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Is there a method to predict the future DA of a site if I know the DA and PA of x sites that will be linking to them in the future? All inbound links will be pointing to the home page.

I have a client who has an opportunity to sponsor a prestigious national organisation. In return, they will get 200+ links from the websites of the organisation's members. Most of which are DA 40+.None of the linking sites have any relevance to my client's industry.1) How likely do you think it is that Google will view these as paid links?2) Do you feel that there is potential harm in gaining this many non-relevant links in a short time-frame?3) The client wants me to quantify the ranking benefits of gaining these links and calculate a potential ROI. If that's even possible, how would you go about that?Thanks in advance

I am performing a site audit and looking at the "Index Status Report" in GSC. This shows a total of 17 URLs have been indexed.

However when I look at the Sitemap report in GSC it shows 9,000 pages indexed. Also, when I perform a site: search on Google I get 24,000 results.

Can anyone help me to explain these anomalies?

Thanks Erika

What I would like to know is how Google charge for RLSA clicks.

Is it priced exactly the same way as it would be for the same search by someone who had never visited your site before?

When a previous visitor to your site clicks on an RLSA ad, is the cost per click the same as if you were bidding on that same Keyword for a new visitor?

Hi David

Probably not the answer you want but... it could be.

It's almost impossible to say for sure without doing a full audit of the site to see exactly what the issues are with the subdomain.

Danny

Cheers Dirk

Didn't know Screaming Frog could do that. Works perfectly!

Screaming Frog is just the gift that keeps on giving

A small amount of Page Rank will be lost for each extra level the page is from the root domain.

So, there may be a small advantage in using the format www.domain.com/first-blog-post as opposed to www.domain.com/blog/first-blog-post

The effect is likely to be more noticeable if the home page of the site is the page with most link authority

I need a tool that will run through a long list of URLs (from multiple domains), look for a specific string in the source code and then produce a CSV showing in which URLs the the string was found.

This is for legitimate research, not for any nefarious purposes

Any ideas of such a tool already exists?

I am working on a project for a client that has two ecommerce sites each with several thousands of products.

Site A has a strong DA, is ranking well on Google for thousands of competitive keywords and generating high traffic and conversions. Site B has a poor DA, ranking poorly and much less traffic. We are considering the idea of merging the 5,000+ product pages from site B into site A.

How can we evaluate whether this would be a wise move with the least risk to site A?

Thanks Jasmine

Great answer and one to which I can completely relate.

I have been consulting now for approx. five years. One of the things I have found interesting is the degree to which so many businesses  hamper their own growth through pointless bureaucracy, internal politics and employees who put their personal career progression above the needs of their employer.

I don't doubt you guys at all but I would really love to know if there is any alternative (and logical) point of view on this.

Budget capping is so prevalent here in the UK and with businesses of all sizes that I worry that I might be giving clients the wrong advice.

LOL

That was my first instinct, but considering how many agencies are working with capped campaign budgets there must surely be some other explanation?

I must be missing something here

If a business has an unlimited supply of product and an unlimited capacity to distribute that product why would they want to limit their Adwords campaign budget?

If your Cost per Acquisition for a conversion is lower than the Customer Lifetime Value for any given keyword bid, why would you want to prevent your campaign from reaching as many people as possible?

Thanks in advance

Danny

You could also use BuzzSumo.com which would also show which posts got shared the most and who by

I took a quick look at this domain.

While there does seem to be a few duplicate content issues my hunch is that it is more likely to be due to some technical issues.

I would first go take a look in Google Search Console and check whether Google is reporting any crawl, sitemap or robots.txt  issues.

If that doesn't show any issues then you may need to get a full technical audit by a reputable SEO

In running a crawl of a client's site I can see several URLs listed in the sitemap that are then blocked in the robots.txt file.

Other than perhaps using up crawl budget, are there any other negative implications?

That's really helpful - thanks Keri

Cheerd Don

Thanks guys - appreciate the responses

The reason for my asking is to help clients looking for related content topics that will be of interest to their clients.

For example, a company selling business insurance may find that their clients are not so interested in reading content about business insurance but they may be interested in marketing, gold, travel or Scarlett Johansson.

I'm sure there will be lots of common searches among any group, but I was wondering if there was a tool that looked for these interesting and less common correlations.

Wix is pretty poor when it comes to SEO

Check out this study which should be helpful:

http://www.seotraininglondon.org/best-ecommerce-platform-seo/

Do you know know if a tool exists that shows shared common interests?

For example, people interested in Soccer are also interested in Cricket, beer and Scarlett Johansson.

The data might could come from social media or search queries.

Anyone seen a tool that does anything like this?

If you do a search for my name on Google, the first result is the author archive page of my Wordpress blog.

I would like to redirect the author page to my  "about me" page but cannot add a 301 as the author page is created dynamically in Wordpress.

Anyone know how I can do this?

Really helpful and much appreciated - many thanks!

Danny

Yes, it should redirect you to the correct country version based on your IP. But I still can't crawl the site from the home page

Cheers Bryan - much appreciated. It's driving me crazy!

I am trying to perform a crawl analysis on a client's website at https://www.bravosolution.com

I have tried to crawl it with IIS for SEO, Sreaming Frog and Xenu and not one of them makes it further than the home page of the site. There is nothing I can see in the robots.txt that is blocking these agents.

As far as I can see, Google is able to crawl the site although they have noticed a significant drop in organic traffic.

Any advise would be very welcome

Regards

Danny

Thanks for the suggestions guys but not exactly what I need.

I can  find all links to the site but, specifically, I need a list of all links to  the site that are not linking to the home page. I don't have list of these page names (as they now no longer exist).

I have a client who owns a website that  attracted a large number of links to internal pages of their  sites. Without realising the value of those links, they removed every page of their website other than the  home pages that now reads, "new website coming soon".

How can I get a list of every website still linking to the  (now broken) internal pages of their site?

@Chiaryn

I had the same issue and dicovered that the tool is very sensitive to how the URLs are enetred. Make sure that you have removed  http:// in the URLs so that all URLs are in the format www.competitorsite.com

That should do the trick!

Danny

Thanks Nakul

Much appreciated!

Danny

I will be pitching to an established major UK-based fashion brand in a few days. Their brand is well-known within their target demographic and they have only recently starting selling their collection online. They are currently unconvinced of the need to use SEO for any terms other than their own brand names for which they would naturally rank with little extra effort.

Can anyone point me to any research or data that shows consumer trends to research fashion purchases online or trending away from shopping mall browsing habits?

Hi Rand

It's good to finally have an honest explanation for why these tools have been so unreliable. To the best of my knowledge it has never been made clear anywhere on this website that ranking data is reproduced without the permission of Google. With this in mind, it's little wonder that these tools are so flaky.

The fact remains that you are charging for a service that you are often unable to deliver. I shouldn't have to spend my time drafting emails to your support department requesting a refund every time these tools go down.

If your aim was to be truly transparent, you would make a full declaration on the site along the lines of, "SEOmoz Tools that use ranking data do so without the permission of the search engines concerned. As a result these tools are liable to frequent downtime. Please consider this fact when signing up for a pro account as the availability of these services cannot be guaranteed". At least then users could make an informed decision as to whether to use SEOmoz tools over a competitors'.

The degree to which my use account usage has been affected is an irrelevance.  A chunk of the $99 you receive every month from me includes the use of tools that are reliant on ranking data to function. By not issuing automatic refunds to all pro users you are simply charging money for a service that was not available.

Until such a time that you have the full co-operation of Google to collect this data through a licensed API, I really can't see that there is ANYTHING your tech guys could do to make these features 100% reliable. The fact is, that SEOmoz is a service that is, and probably always will be, built on technically shaky foundations.

How about a $99 bet on whether the Keyword Difficulty tool stays fully functional to the end of 2012?  The loser donates the money to your Movember charity. You game?

Danny

Hi Peter

I appreciate you providing a full and detailed response but I cannot accept your explanation.

Users being automatically compensated should have nothing to do with how much they are affected by an issue. A big chunk of the $99 fee that you charge every month is for the provision of ranking data. That data is crucial to the both  campaign ranking reports and the Keyword Difficulty Tool. If those services were never available, SEOmoz would look pretty poor value and would struggle to charge  $99 per month. Charging users a fee, for features they cannot use, regardless of whether or not they actually need that feature, is far from being fair and ethical.

Imagine a situation in which your cell phone operator was unable to provide you with a mobile data service for several months.  You could still make calls and send text messages but you couldn't browse the web or send emails. Whether or not you personally needed to use mobile data in those 3 months has nothing to do with the fact that you will have been paying for a service that you could not have used. After all, you could have been on a phone package that included no data and saved yourself several dollars every month!

It is for this reason that this issue should not be handled on a case by case basis. Every pro user has been getting less than they have paid for and should be compensated accordingly. This should be irrespective of whether they use ranking data or have made a complaint.

Can you please confirm for me the exact reason why the Google ranking data and the Google search volume data in KDT has always been so unreliable. This is not a temporary glitch; it has been going on for years! If you are pulling this data from Google's API; is it that the API doesn't function correctly? Or is SEOmoz scraping data from Google web pages without a contractual agreement with Google to do so?

Danny

From: Peter [mailto:[email protected]]

Sent: 01 December 2012 02:19
To: Danny
Subject: [SEOmoz Help] Re: RE: [SEOmoz Help] Re: Credit

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Peter (SEOmoz Help)

Nov 30 06:19 pm (PST)

Danny,

I am happy our tools are back up too! I'm sorry we have dampened your confidence in our services, we hope to gain that back in the future with more service uptime, better and more robust services, and of course better customer experience!

Regarding mass crediting to customers, I think I can answer your questions in a short way that doesn't cause any confusions. The reason we look at customer issue on a case by case basis is because that is exactly how it sounds, the only way to solve customer issues is to physically talk to and solve every unique problem that our customers are facing. While the last week has been tough as a fair number number of problem have been about KWD and Rankings. I think you would be surprised to know that not everyone have the same problems, as SEOmoz PRO have a pretty diverse set of tools that fits a wide audience of SEO consultants which utilizes the suite rather than just one tool (or two in last week's case). The only way we know which specific problem they have is by our users reporting it on the [email protected], we have tools that allows us to effectively answer and keep track of the issues and come up with unique resolutions, which can include credits/refund which we happily provide if it warrants the situation. While mass refund strategy might be one way to handle issues in your opinion, I believe it is generally not the way we should do business because it is neither generous or authentic. When our users come to us with an issue (which we have no way to know unless they report it), they want more than a credit/refund. I feel like finding ways to provide solutions that are unique to their situation is often time more generous (value-added), transparant and authentic because we admit our limitations to our customers quite freely if that is something we did wrong, we provide solutions that are Unique to their issues and we in turn take those feedback and improve our processess which pays dividends in the future of the product.

I hope this is helpful in letting you know some more of my thoughts, I think it is healthy to disagree on something, I am sorry we lost some of your confidence in our service with last week's outage, we will work hard to try to earn back not only your confidence.

Regards,
Peter

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I'm glad to see that  KDT is up and running but this tool has never been stable. It has got to the point where we cannot ever rely on it to work. I have very little confidence that these problems will not re-occur.

I have repeatedly asked the question why users are not automatically compensated when such a vital part of the service is not available for extended periods of time. All I get are glib replies such as this one from Peter, "I think when it comes to finding a to compensation plans for our customers in a time like this, it is hard to just come up to a standard convention when it comes to compensating our customers for their time. We usually take care of all of our user issues on a case by case basis".

The only "hard" thing about giving compensation to users is that losing some of your profits hurts your bottom line. There is nothing technically difficult about saying "We will rebate users for every day that our  tools are down". If you can do it for me, you can it for everyone!

The truth is that compensating only  users who complain costs SEOmoz less money. By insisting that this is handled on a case by case basis, what you are really saying is "We are happy to charge users for a service that they have not received".

Which part of TAGFEE does this sound like? It is neither Transparent,  Authentic or Generous. Perhaps your famous acronym should be changed to just FEE. This would more accurately reflect SEOmoz's  current attitude to its users. Do the right thing here guys!

Hi Peter

Thanks for your response

You say, "we believe by providing our users with credits (often multiple months), we think that is the best way to make up for the time that our service is not working".

Your statement seems disingenuous as you a) make me no offer of compensation of multiple months and b) make no offer to other pro users unless they complain and demand compensation. Why would you not compensate all users who are not getting the service that they have paid for?

If your tools are simply scraping content from Google SERPS, then they are bound to go down every time Google decides to change the format of the page. If you don't have access to a Google API these issues are going to keep cropping up with no long term solution in sight.

So, I will ask again...

1. How will I be compensated?

2. How will you compensate all pro users? (Including those that don't complain)

3. How will this issue be fixed in the long term so that it does not keep reoccurring

I don't need your platitudes about how great I am. I just need simple, straight answers from an organisation that claims to be transparent and ethical

Danny

From: Peter [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: 29 November 2012 17:59
To: Danny
Subject: [SEOmoz Help] Re: RE: [SEOmoz Help] Re: Credit

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Peter (SEOmoz Help)

Nov 29 09:59 am (PST)

Hello Danny,

Thank you for your honest and critical feedback, I want to thank you for being forward on your feelings about our service. It is passionate user like you that keeps us to constantly improve ourselves. Regarding the recently rankings issue, we can understand that when you rely on a service as much as we rely on google for our service, sometimes when problem arises how that can impede or sometimes stop your operations. In terms of our upfront we are with our customers, we consistently update our users our known problems forum, our blog, and twitter @SEOmoz.

Regarding the compensating our users, we believe by providing our users with credits (often multiple months), we think that is the best way to make up for the time that our service is not working. The other form of compensation is obviously our commitment to properly predict and create fire drills for this kind of release from Google in the future (which we learned our lesson from this time). You can read about it here in a great Public post by our CTO: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/biting-the-bullet-of-technical-debt.

I want to both thank you for being a valued user/customer/mozzer and I do apologize for the troubles that you and the community have experience this holiday season.

Warm regards,
Peter Li
SEOmoz Help team.

P,S. I will keep this ticket in my queue so I can keep you updated.

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**The constant stream of excuses may be more believable if this  tool has ever been reliable!

If the the ongoing issues with this tool are due to Google's API then you have got to either find a workable LONG TERM solution or charge separately for this tool on the rare occasions on which it does work.

A tool that works half  the time is worse than no tool at all

When will SEOmoz be compensating all  Pro users? **

If your customer services team was truly being "generous", you would be automatically compensating all pro users for a service that consistently fails to work. Instead you ask people to contact you privately and refund only those that shout the loudest.

I thought SEOmoz was supposed to be better than this? What happened to to the TA in TAGFEE? You may need to change this to  FEG!