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Yes, I've been through this too. My gut feeling here is to focus on your audience and think about how they will consume and share this information.

For example, how can you make it easy for Dave to walk into his boss and tell his boss exactly why he should hire you!

There's absolutely no reason why you can't put the case-study on-line to allow people to read, or at least scan through the document on-line. AND allow them to download the PDF so that it's easy for them to print, read off-line or share around their team/colleagues.

Having the content on a web page also gives you more opportunities to engage your audience (social sharing, even comments etc)

Where PDFs can really come into their own is where you have complicated graphs, drawings that you just can't scale well to fit on a screen, provide enough context and stay legible!

Oh, and make sure that you've got links in your case-study PDF documents to take you to relevant/useful pages on your website.

If you do decide to go down the PDF only route - please do your visitors a favour and provide a really good extract so that they know what they're going to get. I've downloaded too many case-studies that turned out to be rubbish, irrelevant or just blatant marketing bumpf! (Thinking about your audience first can also change the way your approach case-studies and whitepapers!)

This means that your domain hasn't been crawled and that there's no data in Mozscape.

You get the following explanation from OpenSiteExplorer when you look for a domain that isn't crawled:

Although our index is large, there are a number of reasons why we may not have data for the page you've requested. These can include:

• Recency of Page Creation:
  Mozscape crawls the web constantly, but we update the index only once every 30-40 days. Thus, pages and links created since the last index update won't be available until we've seen them. A typical timeline for getting a page/site included in Mozscape is 45-60 days, sometimes less for very important or well-linked-to pages.
• Deep Down in the Web:
  Our crawl focuses on a breadth-first approach, and thus we nearly always have content from the homepage of websites, externally linked-to pages and pages higher up in a site's information hierarchy. However, deep pages that are buried beneath many layers of navigation are sometimes missed and it may be several index updates before we catch all of these.
• Blocked Pages:
  If our crawlers or data sources are blocked from reaching your URLs, they may not be included in our index (though links that points to those pages will still be available)
• No Links:
  The URLs seen by Mozscape must be linked-to by other documents on the web or our index will not include them.

We can see that your site has been indexed by google (site:autoproject.com.au/) so it seems that there's nothing to block crawlers from indexing your site.

If we look at MajesticSEO, we can't see any indexed links to your site either.

It looks like your website went live earlier this year (sometime in April?) but as yet hasn't managed to attract any links and it's those thinks that Moz will used to determine your Domain Authority.

In this case, look at your outreach and consider how you can get some good quality links from authoritative domains (in your niche).

When I look at the links or export them to CSV it looks as if you're only getting a subset of data. (I could only get 30 links in the CSV file when there should have been more than 600.) Might be an idea to drop support a line.

Have you tried crawling the site with something like screaming frog?

Open site explorer is a snapshot of the web as seen at a particular moment in time.

You can't count on any links being permanent. The URL of the linking page can change over time (especially true where you have paginated comments and your/your competitors comments drift down over time.)

I don't think you can automatically assume that disappearing links are a sign of bad link building practices, but I suspect it's a reasonable warning sign to dig a little deeper.

If these links are all blogs / directory links then I'd say that can be a good indicator of low value/risky link building.

You need to look at the nature of the links, their authority and value. Do they exist solely to provide a link or is there another reason. Is the site on which the link existed related to the target site and is it reasonable to believe that a link would belong there. Is there a reason why you'd want to remove them if they were your links.

Especially when you've got a competitive niche, it makes sense to keep an eye on your competitors ranking and then look at reasons behind any changes. I've heard of anecdotal stories of site moving from page 2 to the top of page 1 just by tidying up their link profiles.

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It's your blog directory widget that's adding buckets of links to each page and the more articles you add to your blog the worse it's going to become. I'd take a look and see how people are navigating from between articles.

I strongly that it won't do much hard to remove this directory. Maybe replace it with a list of just the top level categories instead of all the individual articles?

It's the collapsing categories plugin. If you look at the page source you'll also see that it's adding an awful lot of javascript to the top of the page.

I also note that the recent posts widget is showing white links on yellow backgrounds for me.

Hope this helps.

As Frederico says, Open Site Explorer uses the Mozscape link index which only crawls a portion of the internet.

On the front page of Open Site Explorer you'll see some stats about the index: 106 Billion URLs, 150 Million Root domains, 764 Billion Links. While this sounds like a lot - it's nowhere near every link and every domain on the internet!

I believe Raven uses MajecticSEO's link index which may (or may not) index the sites that link to your site hence the disparity between the two.

Normally it means you've got a rogue links somewhere. Are you sure there's not a link lurking somewhere?

If you save your Crawl Diagnostics as a csv file, you'll be able to filter by the 4XX Client Error column (=True) and then see the referring page in the far right hand column. This should tell you the page with the rogue link!

Hope this helps - if not, can you tell me the name of the site and I'll be happy to take a look.

I don't think there's anything wrong with branding your work in this way. There's a legitimate relationship between you and the customer. Things start to get a little more manipulative when you have "web design" as the link instead of your company/brand name and even worse when you see "web design mytown" and the like.

I would give your customers the options of removing the link if they wish, but as long as the link is subtle and the customer is happy with your work then I suspect they won't mind. I'm also guessing you'll have links to their sites from your portfolio page (if you have one?)

It's also common to see this tactic used by template developers and again I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with this.

If you are concerned with hundreds of links coming from a customers large site then you may want to limit the link to just the home page.

You may also want to consider which customers wear your brand. There may be some that you'd rather not be associated with publicly.

What i would say is that these links are likely to be relatively low value so make sure you build some good high-value links from authoritative, sites related to your business.

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I don't know if this google video might help: Video about pagination with rel=“next” and rel=“prev”

It talks specifically about this kind of article index pagination.

You definitely have a nofollow link on your profile page. It may take a while for it to show up in Open Site Explorer. (Ahrefs is showing a followed link from Moz to your site.) I wouldn't worry about it.

I'm guessing that as an ecommerce site you've got multiple ways to browse your content, by category / brand / special offers etc. The thing to watch out for is interesting URLs with categories or lots of parameters.As a result, chances are you've got a duplicate content problem.

As Nakul mentioned a good first step is to take a look at your crawl report or use one of the tools he mentioned to see if you've got the same content being indexed multiple times.

Once you've done that, check is to see how many of these pages being crawled are appearing in Google's index. Is Google doing a reasonable job identifying the right version? How many pages are there in the index. Are recently added products being discovered quickly?

The Site: operators will be your friend here and Dr Pete did a great article on ways you can use it.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/25-killer-combos-for-googles-site-operator

Once you understand what is being crawled and what's making it to the index you need to decide what pages you really do want to be indexed and make sure that these become the canonical versions and block parts of your site using robots.txt. (But understand the problem and what you want to achieve before you start doing this.)

Hope this helps.

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Well open site explorer is your friend! The best way to get a feel for evaluating link profiles is just to dive in and look at the link profiles of lots of sites - sites that rank, sites that don't and sites that should! Remember to take a good look at the sites themselves to get a feel for their layout, relevance and and high level feel for their authority. (humans are pretty good at evaluating this!)

There are tools out there that will help you profile backlinks (such as Link Detective (http://www.linkdetective.com/) (which seems to be down at the moment)

Here's an articles from the SEOmoz blog to get you started::

How to Check Which Links Can Harm Your Site's Rankings

I don't know if you've got the SEO Toolbar installed (http://www.seomoz.org/seo-toolbar), it's a great way to keep an eye on sites as you surt and an easy way to jump into digging into a sites ranking factors.

More than anything else, I would say that the most important thing is to develop an inquisitive nature!

Good luck!

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Hi Robert, as has been mentioned used the SEOmoz report card as a guide, but don't worry if you're not getting full marks! You've also got to look at the big picture too.

Your goal isn't to have the worlds most finely optimised titles! Your goal is to get more (qualified) visitors and make them customers.

With so many variables, both search engine ranking factors and human behaviours, to play with there are lots of things to take into consideration and getting overly focused on just one thing can be detrimental.

Yes, you do want to have your key words in your page titles - but remember your home page isn't your only page and you may have pages that are more relevant (or should be more relevant) for "Widget Program" for example. You need to decide which pages you want to rank for what, and why! Don't expect your homepage to do all your heavy lifting!

Homepages, unless the site is very focused, tend to end up being very generic and broad and tend to cater for those searcher/visitors who know your company brand and search for you by name (or enter your domain directly)

Remember too, that "containing relevant keywords" isn't the only job that your page title has to do. There's no point ranking highly in the SERPS if your snippet looks so spammy and unappealing that nobody wants to click on it.

The combination of your page title, description (and to some extent your URL) need to provide a compelling reason why someone would want to click on it. Are they going to find the answers to the questions, satisfy their needs etc? Can they see the benefit they receive by clicking.

A title made of a list of keywords is less likely to be compelling.

Hope this helps!

As Alan said, if the pages don't have any inbound links then you're not going to lose any link equity by removing them. If the pages in question are not getting direct traffic or search traffic and don't have any links then I'd just delete them.

Otherwise a 301 redirect to the most relevant content is the best way to go.

Do a check for any internal links to these pages too. Your own links should be easy to fix. Remove them or point them at the better relevant content.

It might also be worth reviewing your 404 page. This can often be forgotten, but it can do a lot of the hard work guiding visitors to the content they're looking for.

• Pro Plus: $199/month or $1910/year (12 campaigns, 1000 Keywords, 10k Crawled Pages)
• Pro Elite: $499/month or $4790/year (30 campaigns, 3500 Keywords 20k Crawled Pages)

Both of these also give you Branded reports.

If you need more than 30 campaigns I'd get in touch with Moz direct.

Don't know if/how these may change once Moz Analytics rolls out.

Keep an eye on the climate / issues affecting real tree growers. Anything newsworthy in your industry (think broadly) might be something you should have an opinion on.

What were real tree vs artificial tree sales like this year? The perception here (UK) as a punter was that the cost had gone up, that many trees had suffered with the unusual weather pattern (dry over winter, very wet over summer) and had unusual shapes. Many of the real tree sellers didn't sell out this year. Is the ratio of artificial vs real a good marker for the economy - or people's confidence at least!)

Do you have any e-commerce data that you can use? Does anyone by artificial trees out of season? What's the most popular month of the year outside of the Christmas season? Can you reach out to any of these purchasers to find out why they need a tree?

Are there any unusual out of season uses for Christmas trees?

Christmas tree "fashions" through the ages?

Even if you can't actually build links today, you've got plenty of time to identify possible targets and build assets so that you can reach out to them as soon as the season starts.

Bit of a ramble, hope this helps!

ps. Don't forget about april the 1st. Be nice to see a feature of an artifical christmas tree farm... You could get some good press with something quirky!

I'm not sure how much link equity you're earning from those links (even given the vast number). With so many links on each page and the relatively low page authority of the linking page I'd be surprise that these links make much of a difference.

Questions to ask yourself though:

Is the site linking to you a legitimate/authentic site. Does it exist for a reason other than "to provide links"

Why do these links exist? Do they exist for a legitimate reason? (Without knowing your site it's hard to be specific).

How long have these links existed and what's the anchor text.

How is the linking site ranking for it's own target keywords - you can use this as an indicator for the authority/reputation google believe that site has. (The site you mention seems to be raking well for Irish property price tracker" etc.

My gut feeling (without too much digging) is not to worry about it.

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Got to say I'm totally with Moosa on this one. Your link profile is a significant weakness.

I would start by looking at your business relationships/partnerships etc and see if you can get branded links from other sites related to your niche. There's little other content on your site that will learn more general/broader links. (There's no blog/resource/faq pages etc.)

Even though the link may be using branded anchor text, they are still coming from topically relevant sites.

I'd start by asking yourself why you want followers, and then think about the return on investment you're likely to get.

There's no quick way to buy a loyal following, you have to earn it.

You want "followers", not "zombies"...

Of course percentages can hide a lot of data!  I'm sure you're looking at the volume of links as well as the percentage.

The ratio of followed / no-followed links is just one indicator of how natural the links to the site are.Also in the mix are the authority of linking site, position on the page of the link (footer links vs in content links), site wide links, anchor text (how optimised etc).

Looking at your competitors can give you some great ideas for your outreach, but I would be cautious about trying to replicate everything they're doing.

When you're looking at your competitors link profiles it's a good idea to understand what is natural for your niche. Make sure you don't just look at your 1-3 top competitors, but a broad range of sites.

Here's Tom Anthony's article on Link Profiling:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-profile-tool-to-discover-linking-activity

My advice would be to build natural, editorial links where there's a legitimate reason why the link should exist then you can't go far wrong.

You ask how to check where are the no-follow links on your website? Are you looking for no-follow links pointing at your site?

You can do this using open site explorer. Select show "Only nofollowed" from "only external" to "pages on this domain"

If you want to see no-follow links on your own site, linking out to other sites on the web then you can use the SEOmoz tool bar to highlight no-follow links. Depending on the size of your site you might want to use a spider like screaming frog to do this. (You can do an export of all your outlinks - it's under advanced export menu)

Also, you can get a lot more info our of the SEOmoz craw report by downloading the csv file and looking at it in Excel (or your preferred spreadsheet app!)