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By Domain Rank, do you mean Domain Authority?
You can manipulate Domain Authority by redirecting a bunch of high authority pages to your domain. If you stopped the redirects, the Domain Authority would drop again. If this is what happened, it's not something a reputable SEO would do.
Typically, it Domain Authority updates every few weeks, usually within a month, maximum.
If your site resolves to https, then it's likely Google will display it that way. I haven't seen any click-through studies of https vs non, so it's hard to say how having the https will effect you. That said, I have seen correlation studies that say shorter domain names are better correlated with higher rankings, so you may be onto something.
If I want to get rid of https from showing will that mean I have to take the certificate from the homepage and just have it on the relevant pages of my website?
Yes, if you remove the https from the homepage then Google won't display it.
Fairly certain rel=canonical is not what you're looking for here, as even if you point it to http I suspect Google will likely ignore it.
Hope this helps!
Hi Robert,
The SEOmoz crawler is set to ignore title tags on certain non-html files, such as pdfs. That said, there are still some errant file extensions out there that it will attempt to read. These are rare, but it does happen.
From an SEO point of view, there's nothing you really need to do with these files. If you wanted, you could place a rel="nofollow" on any link that you didn't want robots to crawl, or block them with robots.txt, just to be sure. But from a search point of view, Google and the other engines are pretty sophisticated with these types of files so this is probably unnecessary.
As a side note, Google is getting increasingly good at reading some types of non-html files, like pdfs, so it's often advantages to have these indexed.
If you are seeing errors in your campaign caused by these files, feel free to contact the help team (help@seomoz.org) and let them know.
Hope this helps! Best of luck.
The obvious answer (but not necessarily the correct one) is you lost some important links pointing to your website somewhere. This would cause a drop in your metrics, and could cause a corresponding drop in your organic traffic.
I might run a check with Majectic to look at your historic backlink profile, and also Google Webmaster tools Impressions report, to see if it matches the drop in traffic you've found.
Are you aware of any links that you've lost? You can comb through your referrer data in Google Analytics to see if any good sources suddenly dried up in the weeks/months leading up to the drop.
On the other hand, it could all be coincidence. The drop in DA could be a random event caused by the Mozscape crawlers simply missing an important set of links, which happens occasionally. And the drop in rankings could be due to an algorythm change (Check the Google Algo Update History to see if any of the dates match up)
If you find any missing links, you can work to regain them. Otherwise the only way back is probably to build new, better links.
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO!
Hi,
I'm going to answer with 2 separate and very excellent blog posts that can answer the question much better than I can:
There are also a number of automated tools out there link Link Detox, but a manual review is always necessary before disavowing links.
Also keep in mind that although Panda might have some backlink elements baked in as part of the algorithm, most people consider Panda to be mostly caused by on-site issues, such as duplicate content. You may want to do a bit of digging into recovering from Panda penalties, including removing thin and duplicate content, and improving on site experiences, before removing links.
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.
I agree that bounce rate can be deceiving, as well as time on site and pages per visit. But they do correlate well with engagement and the ability of your site to answer questions.
Yes, a visitor can get the answer question and leave right away. Meaning a high bounce rate and low time on site. But what happens when a visitor lands on your site and gets drawn in - perhaps because you answered another question the visitor didn't even know they had?
I've seen my rankings increase shortly after a rise in time on site or a decrease in bounce rate. It's difficult to tie these imply a relationship between the two, but it works generally well enough that I'm happy to keep looking at these metrics.
Hi Nikos,
Sorry about the trouble with Greek keywords. Almost all of the newer SEOmoz tools, including the PRO platform, are enabled to handle all major character sets, including those found in Greek.
That said, a few of the older tools, such as the Rank Tracker, have trouble with certain characters. In these cases new and better tools are on the way, so the old tools probably won't be fixed.
If you are having trouble with any of the PRO tools understanding Greek, feel free to write the help team (help@seomoz.org) and let them know what words you are having trouble with and where.
Thanks for the heads up!
For some reason I can't "thumb" up any comments, but these are all good answers.
In Ian's case, 40 domains is a reasonable amount. Most websites will have many more than this, often in the 100's or 1000's of spammy, low-quality links that they paid for over time.
Also, there's no guarantee Google will ever lift the penalty, even if you remove 100's of links and submit multiple fully documented reinclusion requests to the Google Web Spam Team. I've known SEO's that have literally sent 1000s of emails and removed 100's of links to no avail. I've also seen smaller sites remove just a handful of links and their rankings bounce right back.
Here's how I would tackle the problem:
1. Do you think you can reasonably remove 60-75% of the links? Or at least have a VERY good reason why you can't? Anything beneath this level and you'll most likely be fighting an uphill battle with Google.
2. In some cases, even if you've been penalized by bad links, some of those bad links still help you - even at reduced traffic levels. So you may be penalized, but you're still seeing more traffic than you would otherwise. In a few cases it's not worth it to remove the links at all.
3. Finally, as Ian said, how many good links do you have? If the sight is truly burned, can you walk away from the good links without too much regret? If the answer is yes, it may be time to start over.
There's no right answer for all circumstances, so weigh your options carefully.
All companies use different link indexes, so in a sense all of them are estimated to some degree. Google has the largest link index, but even then, it doesn't always "count" all the links in it's index as relevant.
Moz tries hard to include the links most likely to "count" and pass link equity. While no system is perfect, we're pretty proud of ours. Ahrefs and Majestic both have solid link indexes as well, both with their strengths and weaknesses.
I am unsure why you are not able to access more than 40-41 links for your competitors. We do limit the number of links to any given domain to 25. (meaning if Moz links to you 100 times, we'll only show you 25 of them). if you think it's another issue, feel free to give us the URL or if you'd like to keep it private you can ask the help team at help at moz.com. Hope this helps. Cheers.
I'm certainly not an expert, and I'm not sure this will help, but...
...if you're formatting it with the brackets as in the example above, the tag may not authenticate properly. Try removing the brackets, like so:
OSE defaults to page-specific metrics, so you have to a little digging to get to the domain level metrics. There are a couple of ways (or more) to get there.
Hit the "Compare Link Metrics" tab. Here you can compare metrics at the Page, Subdomain and Root Domain Level. If you scroll towards the bottom, you should be able to find those root domain metrics that reference those 315 links from 4 domains.
To get a more granular view of these links, you can use the various filter functions on each page.
For example, on the Inbound links tab, you can use the dropdowns to select "all links" from "only external" to "pages on this root domain". By using various sorting options you'll arrive at different numbers, depending on what you are looking for. You can apply similar filters to the other tabs, as well as use the advanced report section to create custom reports.
Let me know if this makes sense. I hope it helps! Best of luck with your SEO!
Hi Marisa,
I'm no .htaccess expert, but that code looks a little wonky to me. Is it complete? I see lots of rewrite conditions, but not rewrite rules.
Second problem, when I run the https version through a server header check, it looks like the redirect serves a 302 status code, which indicates a temporary move and passes no link juice. Oh no!
So the first thing I would do is to make sure that any Rewrite rules in your htaccess file contain a 301 directive like this: [R=301,L]
For Example, the following might work:
<code>RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !^on$
RewriteRule (.*) http://yourdomain/$1 [R=301,L]</code>
So the first thing I would do is to make sure that any Rewrite rules in your htaccess file contain a 301 directive like this: [R=301,L]
Another option to consider is making your entire site secure to https. Many websites are moving this way, and Google has no problem crawling and ranking these sites appropriately. The important thing is to make sure you act consistently, and get those 302's solved!
It is odd that you have proper canonical tags and Google still displays the https version, but after you get this sorted out things will likely resolve themselves.
Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!
Here's the list in question: http://moz.com/community/recommended#link-building
Let's put it this way: based on my experience with the companies on this list, there are very few I wouldn't recommend as a link building partner.
Obviously, some companies are more specialized than others. Some companies specialize in link building, while others offer it as part of a larger, integrative service.
It's a good bet if the agency has a dedicated service page that describes their link building process in any sort of detail, that it's something they specialize in. Cost is another consideration, and most companies should be upfront with you about this.
Sorry I don't have any good examples of universal organic rankings. You might have better results with personalized rankings, i.e. Google+ posts. http://moz.com/blog/using-google-plus-to-appear-in-the-top-results-every-time-whiteboard-friday
As Christy mentioned, it's very hard to find these types of results in the wild as any page with decent social metrics is linked to by aggregators like Topsy, All-top, etc.
We did do an experiment on this a couple of years ago. http://moz.com/blog/do-tweets-still-effect-rankings
Hi Gabe,
That would be a cool feature. Unfortunately, at this time there isn't a method for adjusting reports to a specific time period.
The ranking tab has an option for downloading your entire ranking history to csv. You can manipulate this data in Excel to create time-based ranking reports.
As for custom reports, these are generated on a weekly or monthly basis, but not for historical data. If this is a feature you would like to see, feel free to submit it to the PRO feature request forum, where members can vote on it to put it in the queue.
Thanks for suggestions, and best of luck with your SEO!
Howdy,
Depends on your definition of self-referencing links, as there are several degrees.
Normal internal links (1) are an important part of any website and give search engines important clues about relevance, site structure, and how to flow signals like PageRank. Internal links are very important for SEO, but also the most easy to abuse, so you can get yourself in trouble if you overdo it with aggressive over linking or over-optimized anchor text. And keep in mind that while internal links are important, they don't pack near the punch as authoritative external links.
Internal anchors (2) such as http://example.com#football are also important for navigation, and Google does use them often for clues about content and structure. You'll often see internal anchors show up in search results, especially for sites like Wikipedia.
Finally, I don't see any value in the truly self-referencing link (3). A page that points to itself seems like a mistake, and using it to game a search engine is most likely a bad idea.
As for authoritative sources, you could look at the 2011 Ranking Factors, which shows that the # of internal links on the page is fairly correlated with high rankings. (and notice the anchor in that link, as well 
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO!
The ethics of the Internet dictate that you
This isn't a new issue. Link networks and sites have blocked crawlers and manipulated Google for years. Fortuneatly, it's only a small fraction of the web. Also, it unlikely links from those networks have much value, so crawl priority would be super low anyway.
Actually, it could be viewed as beneficial when blackhat sites block OSE and aHrefs, because those sites often get penalized by Google, but 3rd party crawlers have no way to know this, so blocking effectively keeps them out of the indexes.
In my limited experience, 301's will redirect +1's, as Arjen said.
For example, this page http://moz.com/blog/how-to-rank gained most of it's +1's before a 301 redirect, and those plus 1's are now associated with the page.
I'm a little late to the party, but I want to summarize what I see as the answer.
1. The "Search Engine Blocked by Robots.txt" is only a warning, and not an error. If you intend for these pages not to get crawled (and it does seem like you have a good reason for this), then there is nothing to worry about.
2. The reason the warning appears for MSNbot and not Google is that currently, your robots.txt allows Google to crawl those files. As Daniel pointed out, you would need to add the identical directives to your robots.txt file to make this happen. Does that make sense? Or you could just add all of these files under the * directive to apply to all robots.
Hi there,
You've got the right idea, but let me suggest another tactic.
It's true that search functions can generate 1000's of urls that all tend to look like one another. Google suggests that you keep search result pages non-indexed, as these pages offer very little value and create tons of duplicate content.
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content
Here's one way to handle your situation:
1. Put a meta "noindex,follow" tag in your search pages header, like this:
This tells search engines not to index the page, but allows them to follow the links on the page and flow link juice.
2. Hopefully you have a good site architecture and ways for search engines to discover your content. After step one, you can put a directive in your robots.txt file to block that directory from being crawled.
Something like:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /search/
Which blocks anything in the search directory.
3. Find out if search engines have already indexed a lot of your search pages by performing a site: search in Google, like so:
site:yourdomain.com/search
If you find pages in Google's index that shouldn't be there, you can use Google Webmasters URL removal tool to take these out of the index. You can remove the entire search directory with a single request.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1663427
This is a powerful and sometimes dangerous tool, so be careful!
4. Finally, if you'd like to add "nofollow" to your search results pages, this should be fine, but only after you've completed the steps above.
Keep in mind, this is only one possible solution. If you have significant link juice flowing through your search results, this strategy may not be the best. But in general, you want to keep search results out of Google's index, so I'm comfortable recommending this strategy for 90% of all cases.
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.