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Eric's answer is great, with a very good link. Also see this thread: https://moz.com/community/q/no-location-option-in-incognito-search-settings

Grasshopper, thanks for that.  My whole SEO education is full of little holes where I know some crazy deep in depth stuff, but have zero knowledge of some of the most basic things . . .  the whole www vs. non ww. thing right I think is one of them. I test on screaming frog . . on both each is full of "200" codes, but the www version has a 301 redirect on it. Does that mean I just need to configure moz to be looking for the NON www version and perhaps it will get more accurate information? Not even checking http vs. https . . . It's not an ecommerce site so I should be OK there.

I see two possible problems here. Both have been pointed out but I'll address both. First, duplicate content from the same owner. If they have another site that has the same intent ... same topic ... reason for the site, you might want to merge them. I can't tell as I don't speak that language, but if they are competing sites, you don't want to pour resources into two places. That's my recommendation to the site owner. Second, the bad links. It is possible that even links that have worked in the past for other sites might be hurting this site. Again, it's hard for me to tell, but if the link brings no value other than being a link and no one uses the link to get to the site ever, you run the risk of hurting that site with that link. Free directories are prime targets for Google. I am not sure how stringent Google Greece is on this yet, but this might be an issue. With both of those things being said, if the links are hurting the site and you merge the two sites, you might hurt both by merging them. I'm sorry I can't be more explicit of the cause, but with some poor links in the past and some less than stellar links now, and a possible duplicate intent site from the same owner, either or both of those could be the cause. If it were me, start with merging the two sites. If the rankings drop for the well ranking site, clean up all poor links to either domain. If it stays down, unmerge and just let the poorer ranking domain die. Your other option is to tell the client to focus on the site that is doing well, drop this one. But be careful with the link building. You don't want the same thing to happen to the other site and that's possible.

Hi there! I'm afraid that, no, at this point there are not YOY reports.

Here is my best guess about what this metric is aiming for: How does the quality vs. quantity of the links to this page compare? If a page has a mT/mR score of around 2, with Trust being 4 and Rank being 2, then you're looking at a content that's linked to from great sources but isn't linked to a lot. If the mT/mR score is .5, with Trust being a 2 and Rank being a 4, then you have a page with a ton of links to it, but few that are from "trusted" sources. My guess is that the latter case might start to look like spam to Google - someone building up low-quality links (blogger comments or even the dreaded linkfarms). I am not sure what to make of a page where the Trust and Rank are both high and the ratio ends up looking close to 1. We have one page that falls under this category - the Trust and Rank are both higher than the competing Wikipedia entry, but the mT/mR ratio is lower because Wikipedia has a lot less strong content and fewer strong links directly to that page on an admittedly niche term.

Huh! Fair enough.

Thanks everyone this was very helpful. I think I have it straightened out now. I've set my preferred domain in Google Search Console, and have changed many of the links to match this domain as well. Thanks again.

Thanks again to both of you for the pointers. I just need to get stuck into this now I think. Even delving into just a coupled of the points raised by you has thrown up severel potentially very important areas for me to look to improve. As a starting point I am going to stop obsessing over those heading SEO metrics that seem to have taken over my life. Lou

@Peter basically nails it. None of these tools will be completely accurate to what Google determines is a "bad" link, so it will be very subjective. You really should use a variety of tools (even link detox is a good one) to get a list of sites linking to you. The reason being is that all these tools have very different indexes, so you'll get a more comprehensive view of your profile... however that will be a little more expensive since you would need multiple subscriptions. Like Peter said, you'd then want to download all the links into excel, dedupe, and review. I usually look at aHref Rank below a certain threshold and Trust Flow below a certain threshold (you need to either use a VLOOKUP or an INDEX/MATCH formula to combine the lists from all sources). After that you review those links manually, and add the "bad" ones to a disavow file. The "bad" ones are those that you would agree violates the Google Webmaster Quality Guidelines that fit into a link scheme definition. Once again, this is a subjective process so you'll really need to review the guidelines. To do this analysis to the full extent that you'd want... I don't think there are free tools that will give you any meaningful data. Remember they need to maintain bots and their own software to expand their indexes, so the free trials will be very limited data (usually with no way to export). I'll also say this is a very tedious process and depending on the size of the site I would allocate anywhere between 5 (small site) and 40 hours (larger site) to tackle this process. Buffer in a little more if this is the first run, since there will be a learning curve for the tools and it will take time to put together a professional looking report.

Remove the trailing slash and it shows some links. Not "many" but it definitely shows up in OSE.

It looks like Moz's SERP analysis Reports are almost entirely based on link analysis. Does that mean that this isn't very relevant in my area?

Hey Perry, Here is a few things to look at: 1. Your site is way slow bro!  https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.querease.com%2F&tab=desktop Try caching your WP site with a plug in.  Optimize your images. Seriously it took 20 seconds to load with a really good internet connection. That's way to slow. 2. You need more links and social to compete with other services like yours. You may want to have your experts be more active on social media, your own accounts as well. Your link profile should be clean too. Not too much spam. 3. Check out AHREFS.com and do a competitive analysis with your top competitors, see what they are doing better than you, then copy what they are doing to start. Once you get to doing this you will discover even more things you can do that your competitors have not done yet. All this will help you to rank in the future. 4. Because of your niche "ask a expert" you may want to consider youtube videos and daily motion videos that link back to the expert pages on your site. These are all no follow but you're not doing it for link juice you are doing it for authority and conversion. Hope that helps! Cheers, Erick

Hi Cyrus, That's really useful, thanks! I'm prepared to put in the time so I'll work on the external link building. I'm going through all my old posts at the moment and redoing and SEOing them. It's such a massive task! Hopefully it pays off in the end. It's reassuring to know Google's not going to block me. I was kind of worried. Cheers!

Thank you for this very helpful response, Matt!

Used to dealing with millions of lines of data and analysing so no problem doing it manual, however if there was a tool capable of doing it then why not use the tool if it saves time.............

An easy way to say something about revenue are goals in analytics. It's pretty easy for clients to tell you, what a conversation or lead is worth for them. So you can easy easy use that with goals in Analytics.  Or you need e-commerce tracking - depends on client (https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1037249?hl=en)

Hi there. I think that the "problem" lays behind the idea of OSE - not to get all possible backlinks, but important ones. At the same time OSE crawls only down to certain depth, which means that for facebook link to be crawled it's gotta be at the top of the list for backlinks on facebook domain. The page you specified has about 7.5k backlinks, which is not a lot at all, if you compare to other pages on facebook with tens of  thousands of backlinks (https://www.facebook.com/VinDiesel/ - example). So, the chances that MOZ will crawl a page with several thousands backlinks are pretty slim. It's the same reason you rarely see local directories in your website's OSE report. I hope this helps.

Agree with Dave's comments.  1) Get the syntax updated on your canonical links at a minimum.  2) Yes your canonical solution will "work", but it is not best practice.  This "solution" is really a last resort.  I would try and push to move away from using canonicals this way. You optimally want 1 URL. Just to add some color, a great / classic video on this was made by Matt Cutts.  He gives all kinds of examples where you could have duplicate URLs, i.e. www vs non www subdomain, sorting parameters added onto the URL, different file extensions,  capitalization changes, etc.  He then gives 3 options to fix them. Best practice: Fix your site where you only have one URL per content item and link to it consistently (Best solution) Use 301 redirects to consolidate to one URL (Next best solution) Use a canonical link, if you cannot do 1 or 2. (Last resort) Note that Matt says that they treat a canonical as a strong suggestion (it is treated similar to a 301), but they do not always have to follow it.  He repeatedly says, use the first two options, and would NOT recommend a canonical as your best or first option. My favorite quote is at 2:24 in the video, "Developers keep SEOs in business" What your developer may notice is that Matt does say that using a canonical link for consolidating http and https will work. No one here would say that it would not, it is just not optimal.  Sure, you can use a pair of scissors to cut your lawn, "it will work".  It doesn't mean it's the best idea.  I would think any developer worth his/her salt would want to have "clean code" and having duplicate URLs is not "clean" by SEO standards Ok, so now you need to go back to the developer or your manager with an argument that is stronger than just, "Well, some random dude on the Moz forum said that Matt Cutt's from Google said it was preferred not to use a canonical link even though it would work".  I would never want to leave you in such a position. Here is what will/can happen over time if you stay with your current setup. Report consolidation issues.  When you look at GA for traffic or OSE for links, any spidering tool for technical issues, social sharing counts, you now have split data for any given page potentially.  Sure there are ways around this, but now you have to spend all your time "fixing" reports that should not be broken to start with.   Trust me, this will come back to bite you on the bum and will cripple your efforts to show the efficacy of your SEO work.  Now who really wants that? Link juice consolidation issues.  With any redirect - you lose a bit of link juice.  If you have links to both sets of URLs, any single page is not getting as much credit as it should. Down the line 301 redirect bloat.  If you ever change anything and need to setup a 301 redirect, now you have to setup 2 of them and having too many 301s can negatively impact server performance. One last thing.  If you can get the URLs consolidated into one using 301s etc.  Go with the https   That is the way that we are headed with the web and so you might as well get going in that direction. Good luck!

Thanks all. I'll check out the guide.