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Keyword density today is somewhat of a myth. If it is natural, then Google is very forgiving of keyword stuffing, and they have pretty good algorithms to determine what is natural or not.

With that in mind, the SEOmoz On page tools should be considered more of a guide than an absolute rule.

I could go on, but these two videos say it better than I could:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/advanced-onpage-optimization-whiteboard-friday

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-new-onpage-optimization-whiteboard-friday

Hi Leigh,

The SEOmoz PRO platform is designed to detect canonicals, and disregard these kind of errors when proper canoncials are in place.

That said, there have been bugs before which has presented this from working correctly, but most of those have been fixed. If you are still seeing problems, I encourage you to contact the help team (help@seomoz.org) to make sure everything is working okay in your campaign, and to verify this is actually a bug and not something wrong with your canonical tags.

Best of luck!

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.

Hi Peter,

Would love to help out, but by this point in the thread I'm thoughtfully confused! Any chance we could start from the beginning? If you would like, please list

• exactly an example URL you are trying to redirect,
• The exact code that isn't working
• The end result of how it redirects.

Not promising I can help any more than Marisa, and maybe my brain just hurts right now, but I'm willing to give it a shot.  Thanks.

Ha! I had a drink with Todd in Brazil last year during a conference. Unfortunately, not a grad of his program.

Hi Lynn,

Great question! This can definitely be confusing, but fortunately there is an easy explanation.

The metrics in the competitive analysis of your PRO campaign refer to Root domain metrics - this means the totality of all links pointing to your entire root domain.

On the other hand, when you type a URL into Open Site Explorer, the first metrics it shows you are URL specific metrics - meaning it only shows you links going to that specific page.

To find your 22k number, hit the "Compare Link Metrics" tab and scroll towards the bottom where it lists Root domain metrics. These numbers should jive with what you're seeing in the competitive analysis, and more closely reflect what you see in Google's Webmaster Tools (although Google Webmaster and OSE don't always agree, as they tend to report different numbers)

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Hi Melissa,

Let me try to answer your question, with the caveat that I'm missing part of the back story. Specifically, it sounds like Google wasn't crawling your site for awhile - any idea why?

If Google is indexing duplicate pages for much of your content, then in all likelihood you won't reach your ranking potential for that content. It sounds like this is because you changed your URL structure, and Google has crawled the new URLs without crawling/de-indexing the old URLs. Does this sound about right?

One solution, and probably your best bet, it to maintain a sitemap of the old URLs. This way, Google is more likely to crawl those URLs, discover the 301 redirect, and de-index those pages much faster. Ideally this is setup before the change in URL structure. At this point, it may be a major pain... if you catch my drift.

(there are a couple ways you could accomplish this, both require a lot of work. You could rewrite the URLs using Excel magic, or write a script to generate an old sitemap. Or you could very briefly switch back to your old url structure, generate a new sitemap to save, and then switch back)

Another method would be to use the URL removal tools in Google Webmaster tools. If your old URLs all used a unique directory structure (that differed from your new directory structure) you can remove entire directories from Google's index with the click of a button.

Regardless, whatever way you choose to remove those URLs, doing so should help improve your rankings.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Hi Andrew,

First of all, lots of good answers here, but let me add my own 2 cents.

Google recently cracked down on link networks. Creating a series of multiple sites and linking them individually comes pretty close to a link network, even if you don't intend it to be one. The risk of getting penalized or deindexed completely is too high to consider this as an option.

So really your 2 best options are to create subdomains, or subdirectories - this means each team would be a different folder on the main site, so MLB.com/team.

If I had my druthers, I'd go the directory route, unless there are reasons that you thought this will kill conversions or ruin the user experience. The benefit is that each subfolder would benefit from the link metrics of the root domain, and the site would be much easier to maintain. My feeling is this would give you the greatest traffic/ratings advantages over the alternatives.

If you choose to go the subdomain route, I think you'll be fine. Last summer, Google started reporting subdomain links as "internal" in Webmaster Tools, which is an indication of how they now view subdomains, which agrees to an extent with what Alan has mentioned here.

Here's an older article from Rand on the subject, but much of it is still relevant today: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

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.

Hi Curtis,

If I understand what you are saying, you have 1000 "showall" pages - is that correct? And some of these show all pages are duplicates of another?

I suspect you are not talking about classical pagination problems, the kind that Adam Audette addresses here. Instead, you are talking about an entirely different case altogether where your showall pages duplicate themselves. In this scenario, you have a product page that list a certain number of items, and a link that says "show all"  When you hit "show all" it shows the exact same items, but the URL has changed. Is this correct?

1. The best way to do this would be to automate it, so that a canonical tag was automatically added in each of these cases. If your CMS doesn't allow this, you might find a developer who can build it in for you.

2. If it's truly a matter of parameters, you can adjust the parameter settings in Google Webmaster Tools so that they ignore the "showall" parameter

3. As a last resort, if a technical fix is beyond your capacity, you could place a "nofollow" on the link to the showall pages, and block robots from crawling those pages by using a robots.txt file. Eventually Google would drop those pages from the index. This isn't an ideal solution, as it would take several months, but it might help long term.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Yep! Exactly. Each root domain can link to your page/site multiple times, from multiple pages, and these are all included in the report.

Hi Salehwelli,

Unfortunately, it sounds like your web designer may not be the best person to help you with your site. It's nice when web designers understand SEO and proper techniques, but this isn't always the case.

It's hard to tell how serious these problems are without looking at your site. The fact is, if you can't take care of these yourself, you probably want to find someone who can. It sounds like you're overwhelmed at this point, which is understandable. So your 2 possible actions are these:

1. Hire someone who understands SEO
2. Begin learning what these errors mean

I would say #2 is by far the most rewarding choice.

In most cases, SEO requires only a minimum knowledge of HTML and web structure to get started. So learning some basic HTML might be a good place for you to start.

Tackle each error one at a time. Research the web to discover how each applies to your site, and dig deep to find what is causing it. The community here is tremendously supportive, and the web, and SEOmoz is a great resource.

I'd start by reading everything in the Learn SEO section of SEOmoz. Also, it's a little old, but the Beginner's Checklist for Learning SEO is a great place to start.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

Hi Tom,

Thanks for posting about this important issue. Building links is hard work, and I'm sure this is incredibly frustrating to you.

The primary reason links don't show up - either in Linkscape or WMT - is that they are built on pages that don't get crawled. This means that the link is built on a page that doesn't have many links itself pointing to it.

For example, a link posted on the New York Times will be crawled and indexed very fast. But a link posted on an obscure article submission site may never be crawled. Additionally, links like these don't count for very much, even when they are crawled.

As you mentioned, often times you'll see links from low quality, spammy link networks in your competitors backlink profile. I know how frustrating this is! But don't be discouraged, because often these links pass no real value, and Google is really cracking down on these (at least some... finally)

When link building, pay close attention to the link metrics of the site where you want to get a link from. Does the page have good Domain and Page Authority? Is it indexed by Google? When was the last time Google crawled the page? Does it have good MozTrust? Does the domain link out to spammy sites? (hopefully no) These are all questions you should be asking when building links.

The reality is, link building takes practice and determination, and requires thinking outside the box. But if you practice enough and mix in a bit of creativity and persistence, it will pay off.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO!

Hi happygirlftw (nice name!)

While I don't have any direct experience using the "nocontent" tag, I can't see any reason why it should hurt you. This seems to be exactly what it was designed for.

Adwords offers a similar type of tag for web publishers called section targeting. I've used it to great success and it doesn't have any effect on organic results.

Finally, I'd be curious as to why Google couldn't identify the boilerplate content of your site on it's own. Google custom search uses different algorithms than regular search, but in this day and age we encourage most webmasters to reduce their boilerplate content, so this might warrant a closer look.

Best of luck!

Hi YGF,

Congratulations on launching your new site. As others have mentioned in this thread, MozRank is a predictive popularity "score" that comes from Linkscape, the SEOmoz link index of the Internet.

The short answer to your question is: in order to get MozRank, make sure you earn good, high-authority links to your site. Linkscape generally finds most important links on the web in 30-60 days, but sometimes it can take longer. This is especially the case if the links are buried beneath layers of navigation or not well linked to.

Just so you know, MozRank is a predictive metric based on, and similar to PageRank. Earning MozRank in itself will not help your site to rank, but there is a correlation between sites with high MozRank and ranking potential. The highest correlation with ranking potential is actually Domain Authority.

Regardless, keep working to build high quality links to your site, and they should show up in Linkscape soon. As soon as they are in Linkscape, new MozRank calculations are automatically made for your site.

The next update is scheduled for April 10th. You can find the update calendar here.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!