Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Jovanky,

Thanks for writing in. Turns out your in luck. Our esteemed associate Alyeda Solis recently wrote a post on competitive analysis that outlines the steps you need to take here:

http://moz.com/blog/illustrated-seo-competitive-analysis-workflow

If you're looking for backlink analysis, there's a couple of other posts I'd recommend:

• http://moz.com/blog/guide-to-competitive-backlink-analysis
• http://moz.com/blog/competitive-analysis-in-under-60-seconds-using-google-docs-12649

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Hi David,

I'm actually unsure. Could you send me the URL you're looking at (feel free to private message me if your uncomfortable)

Shouldn't be a problem except when the following issues arise:

1. Duplicate content - easy to do when you're dealing with clients in the same niche. This actually has nothing to do with being on the same server, but I thought I'd mention it
2. Unnatural interlinking between these sites.

In a normal world, there's probably no reason for these clients to link to each other. If you are doing a lot of linking between them in order to influence rankings, THAT could raise a red flag to Google. More than likely, they simply won't count the links. Worse case scenario you get a manual penalty.

On the other hand, it's completely normal to host sites on the same server, even with a common Google Analytics account. If you're not building a link network and have unique content, you shouldn't have much to worry about.

So the short answer is there's nothing in Feedburner's robots.txt to prevent crawlers from accessing those URLs, even indexing them. You'll find them in Moz's index because those URLs are completely discoverable on the web. It appears to me Google is making a special case out of them. Although they don't do that for all Feedburner URLs.

From a larger picture point of view, there's always going to be a discrepancy between what Google counts and what you find in OSE, or Majestic, or Ahrefs.

So we don't really know how Google is treating those URLs. I would suspect they are using them for discovery. It's possible they pass link equity as well, but I wouldn't say that with a lot of confidence.

It's possible we'll considering treating these URLs different in the future if we become more confident in how we believe Google treats them.

Regardless, thanks for the heads up.

Good question. Technically, I can't find a robots.txt directive that would prevent Google (or Moz) from crawling those feeds, although Google says otherwise.

Bit of a mystery. Let me check with our engineers and see if they can shed some light.

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.

Here's the thing: while internal links might help your PA, PA itself is a measurement of all incoming link metrics to the page, both external and internal.

Also, while internal links can help your PA score, we weight external links more, because external links tend to play a larger influence in Google's algorithm.

After the first few internal links, additional links probably won't move the needle much for you. Too many and it's easy to over-optimize. The best internal links are natural, and often located in the body of the text with anchor text that isn't forced, like in the paragraph above.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Hi Saad,

As you've noticed, right now our plans only include the ability to run 100 full SERP reports a month. There is considerable cost in generating these reports, and we've found that 100 fits the needs of the vast majority of our users.

That said, we're happy you are getting use out of it and would like to run more. Unfortunately we don't have a mechanism in place to allow you to order more without signing up for another account. If we get enough demand for the feature, our Product team may work to add that in. You can make feature requests here: https://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums/293194-Moz-Feature-Requests

Thanks again for the feedback.

It's quite common. Moz tends to receive a lot of traffic for "porn"

Go figure.

If it's not a lot of traffic and it's not causing too many problems, it may not be worth the effort of trying to "unrank" for the word. Otherwise by removing important keywords from you on-page elements you may inadvertently unrank for other important terms.

Hi Sebastion,

Interesting question. Testing has shown that Google counts the anchor text of the first followed link. Unless the first link is an image, then Google counts both anchor texts.

We haven't tested this in awhile, but I assume it still holds true today.

In this case, because the first link is nofollowed, Google neither passes PageRank or anchor text through it, and does not follow it. They should, however, count the second link.

Also, the first link isn't a text link, but a link across a class that contains an icon. While not quite an image link, it's possible it might work the same as one. (but because it's nofollowed it doesn't matter in this case)

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

The good news is your homepage is ranking for a lot of words!

Unfortunately, you can't always optimize a page for more than a few key phrases, but often if the content and incoming links are rich in semantic hints, your content can rank for dozens, hundreds, or even 1000s of long-tail phrases that are outside your "top" keywords that you're actually trying to target.

(Just to be clear - adding more than one <title>tag is <strong>not</strong> a good idea.)</p> <p>One thing you might want to consider is if your homepage is ranking for search terms that it doesn't answer very well, and question if you should be creating other resources on your site to answer those queries. If so, it might be worth your time to do so and make sure you are linking to them appropriately with good site architecture.</p></title>

Hi Chris,

I like your approach. Although this is outside the scope of your question, another thing I do is use Google Webmaster Tools landing page report to see what keywords are driving traffic to my pages.

In truth, with so much advanced semantic analysis that Google is doing these days, once you move beyond targeting a single keyword, the math gets really hard - really fast! So for now, it's the old one keyword at a time approach.

Thanks for the question and keep up the good work.

I tested this about a year ago and it still held true, and I haven't seen any evidence or test in the wild to indicate any change in the way Google handles these.

That said, there may be other link signals surrounding additional links on the page. For example, if the first link is in the sidebar navigation, and the second link is strategically placed at the top of the text body, are there no signals passed (beyond anchor text) through that strategically placed second link? I don't know the exact answer to that.

What I would advise is this. Think like a "reasonable surfer" and link intelligently for user experience.

Sorry for the late reply!

Although I don't have a clear answer in cases of conflicting signals. I suppose it depends on your end goal, and what you think satisfies the users most and makes them want to come back to your site.

Are they finding what they are looking for?

Do they want to stick around?

Do the numbers make sense?

There's no rule of thumb. Often you have to dig beyond the data and put yourself in a users shoes, and even sometimes do actual user testing.

Sorry for the late reply!

Short answer: yes. That looks like a gradual drop that could be caused by lack of new activity and/or engagement with your site. I'd be surprised if it was link-based.

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!

Hi Deckjur,

Looks like your homepage is highly optimized for the keyword in questions, and has more link equity than the internal pages, which is why it might be showing in search results.

For one, "vloerisolatie" is the first word of your homepage title tag, and the keyword appears several times on the page. If you really want the subpage to rank first, you could try pointing more internal links to it - not just navigation links, but honest-to-goodness text links.

Think of it from a visitors point of view. If you really wanted them to go to this page, how would you direct them there?

You could also try de-optimizing your homepage for the term, or roll with the punches and accept your homepage as the best result and do your best to convert visitors there.

What kind of CMS do you use? That might help figure it out.

Sounds like your CMS is creating these garbage pages, whether or not they live on the backend or not.

On the other hand, this is pretty common and it may not be something you need to worry about. Are the pages cached by Google? You can find out by pasting this search parameter in your browser:

cache:http://example.com/url

or a site: search for an overview of all your cached URLs. (site:example.com)

If the garbage URLs aren't there, you probably don't need to worry much. On the other hand if you see pages of bad results, this might be something you need to address with your developer.

Hi mszeer,

This resource might help: http://moz.com/blog/the-international-seo-checklist

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.