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Hey Alan, sorry for the delayed response I've been away a little while. So you have multiple facets of design. Did you know some developers specialise in the front-end look and feel of a site, without touching much SQL, back-end stuff or databases? In my opinion, stuff like Adobe InDesign or the mocking up of a a page layout, is only part of the design process. If you're using coding to translate a 'static' design into a living, breathing web-page, to me that's still design work (although it relies upon coding). It depends whether you consider front-end dev to be a design facet, a dev facet or somewhere in-between. It's not that long ago that all designers were expected to know some HTML and CSS, in many cases - quite in depth with possible PHP extensions to their knowledge. Knowing what's feasible, what's possible and how to attach the 'pretty pictures' to functions is IMO, still design work whilst the hard-core developers focus on the complex additions and more technical site facets. I personally wouldn't work with any designer who just produced images of work and nothing else. With my view of design being how it is, since your initial question shows that the developer is 'using code' to 'alter the look' of the site, I would say that regardless of mock ups - design is involved. You are right, there are developers who actually know what they're doing - then there are 'WordPress plugin installers' who will 'masquerade' as fully fledged developers and take your money. Watch out, many sharks roam the digital seas!

Hello Dave. Thanks for your reply. We are aware this is not affecting us being temporary and exclusive to the MOZ bot so that's why we are worried about the data-set issues. As I mentioned most of our excluded content are products, we can't be certain that MOZ has every keyword and that the ones discovered are being weighted correctly. Understandably Shopify might never make robots.txt available so it would be nice for MOZ to identify the web as a shop hosted on Shopify (a moz.txt file) and apply a rate limiting, at the very least allow the user to control the crawl parameters from our control panels for those SaaS apps that block these core functions. Hope MOZ and Shopify one day have a coffee and find a way to figure this out. But meanwhile, Is there any way to request crawls in specific folders?  something like "domain.com/products/*****"

Hi Martin, Just add a robots tag with noindex. This **WILL NOT **create 404 pages, because you are not deleting that pages, and wont hurt your rankings.  Google does understand that you might not want some pages to be indexed, so just with noindex tag is enough. Remember that it should be placed in the parte, like this: <title>...</title> More info about robots: Robots meta directives - Moz About the Robots tag - Robots.org Hope it helps. Best luck. GR

Hi there! Thanks so much for the great question! I'm so sorry you're having trouble getting your site crawled. Without knowing the exact site you're working with I can't say for sure what's going on but I can offer some suggestions that may help. If you're seeing the crawl is successful with other tools, there may be a bot-specific setting or directive that is banning our crawler, rogerbot, from your site. This may be coming directly from your server or it may be listed in your robots.txt file. I have a troubleshooting guide here that may help- it outlines some other common issues that can keep rogerbot from being able to move forward with the crawl. If you're still having trouble, please feel free to send an email on over to help@moz.com with the site you're having trouble with. That way we can take a look and see what's going on!

Hey there! can you send an email to help@moz.com with your account credentials?  We will help you out. thanks!

Have you reviewed this? https://moz.com/blog/wrong-page-ranks-for-keywords-whiteboard-friday

Hello Thank you for the detailed, helpful response. I should note that most of our SEO traffic does NOT come from forum pages. The overwhelming amount of natural search traffic we receive is from product detail, category, subcategory, and related (how-to articles etc) pages on the main www.xxxx.com site. I am concerned mainly with the potential fallout of Google seeing 3000 or more 404 pages if we just delete the forum and kill the server, and am looking for the best way to handle that. I am ok with returning a 410 or redirecting anything that tries to hit forum.xxxx.com to www.xxxx.com. What do you think? Thanks

Well let's take a look at metrics for this page and also metrics for this domain as a whole. Here's the linking page: http://www.adamfrisby.com/create-home-design-and-interior-decor-in-2d-3d.html Moz Metrics: Page Authority: 16 Domain Authority: 24 No backlinks or linking domains detected, pointing to this individual web-page 5,600+ links pointing to the domain overall, from 100 domains Ahrefs Metrics: URL Rating: 7 Domain Rating: 24 No backlinks or linking domains detected, pointing to this individual web-page 7,690+ links pointing to the domain overall, from 84 domains Majestic SEO Metrics (Fresh Index): Page-level Citation Flow: 10 Page-Level Trust Flow: 0 No backlinks or linking domains detected, pointing to this individual web-page Domain-level Citation Flow: 20 Domain-level Trust Flow: 9 Ahrefs estimate of daily traffic this site gets from SEO: less than 1 user per day (0.074 users per day on average) SEMRush estimate of daily traffic this site gets from SEO: 0 user per day At best these metrics are mediocre, at worst the link could be toxic. How can they have thousands of backlinks from only hundreds of domains, and also be seeing no traffic from SEO combined with low trust scores from Majestic?! It seems like one of those cookie-cutter sites produced to sell links to people, not like a viable link source in 2018. By the way, for me - that page took **years **to load! About 20 seconds. It would obviously score terribly in Pingdom Tools / Google Page-Speed Insights / GTMetrix (three solid page-speed evaluation tools). When people build link-farms to sell crap links to people who don't know SEO very well, they seldom care about users. Seldom spend time optimising the site for those who really matter Design-wise the site looks like pure spam to me. It looks like it has been built just to supply SEO links, like the site and contained links wouldn't exist if it weren't for SEO being an active industry. That's strictly against Google's guidelines! 'Links for the sake of it' are frowned upon, this link looks like it came from the early 2000s and won't do a damn thing for your current SEO (except maybe earn you a penalty). Relevance isn't just semantic wordplay, you get me? You have to be thinking "why would it be relevant for a user to click on and follow this link". That's real link relevance. Just because Site A and Site B are thematically related - that does not make the link relevant (whether it be image, text or whatever). By the way, image links barely ever carry any SEO juice. Google don't want to count links of a paid-for or 'advertorial' nature. Links which carry SEO authority should also carry traffic. They should be editorial in nature, and benefit the users that click on those links. This link fails all of those completely. If a page which has barely any or no SEO authority links to hundreds of pages, each of them get barely anything back. It only takes 2-3 consecutive visits to this site to force a 503, server busy. This means that whoever built the site, sure as hell wasn't planning for anyone to ever, ever look at it. Does Google even care it exists? Look at Google's cache for the specified linking page: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.adamfrisby.com%2Fcreate-home-design-and-interior-decor-in-2d-3d.html Google doesn't even keep a cached copy. Google has technically indexed the page, for what purpose I cannot say. Probably just to keep an eye on it, because it's shady AF. Overall I give this link an F-

Hi Chuck As Donna also mentioned, there was a small update which was finally just confirmed by Danny Sullivan of Google: https://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-small-search-ranking-algorithm-update-this-past-week-306103#.W7AVMNe0y5g.twitter So that is the most likely reason for the drop you saw. As with any traffic change, I would recommend segmenting your traffic data by both queries and landing pages (this can both be done in search console) - to isolate which/if specific pages and keywords saw drops. If so, you can then determine if it was a site-wide drop, or specific to a set of pages and keywords. If site-wide, perhaps it is more technical related, but if keyword/page specific it could be more closely tied to the algo changes.

Ha! This is a fun one Ok so you should know, that like many Meta tags - "Description" is just a directive. Google don't _have _to use your Meta description and if they think it's poorly written they will use whatever else they believe to be the top-line leading copy on the page (which is usually something from your body / paragraph content). So your Meta description reads like this: "FICO is an analytics company that is helping businesses make better decisions that drive higher levels of growth, profitability and customer satisfaction." - 154 characters, which is inside of the usually recommended 155 character limit. Obviously Google actually use pixel width, but this _should _be OK to be honest I really hope you don't take this the wrong way but at the open of the description, it reads like slightly broken English. It's actually not that bad, I have probably written one or two worse ones myself once or twice. Also - it's one huge sentence. I'd write it like this instead: "FICO is an analytics company that helps businesses make strategic decisions. Our insights drive higher levels of growth, profitability and satisfaction." - 152 characters My main issue was with the phrase "is helping businesses make better decisions" - doesn't read like real English (just calling it as I see it there, no offence meant!) Now let's get onto the **technical **side of it because this will really interest you! Your privacy notice, to a renderless (non-headless, JS-disabled, CSS disabled) crawler looks like the beginning of your content. Load up your web-page (https://www.fico.com/en). Download and install the "Web Developer" extension for Google Chrome, click the little cog-shaped icon that it adds to your navigation system. Click the "CSS" tab / menu, then click "Disable All Styles". If you followed my steps accurately, you'll see a page that looks like this: https://d.pr/2AOsys.png What looks most prominent there to you? What's under the main, title-like heading? Guess what - it's your privacy notice! What you should do is have the privacy notice coded at the **BOTTOM **of your source code, then use CSS to move it up 'visually'. That way Google won't get confused and think it's your main content opening up... :') Hope this helps. Love little ones like this

You have 60,000 pages that are not unique at all.  The question is not... "what will happen when we delete it"... Instead, the question is... "What will these sites have left after it's gone". If they are shells full of nothing... then your entire enterprise is not worth much.

Hey there! Thanks for reaching out to us! Do you have Campaign set up for these specific sections of your site? If so, feel free to reach out to help@moz.com so that we can take a closer look Looking forward to hearing from you, Eli

Hi there, Thanks for the question. I'm afraid that I'm not too familiar with "Hoth" link building so I can't answer that directly. Regarding subdomains though, from a technical perspective, they are different websites and therefore are capable of passing link equity in the same way that any other website could. It really comes down to the quality and relevance of the subdomain. I'd recommend looking at them in the same way you would any other link and assess them for quality. The one thing to maybe flag is when you have lots of subdomains which are on the same root domain. There is a chance that these may not pass as much value but again, it comes down to why they are there and the quality of them. Hope that helps! Paddy

Hi H.M.N! Thanks for bringing your question to the forum. So, what you'll be doing is to build a complete set of both structured and unstructured citations/linktations for each of your public-facing offices. For each location you will: Have a page on your website featuring excellent, unique content Create, claim and manage a Google My Business listing Create and manage structured citations on the major data aggregators and directories (Acxiom, Yelp, Infogroup, YP, etc.) Create and manage structured citations on any further directories that are specific to your industry or geography (like Avvo for lawyers or Healthgrades for doctors) Seek out unstructured citation/linktation opportunities on platforms like news sites, blogs, local business associations, event sites, etc. to grow the authority of each location You'll go through this process for each of your locations. As far your structured citations go (the ones on platforms like YP, Yelp, etc.) there is no cause for concern about listing multiple locations. Whole Foods Market must have hundreds of Yelp listings, after all, and there is no reason to worry that Google might find this suspicious. As far as your unstructured citations/linktations go, these you will need to handle more singly. What might this look like? Let's say your business is a legal firm in the San Francisco Bay Area with 4 locations. Your office in Oakland could sponsor something like a Know Your Rights Camp event in Oakland. Your office in Berkeley could create a scholarship for law students at UC Berkeley. You have 2 offices in San Rafael. One could be cited in a news article in the Marin IJ online newspaper and another could join the local chamber of commerce. Etc, etc. So, the difference for a multi-location model like yours would be that your structured citations for all locations can all be easily created on the same set of local business listing platforms, but that your unstructured citation/linktation development program will require more creativity and greater uniqueness. A single article in a newspaper is unlikely to cite and link to all 4 of your offices, right? All of the above represents quite a bit of work, of course. Multi-locations typically need to automate part of this process. I highly recommend that, if you're a Moz Pro customer, you explore the Link Intersect tool to help you with the research for linktation opportunities, and if you have signed up for Moz Local, it will take care of many of your most important structured citations. Hope this helps!

Hi Leandro! Thanks so much for the great question! In addition everything that Roman pointed out I wanted to be sure to point you in the direction of some resources we have about Domain Authority, how to use it, and how to improve. You can find information about this here. This resource includes some really useful videos as well.

Thank you for your detailed reply and for the link. I was thinking about doing retargeting but you are right what you are mentioning is probably the way to go. I will try that. Thank you,