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Hi Jacob,

This isn't uncommon. OSE and Mozscape crawl the web and do their best to report on links most likely to influence rankings and traffic, but they don't report all links. The latest index, I believe, is around 90 Billion links. It's a pretty good index, but we can do better, and have plans to do better going forward:

http://moz.com/products/api/updates

We do a good job of finding/reporting the most important links on the web, but sometimes we miss a few links on less popular pages.

My friend Aaron Wheeler gave this explanation of how our crawlers work:

"We update our Linkscape Index every 3 to 5 weeks. Crawling the whole internet to look for links takes 2-3 weeks. And then we’ve got 1-2 weeks of processing to do on those links to determine which are the most important links etc. You can see a schedule of how often we update, and planned updates here.

Linkscape focuses on a breadth-first approach, and thus we nearly 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 points to those pages will still be available). Finally, the URLs seen by Linkscape 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 may not be indexed yet, give it some time – maybe we’ll see it in OSE and Linkscape next month.

Best of luck!
Aaron"

I'm unaware of any study that shows increased website size has a positive effect on rankings. Lot's of spam sites have over 1,000,000 pages, in the vain attempt to rank for anything, but it doesn't seem to help them. That said, there are some secondary consideration that size brings with it.

For example, large sites may have indexation problems if they don't have enough PageRank/Authority for a full crawl.

Conversely, large site will often contain more content, thereby presenting more ranking opportunities.

I can't tell you for certain that redirecting the pages will help you, or hurt you for that matter. In the end you should make the decision based on what's best for user experience. But one thing I'm fairly certain of is that there's little chance that site size is a ranking factor.

Daniel gave the correct answer, all SEOmoz link metrics come from the Linkscape index. This is the same data found in Open Site Explorer, the API, the MozBar, SEOmoz PRO platform and all other SEOmoz tools.

All indexes (including Google, Yahoo, and Linkscape) count links differently. The vast majority of links on the web are "junk" that quickly disappeer and count very little or none at all for SEO purposes, so a big part of the Linkscape Index is an iterative process of "cleaning" and verifying the links before the Index is published every few weeks.

This difficulty was highlighted by our friends at Majestic when they wrote a guest post for the SEOmoz blog on Why Counting Links is not So Easy.

Regarding the Keyword Difficulty Tool, link metrics are only one part of a larger formula for calculating difficulty. Because all queries use the same Linkscape data to calculate difficulty, the score is relative so changes in link counts generally don't become a factor.

Hi Jake,

Thanks for the question.

First off, I highly recommend reading this article by Dr. Pete: How Many Links are Too Many? (he get's asked this question a lot!)

Short answer: over 100 links isn't necessarily bad. If you're consolidating those links via rel=canonical Google is likely doing this in their crawl, and therefor reducing the crawling of every single URL in order to save bandwidth. If those pages rel canonical to each other, you may not have a problem. I would recommend checking your parameter settings in Google Webmaster Tools, just to be safe.

That said, I've often found that reducing the number of links on a page often improves user experience. There's a certain psychology around limiting choices that makes decisions easier for users. I'm not saying this is right for your situation, but it's always best to question your assumptions.

Cheers.

There's little or no evidence that changing the IP by itself will effect on your rankings or traffic, unless you move to a really slow server or a blacklisted neighborhood - but it doesn't seem like something you need to worry about.

Hopefully the speed improvements will be a big boost to your visitors, which may indirectly effect your SEO in a positive way!

Actually, the specific situation with G+ is an interresting question. Let me ask our engineers about this rand see if we can find some answers going forward.

There's a 100 different ways to do this, but typically my favorite approach is to try to work the synonym into the same copy without seeming spammy.
For example, if my primary keyword is "GMO" and my very literal synonym is "Genetically Modified Organism" then I'd try to work both variations into the copy.

<title>GMO Dangers - Knowing the Risks of Genetically Modified Organisms</title>

Here's a great article that goes into depth about the advantages of incorporating multiple variants into your SEO targeting http://cognitiveseo.com/blog/5370/941-traffic-increase-exploiting-the-synonyms-seo-ranking-technique/

This is a common question the SEOmoz help team often receives. In almost 100% of cases, rogerbot (the SEOmoz) crawler, is picking up links hidden on the page.

This is what is great about the PRO platform - it often picks up on problems not visible to the eye.

Two easy way to find links:

1. Install the Mozbar and use the highlight link function. If you are unfamiliar with it, watch the video here to get an overview of how it works. This will show you visible links.
2. For hidden links, you can use tools like Xenu or Screaming Frog, but in cases like this it's best to view the page source and look for something unusual. Depending on your browser, go to the page and Right Click > View Source.

Also, don't forget universal navigation links. Do you have a drop-down navigation that contains extra links? Also, some website use javascript for fly-out type menus that display links only when users hover over them.

If you're still having trouble, feel free to private message me and I can take a look at your site, or feel free to write the help team (help@seomoz.org)

Best of luck!

It generally takes about a week for our crawlers to recrawl your site and process the data. You can find the date of the last and next crawl in your campaign, in your campaign overview.

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Hi Brett,

I assume you want to keep the new hosting? And your domain is still on the test URL? There are a lot of ways to do this. The method below is just one. First you want to transfer your wordpress site to a directory with your new URL.

1. With your new hosting company, you'll set up a new domain (name of the domain you want to host) but don't change any DNS settings or change your nameservers yet.

2. You'll have to transfer all your files to that new domain. This means copying all the files over and adjusting your database settings, if need be.

Couple of guides to help out:
http://www.seo.com/blog/site-migration-cheat-sheet-quickly-easily-move-wordpress-to-a-new-domain/

http://yoast.com/move-wordpress-blog-domain-10-steps/

3. When your files are all set up, you can change your nameservers. There might be some downtime if everything isn't configured right in your wordpress files, so it's best do do this during down time.

If you don't have too much downtime, the SEO impact should be minimal and short-term, at best.

Hope this helps. Best of luck!

I'm going to take the easy way out and side-step the topic of PageRank, which Alan covers well, and raise the issue of relevance and weighting based on reasonable surfer assumptions.

Generally speaking,

1. the first link on a page passes the most relevance, and
2. links from unique domains pass more equity than links from previously linking sites. Meaning each new link from the same domain doesn't pass as much equity as the first link from that domain. It's the law of diminishing returns. http://moz.com/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links

From a practical point of view, I try to get the highest link on a page. After that, I don't worry too much about additional links to the same domain on that page. But there are a lot of factors that play into this, and your situation may differ.

Ranking signals are extremely complex, and On-page SEO is only a fraction of the pie (although sometimes it's a very large piece!)

For a broader perspective, run your keyword through Moz's Keyword Analysis Tool - then run a "full" report. This will show you dozens of on-page and external ranking factors for the top ten websites returned for that search query.

.... and this still isn't the full story.

Questions like this help us learn how Google's search algorithm work, and why some sites rank higher than others, even when we don't expect it. Keep questioning everything!

This is a really interesting question, because Google webmaster doesn't actually display rankings, but "average position."

For example, let's say you rank #1 for a keyword phrase, but another URL on your same site ranks #50. In this case Google will report your average position as 25! Now this is an extreme example, but "average position" in Google Webmaster tools is almost always lower than your actual ranking.

Or consider the example below. SEOmoz ranks #1 for "seomoz" but Google Webmaster reports the average position as 4. It doesn't really make any sense.

Hi Micheal,

First of all, congratulations on your endeavor. Looks like you've done a lot of hard work and you should be congratulated for your efforts.

Finding a good SEO firm can be both challenging and rewarding. The range of talent out there runs from super to snake oil salesman. Whoever you hire, be sure to do some research. Ask for a list of clients and recommendations (sometimes, for practical reasons, they can't provide this) Talk to folks who have used the service. Ask about certifications, training, philosophy and influences. And most importantly, ask about the techniques they will use.

A good place to start is the SEOmoz Recommended list, although most of these folks might be out of your price range.

A lot of good SEOs hang out here in the Q&A, and if you check their reputation you can often find a good "up-and-comer" that doesn't charge an arm and a leg for SEO services.

First and foremost, I'd look for a firm experienced in link building, especially in your situation. Wish I could suggest someone specific, but you fall in that tight area between doing it yourself, and hiring an outstanding firm.

Regardless, best of luck with your SEO!

It also depends how you set up your campaign in the setup process.

For example, if you set up a "subdomain" crawl for example.com, it will only track keywords for example.com and not www.example.com (because the www is a different subdomain)

To track keywords for www.example.com, you can do one of two things:

1. Set up a subdomain crawl specifically for www.example.com
2. Or set up a root domain crawl for example.com

The second solution will record ALL rankings for anything found with *example.com in the url, which picks up both the www and non-www version.

Here's a post from Rand that explains this in a bit more detail: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/subfolders-root-domains-linkscape-update-more

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO!

Hi Jacob,

Sorry for the late response. We're working on including more links from HTTPS websites (i.e. Google+) which is something we haven't been able to previously do before. But our new crawling technology should be able to handle this no problem. Look for it soon!

Hi Dee,

My understanding of 1&1 WebsiteBuilder is that it is extremely limited on the amount of control you enjoy in altering things like title tags, meta data, etc.

Theoretically, you could use robots.txt to block Google from crawling the sitemap, then submit an URL removal request, but in reality this is probably unnecessary.

The same goes for the two main URLs, one with the trailing slash "/" and one without. Although technically these are different URLs, in reality Google will almost always treat them the same, and not ding you for duplicate content/title tags.

So my best advice would be not worry too much about it. Glad to see you're learning some SEO and building websites. When you're up for it, you should graduate to a more advanced website platform, like Wordpress, where you can exercise a greater degree of control.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

Interesting. I can only imaging that the company that created your local subdomain pages is promoting those pages through local optimization over your root domain, and that's why they are ranking - although this is only a guess.

On one hand, we often get questions about the subdomain/root issue. The simple answer is: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Google often associates your subdomian with your root, so moving it doesn't always mean an improvement in rankings.

On the other hand, duplicate content is a problem. In this case it might be worth it to 301 redirect the duplicate content to your main domain, and drop the stuff that is duplicated from your other sites.

To address your final question, what you do in the local space can impact your regular SEO, because there is some overlap between the two. One often influences the other.

Hope this gives you some points to think about. Best of luck!

You've touched on a tricky and delicate issue. As you've noted, Google's TOS specifically forbid automated queries, but rank checking services all over the world need to collect this data.

Although I can't tell you exactly how SEOmoz does it (it's part of the secret sauce), I can tell you it's done in a manner that's as Google friendly as possible - we want to stay on their good side.

Rest assured that the rank checking SEOmoz does will not effect your site in anyway. In fact, because SEOmoz is checking keywords (some you don't even rank for) and not your site specifically, there is no way to associate the queries with your website. This is one of the advantages of using a 3rd party rank checker.

Hi Scott,

Let me be very specific about what we're talking about. To be clear, no you can't get penalized for too much internal exact match anchor text, but you can hurt your rankings.

It's very common to have site-wide internal anchor text on your website, all with the same anchor text, all pointing to the same page - especially if it's in the navigation. For example, SEOmoz has literally 100,000 links pointing to it's tools page with the anchor text "research tools"

That said, it's best to vary your anchor text the best you can, and be careful where you place it. Sitewide anchor text in your footer is probably the least valuable spot (and potentially the most harmful) followed by the sidebar and header. The best anchor text is often editorial links within the main text body, using natural, non-repeating phrases.

Hmmm... now that I read your question again, it probably does look unnatural if every blog post has the same anchor text in it, pointing to your homepage. Best to clean that up.

And check out this latest Whiteboard Friday on internal linking.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!