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If I understand correctly, you want to build links to the new domain, and then possibly 302 (or 301 redirect) them to the new domain.

Without knowing all the variables of your situation, it would seem to me that the best thing you could do is what Adam suggested. That is, build up content/links to the new domain as soon as possible to build up your domain authority, trust and traffic.That way when you make the switch, you won't be starting from scratch.

Theoretically, you could 301 those links from the new domain to the old, but this could send potentially confusing signals to search engines when you stop the redirects, and it's not something I would recommend. 302 (temporary) redirects could send the same potentially confusing signals.

If the corporate office is putting a new site on the old domain, they will retain that authority and you won't have anything to fall back on. Best to start building up something now that you can rely on later.

In addition to Robert's answer, I'd like to add that although OSE doesn't have a built in bias towards "name-brand" links, it does favor links with high Page and Domain Authority, and URL that have good inbound link profiles themselves, because these are the most useful to crawl and index.

Of course, OSE doesn't report all links, especially those buried beneath layers of navigation and those on pages with very few inbound links themselves.

Part of the issue may be temporary as well. Each index changes from the last. The most recent index was an improvement in that it reported far more domains, but significantly fewer URLs. This is a trend we may see reversed in future updates.

More about the last update here.

Generally keep your eyes open for sitewide links, keyword-rich commercial anchor text, out-of-context links (like a link for laundry soap on an auto blog) and anything that you couldn't defend to Matt Cutts.

3 domains ranking in the same SERP? Not necessarily a bad thing there, as you now own that page. Must help with the CTR.

My gut tells me that duplicate content is hurting your main site more than the traffic to the EMD justifies. Leaving the duplicate content up may continue to cripple your rankings over time.

Fortunately, you have a lot of tools at your disposal. If the backlinks aren't spammy, you shouldn't have much problem redirecting the domains to the main site. I'd experiment with redirecting a single EMD (exact match domain) and filing a change of address with Google Webmaster tools. (here's an excellent guide on site migration: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos)

After this, look to see if the keywords sending traffic to the old domain now send traffic to the new. I'm not sure migrating one site out of 6 is going to make that big of difference, but it's much safer than migrating all six at once - which could be seen as somewhat suspicious by Google.

My guess is that combining your content into a single domain will give you a ranking/traffic boost that justifies the trouble.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO

Sorry to hear your rankings dropped. If anything, a link from here would likely help.

Google released 2 known algorithm updates in May that targeted low quality backlinks, so there's a possibility you were caught up in these.

If you're confused about your links, you can research them one of two ways, with either automatic tools or manual analysis. Realistically, you should use both. A good Manual Analysis Resource:

• Easy Step by Step Guide to Finding Low Quality Links

And some good automated tools:

• Link Detox
• Remove’em
• SEOgadgets Link API Extension for Excel.

It's hard when you're competitors are building similar links. Unfortuneatly we don't always know why Google targets some links and not others. The truth is you know you have low quality links, you know your rankings went down, and probably the only thing to do about it is try to clean them up, disavow as a last resort, and file a reconsideration request.

I've got some tips in this post here: http://moz.com/blog/google-disavow-tool

Really great question that boils down to economics, scale and accuracy more than anything else.

The good news is that independent testing has shown that Moz keyword tracking, especially in the PRO campaigns (which uses slightly more sophisticated tech than the stand alone Rank Tracker) provides a greater degree of accuracy than most other providers.

The biggest hurdle to daily tracking is processing power. When you track as many keywords as SEOmoz across various search engines across the globe, it actually requires more processing power than other companies have to muster. At scale, this causes multiple challenges, including cost and server resources.

Tracking also means checking with Google, so Moz has to be careful about not violating Google's TOS (terms of service) by making large requests. Other companies play loose and fast with Google's rules - and that's something Moz won't risk as the data is too valuable for our customers.

And because keywords naturally fluctuate daily, we've found that tracking keywords once per week provides more actionable metrics for most folks.

Glad you got it. The code I like to use:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Of course, replacing "domain" with your own domain.

Let us know if you need any more help.

Hi Corbis,

Man, you've got some tough questions! i may have to call in some outside support on this one if we can't figure it out.

First of all, are you getting the indexation #s from Google Webmaster Tools? What I mean by this - is Google saying there are 6000 URLs in your sitemap, but they are only indexing 3,481?

When I unzipped the compressed sitemap file, it opened fine in my browser, while the 2nd uncompressed file did not. Are they identical? And have you submitted both to Google?

There could be many reasons why you're getting the XML parsing error. One issue might be in the second line, referencing http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1/ as a Schema location, because this is an html webpage and not an XML or DTD file. You might try removing the reference to this URL, and see if that helps.

Otherwise, if Google is reporting the correct number of URLs and Images, then you know they are aware of those URLs, and the problem may not be with the sitemap. Google doesn't necessarily index all URLs in a sitemap, but instead bases it's indexing on factors like your domain authority, link structure and crawl allowance. Addressing these issues will usually help get more pages indexed than a sitemap alone.

So if you can improve internal crawl errors, duplicate content issues, and make sure there is a good navigational architecture to your site, you should see a good rise in indexations.

Hi Jesse,

aHrefs does an awesome job visualizing their anchor text reports, I agree. We're working on updating how we visualize data in Open Site Explorer in our long term plans. Lots of cool things in all of our products.

That said, the quality of the data in the OSE anchor text report is damn fine

Jesse,

Just this week, Squidoo announced they are now making all external links "nofollow".

http://hq.squidoo.com/squid-news/changing-link-status-on-squidoo/

Links to squidoo.com will still be followed (internal links)

OSE is based on data a few weeks old. The changes on Squidoo.com will be updated in a few weeks.

1. Ideally, but not always the case with smaller sites, local sites and folks who can't get their own branded domain. But you are correct, there's a great deal of difference between a keyword rich domain and a non-keyword domain.

Unfortunately, there's no "correct" answer to the ideal ratio, although 90% branded seems incredibly high to me. In fact, I wish fewer of SEOmoz's inbound links were branded, as we could benefit from more variety.

Here's a video I made on anchor text

Along with some related resources which address the topic:

• Are We Over Engineering the Link Graph?
• Backing Up The Brand – Are Over Optimised Link Profiles A Barrier To Top 5 Rankings?
• How to Unnaturally Naturally Vary Your Anchor Text

Hello Mr. Smith (I love saying that)

Taking a look at the URL you provided: http://www.keepitpersonal.co.uk/silver-personalised-noahs-ark-money-box-p-108.html....

...I wouldn't guess that keyword stuffing is a cause for concern. In fact, I like the recent engravings box as it adds a nice touch to the information on the site. I also didn't find it spammy at all.

The design is a little "busy" and perhaps outdated - sometimes with edge cases this is enough to trigger a Panda update - especially if you have poor user engagement metrics, but I couldn't find any duplicate content and overall the site seems structurally sound.

I know you're hesitant to blame the link profile, but 80% of the time it's the culprit in these cases. The difference between what you and your competitors are doing is not always fair, but more based on what Google defines as "unnatural" at the moment.

I ran your URL through Remove'em link analyzer - http://www.removeem.com/ which loosely identified 285 "suspicious" links. You can do the same sort of analysis with these 2 other tools as well:

• http://tools.seogadget.co.uk/
• http://www.linkdetox.com/

Looking at the backlink profile in Open Site Explorer, we see a lot of comment signature links and directory listings, both types of links that were targeted by Penguin and/or over-optimization filters.

I'd check Google Webmaster Tools for any messages and/or errors. Even if you didn't get a link notice, you can file a reconsideration request to see if they will verify a penalty. Sometimes this will get you more information then you had before. In any case, it might be well worth it to do a complete link audit and cleanup, and even go through the disavow process if necessary.

Just my 2 cents. I know it's probably not the best news you want to hear, but I really like your site and want to see you succeed!

Hi Hexpress,

Mobile is hard.

First of all, I understand why you have a mobile version of your site. Although Google supports this, they recommend to instead use responsive web design to serve your content - which keeps everything on a single URL. This reduces the chance for errors and in general delivers a better experience for users.

• It keeps your desktop and mobile content on a single URL, which is easier for your users to interact with, share, and link to and for Google’s algorithms to assign the indexing properties to your content.

• Google can discover your content more efficiently as we wouldn't need to crawl a page with the different Googlebot user agents to retrieve and index all the content.

From the official Google Webmaster Blog

But in your case, this may not be an option. For separate URLs, Google recommends using a combination of both canonical tags and alternate tags. Google explains that it works like this:

On the desktop page, add:

and on the mobile page, the required annotation should be:

This rel="canonical" tag on the mobile URL pointing to the desktop page is required.

You can also add the "alternate" annotation to your desktop sitemap. More information here.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO!

Hi Daniel,

Disclaimer: I'm not a data scientist and can't speak to the mathematically specifics of how much "juice" a particular link will pass in terms of Moz Metrics (Domain Authorithy, Page Authority, MozTrust) but I can tell you the answer depends on several variables, including but not limited to:

• Specific authority metrics of the linking page
• Number of links on the page

And from Google's point of view especially, factors such as the position of the link on the page, relevance of the page/domain and anchor text are just a few considerations at play.

In fact, beyond the pure mathematically calculations, there are literally dozens of factors that determine the value of link. For a good introduction to the subject, one of my all-time favorite blog posts was written by my boss Rand:

http://moz.com/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links

Hope this helps!

Hi Andrea,

First of all, I'm sorry to hear your rankings dropped. It's possible your site was hit by recent Penguin updates. Previous Penguin updates targeted entire domains, while the latest edition is said to target individual pages, which might make sense of why your blog is showing up above your main site.

Regardless, it's likely one Google update or another targeted your backlinks (assuming you don't have any other issues plaguing your site)

Regardless, the producer in these cases are always the same.

!. If you haven't done so, do a full site audit to identify any problems. If you run a Moz campaign, much of this work is probably already done for you.

http://moz.com/blog/how-to-perform-the-worlds-greatest-seo-audit

2. Look for messages from Google's webmaster Tools for clues as to what might be causing the issue.

3. Perform a link audit. There are two ways to do this, and you should likely do both:

• Manual: http://www.stateofsearch.com/step-by-step-guide-finding-low-quality-links/
• Automated: There are several options, but my current favorite is called "Link Detox"

4. Work to remove any poison links and file a reconsideration request.

5. As a last resort, disavow any links you can't remove that you believe are hurting you.

6. Continue to build great content and high authority links.

This is a lengthy process, but it's possible what caused your rankings to drop is fairly simple and you'll discover it early in the process.

Best of luck!

The Linkscape index, which feeds Open Site Explorer, is updated every few weeks - or on average about once per month.

You can find a calendar of the updates here - http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/w/page/25141119/Linkscape%20Schedule

Here's how the process works: The Linkscape crawlers explore the entire web - this generally takes at least 2 weeks. Then another couple of weeks are spent processing this information (it's a lot of processing!) So in theory, by the time it is released, the index could contain some links up to 3-4 weeks old. In edge cases, for example it's been 3-4 weeks since the last update, the links could be up to 6-7 weeks old.

Only links that were found in the last crawl are included. Unfortunately, there's not much you can do to speed this up.

That said the vast majority of these links will still exist. Linkscape has built in biases for links with permanence. This helps deal with the fact that 50% of the web disappears every year.

Hope this helps! Best of luck.

This used to be best practice... but I suspect the technique has lost most of it's usefulness.

The reason is that Google can now render CSS - and has been able to for some time. It's also better at context analysis - meaning it knows and understands sidebar content vs. footer content vs. editorial content.

What is important is how much of your content is above the fold and prominently displayed to users.

PRO tip: Enter your URL into the Browser Size tool from Google to see how visitors see your page.

http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/

If you find that you have too much non-essential content in your code that over-whelms your more important, unique content (such as the elaborate drop-down menu you describe) - folks often see improvements in rankings by trimming down their navigation and reducing their template footprint. Something to consider.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!