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The Open Site Explorer indexed is completely refreshed every few weeks, and currently consists of 105 billion links. While that's quite a large data set and mostly comparable with other indexes in the space, it's still only a fraction of the links on the web and only a portion of the links Google undoubtedly knows about.

The way OSE finds links is that it prioritizes pages with lots of inbound links and links it found during previous crawls. Because BBB pages are often found deep-deep-deep under layers of navigation and usually don't have a lot of external links pointing to them, they aren't easy pages for crawlers to find on a regular basis. BBB has an especially difficult site architecture, and sadly this issue comes up a lot with that particular site

We're working on including more historical data in the index, so that even if we didn't crawl the link in the past two weeks, we'll still include it if we are reasonably confident it still exist. This will help alleviate some of these concerns.

The good news (or bad depending on how you look at it) is that while OSE doesn't show every link, it tends to show the majority of the most valuable links.

Regardless, thanks for the feedback and best of luck with your SEO.

Hi Reece,

Data for OSE is collected straight through the APIs of the various social services, so whatever they return is what we display.

As others have mentioned, metrics are URL specific. For Facebook, we display the activity of the URL you are examining, which is different than the activity around your Facebook page.

Hope this helps explain things a bit. Best of luck!

I don't think there's a clear answer. Longer headlines are harder to share on some social media sites (especially twitter) and Google won't display much past 55-75 characters in search results.

But from a user engagement perspective, I bet Huffington post is finding some success with the longer headlines. This probably has as much to do with how they display the headlines on their site, and also how they distribute the content and share, so it doesn't mean this is a system that would work for everyone.

Best practice remains writing headlines between 55-75 characters.

But best practices were made to be broken

Hi Anton,

We've done a lot of studies here at Moz and what we've found is this:

• There does seem to be a slight correlation between site speed and rankings (keep in mind that correlation is not causation)
• Our studies have not found a relationship between CDNs and higher rankings.

So the evidence would seem to suggest that CDNs can help your website speed, and it's possible to help your rankings, simply using a CDN by itself is no garentee.

The other answers here give you some fine tips for speeding up your site, so I'll stay out of the advice business. Some recommended reading from the Moz Blog

• http://moz.com/blog/15-tips-to-speed-up-your-website
• http://moz.com/blog/improving-search-rank-by-optimizing-your-time-to-first-byte

Hope this helps! Best of luck.

I suspect it's not a problem for YouTube, and I doubt Google would penalize a site too much for doing so.

That said, in general it would be considered best practice to keep your text visible. If you do need to hide text or include it in popups or slideouts for the sake of usability, that's fine too as long as it's not done to excess.

In cases like these I think its best to keep an open mind and experiment if necessary, but I wouldn't expect to see a big difference either way.

As others have mentioned, unless you are using dedicated servers it's likely most of your accounts are already closely related IPs and/or c-blocks already, so switching to a combined account will likely make little or no difference.

In my personal opinion, I'm not a huge fan of Godaddy for my own hosting as I have a perception of a lot of low-quality sites also hosting there, which could influence my performance if they share the same server as myself, or spam from the same IP. I perfer to go with dedicated hosting or choose a slightly more pricey host to "raise the bar" on my neighbors. Probably doesn't make a big difference in the end but I have my superstitions.

Hi Jason,

Thanks for writing in. Without going into a full site audit (which could take hours-days) a few areas I might take a closer look at:

• As others have mentioned, the site design does have an outdated feel. Beyond user experience it looks like a site that might be vulnerable to Panda updates. Relentlessly improving user experience will likely lead to an increase in rankings.

• Is the new site a copy of the old? Just wondering if any duplicate content exist out there from the old site. If you, you probably want to make sure to remove all old content from Google's index.

• I'd give the site a full link audit. You can do this by hand using Google Webmaster Tools and Open Site Explorer. Lately, I've been using Link Detox with good results. Disavow any dodgy links you can't remove.

Overall your link profile looks decent for your vertical, nothing too penalty worthy but some of the directory-style links may be suspect (or at least lower in value) in Google's eyes.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

I'm not sure there's a one-size-fits-all answer. From an SEO point of view, if the subdomain has a similar design and structure to the main domain, then the new product 'may' benefit from the domain authority of the root domain.

On a new domain, the site starts from scratch, although I wouldn't worry too much about a sandbox effect.

Anything in the legal category is going to be highly competitive, and this is a vertical that's been subject to a lot of turn and burn practices in the past (and it's still probably going on today) so it doesn't suprise me to see the fluxation.

In part, the fluctuation may be coming from the site's own backlink profile. There's a number of highly-optimized money keywords in that anchor text that may not be 100% editorial.

Regardless, the only way to stabilize is to rise above the competition with superior content and ranking signals of your own. Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts. This means having a clean backlink profile and disavowing any links that may be harming you, checking Webmaster Tools for errors and/or messaging, and building up high-authority editorial links  to the site.

If you are on the board already, and it sounds like you are, then gaining a few positions and holding onto them shouldn't be as hard as someone just starting out. Best of luck!

It's not uncommon for keywords in certain verticals to jump around a lot. Watch this video on Dave Naylor's blog: http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/google-secret-santa-search-results.html

But jumping around 30-40 spots seems like quite a bit. If this were happening I'd be suspicious of a couple of things:

• Are the keywords in an extremely competitive vertical with lots of competition and moving around? A jump of 30-40 in the "payday loan" category would be common.
• Are the backlinks on the edge of what would be considered white-hat? Sometimes Google rolls out an algorithm update and tweaks it for several weeks after. During this time its not uncommon to see sites rise up and down dramatically
• Is the vertical a news type site in which the queries are sometimes falling under the QDF (query deserves freshness) category? This could shake things up quite a bit.

Finally, I'd check to see what traffic was actually doing. If rankings were changing but overall search visibility stayed the same, it could be just Google trying to figure out the best results to serve, while recognizing the overall authority of the site.

Wish I had a more complete answer for you. Best of luck.

Can't say with 100% confidence, but sounds like it might work. You could always upload it to a server and use a robots.txt checker to validate, although sometimes the validator tools may incorporate slight differences in edge cases like this that make them moot.

I'm not aware of any off the shelf tools that will go back several years, so you'll probably have to use a more advanced, do-it-yourself solution.

Almost any sort of scraper technology should work, from Screaming Frog, Scrapebox, SEOTools for Excel, etc.

Here's an article explaining how to use SEOtools for Excel to do almost what you are asking.  http://wiep.net/talk/diy-link-building/branded-mentions-link-building/

The difference being that this article uses Mentions.net to find recent mentions, whereas you'll likely want to go to Google directly to collect your data - probably by using a custom scraper like Screaming Frog or Scrapebox.

I don't have detailed instructions as I've never done it before (and it would take like 3000 words) but the basic idea is to scrape Google for your mentions using the tools described above, then use SEOtools for Excel to extract non-linking mentions.

Hope this helps! Best of luck

It seems that the URL you asked me to run at OSE's home page should not be the back-link but the my site's link whose back-links I want? Is that correct?

Yes, that's correct.

It could be that you are seeing only links pointed to the URL. Be sure to use the filters and drop-down to choose "pages on this root domain"  (see the attached screenshot)

Otherwise feel free to shot me the URL and I'll be happy to take a look.

One note: different indexes always list different URLs, even Google Webmaster Tools doesn't list a complete set of links to your site. Moz's index could be considered "medium" size. It doesn't contain every link to your site, but it contains the majority of the important ones.

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Mmm... Try running a URL first and then try the reports tab on the far right. Let more know if it works.

It's likely that if you are getting a "0" that indicates no data available.

Mozscape will only report the status code for pages it has actually crawled in the last index. If it hasn't crawled the page recently, it doesn't report the status code. (it still has link metrics for that URL because it can see and calculate all the incoming links to that page without crawling it)

If these are backlinks to a particular site, you should be able to get the same data using Open Site Explorer, and running a custom report to export the large amount of data.

Another option, if you actually want to crawl all of those links and return a status code is Screaming Frog. 

The Frog has both a paid and free version, but it's one of the most useful paid tools I have ever used.Hope this helps! Cheers.

Hi Sebastian,If you're willing to share the URL, we may be able to troubleshoot. No worries if you can't or want to keep it private, but otherwise it may be hard to diagnose without actually looking at the site/URLs.

Cheers

If you're using Wordpress, Yoast is the way to go. It sounds like you're submitting an HTML file to Webmaster tools instead of an XML or other supported format.

The address of a Yoast-generated sitemap is almost always http://example.com/**sitemap_index.xml**

For example, here's where it is on my personal site: http://cyrusshepard.com/sitemap_index.xml

Additionally, this article may help you troubleshoot: http://yoast.com/xml-sitemap-in-the-wordpress-seo-plugin/

Best of luck with your SEO!

Ahhhh! Yes, there are ways to do this. A couple of options....

1. If you are code proficient, our API is probably a good bet. http://moz.com/products/apiHere's some info about getting started: https://moz.com/products/api/keys

2. A less technical solution is to use a 3rd party integration. A good one is Richard Baxter's SEOgadget for Excell, You'll still need an API key which you can easily obtain from above, but it puts everything in a spreadsheet format where you can gather all kinds of link metrics.

3 Mozcheck.com This is what I suspect you are really looking for
Hope this helps!

Just got it, thanks.

To be honest, the only way I judge directories today is by how much referral traffic they might bring. In the past 2 years we've seen Google get tighter and tighter on link directories, and if you're going after a link purely for the "juice" than I would consider that highly suspect in Google's eyes.

On the other hand, standards are different for local and niche specific directories, as they might more endorsement and local citations are considered the #1 local ranking factor.

At the end of the day I doubt very much a link from the Yahoo directory will hurt, but I would also be equally surprised if it helped much.