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Hi Micheal, Sorry to hear about your issues with 404s. It's common to see a fluxuation in MozRank from index to index, although this is quite a large one. That said, it sounds like there might be a perfectly reasonable explanation, and unless you've seen a corresponding drop in rankings and traffic, it may be nothing to worry about. Let me address each of your points one at a time. 1. Linkedin - it's my understanding that Linkedin redirects all links internally. Some links embedded in comments and posts aren't redirected, but these are still nofollowed. Linkedin gets a lot of heat for this, but they probably wanted to avoid getting spammed. To my knowledge, it's been like this for quite some time. 2. Your metrics won't decrease specifically because of 404's but if your link metrics depended on those pages, then the result is the same. For example, if a page has 10 other pages linking to it, but 8 of those return a 404, then only 2 pages can pass link metrics. This will severely effect the metrics of that page. But there is no "extra" penalty for a 404. So your drop in MozRank resulted in either new 404s that previously counted towards your score, a loss of links elsewhere on the net. Sometimes Moz just doesn't find them on every crawl. This accounts for variances between indexes. If you saw a similar pattern with your competitors, it could just be that the latest crawl covered a smaller portion of the web where your businesses exist. If you had "NOINDEX" on the category pages, these wouldn't have counted towards your metrics anyway, so the problem probably doesn't lie there. ( I say probably, but I can't rule it out) Based on your description, Datafeedr is a likely culprit. I really depends on how many crawled, indexed pages used to exist, that have disappeared. In the end, it may not be a bad thing. Moz Page Rank is a rough approximation and although it is highly correlated with rankings, it's not nearly as sophisticated as Google's algorythm. Sometimes, as in the case of Panda, removing indexed pages is actually a good thing... even though this can often reduce Moz Page Rank. Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Hi  Ben & Robert Many thanks again. I have now found at least two more websites the big company has done this on ie ditched the original small company web pages and content for a copy of the Big company web pages content. In each case the small company sitemap.xml lists the big company pages BUT many of those are wrong URLS. I think I'll take my time on this.... Cheers Richard

Many thanks for the quick replies guys. That's a great help! All the best Richard

I did not know we had one free private question every month. Thank you, Thomas

Hey Keri, Will do.  Thanks for the reply.

Hi Peekabo! This is Megan from the SEOmoz Help Team.  Unfortunately, OpenSiteExplorer does not support https at this time.  Sorry about that!  This also means that any metrics that are gathered by our Mozscape Index (the index for OSE) are going to be for the http version of the site, which includes Page Authority.  We hope to support https sites in OSE at some point, but it's probably still a ways out.  We'll update this feature request  thread as soon as this feature is available, so you can keep an eye on it:  https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/20770156-open-site-explorer-to-crawl-https If you have any other questions about our tools, feel free to send us a message to help@seomoz.org. Cheers!

I'll second that. I've been using x-cart for 4 years and I don't know of any other mod for x-cart that works as well. Think of the $139 as an investment, not an expense. Of course you still have to have solid SEO research to get the results.

Perfect, that's exactly what I was after!

That is not through the campaign, it's through the Crawl Test Tool at http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test

Thanks for answering this Ryan. This is the best thing to do in this case. Our help team will be back in the office on Monday and be able to look into your account and figure this out with you. Thanks!

Hi there! This is Megan from the SEOmoz Help Team.  I'm really sorry that you're running into problems with your OSE exports!  Since this is more of a tools related question, I'm going to open up a helpdesk ticket for you for tracking purposes in case this is a bug.  I'll be in touch with you shortly! Cheers!

Well for a 301 redirect you can add the redirect to your .htaccess file. However I have never used Xsitepro to build a site but I assume you have access to the code behind the pages in which case you can place a canonical tag in the header of your index.html instead of the 301 redirect. See this link on duplicate content and an explanation of the canonical tag is in there - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content

Hi Paul, I haven't heard back from you yet so I wanted to follow up and check if you were still having any issues with your campaign. I'm going to mark this as answered for now, but you can write in to us at help@seomoz.org if you still have any questions or issues. Best of luck, Chiaryn

Thank you!

You need to come up with highly unique and engaging content that will benefit users like in depth product reviews or writing about your industry, make it good and it will generate it's own links and social shares. Relevant business directories are still good, but will not get you ranking high on their own. Since you sell products try using product feeds to syndicate to other sites as well.

Hi Irving, thank you for your replies. I am new to SEO. Could you please elaborate a bit . what do you mean by sabotage here? Thanks.

Wow EGOL - Thanks for that insight - You successfully read the title of the page! Yes, see how easy your question was?  I have a homepage with a PA of 52 that is outranked by an ebay page with a PA of 1 and an amazon.com page with a PA of 1.  These ebay and amazon pages have zero links from other domains.  My page has 45 linking root domains. Amazon and Ebay win because GOOGLE awards high rankings to pages on authoritative domains.  SEOmoz PA is irrelevant because Google determines the rankings using a different set of factors - especially "onpage" factors. SEOmoz PA and DA are great for tracking your progress over time but they are very imperfect for predicting google rankings.   If you don't believe that just watch Q&A and see how many people make a post like yours.... "WTF, my PA is higher and they are beating me" These folks think one of these things: Google is screwing them SEOmoz metrics are bogus The real answer is:  3) These folks don't  understand PA and DA or they have a site with some penalty or throttle. I would like to see SEOmoz explain these numbers and how they should be used with greater clarity and post obvious links to that content  where the results of the tool is displayed.