Welcome to the Q&A Forum

In our last Ranking Factors Correlation study, Domain Authority had a 0.29 correlation, which is one of the stronger correlations we measure.

The strongest metric, Page Authority, showed a .39 correlation.

The idea of Domain Authority is that comparing 2 websites... all other things being equal... one is more likely to rank than the other. A significant portion of the weighting factors in Domain Authority is links. As Google shifts the significance of links, this changes.

But as you've observed, in the real world things are rarely equal. Moz is also working on spam scoring to help us better discount links that Google may likely be ignoring.

Interestingly, with all the talks about links and Google, what's surprising is how important links still are. Metrics like DA and PA haven't changed that much in their ability to gauge ranking potential. Perhaps someday we'll need new signals. For now they are still reliably useful.

You basically have two options, both explored by the other community members (I thumbed them up)

Solution One - Migrate your Wordpress blog to your primary domain. This would involve moving the files, the database, the whole shebang. There are various guides online how to do this:

• http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress
• http://yoast.com/move-wordpress-blog-domain-10-steps/

Pay close attention to the Yoast post, as he has some suggestions for 301'ing your old URLs to your new URLs.

Solution Two - Reverse Proxy, as James suggested.(big thumbs up!)

In either case, consider this the same as a site migration, and be sure to catalog and redirect your URLs appropriately. Richard Baxter wrote a great couple of posts about this:

• https://seogadget.co.uk/surviving-seo-site-migration/.
• https://seogadget.co.uk/domain-migration/

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

I don't have any real world experience with these terms, but if I understand correctly, your asking if Google is treating the intent of "lawyer" and "attorney" as the same.

The only way I know to investigate is to search Google for similar terms, like Seattle Lawyer and Seattle Attorney. If we do this for a dozen searches there seems to be some overlap of intent, but it's certainly not 100%.

That said, I think Google would interpret "dog bite lawyer" and "dog bite attorney" as pretty darn close semantic matches, which if overdone could lead to a Panda, duplicate content like situation. I'd probably try to target these terms on the same page, and consolidate my unique content as much as possible.

Hope this helps! Best of luck.

Hi Niall,

This isn't a case of the canonical tag being properly applied, but a case where two or more pages are so similar in code that they are setting off the SEOmoz duplicate content flags.

First of all, those pages look different to us humans. But the SEOmoz web app uses a similarity threshold of 95% of the html code. This takes everything on the page, both hidden and visible into account.

In this case, it's counting all of the navigation and sidebar as well, which is significant. What's left of the unique content - the part that matters, makes up less than 5% of the code.

Here's a tool you can use to check the similarity: http://www.duplicatecontent.net/

I ran the pages through a couple of tools which showed 98% HTML similarity. And 99% text similarity.

For perspective, take a look at Google's cached versions of one of these pages. This is how googlebot sees the page: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:mdybPKIjOxUJ:www.fredaldous.co.uk/craft-shop/general-crafts.html+http://www.fredaldous.co.uk/craft-shop/general-crafts.html&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1

That, as we say, is a lot of links!

Since Panda, when I see a site with this many navigation links, I usually advise them to restructure their site architecture into more of a Pyramid shape, so that you reduce the overall navigation on each page.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Good news, you can set up the On-page reports to grade any URL you desire.

By default, the On-page function generates reports for keywords ranking in the top 50 of your given search engine, for the URL showing in the search result. But sometimes this is not the URL you wish to grade.

For example, your "Contact Us" page ranks #5 for the keyword phrase "Yellow Shoes" and the Web App grades it a B. What if you really want to target your homepage for this keyword phase? Here’s how:

1. Hit Report Card at the top of the On-page summary.

2. Choose your Keyword you want to grade. The keyword must already be included in your   campaign. Select Manage Keywords if you need to add keywords.

3. Enter the URL of the page you would like to grade.

4. Hit Grade My On-Page Optimization to generate your report.

To stop a particular keyword/URL combination, you can hit "Stop Running Weekly" button on the report card page itself. It's also possible to grade multiple URLs for the same keyword.

Read more here....  http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/20034412-on-page-reports

Hi Thomas,

The layman's definition of a "top-page" is a URL that has a lot of links pointing at it. These are URL that have more links and authority pointed at them then other URLs on your site, so they are considered "top pages"

OSE updates about 1x month, so is it possible that these URLs used to exist, but now have moved? For example, did you rearrange or delete any images? Off the top of my head, this is the most reasonable explanation.

In this case it's probably not that big of deal, as it appears that there were no external linking domains to these URLs. When the photo disappeared, I assume the internal link on your site to it disappeared as well.

That said, best practice is to redirect any missing URLs via 301 to an appropriate location, so that when search robots or visitors try to find them they aren't left with a blank page, and you preserve all the authority you've earned in link juice.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

Hi Sebes,

Good question. There's a lot of outdated information around the "only the first anchor text" count rules. In general, this is to believed true for text links. A couple years back a smart SEO specifically tested if the rule holds true when the first link is an image alt, and he found that the rule did not apply to images when the image was the first link. Unfortunately, this was quite awhile ago and I can no longer find the research.

To my knowledge, it's high time for another experiment in this area, so I wouldn't say for certain whether this rule is true today or not.

What I can say is that anchor text sculpting using the technique you described probably doesn't help much. In fact, by making the image link followed, you have the opportunity to vary your anchor text to your target page (if indeed Google does count both anchors when the first is an image).

Like I said, we need more experimentation. But I would wager your clients traffic and rankings will not drop if they make those links followed.

Keep us posted!

It's quite common for Google to index robots.txt files. (and also, rather odd) But check out all of these robots.txt files:

https://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3Arobots.txt&pws=0&gl=us

So it's nothing to be alarmed by. With your particular query. "Site:website.com -www" it only shows pages indexed without the "www" so this just says that all the indexed pages most likely begin with www. The exception, of course, is the robots.txt file.

The bigger question for me is, why does Google cache robots.txt files? Oh well.

Ken, this is a really common problem with lots of eCommerce sites today. The problem is lots and lots of category pages with duplicate content/title tags.

First of all, consider what is best for your user. Is 100 products per page the best solution? You might need to test different scenarios to find out.

Second, how best to structure your category pages for maximum SEO benefit? The typical problems are:

• Pagination. Category - Page 2 often looks the same as Category Page 1.
• If the same products are in multiple categories, the categories themselves become near duplication.

The first solution is to make sure your products are properly categorized. If the same product is in 16 different categories, you might want to revisit that.

The second important step is to manage pagination. Adam Audette wrote a great article on Search Engine Land which covers the major pagination issues. It's well worth a read:

http://searchengineland.com/the-latest-greatest-on-seo-pagination-114284

Also, you may want to study how SEOmoz handles it's category pages. For example, consider Page 2 of the "Search Engine Trends" Category. Notice the title tag, meta robots tag, and use (or not) of the canonical tag.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

Ha! I always get myself into trouble when trying to answer these .htaccess questions. Someday I'll learn.

I'm not an expert, but here's one thing you can try. Make sure to backup your file before you attempt these, in case you break something you want to be able to quickly back it up. My suspicion is there are conflicting rules in the file that are causing the wrong redirection.

-Try changing your rewrite rules to the following format. The "L" indicates this is the last directive, and place no more rewriting rules on this condition.

RewriteRule ^tours2006.html http://www.petersommer.com/escorted-archaeological-tours/ [L,R=301]

If this doesn't work, let me know and I'll try to find someone who knows more.

Lots of good answers here. If I understand the question correctly, you're wondering if you should move to a keyword-rich domain in order to rank better for the "fabric"

One thing I noticed is that you seemed to have paid links in your backlink profile (or at least highly suspicious

Examples are:
http://www.squeezethestone.org/making-purchases-from-an-internet-fabric-store/
http://www.turkhukukenstitusu.org/category/fabric/

Although links like these might have helped Beverly's to rank well in the past, it looks like Google has identified these as part of a network, and devalued them. Did you receive any warnings in Google Webmaster Tools. If so, you might make an effort at cleaning these links up and filing a reconsideration request.

The problem is, if you migrate domains, and you 301 redirect your old domain, you carry your link profile with you. This means if any algorithmic actions were applied to the old domain, they could likely carry to any new domain you chose, where they would again inhibit you from ranking for your chosen term. The only other alternative would be to start over.

So here's what I would do...

• work on your backlink profile.
• Work with Google to clean up any potential penalties.
• Build new, clean, relevant links
• Check your title tags and internal link structure. To my eye, the word "fabric" seemed a little keyword stuffed, both in your titles and internal links.

I really like the domain name beverlys.com. It's an awesome name that a lot of marketers would die for! Don't let it go!

Hi Hfranz,

I took a look at your campaign and was unable to duplicate the errors, which leads me to believe it was a blip in the crawling. I'm speculating here, but my suspicion is that there was a miscommunication between your web server and the SEOmoz crawler, the end result being the crawler got sent on a wrong crawl path, and your server kept delivering the bad URLs.

Hopefully, things will return to normal after the next crawl. If not, feel free to contact the help team at help@seomoz.org.

You can also double check with Google Webmaster Tools, to see if there has been an increase in crawl errors or html suggestions.

Finally, your web server should be configured to deliver a 404 for these URLs that don't exist (www.example.com/testing.php/helloworld) Unfortunately, I can't tell you exactly how to do this, and you may need to find a developer with expertise in this area - but my guess is very little, or no, damage has been done.

Hi there,

Not sure I have enough information to weigh in on the first part of your question - Google will index whatever it sees on the page. If you deliver the content to Google, then they index it. The problem comes when you deliver different content to different users. Try a tool like SEO Browser to see how googlebot views your site.

http://www.seo-browser.com/

To answer your second question, its often hard to rank near-duplicate pages for specific cities/states without running into massive duplicate content problems. Matt Cutts himself actually addressed this awhile back. He basically stated if you have multiple pages all targeting different locations, it's best to include a few lines of unique content on each page (I recommend the top) to make each unique.

“In addition to address and contact information, 2 or 3 sentences about what is unique to that location and they should be fine,” Source

But this technique would be very hard with only 300 product page. The alternative, stuffing these pages with city/state information for every combination possible, is not advised.

http://www.seomoz.org/q/on-page-optimization-to-rank-for-multiply-cities

So in the end, it's actually not hard to rank for city-state keywords without having it in the URL, but the information should be in the content or other places like the title tag or internal link structure - but to do this for 1000's of locations with only 300 pages without keyword stuffing is near impossible.

The best thing to do is figure out how to create unique content for every page you want to rank for, and take that route.

For example, I might create a "Seattle" page, create unique content for the top of the page, then list 50 or so products with the unique Seattle prices. (This is a rough strategy - you'd have to refine it greatly to work for your situation.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Hi Matthew,

Excellent question, and one we should explore in more depth, research and write a blog post here at SEOmoz.

But the short answer is: yes. I've seen a lot of evidence in the past year that low quality backlinks pass through 301 redirects, almost as powerful as if you linked those bad links directly to the new domain.

We've seen more evidence of this lately, as Google cracks down harder on bad links, more webmasters are grumbling that that their 301s are hurting them.

Of course, the best solution to any bad redirected backlinks is to stop the 301. I've seen sites recover after doing this and heard evidence from other webmasters of this working, at least to a degree, in some situations.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

Hi Cesar,

Could be, yes. But it's not the number of links on the number of pages, but rather the quality & nature of those links and pages that matter more.

If it's lot's of low quality, exact match anchor text on lots of questionable sites, then definitely.

On the other hand, if you're only talking about the sheer number of links on your own pages, I haven't seen any evidence of this causing Penguin problems. On the other hand, if you have a ton of internal, heavily optimized links, it's easy to overdo it. How many links are too many?

Hi Ray,

First of all, I'm sorry to hear about your huge drop in traffic. it totally sucks. There's a lot of that going around these days, but it doesn't make you feel any better when it happens to you.

First things first, I wouldn't be too worried about the links from SiteLoki. It looks like an auto-generated site that probably links to millions of URLs, and Google is pretty good about discounting these types of links. It's not uncommon for most link profiles to contain something similar.

Here's the problem... paid link networks. A few weeks ago Google started deindexing link networks by the dozens, the most high profile being BMR. (http://searchengineland.com/google-eliminates-another-link-network-116513)

I pulled up your site's link profile on OSE and picked a number of URLs at random. Here's what I found:

• Link 1 - Not Paid, Indexed - http://www.examiner.com/article/retirement-means-time-to-think-futuristic-for-local-art-photographer
• Link 2 - Looks Paid - http://coolartdude.com/how-to-get-your-photo-on-canvas/
• Link 3 - Looks Paid - Also hidden text - http://goldcardreview.info/421712603coolche.php
• Link 4 - Looks Paid - http://waterproofcameraworld.com/blog/2011/03/31/photos-printed-on-canvas-a-unique-gift/
• Link 5 - Looks Paid - http://www.giftsandgadgetsnews.com/keep-fresh-and-live-pictures-with-canvas-prints-from-digital-photos/

So out of 5 random links, 4 of them look spammy and paid, and often have very similar or repeating anchor text. My best guess as to what happened to you is that several weeks ago, Google discounted much of your backlink profile that was based on these links.

What can you do? First of all, if you are still paying for links, stop now. It might help to try and clean up/remove as many bad links as you can. Read Dr. Pete's post on Penguin.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/penguins-pandas-and-panic-at-the-zoo

In the end, you probably need to take a different approach with your link building, and begin to build good, white hat links over time.

Regardless, I hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

Okay, a few points:

1. In addition to using Yoast to noindex archive subpages, you may want to also consider seting it to noindex both tag and category pages.

These are found in Yoast under "Titles and Meta > Taxonomies"

2. While the Yoast plugin will put a "Noindex" tag on the page, this doesn't remove it from Google's index right away. Google first has to crawl the page. Using the index removal tool does help.

3. If your site dropped from 320 visits a day to 30, you may have different problems than duplicate title tags and/or content. Not sure what to tell you to look at, but backlinks, penalties or something else may be to blame.

If you're interrested, here's a great (free) webinar on Wordpress SEO http://moz.com/webinars/advanced-wordpress-seo

Another possibility, does more than one person have access to the Google Webmaster Tools account? If so, it's possible another user deleted the message.

If you have planned on cleaning up your links anyway, I don't see the harm of submitting the reconsideration request (unless you are notifying Google of paid links they haven't caught yet) Usually Google will respond with a message that will either confirm there is no manual penalty on your site, or that they are still seeing unnatural links that hurt you.

There's been a lot of discussion lately about whether webmasters should respond to every unnatural link warning in GWT, or simply ignore them. Those that have submitted reconsideration request often go though massive efforts to reach resolution.

The big question is - have your rankings/traffic improved? This might indicate any possible penalty has been removed, or that Google now considers your backlink profile more clean - or at least good enough not to trigger any automatic messages.

Here's one way to tell if this site is hurting you:

Do a search for some of your unique content (wrap it in "quotes" for exact match) and see what site ranks higher. If the scraper site ranks higher than yours, then you definitely have a problem and should follow Lesley's advice here.

Also, make sure you place proper rel="canonical" tags on all your pages. Oftentimes a scraper will scrape everything, including the canonicals, giving you credit for the content.

Most of the time, scraped content is nothing to worry about. Most sites over a certain size get scraped and the content published elsewhere. It's quite possible your dip in rankings wasn't caused by this site (although I can't rule it out) so it's best to keep looking everywhere you can.

It's probably natural, as lots of sites have and continue to do this. The problem comes when lots of domains are 301 directed all at once, or there are spammy link pointed to the 301 domains.

In the old days, misspellings and exact match parked domains got a fair amount of traffic, so this practice was much more common than it is today. Now, Google is much more sophisticated and these types of domains don't pack much of a punch.

On the flip side, you're probably gaining little or no SEO benefit from this either. If you are concerned about it, you might test stopping the redirection for 30 days and see what happens, or change the 301's into 302's, which don't pass PageRank and are therefor considered a little safer in shady situations.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!