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I had one listed last week after just a few weeks.

For as long as I've been around though, the average timespan is somewhere between 1 day to 2 years to never (no matter how well you've complied with guidelines).  It's a pretty terrible system for maintaining such an important thing.  Each category is maintained by different volunteer editors, with different priorities / level of corruption.   Others are totally nice and reasonable.  Some categories don't have active editors at all.

In other words, it's a big game of chance.

HTTP Error 500 is an Internal Server Error.  It's a server-side error, that means there's either a problem with your web server or the code that it's trying to interpret.  It may not happen in 100% of scenarios, so you may not always see it happening yourself, but it prevents the page from loading.  Obviously, that's bad for search engines and users.

Your best bet in tracking down this error would be to go through your web server's error logs.  Or, if you can replicate this happening on the web, you could enable error reporting, and see what errors pop up there.  That should tell you how to fix the issue, whatever it may be.

Agree here.  Using the free newswires is a waste of time, but using PRWeb/PRNewsWire correctly seems to yield consistent results (with emphasis on 'correctly' here, as there is a lot to writing and distributing a solid release).

I think the real issue here is that crawling the entire Internet is hard work, no one does it perfectly.  Not SEOmoz, not even Google.  OSE crawls independent of Google, so the two won't be related.  It's possible that SEOmoz will find it yet.  It's more likely that Google has already found it (they definitely have more resources).

You can see if Google does know about the page by searching "site:bbb.org (your company)".  It may also appear in Google Webmaster Tools, although like any backlink data provider, I'd take that with a huge grain of salt.  I see major links appearing in GWT from 5-10 years back as "new links" all the time.  It doesn't take too much analysis to realize that this doesn't 100% jive with the data that Google's organic search results are using.

This is the sort of thing that you definitely need to test like crazy.  Use the A/B testing tools in Google Analytics and try all possibilities of presentation, descriptions, colors, the order you present them in, and so forth.   If you see any volume of traffic at all, it will be worth it in the end.

That said, the most common approach that I've been seeing for this sort of thing as of late, and I've had success with as well, is to take some vertical tables likeso, and highlight the center option:  http://wrapbootstrap.com/preview/WB00H9006

Good luck!

1. It's not hard to implement.  It's just one line of code to each page.  If you're using software like WordPress or Joomla, there is probably an existing extension that will place it on all pages.  If it's a custom site, I wrote your developer some code and explained it here.
2. Redirecting old URL's was a good idea (ideally a 301 redirect done by at the web server level).
3. Not having canonical tags doesn't necessarily mean that you'll lose 'link juice' (if that's the phrase we're going with), but it can cause canonical issues (lost 'link juice', as well as negative issues that come from duplicate content in the index).  Often times, they're little things that you don't even think about (ie. a variable that's automatically ended on URL's by a certain service, like ?utm_source=twitter, an affiliate link, or just an issue of a missing "/" at the end of a web address).  With so many possible variables, my philosophy is just to use rel="canonical" everywhere so that you can not worry about it.

Cheers.

A quick Google search proves that this is not at all true (like most online SEO advice ).

On the other hand, having 200 words of really strong content on a page can really help your rankings.

Definitely been here.

One thing that they'll definitely need to realize right away is that they probably won't gain any ground in Google until after their on-page webspam is fixed.  Potentially long after.

If their site still provides a good user experience though, and they're up for it, I'd say sure, build some great links.  Get some product reviews out there, put them in niche directories, place some killer guest posts.  Those pieces are always valuable in terms of the residual referral traffic and brand perceptions anyway, and the added authority will still be there/helpful when once their on-page SEO is palatable.

If your agreement with them is short-term, though, or they aren't willing to continue budgeting for anything other than what yields SEO results, I also might consider pausing the agreement.   If you're an independent SEO (as your profile suggests), these situations can be particularly tough, as the client may not necessarily have a huge vote of confidence in giving you the time that's needed to really help work their company through this .  Even then, there are going to be clients that aren't patient or trusting enough to let you help them through these things.  I've seen plenty that would just as well dump their SEO after hearing that and hire a few more spammers.

If they won't accept either of the two options above, it may be time for you to part ways.  Those scenarios are really the most frustrating, because there will probably be no time that they need someone like you more.  But I'd consider all of the above when you talk to them about this and make the best decision that you can.

For the most part, Google and Bing are very similar in their ranking practices, but there are definitely still a lot of subtle differences.   Sometimes the difference is obvious, but it's still a fairly dense subject with no immediate answer.  Here are some nice starting points full of lots of ideas to consider:

http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/uk/archive/2012/04/13/optimising-website-content-for-higher-rankings-on-bing.aspx
http://www.searchdiscovery.com/blog/seo-for-bing-google-and-bing-indexing-differences/
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements

It's definitely cool that you've recognized the comparative difference.  Knowing how Bing works gives you a great creative resource  to check against Google as well, and vice-versa.   It's one of my favorite tricks, namely because it should reduce the possibilities from 200 or so odd ranking factors that are possibly out of wack to a fair ~25, and when the difference is as drastic as you say, it usually lays out a fast path to more traffic.

I wouldn't be so wrapped up in word count as I would be making that page valuable.  An about page can have huge weight in a potential customer's faith in your company.

I do usually target some keywords to an about page, though.  People search for companies as well as their services, and I would use company-oriented phrases in your title, meta, and copy.  So, if you  ran a digital strategy company in New York, you might title it like:

Digital Strategy Company | New York | (companyname)

Firm, agency, provider, etc. work well here as well, depending on the particular niche (AdWords keyword tool helps a lot with that).  You could also get more geographic with it, and close some easier long-tail searches (for example, if you were in NYC, you might find people searching for SoHo, Midtown, Manhattan, or nearby villages and such).  It usually doesn't take much more than saying "Hey, we're located near X, just down the road from Y, in Z.".

Or, you could get really crazy, and about weird minor niches that sometimes only the keyword tool will pick out.  Like, do people care about you being certified in A, using B software, being compliant with C, having a charitable / environmental program like D.  People search for some crazy stuff.  Even if the volume is very low, competition for these sorts of things usually is too, and taking a few moments to consider usually adds up to a lot in the long-term.

Personally, I would no longer look at SEOmoz's  duplicate content identification if they did this.  One thing that's crucial to consider here, is that GWT != Google Search.

Just because GWT adds a suggestive signal for organic search doesn't mean it's going to work (in fact, in my experience, usually it doesn't).  A great example of a 100% GWT vs. Google Search mismatch- have you tried "Download Latest Links" in GWT?  (http://www.northcutt.com/blog/2012/07/what-download-latest-links-means-for-seo/).  I don't know about you, but every time I've tried it, the "new" links range from a month ago to 10 years ago.  And they're definitely pages that are long indexed as per a "site:" Google search.   Totally out of sync.

There are many more applications of this that I see each week as well.  Pages that have long used rel="canonical" correctly still having hundreds of duplicate pages in the index.  Parts of Google Analytics working totally different than other parts of Google Analytics.  It's a kind of 'Microsoft syndrome' that's formed, whereby teams don't mesh quite like the cohesive public-facing brand image would imply.    Your best bet is to configure GWT, use rel="canonical", and while you're at it, work with your application to make sure that no crawler-accessible page ever uses GET variables.

This is search feature is a relatively new development, and something that I wouldn't even be sure will stay, but here's what I've seen get people listed.

The first step is definitely to create a brand page on G+ (that's definitely where it's pulling SEOmoz's listing data).

The second step, would appear to be to have a verified G+ listing.  I can't find a single example of this where the profile isn't verified.  Here you go:  http://support.google.com/plus/bin/request.py?hl=en&contact_type=page_verification&rd=1

The third step (I'm assuming), would be to have a company name that isn't at all ambiguous, and it won't interfere with the query.   For example, Amazon has a verified G+ page, but doesn't show up as in your screenshot when searching for "amazon".  They definitely don't want a result that doesn't get people exactly what they want, or that chips into AdWords revenue.

Good luck!

They do get indexed and they can help as much as any other link.  And, like everything, you're best off doing it without embarrassing your brand.  So,

YES:  If you want to plop a PR rep on a forum to make a good 15 or so useful contributions to the conversation, with a real signature, like you might attach to an email, compliant with that particular forum's signature guidelines.

NO:  If you want to buy 100,000 forum signature links blasted using a piece of software.

As with everything, chase the marketing, not the algorithm.  That will get you a lot further than worrying about what Google will be doing in 2013, because even if you dodge a bullet in the short-term, Google's end goals are always the same.

Hi Matthew,

The 'multiple domains for one company' conversation is one that I feel like I've had hundreds of times now.  It's a little subjective, but my advise is almost always absolutely not.  Why not:

• The SEO benefits of having a keyword in domain exist, but they're just one factor out of at least 200.  They might just as well negate a brand looking stupid by building a few more great links, and keep the same rankings.

• Keywords in a domain usually mean crappier branding.    Personally, I'd be far more likely to want to buy from, or send a natural inbound link at seomoz.org, than buy-the-best-seo-software.com.

• One domain with high domain authority from inbound links will often dominate two domains with moderate authority.   And building up authority in inbound links isn't easy.

• Any type of crafty interlinking in these scenarios is never nearly as clever as the person thinks.

The only scenario where I might keep both would be if both of them had a place as very strong businesses each by themselves, or the two topics would be completely categorized differently (ie. one business does flooring, the other sells kittens).

-C

Based on similar scenarios that I've observed, I wouldn't be worried about a terribly negative Google reaction to a select box.  Obviously if your rankings take a dive within 60 days of rolling this out, I'd consider backpedaling this feature.  But select box navigations aren't uncommon and it seems that Google understands them well enough at this point.

My issue would be more related to quantity; usually "normal" links on a page are best kept much lower than this, although, I also wouldn't be so sure whether Google will understand the JavaScript like a link or not.  That is, Google does crawl your JavaScript these days (source: Matt Cutts), but, sometimes Google seems to understand it, sometimes they don't (source: much first hand experience).  Also, from a UX standpoint, a select box with 450 items is really tedious.   Users hate having to do more things to get to other things (ie. scanning through a small box of 450 items that only displays 4 items at a time, not fun).  If you think that they already know the name of the concert venue, a suitable replacement could be a text box with autocomplete (if you search for prototype.js and autocomplete.js, you'll find a slick pre-written code to help with this).

If people don't already know about the concert venue they want, or if you wanted to accompany this, I'd think about some other ways to present the data.  There are lots of cool ways this could be done, some might even score you many more organic links / social mentions.  A Google Maps plotter comes to mind.  As does some creative categorization by niche (ie. blues bars vs. hipster hangout).  One more possible factor to help people talk about your site ...  "Omg I can't believe X calls Y a hipster hangout!".

As with all things web and marketing, test the crap out of whatever you do to validate, regardless of what route you decide.

Sadly SEOmoz (or any SEO tool) never seems to solve more than 5% of the puzzle.  But I think Screaming Frog will probably do what you're asking (plus, it's free).  If not that, I like SEO PowerSuite's Website Auditor a lot, and always seems to pull back denser data than most alternatives (but isn't free).

There is something similar in SEOmoz Pro, whereby if you add competitors, you can their SEOmoz off-page metrics historically.  It's just a bit buried, found under Link Analysis > History.

It does have some obvious drawbacks, mostly out of the fact that you can only track 3 competitors.  The history runs for as long as you have SEOmoz setup though.  If you wanted to track more, you might look at a simple spreadsheet implementation of the SEOmoz API (lots of people on the blog have pulled this off in various was using Excel, and even Google docs, like here:  http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/updated-tool-seomoz-api-data-for-google-docs).  Then you could compare as many as you wanted using spreadsheet functions, without any real programming knowledge.

You'll probably want to disallow spiders from crawling them with robots.txt:

http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html

First off, the 100 links thing isn't a law written in stone.  SEOmoz's tools do yell about it if you go over 100 links.  This "100 link lore" comes from a Matt Cutts blog post:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-many-links-per-page/

If you look close, you may notice that there are more than 100 links even on the page that Matt wrote about this.  It's kind of a loose guideline in my eyes.  From my own professional experience, if every page on your site has 500 links, you're going to hurt for it.  But if you have 125 links on quite a few pages, or put out a blog post that's just an insane resource that links to a few hundred people, you'll still be just fine.

What it seems like they're going for here is just an indicator of quality and usability.  People do really abuse internal linkage, and Google needs to make sure that those people hurt for it.  Without having seen your site, I'd just say, think about what your users really end up needing on every single page of the site (usually it is much less than 100 links).  Often times, a simpler navigation is the better one.  Look at what pages people actually reaching in Google Analytics, or setup a heatmap to follow their behavior.  Tweak it.  Annotate it in Google Analytics.  See if pageviews or other key goals improve.

As for only seeing 1k pages out of 6k in the index, I'd again take a close look at what is actually of value.  If you have a lot of duplicate/thin content, you may be best off just using noindex,follow tags on some of it, to improve Google's perceptions of your domain's quality as a whole.  If they are all of value, you could have other IA issues.  One test site of mine has roughly 1,000,000 pages without noindex,follow, and that's exactly how many appear in the index.  If it's really good, useful stuff you should definitely be able to get indexed.

Yes, actually the 'Crawl Diagnostics' tool that comes with SEOmoz Pro does let you export to CSV.  There are just two limitations:

• It isn't in real-time (and I've typically leaned towards instant gratification ).

• It may not find every page (to give you a real life example, one of my many experimental sites has approximately 1,000,000 pages .... in checking the Crawl Diagnostics export just now, SEOmoz found 10,319).  But for smaller sites that our agency works with, it's pretty much spot-on.

Could you provide a few samples of URL's that SEOmoz Pro claims contain duplicate content?  It should show you if you click on the error, then click on individual links.

Sure, the chaining redirects thing is something that Matt Cutts has talked about, I think in a few videos.  I'm blessed with the ability to actually test/observe this stuff on loads of major sites that are in production as well, which is always the ultimate bit of validation on an SEO theory.  Every now and again even Google will give advice that is flat out wrong, and for the most part, the SEO community will repeat it again and again as it's lore.

As for extracting headers, I have some back-end automation that I've written.  Here's a nice little free tool that lets you see a single page though:

http://www.northcutt.com/tools/free-seo-tools/http-header-viewer/

If you have a chain of redirects occurring on a page, it will show.  Sometimes this is necessary, especially if you have them flying in from all over (ie. in the application, in your .htaccess, in the Apache config files).  It always helps to test; I've surprised a few clients with this one.  

I don't know any one great source for this, but for the most part, a good reputation management process isn't all that complex, it looks like this:

1.) Identify what existing content has the best potential to rank (social media seems to do great, review sites that allow you to moderate or at least respond, etc...  pretty much anything that isn't scamreport)

2.) Identify how you can easily get some more good content out there (ie. getting permission to syndicate some of your clients' reviews to big sites is pretty popular).  You can also put some keyword-rich content out there, though, it's generally looked down upon to flat out fabricate reviews, so careful there.  Syndication can be especially helpful here (think: press release about the posting of a client reviews section somewhere, linking to a handful of your social profiles).  I've also found that profiles on social sites are much easier to move up for your company name than just flat out starting a fresh blog.

3.) Build lots of good links to the positive content.  This tends to be much easier than you think, as your company name is nowhere near as competitive a phrase as what you might normally try to optimize for.  The key is just to have a lot of it (at least 20 pieces to start), as some may not respond as quickly / effectively to your link building as you might hope.

That should about do it.  If you have a scenario where the reviews are flat out dishonest and spammed again and again by the same person, some webmasters will be receptive; many won't, but it never hurts to bring it up with them once all the same.

I often feel like Copyscape was created by the owners of automated content spinners to falsely prove themselves legitimate.  The place that I've seen it talked about, by far the most, is in any spammy blackhatworld.com or warriorforum.com offerings, talking about how they pass Copyscape.

You should find that quickly, Google is a much more accurate at understanding similar copy, if you paste a few lines into search and thumb through a few pages.  I would never trust Copyscape alone.  There are a number of reasons that it may be wrong; as there's definitely a lot to consider when analyzing copy.

First off, never use rel='nofollow' to your own site.

Personally, I would trim up the left menu if you can, or find an easier / creative JavaScript-driven way to present the data.  The 100 links thing isn't a law written in stone.  SEOmoz's tools do yell about it if you go over 100 links.  This "100 link lore" comes from a Matt Cutts blog post:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-many-links-per-page/

If you look close, you may notice that there are more than 100 links even on the page that Matt wrote about this.  It's kind of a loose guideline in my eyes.  From my own professional experience, if every page on your site has 500 links, you're going to hurt for it.  But if you have 125 links on quite a few pages, or put out a blog post that's just an insane resource that links to a few hundred people, you'll still be just fine.

I'd think about it as just one more signal of a potentially abusive or low quality site.  If your site isn't under heavy scrutiny for other reasons, and you don't go totally nuts with links, you'll probably be just fine, but there is a lot of wisdom in Matt Cutt's post all the same.  Eliminate the unnecessary and things will work better, in and out of Google.

Usually the only exception that I've seen that makes this work OK is when doing International SEO.  And even then, it's a very good idea to tell Google that you're doing it via Webmaster Tools.

If this is instead something like chicagosuperseos.com, indianapolissuperseos.com, and so forth, all with the same content, I'd say that most likely, far gone are the days of them really being able to capitalize on this kind of strategy.   Although hey, if they're dominating in the search ranks despite this, you might rationalize leaving it for now, but on a long enough timeline, I'd suspect Google will catch up to them for this, if not the very likely scenario that they have already.

I'm seeing a little drop too.  If you switch this to monthly view and zoom all the way out, you'll see that their domain as a whole took a bit of a dive this month:

http://www.quantcast.com/squidoo.com

I'd suspect that 90 degree day on MozCast 11/19 gave them a swift kick in the junk.

I see what you mean.  Here's what you do for these particular pages.

Since these have no real value as a search engine landing page (since they're basically all the same), Google won't want to send people to them.  Seems reasonable, right?

But, because your site has a whole lot of these, Google may also decide that loveday.se as a whole is feeding them content that has a high % of non-useful pages.   It's an indicator of an overall low-quality site.  This really started to become an issue with the first "Panda" update.  So, for each of these particular pages, you want to add a tag to your HEAD section:

| name="robots" content="noindex,follow" /> |
| We tell Google "noindex", because we don't want these pages in their index (really, they don't either, so everyone is happy).  They're terrible landing pages for a search engine. |

We tell Google to "follow", because the other pages that these are linking to are still of value.  And we want Googlebot to continue crawling and crediting internal links on your site.

I would definitely setup some 301 redirects; done dynamically, if it's for a lot of pages.   You'll want that old 'link juice', as well as any inbound visitors.  Depending on whether your hosting is IIS or Apache-based, it's done a little bit differently, but should be pretty straight-forward.

About 5 years ago, I would rank pages for just about any moderately competitive phrase under the sun, pretty much by boosting as close to 5.5% keyword density as possible on a domain with a good bit of trust.  That mentality that you see in Scribe SEO could still gain some ground, but it's a little antiquated.

The issue that over time, Google's gotten smarter (and continues to do so).  Including keywords still matters, and not over-doing it does as well.  What's changed, is that Google has gotten better at understanding language.  Sure, you could stuff "cheap london flights" 15 times into a copy and probably still make it make sense if you really try, but should you?

Everything that you see Microsoft Word doing, analyzing grammar and reading levels, you can bet Google is capable of doing too.  And it's pretty well-established now that things like root word stemming (+s, +ed, +ing) and synonyms play too.  That sort of thing is more enjoyable for a reader too, so it stands to reason that Google would prefer it.  And, from what I've seen in recent years, it seems to look more and more like they do.

So, I'd include keywords/phrases.  I'd include them especially in first 1/3 of a sentence, paragraph, and page; lead in noun-first.  But I wouldn't let it dictate your writing too much from there.

These topics are always a little subjective, but here's what I'm seeing.

1. Screen readers (used by the blind) do like 'H tags'.  And Google does give preference to sites better that are more likely to be handicap accessible.  From what I see, this isn't an ideal use though.  For example, if you can end up with 200 x H2 tags on a page, I'd say this is wrong.

Keywords placed in 'H tags' are also given more weight in a page's ranking.  So, if the # of H tags is abused, and your page provides near nothing but H2's, it's not unreasonable to suspect that Google thinks you're stuffing keywords into the second-most powerful tag that can go into .   It seems that Google does more to go after these kinds of possibly manipulative practices than they do to award the positive:  far more often people shoot themselves in the foot.  And this seems to, at very least, make that a lot easier to do.  A page should generally have a single H1 at the start, and a small handful of relevant headings marked H2 - H6.

2. I'd again be a little wary.  Text in the source that's not visible to the user is the definition of cloaking.  As AJAX has gotten more popular, you do see more prestigious sites hiding content with JavaScript, and very slowly (that is, much slower than mainstream development), Google seems to adapt to these kinds of evolutions.  But hiding everything by default in a CSS class?  I'd personally avoid that, and if I saw it on a client's site, it would sit high on my list of things to tweak and test.

Hope something solid gets sorted, and then extensively A/B tested in production.  Drupal is a good application; it still blows my mind that people still need to write SEO plugins / hacks for literally every application out there.   It gives us SEO's a little more job security that these technical problems are almost never fully tackled at the source.

Well "social indicators", as they've been dubbed, are a ranking factor in both Google and Bing, although just one factor out of 200+.  Legitimate accounts tweeting links to a site would definitely be a positive signal.  It would also hopefully provide you with some legitimate inbound marketing benefits by giving you access to new audiences.

Well, first of all, you can't use a keyword as your TLD.  

I think I see what you're getting at though.  No, don't ever chain redirects; part of my auditing process in fact involves mining for that exact thing, because it causes other issues.  Instead of:

/originalUrl.php -> /secondTry.php -> /thirdTry.php

Do:

/originalUrl.php -> /thirdTry.php
/secondTry.php -> /thirdTry.php

I'd also add, at least half of the SEO blogs that I've read over the years are provably wrong in one way or another.  But I think I see what that person was getting at too.  301 redirects do sometimes get cached, because a 301 redirect is supposed to be a permanent redirect (unlike a 302 redirect).  That doesn't mean that you can't change it though.

In the scenario that they described, they said that they would not just remove the redirect and expect everything to return to normal.  It was a 'permanent' redirect.  It needs to be 'permanently' directed back to definitely be undone where actually possible.

Good luck.