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Without your url its a bit hard to say exactly what could of caused the drop - as there are no official response from Google yet to give more details its a bit difficult to find the real reasons for drops

Surely if you are building this in dev, the new site isn't craw able anyway so I don't know what the issues are.

Always recommend building new sites and making sure Google or any bot / human cannot see them anyway - as there are usually quite a few errors during build, so wouldn't want someone to accidentally find the dev site and get a bad brand experience,

But on the url side of thing, build it without the dev in the url.

I agree let it settle down for a few days and see what happens, however even if you do stay down there I wouldn't recommend getting a new domain name, Google is quite smart nowadays and if they realise what you have done will just hit the new site.

You say you have 110 domains pointing to your site (and without url I am only guessing here), how many are these are from forums, directories, spammy sites.

How have you gotten these links, are these natural links or are they genuine organic links.

Instead of worrying about whats happen, simply either through moz or ahrefs download your enitre backlink database and take a detailed looked at every link.

Think like Google, does the link look genuine, does it look like its paid, is it a spam link in a niche not even related etc and if you answer yes to a link, simply put it your a disavow file.

I have got a funny feeling Penguin is going to be on a monthly cycle, John Mueller from Google webmaster team has been hinting that the new penguin will refresh more frequently, how frequently I am unsure yet - but if you get your house in order (get your back links sorted) then the next refresh you should hopefully be able to recover.

In future, don't try and cheat Google with spammy links, stick to getting good natural organic links and then you don't need to worry about Penguin

Depends on the SERP page, some of our keywords move around like that on a daily basic as they are a active SERP results.

It doesn't sound like you have been penalised with such a small drop. Probably more likely others have benefited by having old penalties lifted. I would just carry on with what you are doing and building better links

Hi

Sorry to tell you there is no 'magical' number here.

Firstly: what resources do you have, if you have a team of 10 people able to create content, 10 people link building, 10 analyst looking at gaps etc then I would image quite a few, if its just you doing SEO then the numbers will be a lot less and even less if as well as doing SEO you run the entire company.

Rather than looking at quantity look at quality and if your only focus is SEO for you company then when your looking at what work to do, work on the time/cost benefit analysis. Also your niche in which you operate will affect the number of links you can get.

If you work at Apple, getting links is incredibly easily, working for a company that sells products to businesses might not find it as easy.

Like you said quality links from in your niche area is always better than loads of general links (even if DAs are higher).

If your site is new, have you done some basic PR contacting relevant sites and telling them your about to launch, this is a great way to quickly build initial links.

In answer to your questions: How many links should i build? It would all depend on the time / resoures you have available.

Read this great article on how to go about getting links: http://moz.com/blog/my-recipe-for-success-how-to-launch-a-successful-blog

yeah and most worrying is people are claiming to be affected by Negative SEO - which if true is a whole new SEO strategy to worry about. Protecting yourself as well as trying to improve

Hi

I am hearing that Penguin 3.0 has rolled out within the last hour or so, can anyone confirm this and secondly has anyone been affected?

My rankings don't seen to have changed, neither has my main competitors but it might just be too early to tell.

Thanks

Andy

Hi

Its a tricky dilemma you are having. I would personally say option A.

You mentioned over the last two years you have done lots of great onsite content which is great, but SEO is really boiled down to three area's.

1. Content
2. Link building
3. Technical

You could argue content / link building is the same, but I tend to keep them separate. While over the last two years you have been working on the content part of your overall strategy, have you let something slip in the other two area's.

What new links have you recently gone and got in your niche (not directory links etc, but links from key influencers and websites in your niche. While this article talks about launching a blog, its one of the best articles on here for explaining what you need to do: http://moz.com/blog/my-recipe-for-success-how-to-launch-a-successful-blog.

You have some great blog idea's, why not share these with similar websites (obviously not your competitors), but other sites in your niche and get them to link back to you.

And the third option is technical - have you kept upto date with all the latest recommend changes from Google, is the schema markup correct on your product pages, to help rank the pages higher. Is your sitemap working, so that Google can crawl your site more efficiently, does your site work well on mobile etc.

Writing great content is just part of an overall strategy and on its own won't help you to rank any better. While Google tries to use other metrics to determining ranking, links are still an important factor in where you rank.

All your link in my opinion look spammy and from directory sites and if I am thinking this, Google is potentially seeing the same thing. Have you got any messages in WMT about penalties.

Have you thought about contacting some bloggers and asking if they would like to review your products (Note never asks for a link, but let the website decided if they want to link to you - looks more natural if every mention isnt a link). This way if these bloggers review your products as well as some potential extra links, you are also potentially advertising to new customers.

Hope this helps.

It sound like you have done some great on site SEO work.

However Domain Authority (DA) is based more on external factors, i.e. links pointing to your site. You might want to read http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority

How you go about getting links is a whole different conversation. I would recommend doing it the hard and slow way. Trying to cheat Google / Moz will only get you penalised in the long run. DA is a Moz score, but Google will have a similar score, even though they will never reveal your score.

Try producing good content onsite that people in your niche want to link to. Once written instead of waiting for these people to find your content (they never will, or it will take years), be direct. Pick up the phone and speak with influencers in your niche.

There are two parts to SEO, technical and content / links. The content / link strategy is what was called PR 10 years ago and its all about getting mentioned and links in relevant areas. There is no point getting a link to your site from sectors which aren't relevant. Google will see through these.

Also never pay for a link, and never trust any of these emails you get offering to get you amazing links from PR6 etc sites. These never work in the long run and only will do more long term damage than help you.

I hope this is helpful in explaining why your DA hasn't improved and what you need to do to improve it. Also DA only updates around once a month, so any work you do now may take a few months to show. You have to wait for Moz to find the link, then wait for their next update. The more popular the site you get the link from the quicker Moz is likely to find it.

Thanks

Andy

to cancel it - simply go to Billing & Subscription and click on the cancel button.

In terms of getting your money back, I doubt it - but one of the staff members will be able to answer this.

Why would you want to cancel one of the best pieces of marketing software on the market.

Moz is brilliant for SEO and a host of other great features, granted its not perfect but its improving every day, and there isn't a one stop solution for marketing software - you usually have to use this in conjunction with other bits of software.

But for SEO I wouldn't be able to do my role without moz. Even just checking Domain Authority of links gained etc is great as well as tracking how well your doing.

this is where the additional feature of when Moz last crawled a page would be great, but as this page has a PA of 1 and no known links, I would guess Moz hasn't crawled the page / found the page just yet.

These are large sites which I am guessing Moz is visiting fairly frequently and its great you have got a link from Google.com, however I was hoping you could send me the actual urls of where your links are located.

I had a similar problem in the fact I linked from our main site (DA of 68) to a brand site and the link still isn't showing up in Moz, but when I did some digging it turns out it was my developers / designers mistakes as it wasn't that easy for a bot to get to that page - so Moz was crawling the site, but the page with the link wasn't easily reachable hence why Moz hadn't found the link etc.

What would be a good feature would be like with Google you can see the last time a page was crawled, if Moz had a similar feature.

Hi

It seems to be working ok for us, however whats your brand name?

If your brand is something like cheaplaptops then this is going to appear on these sites, when they are talking about cheap laptops, but they aren't obviously mentioning you.

I will take a look if you can send me your url or brand name.

Thanks

Andy

While moz is a great company, Google has hundreds more servers than Moz so is able to dig further and deeper into the internet to see more links.

Moz last month crawled and indexed 166 billion pages  http://moz.com/products/api/updates so this means there is still a large part of the net which hasn't been crawled by moz. They tend to crawl the larger more reputable sites and follow those links, rather than the smaller / black hat sites. They also can't crawl every site in every country so do tend to focus more where they have more demand from their customers (US etc), but your in Australia so I wouldn't have thought this would be an issue.

It actually took 4 months for my link from my Moz profile to show in Opensiteexplorer so even they don't crawl their own site that often.

Where are most of your current links from (that are appearing in webmaster tools). Have you checked these urls in Opensiteexplorer to see if these have been found by moz.

Google obviously has to crawl the entire web (or as much as they can) to offer the best user experience for when searching, plus people want their sites to appear in Google so submit sitemaps etc to them. Whereas and I don't know if this is techncially possible but I am assuming it is, the sites where you have got links could potentially stop moz from crawling their sites. In that case, your links would never appear.

If you could let me know a couple of the links that are appearing in WMTs I will take a look for you.

Google made a big announcement last week about Google news: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-in-the-news-19259.html

The news section is not just coming from a human news approved sites, so how you get listed in here I don't know if you still have to go through the old method or whether Google will now just rank you if you are relevant. If anyone knows if you still need to apply be great to know the answer.

I have a google alerts for 'brand name' and set it to email every time the 'brand name' appears on the web.

Its then when Google finds a new mention of my 'brand name' anywhere on the web it triggers an alert to me.

It doesn't send me historical mentions on the brand, but it does send me an email every time the brand is mentioned. I sometimes get really old articles but it just means Google have just found the article.

If its on the bigger, more popular sites I can get alerts within minutes / hours of the article going live, sometimes its a few weeks later and the longest I've had is a few years.

So the alerts are triggered every time Google find a new mention of the 'search term' you have requested. They don't send historical mentions about the brand.

Also I would suggest using all numerous bit of software.

I use ahrefs, Moz, Webmaster tools and about to sign up for Majestic.

They are all good in their own way and have some great resources (Ahrefs now tells you a list of all your links pointing to 404 pages - great report), but they also have their limitations - unfortunately there isn't one software that does everything amazing so you do need to sign up for multiple resources.

I agree its not a great topic for a WBF but a page on the website would be great.

Look forward to meeting you at SearchLove London.

Thanks

Andy

PRO membership you are getting a lot more tools, not just OSE. The moz community is probably worth the $99 on its own in my opinion.

OSE limitation - I will let an employee tell you the official definition but they do a great job crawling as much as the web as feasibility possible on there servers - but they do crawl a huge % of the web and expanding this each month.

Hi

I've answered this question a few times, wish Rand would do a whiteboard friday on this and explain once and for all.

Google is huge and have a vast amount of severs that crawl the entire web (and they don't pick up on every link), moz even though its great, is relatively small and can only crawl a proportion of the web (usually the bigger sites and the most visited sites) and rand has said before that they keep growing there servers and can crawl further and further, but for what you pay for moz $99 a month for them to backwards engineer Google and go as deep as they do, you would probably need to paying a lot more, so I would happily take missing out on a few of the lower domain links for the relatively low price I pay each month.

So if Rank, can do a WBF on this subject that would be great - then I wouldnt have to keep typing the same answer I could just link to his video (Google doesnt like duplicate content).

Also mention above, if you really want to know all your links I use ahrefs and Webmaster tools, but even these aren't great.

If a new websites gets built today and links to you - you still have to wait for Google, Ahrefs to find this website - if this website doesn't get links from else where then it might take these sites a while to find the new website, so even these services aren't perfect.