Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks,

That’s quite cool to see, I take your point, it would be interesting to test by setting up a brand new site, throw up a few pages and see what happens. Common sense would say Google should always show, home page, contact page etc but it's not always the case as we have seen.

Have you had a look at what your most popular blog posts have been to see if that correlates in anyway?

Craig

Thats quite interesting Dejan but as for URL length, do you not think that's probably becasue the longest URL's are usually the deepes in a websites structure? eg:

www.mydomain.com/cat1/cat2/cat3

Craig

Q1 - Usually there is one update per month, sometimes more, they are trying to spped this up.

Q2 - Always use analytic for traffic reporting, any data you get from within the SEOmoz app is pulled from the Google analytics account anyway so their shouldn't be any difference. (perhaps I've miss-understood that question)

Q3 - The number of links depends entirely on the client, what the budget is, where the links are coming from so it's impossible to answer that question, not all links are created equal after all.

Craig

Just a side note Jake, if it gets really bad for any pages and you don't feel that's an option you can always use the:

Hope this helps

Hi Adam,

If they get most of their traffic form the long tail search, why not focus on increasing their ranks by small amounts across a large amount of keywords instead of going after broad terms.

Rand covered a great way to do this using the SEOmoz app, http://www.seomoz.org/blog/new-seomoz-web-app-now-in-beta

Go to the bottom half and read the section on importing their top 200 keywords and seeing which could benefit from simple on-page optimisation, this works great.

On the links not showing up form Wikipedia, they are no-followed links so if you have selected the followed and 30 only option then that could be why. Alternatively if they were added recently, OSE may not have crawled them before the last update so they wont show up yet. Hope this helps.

Craig

Hey Adam,

I've never seen any conclusive evidence as to what the order is, I've heard some people say that it could be the order in which the pages were first crawled, the order of importance etc but to be honest I wouldn't worry about it, or use that as you basis for what pages Google think are most important.

Spend time creating a good clear navigational structure when the site is built and submit a site map, between those two you should be able to let Google and other search engines know exactly what pages are the most important.

If the first page isn't your home page, try making sure that Google isn't showing any personalised results, a good way to check is to use chrome and open an 'incognito' window and do the same search. Whatever the result I would worry unless the home page isn't indexed at all.

Hi Wayne,

Firstly I would look back at what the scope of the project was, what were the aims and objectives of the project? This should help you answer whether or not you have been successful in achieving those goals. Let me first address some of your concerns on the drop in links etc:

Domain Authority: 29 now 28

Domain Moz Rank: 3.30 now 3.98

Domain Moz Trust: 3.47 now 3.76

Total Links: 3,053 now 6,123

Ext. Followed Links: 2,995 now 378   (hoping someone might be able to explain this also!)

Linking Root Domains: 21 now 28

Followed Linking Root Domains: 18 now 26

Linking C Blocks: 16 now 22

SEOmoz have made some updates to the crawling - sadly, with a few hiccups. The new crawler is built to be fresher, but it is going deeper into domains, and, unfortunately, not visiting as many domains. Domains with a high MozRank are getting crawled deeper, but domains with middle to lower MozRanks are not getting crawled. Their top priority now is to get the domain diversity back up to or better than that of our last update (as was originally designed) so that they should have many more inbound links.

The above can be your answer to any questions regarding the drop in stats, explain that it's not that anything has been done badly, it's just the way it's being measured and should return to normal after the next update (hopefully).

If you have been building links you should also have a list of domains that you can prove you have been building links so again I wouldn't worry about explaining that.

Some good ways to measure success other than ranks are:

-Traffic volumes

• Number of referring domains

• Number of referring keywords

• Average time spent on site

-Reduced bounce rate

Some of those might not be relevant if all you have been doing is link building but take what you need and leave the rest. I think the best is to look at traffic and number of keywords referring traffic. The reason being, while you might not be position1 or on page 1 for a lot of terms yet, you may be getting a lot of longer tail traffic which you can definitely take credit for.

I hope this helps

Craig

Hey mike,

I'm not sure if I understand your question completely but I'l give it a shot.

You are saying that links you used to find in OSE, Yahoo site explorer, majestic etc are now not showing up when you repeat searches? If that's true I wouldn't look to much into it. I've used Yahoo lots of times and the links jump in and out of their index. What about Google webmaster tools? I'm assuming if they are clients you have access to that data, have a look in their as to which links Google reports, these tend to not move as much since Google don't seem too bothered about telling you information about your own site.

In any case if they are crappy links you should be focusing on getting them taken down, in which case it's nothing to worry about. Specifically on Panda though, yes Google could definetly be removing pages if they are really bad content, after all thats what panda was made for.

Hope this helps

Craig

If it's purely from a user point of view and you don't need Google to crawl the links I have two suggestions:

1 - Do it in JavaScript or some other language that Google can't click, then there is no way Google can see or use the links

2- Alternatively you could always just stick a no-follow on all the navigation links

Not sure if either of the above help, kind of confused at your needs to be honest. If you truely build it in the best interest for the users, the number of links shouldnt be an issue. If it's all city links, why not try grouping them into the country, then into city.

Craig

This might sound daft but just to be sure, is this perhaps an old domain that you have purchased on an auction, or one which has expired and you have re-registered? If so you can certainly inherit links which other people have built up.