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Thanks a bunch.  Its really a little daunting when it comes to changing the URL structure. So changing these is ok as long as i have all the 301 redirects in place. CHECK! Look at hosting two sitemaps for a week or two before removing the old one. CHECK! One thing I spotted in your responses was that you said: retain the ending / also the first URL structure i used was adequate. Just wanted to know why? Also in regards to this URL change, my on page SEO tools mentions that i should try to use the focus keyword in the URL.  Is this a big help now?  I know it always was before, so just checking nothing has changed. Obviously if i go back to using - /Locations/uxbridge/ - that doesnt say a lot about the keyword i want to be recognised for, whereas using - /CBT-course-locations/uxbridge/ - on the other hand does. The latter however this does keep me pretty much locked to this keyword forever, whereas using the original /locations/uxbridge/ comes down to content right? Have you any final feedback or guidance on this last point?  I cannot tell you how much it helps to have you guys to bounce off - It gets all a little overwhelming on your own sometimes. Thanks again C

Yeah, I'm afraid Chris is right. There's really no way to tell Google to index both pages but then not give them control over which one ranks. Google is naturally going to prefer the full content page, because they want to get people to the best "answer", in a sense. Truthfully, I think it's a better search user experience, in most cases. Internal search users can travel from the snippet to the post, but search users may get frustrated at going from Google's results to your results, and not straight to the resource. If you force the first step on search users, you may actually increase your bounce rate and harm your overall performance.

You'll get way more than 1000 links from WMT.  It says you get links from the top 1000 domains but it's usually quite a bit more.  I have had some spreadsheets from WMT that contain over 30,000 links. John Mueller (Google employee) once said that WMT was all you needed in order to remove a penalty.  So, for over a year that's all I used.  However, in the last couple of months since Google has started to give examples of unnatural links when a site fails, many of those examples are not in WMT!  I think what John meant was that you could see the patterns in WMT such as articles, directories, etc. and then use those patterns to find additional links.  But, if you don't have a list of all of the links that you have made then that is not going to work for most people. So, now, what I do is combine the links from WMT, ahrefs.com, majestic SEO and Open Site Explorer.  It's a pain.  I've written a script that combines them for me but it still takes me quite a while to put them together. With that being said, I have removed penalties from some sites by just using the WMT links.  And then I've had other ones that Google has been really nitpicky on and has not removed the penalty until we addressed every single self made link.

Is Penguin focused primarily on backlinks or does it also assess internal linking/anchor text? In my opinion it is focused on backlinks.   If internal anchor text links would kill a site then wikipedia and any informative site that was built on their hyperlinking model would be dead.   I got a lot of internal anchor text on my sites and nothing has happened. If google wanted to dull the impact of internal anchor text they could do it much more easily by just turning a knob and would not need to put it in the Penguin algo and beat webmasters who have done good for their users by hyperlinking their content.  Google is after manipulation rather than trying to do a "gotcha" on innocent webmasters. My backlink profile also has an over-abundance of affiliate links but that's kind of out of my hands isn't it? You can require any anchor text or linking method that you want.  If they don't like it they can quit or you can turn off their bounty.  You can require nofollow if you want. My affiliate program tells me what I can't and can do.  They have not been telling me how to link but they have their hoops that I better jump through if I want to be paid. You are in the driver's seat.  You just have to decide if you are going to steer or let other people do it for you.

I just want to add one thing. If you looking at points to determine the validity of someone's insights or SEO knowledge, I wouldn't. For example, I have 160 some odd points, but almost all of those are from me asking questions. Not from me answering them. Whenever someone is kind enough to answer one of the many questions I post, I look at their thumbs ups, thumbs downs and good answers as one factor in how much stock I take in what they say. Best, Ruben

Thank you for your response. All organic search dropped - google, bing, yahoo, etc.. Index status looks normal through that time period. Impressions and clicks carried the same pattern as usual - no change there.

It is recommend you try to get in touch with the webmasters of the sites before going down the disavow route. I second this as well. Disavow is not a plan A, but an plan B, C, D. In the process of link cleaning

Thanks Ari!

Hey, Some great answers already. I just wanted to chime in real quick. When you are trying to compare metrics between companies, make sure that you're comparing the same metrics. Often times people will look at the page specific metrics in OSE and then compare them to the root domain metrics in other services. This is inaccurate and isn't doing you any good. The url in question has 2532 total links in OSE. I checked in in Majestic -who has a larger index because that's their primary function- and found that it had 3652 total links. So Majestic does have more because that's what they do. If you aren't satisfied with the links in OSE, I would recommend combining our tools with a dedicated back link service since we will unfortunately miss links and/or leave low quality pages out of our indices. Thanks! Joel.

Hi Devanur, I just sent you a private message. Thanks a lot man!

If you're saying that each ebook landing page lives on your root domain then that's definitely better. I thought as you were using Unbounce for the landing pages that they would be on a subdomain.

Hey john, I'm really sorry that you feel we haven't been responsive to your issues. Looking into our system, I do see that you've written in two Q&A posts about your campaigns being archived here: http://moz.com/community/q/my-campaign-is-gone-what-happened-to-it and here: http://moz.com/community/q/all-my-campaigns-have-gone which were both answered by Jennita, our community manager, on October 17th. I also see that Abe responded to an email to our help desk on the same date. If you are not receiving notifications of the Q&A responses or the email response, I highly recommend that you make sure you are able to receive emails from moz.com. In regard to the issue you are experiencing with GA, I'm afraid you will need to completely disconnect Google Analytics and then reconnect again using the "Connect Another GA Account" from the Campaign Settings section of your affected campaign. It can take 24-48 hours for the data to repopulate, so you should so data back in the account shortly. If you are still seeing an error message or if you do not have any data within 48 hours, please let me know. Chiaryn - Help Team Ninja  http://moz.com/about/team/chiaryn

Hi Elsa, Thanks for writing in! It looks like you did have a draft campaign set up in Pro a while back that Analytics is checking against which is why you're running into this error. It looks like you worked around it by creating a campaign with a different name, but Analytics definitely shouldn't be referring to Pro for this data. I'm going to create a ticket with you as the requestor and forward this along to our Developers for you. This way we can get the issue logged, repaired and I can let you know when its deployed. Thanks for reporting and let us know if there's anything else you need! Best, Sam Moz Helpster

I have written some code to do this if anyone has the same problems: Title: Number of Pixels: Description: Number of Pixels:

Hey there! You should totally take one of our 1:1 demos. You can signup here: https://mozonboarding.youcanbook.me/ I'd also like to say, thanks for starting this awesome conversation with everyone in the community. Cool to read all the ways people found value in the tool or even where they aren't. Love the feedback. Stay awesome! Nick Director of Customer Success and Support

I agree with Lesley, I really wouldn't use Page rank as your main metric moz has some good metrics or majestic to give you another option.