Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I can still access the videos by going to the "2012 Mozcon Video Bundle" under the Learn SEO menu. If I scroll down I can see the "MozCon Seattle Seminar 2011" and 2010 videos.

Just tried clicking on a couple and they play ok. (Did notice that some of the avatars are missing though.)

If you can't see these you might want to contact support. help[at]seomoz.org

<object id="plugin0" style="position: absolute; z-index: 1000;" width="0" height="0" type="application/x-dgnria"><param name="tabId" value="ff-tab-1"> <param name="counter" value="165"></object>

Some things to check:

Was your site available during this time? If visitors couldn't access your site then you wouldn't see the referrals. Had a similar problem a while back with intermittent downtime on one of my sites. This would affect all traffic regardless of the source.

Can you check your server log-files. This will show you what pages were being served regardless of any GA tracking issues.

According to Google:

Broad: The sum of the search volumes for the keyword, related grammatical forms, synonyms and related words

Exact: The search volume for that specific keyword and close variants

The more generic the words in your keyword the more searches you're going to see in adwords for Broad match.

What page are you checking? As well as picking "only external" have you tried selecting "pages on this sub-domain" or "pages on this root domain" to check for any links to any page on your site?

Totally agree regarding the H1s. They should be used for the main title of an article - not for branding or other "stylistic" reasons. I would definitely recommend making the change.

As for the page naming convention - if the pages have good content (with the broad terms that Vahe suggests) then I don't think it's too much of a problem. After all, I'd expect a page about burlesque hen parties to be called "burlesque hen party"! As long as you're being authentic about it.

Why so many duplicates? As it's a blog I suspect it's something to do with tags and/or categories.

Instead of trying to hide the problem using the robot.txt file can tackle the root cause directly?

Agree with the other posters. It's important to review your backlink profile before proceeding. You can also check for other reputation issues like presence on email black-lists etc.

As we as checking the backlink profile of the domain you've purchased you may also be able to take a look at the historical content on the site using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine: http://archive.org/web/

Assuming that the domain you purchased was targeting the same audience as your website or operating in the same niche:

You can redirect the entire site to your home page. But be aware that if you do this the old site content that's currently indexed in the search engines will decay and vanish over time. If you've got ownership of the old site content as well as the domain it may be worth looking at how you can incorporate any good content, high ranking pages onto your own site and then re-direct to them.

You can redirect specific pages to the relevant page on your new site. You can direct visitors to the content on your site that is most relevant to them which may improve the user experience and engagement. Even if you decide not to do a blanket re-direct, you may still be able to redirect those pages that you're really interested in.

Use this as an opportunity to do outreach to the sites that are currently linking to the domain you've purchased and see if there is an opportunity to link directly to your main site. (a direct link may be worth more than just the re-directed link.)

You can also look for citations on the web for the domain that doesn't have a link and see if there's an opportunity for outreach there too.

I think if you do this you do have to keep the visitor in mind. First of all you have to appreciate that you're potentially creating leaks by creating these links. People will follow these leaks and not return.

That said, if you can link to good supporting content that is going to help the visitor achevie their goals then I can see that it's going to help make their experience better.

Sometimes it's better to have supporting information from a trusted third party to add authority to your content. As Robert said, make sure it's a good reputable source.

Robert, do you no-follow any of these links?

It's not just about getting links to boost your rankings. Think about the potential referral traffic too. A great blog post on a site relevant to your niche can send you well qualified traffic that converts well. At the end of the day, it's not traffic the site needs - it's business. Also think about your positioning - If you visit a bunch of sites about fly fishing and see guest posts from the same person on just about every site you visit, you're going to think that they are more likely to be an authority on the subject. Just make sure the articles are good! Don't just cobble together a low value blog post just to get the link. Think about your positioning, think about the particular audience of the site and create something worth reading. If you've been offered a guest post then it's not unreasonable to ask a couple of questions about the site's visitors. What kind of thing are they looking for and how many readers of the blog are there? Even if you just get your name/brand in front of your customers, that can be a good thing. If you were given the opportunity to talk to a group of potential customers - how big would the group need to be to make it worth your while?

Hi Marisa,

I'd start by looking at how your human beings are navigating your site and see how much cross-category jumping there is, but I suspect that your suggestion would be a good idea.

As you say, Instead of having the drop-down navigation with all the categories, you could replace this with just the top-level (FIRE, POLICE, MILITARY,SPORTS etc,).

I notice that these top level categories don't have a page themselves, so you would then need to create a page for each with navigation to the sub-categories.

These top-level pages can be optimized for phases like "police patches" etc, perhaps put the most popular patches on this page.

Can you add more text to the individual items too. A shortish description for each patch would help.

Could you add a "vote for this patch" thumbs up widget? Can you contact the organisations who's patches they are and run a competition to get them to come a vote (get a link?). Depends on how happy they are to have their patches featured in the gallery.

When you click on the www.wireless-alarms.net you get re-directed to www.wireless-alarms.com. So in the serps you're seeing the Mozscape stats for the .net domain and when you get to the page you're seeing the stats for the .com domain.

The www.wireless-alarms.net home page is using a meta-refresh to do the redirect. Looking at the wayback machine this has been in place since before December 2010.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080701000000*/http://www.wireless-alarms.net

Even the service area option is for businesses that go out to meet people in the local area. Google+ Local isn't the right place to promote an entirely online business and it's difficult to see what benefits you'd get by trying.

Think about it from the searcher point of view. If they're looking for something with either an implied or specified local intent, they're unlikely to be looking for an online product.

Steve, can you tell us what the page is and what you used for analysis? Was this Open Site Explorer?

Just to keep it natural so if you were to read it out loud to others it wouldn't sound odd. Just make sure you avoid hundreds of links with the same keyword specific anchor text. When you come to linking to your static pages, try and think about more than just getting those keywords into the anchor text for the search engines - also think about the real people reading your blog articles - make sure your anchor text properly describes what they will find if they click on the links. If you/re trying to move your human visitors towards your offerings then think about making your anchor text compelling and trying to get the benefits of your offering in there somewhere. Good luck!

geeks.com do have the keywords all over the page. Each printer item has the word "refurbished" in it (I counted 11 times). They have both a high domain authority (73) and high page authority (58). They have the keywords in their Title too.

The keyword phrase "refurbished printers" looks pretty competitive to me and I suspect your site/page just doesn't have the authority to compete at the moment.

Looking at the introduction on your Refurbished Printers page - it doesn't read very well and looks/feels rather stuffed with keywords and not a natural way of writing and maybe a little "overcooked".

I'd think of ways you can build more links, offer more genuinely unique/useful content and maybe look at less competitive niches you can target while you do this. Are there any low-hanging fruit out there keyword wise?

Why the .net is ranking and the .com is was the first question that went through my mind too.

Looking at the link profiles for the two domains the first impression is that the .com domain should rank because it's got loads more links than the .net domain.

Virtually all of these links come from the .net variant of the domain.

If you look a bit closer you'll see that wireless.com has external links from wireless-alarms.net & resonsesecurityweek.com. (And wireless-alarms.net is redirected to .com so I'm sure google wouldn't count these.)

Wireless.net has links from: cheviotsecurity.co.uk & saboteurcrimeprevention.com.

So out of the two, the .net looks marginally stronger.

I use Buzzstream (http://www.buzzstream.com/) to keep track of my outreach and monitor pages for backlinks, Might be worth checking out. There's a free trial.

624 is the number of total links (followed and no-followed).

Your 624 links are made up of:

• 616 Internal Links (of which 118 Followed Links)
• 8 External Links (of which 6 are Followed Links)

= 624 Links (of which 124 are Followed Links.)

You can see these metrics easily by looking at the Compare Link Metrics tab in Open Site Explorer.

Hope this helps.

Looking at the www.421taxi.com site, I downloaded all inbound links from open site explorer. I could see a whole bunch of spammy links which to me look as if the site was compromised in the past.

To be honest, from what you'd been saying I expected worse!

The good news is that almost all of these links go pages in /archives and /reviews which no longer exist and return a 404 error. So you won't be getting any value from these links so I don't believe you'd be penalised for them.

There are a couple pointing at the homepage(with a ?p=xx parameter), but I wouldn't worry too much about these.

(Look at the Top Pages report in Open Site Explorer and you'll see the pages most linked to... lots of dead pages with No Data...)

Keep an eye on your anchor text as you build links. You don't want to trigger an over optimisation penalty!)

www.landregistry-e-services.co.uk doesn't look as if it has the same problem.

Thanks for the weather report! Are these new or returning visitors? (Does that reveal anything interesting?)

Is this a constant bounce rate or a recent change? What's the trend? What's the period covered?

As well as emails... any printed material (or other) with QR codes?