Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Joe, I have read a bunch of your questions today and let me tell you, currently, you are in a bad place SEO wise. Steve, myself and many others have given you great, informative answers yet you cast them aside, and their efforts aside as it is not what you want to hear. You are looking for the 'secret of SEO link building' or the 'SEO Tool that allows you dominate the first page of google!!!!!!' - in essence, you are not looking to do things the right way, you are looking for spam tools to cheat your way to the top. Steve said it above and I have said it in another of your threads but you are not alone, many of us start out there, in the place that you are in at the moment. Looking for the easy fix, the easy win, the trick, secret or tool that will let you get to the top and you know what, long term, you are wasting your time (and ours a little). The longer you are in this game, the more white hat you become. Are you looking to do some anchor text link spam to promote some burner domains or are you looking to cheat? If you have a real business, with a future, then stop looking for these easy answers as they simply don't exist. Sure, there are strategies, and easy wins, but if your whole approach is to spend time looking for low value links then buddy, you are just wasting your own time and everyone here will tell you the same thing. No one here is going to give you success stories about such a tool as everyone here is working their asses off to do things the right way and that involves a whole lot of graft, hard work and patience. Joe - if I can give you any advice it would be to stop looking at these tools, set realistic goals and maybe start reading the link building posts on this site. There are tons of solid strategies and approaches and none of these will be a waste of your time, money or effort and certainly none of them will end up with you having to burn the site and move onto a new domain. Sorry if this comes off a bit harsh buddy, think of it as tough love from someone who has been burnt before. Cheers Marcus

Well there's the rub. Close key words... avoid an audit avoid a tax audit avoid audit all get hits from the rankings data. they bring up different pages as top ranking because different sites and pages rank differently based on the key word optimization. Now I have the experience to know that in the past a good well developed linking structure will overcome this and you actually can rank for several variations by having a good topical silo structure. I am sometimes surprised what my main page ranks for just because a term is on the page! Content dominating the page does get hits. BUT...competition is getting crazy in my industry. Sales companies are ranking and then selling the leads.I'm not just competing with similar businesses anymore. It seems like as long as I can vary the content, and i really can, because I have over 30 years in the business and more experience than anyone i know , so i can write varied content all day long! As for the page, we don't use flash or anything. Had over 100 links on many pages so some changes had to be made. Tell me more about an easier path to trend instead of doing pages for slight variations. Long term phrases don't seem to get many hits in my business. At least I don't think it's worth doing pages for till we knock off the shorter ones we have a chance of ranking for, which includes the three listed above.

The same thing confused me to begin with when I first started using these tools. I found that this issue would be raised when I checked a newly published post. It turns out that as I use the "recent posts" widget on my sidebar then the tool would see the title text and link as an issue and flag it up. Is it really such an issue? Eventually that post won't be shown in the widget as more posts are published. Based in that do you think it's OK to ignore the issue in this instance?

Yes the new Moz Analytics does not give you the page that is conflicting like the old system. I hope they fix this soon.

Interesting read, lets hope people see that before handing money over.

Ah. Sculpting in the sense that I'm familiar with is more so a function purely of PR strength.  I think as long as you're not pushing the boundaries of contextual relevance and spam you'll be fine interlinking related silos.  In the example I provided above, if they suddenly linked to a newly created page on their website about creating an online casino account it would probably be discounted and problematic.  Same thing if they linked to an trusted neighborhood externally. Here's an excellent recap of linking in general: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links and a highlight of linking to bad neighborhoods: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/more-on-nofollow-at-seomoz-and-how-bad-outbounds-can-impact-websites If you're internal links are all fairly similar semantically you won't be an outlier.

The holy grail of all that is analytics: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/

It sounds like you are off to a strong start with a great attitude. Good luck to you!

You just need to ensure that there are set pages with relevant keywords for them, and don't cross the keywords with the other pages. There's two SEOmoz articles on it by Rand from ages ago here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/keyword-selfcannibalization http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization

I'm not sure what the deal is with blue flags and report cards, but if you have duplicate pages, you should either use the 301 redirect or the rel=canonical tag. My guess is that maybe you had a rel=canonical tag on a page that pointed to the same page, so maybe the crawling tool took that to be some kind of error? I don't know, but make sure your duplicate pages are either redirected to the original or that they use a rel=canonical tag to specify the original, and don't worry about any reports that are simply notifying you of the purpose of a canonical tag.

I would always carry out analysis of the site I was working on before I look at competitor analysis.Keyword analysis would form part of this to ensure that I knew what relevant words and phrases should be targeted. Next I would look at the content of the site to see if it contains the phrases in all the relevant places (title tag, alt text etc). A key task would then be to make sure there are no technical issues reducing the chances of your site ranking highly. I would look to get the on-page elements sorted before focusing on link building as the site may not deserve a link until on-page issues are sorted out. With regards to the benefits of article submissions and social networking I would advise you to research these areas a little more as low quality articles strewn across the web may not be the best course of action and social media aspects may or may not be worth chasing depending on whether there will be ongoing resource available to support the initial efforts.

SEOmoz has also recently revamped their list of directories. You might check out the post about link building via directories (with a link to the list) at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-link-directory-best-practices.

Thanks Doc Yeah I think I have a problem accepting any kind of reward for anything to be honest. Even when I get paid by a client I feel bad for taking the money, even though we've done a good job for them. I don't know what that's about lol. But anyway thank you very much. It's good to hear someone had the same worries and paranoia before. I'll stop worrying about it now

Good point.