Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Gina,

I looked into the keywords that you mentioned that you are tracking ( "web design Santa Barbara" & "Santa Barbara web design") and I am not seeing your site anywhere in the top 50 results when I manually check in an incognito window, except in the ppc section. In regard to the keyword containing "in" we only show results for exact matches for the keywords that you are tracking, so we wouldn't include the results for that keyword in the rankings we show. Here are screenshots of the top 50 results for the two keywords that you are tracking where I did a search on the page for your site and only found it in the ppc section:

web design Santa Barbara:
http://screencast.com/t/kQlxP0I5

Santa Barbara web design:
http://screencast.com/t/nt8RKJhroC

It does look like the manual searches I did match with what our tool is showing, so investigated a little bit deeper into how Google calculates the average position metric and it looks like they include the personalized results, which we do not. Our tool shows what most users would see when doing a search for the keyword and, since you are viewing the average position section while signed into your account, that could certainly add bias to the position GA is showing. Here is a forum post from stackexchange.com that talks more about that metric: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/826/what-does-avg-position-from-google-webmaster-really-mean

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any other questions.

-Chiaryn

Hi Gina,

Thanks for writing in. It is a bit difficult to answer this question without knowing what the keyword is and the site that you are comparing to the keyword, but there are a few reasons this may happen. First, it can depend on how the campaign is set up. For example, if you set up the campaign for www.example.com, but example.com (without the www in the URL) is actually what is ranking, we will show that the site is not in the top 50 because the campaign is only looking for URLs in the rankings containing www in front of your domain name.

Also, you mention local listings, which are not considered organic rankings so, even if you are the #1 places result for a keyword, we will not count that as within the top 50 but that we will label as a universal result.

If you can provide me with the specific keyword and website that you are having this issue with, I can look into it more directly. If you prefer to keep that information private, you can send it ti help@seomoz.org with Attn: Chiaryn in the subject line.

Thanks,

Chiaryn

Hi Sanaa,

Thanks for writing in and sorry that your having some issues with your crawl. It is difficult for us to say what may be the problem without knowing what site is that you are trying to set up a campaign for and how you are setting up the campaign.

I looked into your account and found several campaigns that are only receiving 1-2 page crawls, but all three of the URLs that those campaigns are set up for either redirect to a different domain or have a meta-robots noindex directive on them. Our crawler will not follow a redirect to a separate domain because it only crawls pages on the domain that the campaign was set up for and it will respect the noindex directive, so it is correct that we wouldn't be able to crawl any of those sites with the way the campaigns are set up.

I can look into the specific issue you are writing in about more directly if you let me know the website you are trying to have crawled and the way you are setting up the campaign for that site.

If you prefer to keep that information private, you can email us at help@seomoz.org and we can investigate it that way.

I hope this helps.

-Chiaryn

Hi Dana,

Thanks for writing in. The robots.txt file would not cause a 403 error. That type of error is actually related to the way the server responds to our crawler. Basically, this means the server for the site is telling our crawler that we are not allowed to access the site. Here is a resource that explains the 403 http status code pretty thoroughly: http://pcsupport.about.com/od/findbyerrormessage/a/403error.htm

I looked at both of the campaigns on your account and I am not seeing a 403 error for either site, though I do see a couple of 404 page not found errors on one of the campaigns, which is a different issue.

If you are still seeing the 403 error message on one of your crawls, you would just need to have the webmaster update the server to allow rogerbot to access the site.

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any other questions.

-Chiaryn

Hi there,

I tried to look into this issue in your campaign and I am not seeing that you have any On-Page reports being run for the same keyword with different capitalization, so I was going to run test reports for the specific example you gave and I also don't see the keyword "air freight" with different capitalization in your keyword list, so I wasn't able to test exactly what you mentioned within the campaign.

I did run the test for Air Freight and air freight against the /air-freight/main-carriers page of your site in the stand-alone On-Page tool (http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization) and I am seeing both versions of the keyword receiving A grades with exactly the same metrics counted for both, so they are being treated the same regardless of capitalization.

I was able to test within the campaign for the keywords Freight Consultants and freight consultants against the URL /air-freight/air-compliance/air-freight-consultants and those keywords also both return exactly the same reports with an A grade, so we are considering both versions of the keyword.

I'm not seeing a bug for capitalization of keywords in our system, so it would be really helpful if you could provide me with screenshot of the pages of where you are seeing this issue so that I can investigate further?

Thanks,

Chiaryn

Hey Kevin,

This is actually a great question.

Google isn't very open about how they select sites for the rankings, so we have to base this type of report on best practices and past experience so some keywords can have funky results.

For the location specific keyword, you can almost use the Private Dining report as a mirror for the Private Dining Sacramento report. While Google knows your business is in Sacramento, our tool is only looking for specific words in the code and content of the page and does not take location into account. To the On-Page tool Sacramento is just a collection of letters, but Google would infer that you are targeting users in Sacramento when looking at how well the page is optimized for Private Dining.

As for the reason why the site would not be ranking for the more broad keyword but would be for the location specific keyword, that is most likely because you are optimized for the term Private Dining and the location specific version of the keyword is not as competitive as the more nationally applicable keyword would be.

I hope that makes sense! Let me know if you need any clarification.

-Chiaryn

Hey Lawrence,

Campaigns have a 95% tolerance for duplicate content. This includes all the source code on the page and not just the viewable text. So if a URL is at least 95% similar in code and content to another URL, this warning will appear.

You can run your own tests using this tool: http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php

We don't know what standard Google uses, but it's safe to say they are a bit more sophisticated than us - so you might be okay in this regard as long as you have a couple hundred words of unique text and some unique coding per page. Google won't say how much duplicate content is too much, so we like to be better safe than sorry.

I hope this help. Let me know if you need further assistance.

-Chiaryn

Hey Lawrence,

I checked a few of the pages that are listed as having a meta refresh on the Australia version of the site and it looks like the meta refreshes have been removed in the source code, but the last crawl was on the 14th for that site, so you would just need to wait for the next crawl to come through sometime today to see those changes reflected in the crawl. The same goes for the US and New Zealand version of the site. All three crawls will be updated within the next couple of days, so you should see those meta refresh errors drop off for those campaigns after the new crawls complete, as they did for your other three campaigns in their recent crawls.

Please let me know if I can help you with anything else.

-Chiaryn

Hi Michael,

Thanks for writing in. I already emailed you in response to the ticket you sent in to the Help Desk, but I will copy my answer here for you review.

--

I looked into your campaign and it seems that this is happening because of where your canonical tags are pointing. These pages are considered duplicates because their canonical tags point to different URLs. For example, http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/tweed-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx is considered a duplicate of http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/olive-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx?p=true&rspage=4 because the canonical tag for the first page is http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/tweed-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx while the canonical for the second URL ishttp://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/olive-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx, with one URL showing tweed-green and the other showing olive-green.

Since the canonical tags point to different URLs it is assumed that http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/tweed-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx and http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/olive-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx are likely to be duplicates themselves.

Here is how our system interprets duplicate content vs. rel canonical:

Assuming A, B, C, and D are all duplicates,

If A references B as the canonical, then they are not considered duplicates
If A and B both reference C as canonical, A and B are not considered duplicates of each other
If A references C as a canonical, A and B are considered duplicated
If A references C as canonical, B references D, then A and B are considered duplicates
The examples you've provided actually fall into the fourth example I've listed above.

I hope this clears things up. Please let me know if you have any other questions.

--

-Chiaryn

Hi There,

I think we were able to resolve this issue through our email system, so I am going to mark this question as answered, but please let me know if you have any other questions.

-Chiaryn

Hi Bernardo,

You can certainly share your login credentials with the contractor. We don't put any restrictions on how many people can be logged into the account at one time and that is the only way to share access to the data, so you are more than welcome to share your credentials, but the contractor will have full access to the account.

As ColinSV mentions, you can also create a custom report that cc's the contractor directly when the report is generated, so they can review the campaign data without having full access to the account.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any other questions.

-Chiaryn

Hey Colum,

That forum you are looking at is a bit old and I believe we have resolved the authentication issue, so it isn't an overarching problem. I also was able to grab the sample code on your account and get data back when I ran the code in my browser, so I would recommend trying to run a call again. If you regenerated your credential and still received the error, it may be that the new credentials hadn't updated yet in our database, since it can take up to 30 minutes for the database to recognize the new credentials.

I would suggest trying both the sample code on your account and a regular call to see if either are still giving you the error message. If you are no longer getting the error message on the sample call, but you are still getting it on the other call, it may be a formatting issue. I'm definitely seeing data for the sample call now, so it shouldn't be any issue with the actual credentials.

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you are still seeing any issues.

Glad to hear everything's working for you again! Let us know if you run into any other issues.

Hi Meghan,

I'm sorry to hear you're having some trouble with the Mozbar in Firefox. I logged into your account and was able to access the PRO features of the Mozbar in Firefox with no issues. If the solutions that Mike and Oleg suggested don't work for you, I would recommend clearing your cache and cookies and giving it another try. That usually fixes the issue.

If you are still running into the issue after that, please let me know and I will look into it further.

Hi Justin,

It looks like you got some good answers here and I think we talked to each other in chat earlier today, so you should be all set, but please let us know if you have any other questions.

-Chiaryn

Thanks for writing in, sorry that your universal rankings campaigns data is looking off. I checked into your account, and I'm seeing quite a few campaigns. Can you let us know which campaign you're seeing this issue in?

If you would prefer to keep this information private, feel free to email us at help@seomoz.org with the details.

I look forward to hearing back from you soon.

• Chiaryn

Hi Anuj,

Thanks for writing in and for using our Open Site Explorer! I'm so sorry that you still haven't been able to see your links in Mozscape. Most new sites and links will be indexed by our spiders and available in Mozscape and Open Site Explorer within 60 days, but some take even longer for many of reasons, including the crawl-ability of sites, the amount of inbound links to them, and the depth of pages in subdirectories.

Just so you know, here's how we compile our index:

• We grab the most recent index.
• We take the top 10 billion URLs with the highest MozRank (with a fixed limit on some of the larger domains).
• We start crawling from the top down until we've crawled 59,000,000,000 pages (which is about 25% the amount in Google's index).

Therefore, if the site is not linked to by one of these seed URLs (or one of the URLs linked to by them in the next update) then it won't show up in our index. Sorry!

We update our Mozscape Index every 4 weeks. Crawling the entire Internet to look for links takes 2-3 weeks, but our crawlers are always in motion. When we need to start processing, we grab all the data they have collected and start processing which can take up to 3 weeks to determine which of those links are the most important. You can see our most recently updated schedule here: http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345964-linkscape-update-schedule

Mozscape focuses on a breadth-first approach. Therefore we almost always have content from the homepage of websites, externally linked-to pages, and pages higher up in a site's information hierarchy. However, deep pages that are buried beneath many layers of navigation are sometimes missed and it may be several index updates before we catch all of these.

If our crawlers or data sources are blocked from reaching those URLs, they may not be included in our index (though links that point to those pages will still be available). Finally, the URLs seen by Mozscape must be linked-to by other documents on the web or our index will not include them.

I hope this information helps! While the site and links may not be indexed yet, give it some time - maybe we'll see it in OSE next month.

Best of luck,
Chiaryn