Welcome to the Q&A Forum

So, I'm getting ready to start a campaign to get some backlinks.  Pretty sure this is a silly NOOB question, but what is better:

To get backlinks directed to my home page

To get backlinks directed to she specific product/topic being discussed in the backlink.

Thanks in advance for any help.  My GUESS on the whole topic is that linking to a specific product page from a backlink with anchor text is best practice.   It will boost the Page Authority of that page while boosting the overall Domain Authority . . . a win win.

Grasshopper, thanks for that.  My whole SEO education is full of little holes where I know some crazy deep in depth stuff, but have zero knowledge of some of the most basic things . . .  the whole www vs. non ww. thing right I think is one of them.

I test on screaming frog . . on both each is full of "200" codes, but the www version has a 301 redirect on it.

Does that mean I just need to configure moz to be looking for the NON www version and perhaps it will get more accurate information?

Not even checking http vs. https . . . It's not an ecommerce site so I should be OK there.

Looks like I'm indexed, webmaster tools says 66 pages.    There WERE some redirect errors, but I just fixed those today (though really most were irrelevent . . . .links to gallery pics, even links to some plugins)

I'm wondering if analytics is installed properly . . .would there be a difference between www and non www url preference?

I know this question is terribly general . . . but I don't even know where to start in terms of sharing info, which I would be glad to post on request.

My site was recently re-designed and migrated to a new server.  I certainly expected SOME drop in traffic as google gets the snew site all figured out, but as you can see this drop has been dramatic.  It's a simple wordpress site, I have yoast ptimized on it, I don't have many obvious errors that have not already been fixed that I can see.   
I just . ..what the heck is going on and how can I fix it?    Is it normal and takes a month or two to sort out?  Help!

Screen%20Shot%2012-04-15%20at%2011.32%20AM_zpsczdmzcjt.png

Oh man, thanks Bryan!   That makes perfect sense.   These were all images in the gallery, so on their own they have no content per se . . . I was not really aware they had an indexed page of their own.   I checked it out, and looks like it will be easy to simply add some copy for each.

Thanks a bunch!

I just upgraded our website to a new one.   This is the first crawl of the new website.  It is telling me I have 24 Critical issues, all of which are duplicate content errors.

Thing is, the urls are not duplicates and the content on the page is not duplicated either.   Example, here is one error where it says there are two duplicates:

<colgroup><col width="595"></colgroup>
| http://winterguardtarps.com/portfolio-item/props-10 |
| http://winterguardtarps.com/portfolio-item/props-2 |
| http://winterguardtarps.com/portfolio-item/props-7 |

There are photos in our portfolio, and none of them are the same.

I'm a bit of a noob, but what am I missing here?

OMG!  I just did ran Open Site Explorer for ALL links on the site and found what you are talking about.   There are DOZENS of spam links that should not be there!

It looks like I have been hacked and had links added into my images folder!   Grrr.

Thanks for finding this.   Clean up process begins in 3. . 2. . 1. . .

THanks for taking a look Umar!

I think I confused DA with PA . . .

That said, I AM still showing a 5 for spam.   See attached.

Also, I'm not sure where you are seeing those two links on my site?  I even inspected the code to see if the link was hidden somewhere . . . Am I missing something?

BTW, working on a full album now.   Should post some new stuff soon!

Screen%20Shot%2009-05-15%20at%2012.32%20PM_zpss2sqq5nu.png

I have a personal site that is pretty strong (35 DA) likely from the fact that I have had it for so damn long (like. . . 15 years).

So, since it's my own site of course I used it to link to my business site.

Sadly, it looks like that site has "five spam flags" . . . which is ironic since it's totally legit.

Anyway, what can I do to reduce spam flags?   It mentions "low trust", small proportion of branded links, and "large site with few links".   Pretty sure it's not the latter, since the site is just a wordpress site I use to share some of my music. (www.damonsongs.net in case anyone wants to hear it . . . ).

So. . . 1) can I do much of anything to legitimze the site and 2) am I better off removing the site link I am trying to promote?

Insights welcome!

Well, I think Charles may have summed it up, that it is just some CMS wonkiness . . . though I was sorta hoping there was a more concrete answer/solution than that.

Episode 2 of "Damon the idiot noob" web series . . .

I have like . . ..90 plus temporary redirects in my moz "medium priority diagnostics".

But the majority of them have a url, but no redicret url.

How can it be a temporary redirect if there is no redirect address?

Some of the addresses simply don't make any sense.  Like:

http://www.thirdcoastsigns.com/catalog/seo_sitemap/product

How on earth would a "seo_sitemap" be followed my a "/product"?

This is a Magento site, so I know some of these things get created automatically . .. but what on earth is going on here?

Help welcome, appreciated, and welcome.

Did I mention it is welcome and appreciated?

Hi everyone . . ..bear with me as I am  "noob".

My moz analysis brought up a few "critical" issues, one of which was a missing or empty title for a page.  That page is:

http://www.thirdcoastsigns.com/sales/guest/form

Which does not even appear to be a working page . . . so I'm at a bit of a loss ow to fix this.

I suspect it's a little bit of SEO expertise and a little bit of Magento expertise.   Thoughts and suggestions welcome!

P.S.   Look forward to my NEXT noob question about a bunch of pages I have flagged as "Pages with temporary redirects".    Stay tuned!

So . . . I've written a beautiful blog (or video or podcast or whatever . . . just take my word for it that it will be nominated for an Oscar, Webby, or Pulitzer very soon).

What's the best way to get the word out about it?

Let me rephrase that.  I know I should tweet, post on Facebook, social networks etc cetera.  My real question is, should I link to the home page (which is where my blog is located . . . it would show up there) or should I link to the specific page of the full blog post?

Seems to me, linking to the blog post directly gives me a better chance at tracking the success of the article in generating interest and traffic, but I was assuming linking to the home page helped pump up the importance of my overall site?

I still consider myself an SEO Noob so be sure to speak slowly and not use big words.  Consider drawing pictures.

I'm learning that there are no shortcuts.  So many people think that because "it's the internet" that "there must be an app for that".

Elbow grease.  The Original App.

My website is a Joomla based website.  My designer is good, but I don't think he knows that much about SEO . . . so I doubt if he added any extensions that can assist with SEO.  I assume there are some good ones that can help my site.

Does anyone know what/which Joomla extensions are must haves?

Have you considered using a captcha program?  I assume there's a cost involved to get that setup . . . I've never really looked into it.

Jeez  . . . how sad/dedicated are we lurking on SEOMoz on Memorial Day . .. .

I don't think it does anything other than send me a response via email, but I will check with the designer to make sure it is not allowing anything.  It has a section for "comments", but that's just so they can clarify the quote info to me.

Ha!  Somehow I don't think my site has garnered that level of interest from Google yet . . .

I get a lot of form submissions through my website that are clearly not actual people (unless they are insane . .  ).  It fills out stuff nonsensically, has an email address, and usually some stupid snippet of text that makes no sense.

Does anyone know why people do this?  Clearly there can't be any SEO benefit to submitting to someones web form.

I guess if I added a "captcha" option it would put a stop to this . .

Joomla.