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This seems to be one of those unfortunate instances where OSE just hasn't found any links to your site.

The types of links that are most likely not to get crawled are pages that don't have many inbound links themselves, and pages hidden under layers of navigation. This is the case even with high authority domains like YouTube - which literally has millions of pages, but only a small percent pass real value.

I checked your site on Majestic SEO

https://www.majesticseo.com/reports/site-explorer/summary/webmakercms.com

And found 12 linking domains, mostly article directories, which are often excluded from OSE. Since OSE tends to favor links that pass more value, so often links don't appear. Unfortunately in this case, the links that it's not reporting are most likely only passing minimal value to your site.

Soon (two weeks - best guess) there will be a new OSE index released that will undoubtedly contain many more URLs as it's based on a new crawler technology. Hopefully you'll see your links then. Here's the post:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/interim-linkscape-update-for-january

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 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!

This is almost a philosophical question, like "If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound?"

In this example, if Google shows Places results in its regular SERPs, does it matter the format? Most would argue that a #3 position is #3, no matter how it's formatted. The general public won't recognize the difference, and all indications are that click-through rates are about the same.

Regardless, to answer your question about how SEOmoz tracks rankings, the PRO platform tracks rankings in a way that is location-agnostic which means that in most cases, localization isn't a factor and "traditional" Places listings don't show up.

That said, for many queries with local intent, Google will display results that mimic Places listings, like this result here.

Whatever Google returns as the result to SEOmoz crawlers, this will be recorded as your rank. So long answer short, the PRO platform doesn't distinguish between regular SERPs or Places SERPs, as long as those results are returned by the search engine for your query.

It's still a possibility, although to my knowledge nothing is in the pipeline at this time.

Hi Mike,

The crawl in your PRO campaign is different from Linkscape, and in fact updates each week. I took at look into your campaign and it looks like although the errors have decreased, many of the longer title tag warnings were still there.

These warnings are issued any time the <title>tag runs over 70 characters. If you use the <a href="http://www.seomoz.org/seo-toolbar">MozBar</a>, you can use the on-page analysis to automatically verify the number of characters.</p> <p>If you have any questions, feel free to send me a private message if you don't want to share your info publicly. You can also ask a private Q&A question of contact the help team at help@seomoz.org.</p> <p>Best of Luck!</p></title>

Hi Maureen,

Sorry you couldn't find any link metrics for your site, but maybe we can help.

First of all, no two companies ever report the same amount of links. Most links on the Internet are "junk" and Google Webmaster has been known to over-report unimportant links, and under-report links that matter.

If OSE shows 5 links to your site, you may need to select "root domain" metrics from the various drop down options to make sure you're seeing the right metrics. Otherwise you may only see page-level metrics, which might not be what you're looking for.

For example, to see all the linking domains to your entire site, choose the "linking domains" tab and select "pages from the root domain" from the drop down. Hopefully you will see at least one domain listed. Use the "root domain" option on the other tabs to find your links. After this, the download to CSV should accurately reflect the on-screen report.

Hope this helps! Let us know if you have any problems. Best of luck with your SEO.

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 Nikos,

I'll notify the SEOmoz Help Team (help@seomoz.org) to let them know you're experiencing trouble.

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!

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.

Hi Brandon,

When I search, I also see your site ranking in the #2 position. Here's a screenshot -

https://skitch.com/cyrusshepard/gidyr/raleigh-bail-bonds-google-search

No two people hardly ever see the same search results due to Google's effect of both localization and personalization, but there are some ways to mitigate these factors.

1. Add pws=0 to the end of your search query URL. This "depersonalizes" the search results. So your final URL will look something like this:

https://www.google.com/search?q=raleigh+bail+bonds&**pws=0**

(notice the pws at the end?)

2. To minimize the effect of localization, set your location to as wide as possible. For the US, hit "change location" and type United States into the box, like this:

Here's a whole blog post with tips and tricks to get neutral rankings - written by a smart and overly handsome man.

Best of Luck!

Great question. For the most part, no - but there are exceptions.

The rankings in the PRO platform are designed to be geo-agnostic, meaning they don't take localized results into account. So if your keyword is "pizza" and your search engine was set to Google US, your rankings would reflect a general United States point of view, like this.

On the other hand, if your query contained local-specific words, like "best pizza in Chicago" Google will automatically return local results, like this.

While these aren't technically "places" results, they do bear some similarities, and these are the results you will find in your PRO ranking report.

One final note. The above only applies to PRO campaigns. The stand alone Rank Tracker tool uses less sophisticated technology and has been known to included weird local results from time-to-time. Look for an update to this tool soon.

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.

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.

Yes, there is a discrepancy between all indexes on link counts, even though everyone might agree on the definition. But this doesn't mean one is right and one is wrong.

Counting links is like counting cats in Schrödinger's box. It changes depending on how you look at it... even though we all agree on the definition of a cat.

Using the same definitions as you described above, if you were to look at Google's index you would arrive at a number higher than this, and using Bing's index perhaps a number somewhere in the middle.

For example, consider that 50% of the web disappears every year, which means around 4% of all the links on the Internet disappear every month. But what if your crawlers only visit those links every 60 days? (this is an extreme example)

Or the fact that 80% of the web is spam that shouldn't be crawled. Depending on your definition of spam/trust, different crawlers will crawl different websites and arrive at different link counts, even though they are using the exact same definition of a link.

The important thing to remember is this - raw link counts are hardly ever useful. What is important is finding the links that matter. That's why using metrics such as Domain and Page Authority become increasingly important. 10 links can be more important that 10 million links, if they are the right ones.

That said, metrics like # of linking root domains do play a significant role in corollary ranking factors.