still 100% accurate - they're just missing the information we pull from the API, which you can get at https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool in the meantime.

Please let me know if you have any other questions. I'm here to help!

Cheers, Chiaryn

Glad to help, Steve! The www would definitely change the metrics you are seeing!

Let us know if you have any other questions.

-Chiaryn

Hi there,

Thanks for writing in with a great question.

The social media information is based specifically on the URL you are inputting, so it would not include the likes on the Facebook page for the site unless you are specifically looking up facebook.com/examplebusiness in Open Site Explorer. For example, for www.seomoz.org OSE shows 155 Facebook likes (http://screencast.com/t/m0curvDuwsVU) while for www.facebook.com/SEOmoz it shows over 79,000 likes (http://screencast.com/t/34eHBJ4IEu). All of the metrics in the top section of OSE are specifically related to the exact URL you are researching and would not pull in information for other URLs.

I hope this clears things up. Please let me know if you have any other questions.

-Chiaryn

Hi Steve,

Thanks for writing in. You can't really specify localities in the Compare Link Metrics section of Open Site Explorer, but if you are checking your competitors using different TLDs, that would affect the metrics you are seeing for the competitors. If you can give me some exact examples of the sites you are comparing in that section, I can look directly into the issue you are seeing.

Our system isn't set to show different results based on different regions; it just shows different results based on the number of links to a domain, which would change between TLDs since example.com vs example.ca would be considered two different domains.

I look forward to hearing back soon.

-Chiaryn