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Paul, This is a good question and as they say in the art world "an important piece." I am going to list an assumption or two here: There is a single domain with sub directories for each location. (Not micro sites, sub domains, etc. for location). The pages are optimized for each locale: Say, Cherry Hill, Newark, and NYC. So, what are your options for tracking these? The best I have found is to track based on KW plus geo locator for the various keywords. So, house painter + each city, etc. Now, you will know what are the key terms and you can use a ton of different tracking options from Raven, SEMrush, WooRank, Moz, etc. If I were you, I would set each as its own campaign like with Moz. So, even though it is a single domain, you set it up with subdirectories instead. In this way when you list competitors you are able to use different competitors for each. It is not as easy as most would like, but it is the best I have found. Best of luck,

From my experience, there is always a big discrepancy between OSE and WMT. First, make sure that when you use the OSE, you aren't viewing only follow links or links that have equity. WMT displays all links, regardless of their type. Next, you might want to check out the "Just Discovered" section of OSE. Even though it is in beta, it should let you know if it is finding any more links at all, as opposed to new domains. If you are sure that OSE is not finding new links, verify that the links listed in WMT actually do exist and it isn't a problem with WMT. If they do, and it is a problem with OSE, then I don't know what the problem is. You should consider contacting Moz directly instead of asking on the Q&A.

It's likely on our end. We did have a smaller index this time, and will have a smaller one next time as well. I know it's frustrating to see your numbers go down one month, but it's actually best to look more at how are you doing compared to your competitors rather than absolute numbers each month. We have information about each update at http://moz.com/products/api/updates. Here's the information from the most recent update from the engineers: One note: With this index release, there is a slight reduction in link counts across the board, but the majority of them should be there. The reduction is due to some scheduling issues we ran into a couple of weeks ago (and have since fixed) for the crawlers. So, we will have slightly reduced counts for this index and the next, and we'll return to normal after that.

And we've updated! Thanks again for your patience everyone.

Cool !, thanks for clarifying Dr Pete ! Cheers Dan

I have been approached by several SEO companies that are offering to place inbound links on several websites. I have heard this is considered unethical and even black-hat, as I do not know whether those sites are relevant to my website. Furthermore, Google penalizes for links that are out of context. Am I correct about that? I will try the suggestions provided by you. Thanks for your responses. I have been blogging on a free wordpress site. I usually write about products with backlinks to my website. The blog posts I write are hopefully educational and informative.

Do you mind posting your URL so we can have a loot at it?

Exactly, although it was "invented" to prevent duplicate content issues and therefore used on those pages that are duplicates, it doesn't make any harm (and possibly bring benefits for future issues that may arise), you should still use it. As it says, it is a recommendation, not a must :).

thanks Paddy !

Hi Jesse, I use Chrome Incognito for checking search results, and I find that I often have to go into the gear settings and click Disable customizations based on search history. Do you also take that step as well?

Thomas, are you referring to the on-page grader, or to ranking reports?

Hello Becky, Abe here at Moz. Matt could be right about changes to the website causing the sudden dip. I have seen a drop like that take place several times when some minor changes have been made. Sometimes when pages are temporarily hidden from our crawler, we would fail to report any errors during that crawl. If you are seeing a discrepancy or something seems totally off, never hesitate to contact us at help@moz.com. We can always dig in and get our engineers involved to ensure it wouldn't be a bug or error on our part.

Hey Sean, This is most likely just related to how Just Discovered Links is interpreting the alt text for those image links. Though the alt text is legitimately the same for all of those image links, the Just Discovered Links tool isn't indexing your pages in the same way a search engine crawler would. Search engine crawlers are much more sophisticated then the Just Discovered Links crawler and they will be able to note the difference between alt and anchor text. Also, I am not an SEO, so take this with a grain of salt, but I don't think that duplicated alt or anchor text is harmful to your SEO, since those image links are all pointing back to the same homepage and your pages themselves don't seem to be duplicates of each other. I hope this is helpful. Let me know if you need help with anything else. Chiaryn

Great question, I would love to have the same feature. One suggestions is to tag one of the moz product categories so that the moz staff can get to you quickly.

Sure, you can get the crawl anytime in between subject to cap of maximum 3000 pages been crawled - http://pro.moz.com/tools/crawl-test As a PRO member, you can schedule crawls for 2 subdomains every 24 hours, and you'll get up to 3,000 pages crawled per subdomain. However, you may have to manually identify the error in excel sheet

Sara, if you're 301ing a page that also includes a rel=canonical directive, the rel=canonical will not be seen because the server redirects the user before they get to the page. If the pages are identical, you can rel=canonical one to the other and both URL will be available to the user.  A 301 will prevent a user from landing on that page.

I'm not sure offhand, but I'll ask and see what I can find out.