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Hi Jason! I'd definitely recommend looking at PageAuthority and DomainAuthority as PA is much higher correlated with rankings with MozRank or MozTrust. And you can get PA from the regular reports download in Open Site Explorer. Let me know if you have any additional questions! Thanks, Jen

To replace this trending bugs list, we've launched http://health.moz.com/. You can use this site to see our current status and know if you're not alone regarding a hiccup.

Every time I have seen this happen it is due to duplicate content across various URL's or very thin content. Google doesn't tend to want to keep an index of the same page many times or many pages with little to nothing on them. If you didn't have duplicate or thin content problems and have cleaned up your error producing URL's then I'm not sure what to tell you. Someone will probably have to get into your GWT account to diagnose from there.

Hi Ennick, How long has it been since you set up the new GA account that the former vendor doesn't have access to? I ask this because I think removing the vendor's access to your GA data is possibly more important than removing their access to your GWT. Yes, you could muck things up through GWT, but that would only be done vindictively, for no other purpose than to hurt you. If the vendor starts working for your competitors, though, continuing to give them access to your data through GA offers an insane amount of details that could potentially be used against you. I recommend that you shut down the agency GA account. Download the historical data, like Patrick recommends, for reports where you need it, but as you move forward with your new account, you'll probably focus on month over month or year over year comparisons, and eventually you'll rarely use it. Good luck! Kristina

Correct, 301 redirects of duplicate homepages in order to consolidate them into one should not be an issue.

Hi Robert, Thanks for your suggestion! Would you mind submitting a new feature request at https://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums/293194-Moz-Feature-Requests? You can also vote on other feature requests, track their status, and review feedback from the Product Team at that URL. Thanks, Christy

Yes, if you redirect URL B, it will not be indexed as content. It will be ignored by Google. Well... Not ignored, but Google will acknowledge the URL B shouldn't be indexed.

Oh I'm sorry I clearly misunderstood the question. I have not seen any studies or testing done on this, but I have to assume that they are ignored by spiders entirely. I certainly don't think they are more damaging than a 404 would be. A 404 tends to be ignored and only registered if a certain amount of time passes and the page is still not found. Google doesn't make it a habit to instantly remove URLs unless you ask them to. At the very worst, the 403/404 error would de-index that particular URL but this should not affect the rankings of your other pages and your actual site. And I think it'll take at least a good 30 days before Google will stop crawling those. That said, it shouldn't be crawling them at all if there aren't any links pointing to them either internally or externally. And if there are links pointing to the pages in question, you should be redirecting them via 301. That is of course if they are links you want. Hope this was more helpful.

I agree with Miriam. There is a company in Phoenix that calls themselves "Phoenix SEO" in the maps- even though that's not the name of the company. When you search for Phoenix SEO, one company dominates the search. Very odd. But it will surely be worked out.

Happy to help, and best of luck!

I doubt it would have a negative impact, but I would make sure that the alt attribute accurately describes the image. The alt attribute is just a small factor in ranking, so I would not spend too much time on it Just make sure that you're using the most appropriate image: if you're re-using the same image to target different types of keywords, you might be using images that depict something too broad. You be the judge: if you think it's a good image for the user, I can't imagine it getting you into trouble.

Hi JBlank, My solution to this is to ask whether you actually should be using the switchboard tags on all your desktop pages? Switchboard tags (which are basically a special version of rel=canonical for mobile), are meant to indicate to a search engine that the two pages contain (near-)duplicate content, but that it's ok because one is a mobile version of the other. If the content is not substantially the same, you don't need to have a switchboard tag (just like with the normal rel=canonical). So my recommendation: are any of your mobile pages direct or near-direct duplicates of your desktop pages? If so, use the switchboard tags for those desktop pages. You should also implement redirects in both directions based on user agent so that people land on the version most relevant to them. (And include the option to switch to the other version). for the other desktop pages, which may relate to certain mobile pages but which are not at risk of being classed as duplicate content, you can simply ignore them, and allow mobile users to land on a non-mobile-friendly page; or you can redirect mobile visitors to the most relevant page on the mobile site (again, with the option to switch to the 'full site'). If you actually have multiple desktop pages which are so similar that they could both have a rel=alternate tag to the same mobile page, that's probably a separate issue. If you're concerned about ranking for deep desktop content in mobile search, I'm afraid the most sustainable solution is to develop that content into a more mobile-friendly format. Hope that helps!

Since the "important pages" have been removed "by request" leads me to believe somebody with access to your GWT has manually requested to remove the site from Google via the URL removal tool.  You should be able to see who has access to your GWT and who removed the URLs within GWT. Just go to "Google Index" then "URL Removal" then click on the select box to the right to see the URLs that have been removed by others. You should be able to resubmit the site/URLs to Google afterwards.

Alan if you are using rel="alternate" hreflang="x" correctly then there shouldn't be any problems with duplicate content for different locales using sub domains or folders. As per Google's guildelines: Some example scenarios where rel="alternate" hreflang="x" is recommended: You translate only the template of your page, such as the navigation and footer, and keep the main content in a single language. This is common on pages that feature user-generated content, like a forum post. Your pages have broadly similar content within a single language, but the content has small regional variations. For example, you might have English-language content targeted at readers in the US, GB, and Ireland

Yer i watched this today, was very interesting and useful. Lots to learn.

Thanks Wissem and Mike, GWT gives now a good response, so it works! Cheerz,

Hmm a 5 years old post. A lot have changed since then. And still not sure what would be the best way to do it. Completely block, show some page saying they can't access or what would be the best?