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In your Keyword ranking report you can take a look at the SERP that SEOmoz saw when they collected your ranking.

Click on the little pie/clock shaped icon when you hover over your search term or click on the drop down and select ranking history.

Note that there's a comment that says:

"We gather rankings that are non-personalized and independent of search history or location. This method has provided results showing what most users see most of the time, though fluctuations can and do occur."

If you look at this snapshot, can you see what else has moved about?

#3 to #40 does seem like quite a large fluctuation, but I've seen the same thing on occasion too and I've used the keyword difficulty tool to double check too.

Remember that SERPS aren't static and depending on your niche can be subject to quite a bit of fluctuation.

Did you notice any changes to search traffic? Take a look at your google analytics over the affected days to see if there was a drop one hour to the next... Was there anything else that might explain this such as server downtime or your site being unavailable etc?

Keep an eye on trends rather than individual results but yes, do check out any surprising changes to the position of your priority keywords!

Hope this helps.

What about off-site factors? Do they have well optimised Google+ Local pages for  their individual sites (linking to their respective location pages on their site?) What about citations? Do they appear in local and authoritative listings? Have they got any reviews?

How competitive is the niche?

I agree with Takeshi, but would add the following point:

If you've got the time, it can be well worth reaching out to those websites linking to you and asking them to update their links to link directly to your new content. Not just because of the link, but because it's also a great opportunity to make contact and build awareness and build relationships with those other sites.

Obviously you can do this once you've got the new domain launched and the redirects in place.

Good advice from Simon. I would say that reciprocal linking does occur naturally and helps determine your position in your online neighbourhood.

Imagine a site like SEOMoz, I'm sure many of the sites that get links from SEOMoz (Distilled, SEER etc) link back to SEOMoz...

These links are of course entirely natural and authentic and I don't think there's anything wrong in taking proactive steps to create these relevant, in context,  relationships.

Where things start to go wrong is where two parties agree to place links to each other on their "links" page, page footers etc. Especially when the only reason you could give to explain the presence of the link is "SEO!"

The mozrank on the SEOmoz tool bar is coming from SEOmoz's linkscape index.

Different services will use different methods to discover links so you'll find that Alexa, MajesticSEO, SEOmoz etc can show some significant differences in the data they collect.

I wouldn't worry so much about what your scores are, just what you can do to improve them. After all the only real thing that matters here is getting the right traffic and improving engagement once they get to your blog.

If you're commenting on blogs in order to get links then note that these links are usually no-follow links and may not be doing very much to improve your reputation - you don't want to be seen as a comment-spammer.

Your time may be better used by finding higher quality ways to get backlinks. See my previous comment about guest posting.

If you've not already done so I'd recommend reading the SEOmoz beginners guide to SEO and SEOmoz's Professional Link Buidling Guide

I don't think it's SEOmoz's "fault" as such. They can only tell you what Google showed them at that precise instant they checked your rankings. Who knows what google was thinking at the time!

You don't know what the other ranking tools would have shown you if they'd checked your rank at exactly the same time as Moz or what Moz would have seen if they've checked your position some time later.

When I mentioned about your server being down - I was just wondering what other reasons might have existed for Google to fail to return your primary page. (Nothing to do with Moz)

If your traffic wasn't affected and your ranking is still in place then I wouldn't worry too much, it's just one of those things.

Looking at the page, you've got a link in the footer to a news item with the following anchor text "Fire Warden Training at Elms Nursing".

I suspect that this is triggering the warning as you're pointing a link to another page with your keywords in the URL.

I wouldn't be overly worried about this, but it might be worth pointing a link back from the news page to your Fire Warden Training offering page so people could find out more about what you do, and increase the authoritativeness of your service page.

If the news item is no longer relevant, or getting visits, do you still need it?

Absolutely agree with you Grumpy Carl! I can see that this change is just going to increase the need to check rankings in order to find out which page is ranking.

Why we can't get this link in the google webmaster tools data I just don't know (but I know it's nothing to do with privacy!). I just want to know which pages the keywords are sending traffic to... grr

I just get a feeling that it's all going to get messy and I'm going to be spending a lot more time in front of spreadsheets.

Maybe I'm missing something, but can't you use Open Site Explorer and select "pages on this subdomain" or "pages on this root domain"?

If you export to a csv file you can filter by the Target URL column.

HI Greg,

Your site isn't in the Linkscape index that the SEOmoz tools use, as a result there's no data for the tools to work with. If you look-up your site on Open Site Explorer you get the error "No Data Available for this URL"

If you've only got a small number of sites linking to your site you're going to limit the chances that your site will be found and included.

You mention you have a ton of links from a forum you visit. A bunch of  links from just one domain (especially forum posts) isn't going to make your site that visible out there on the net.

I would look at ways to promote your site more broadly. Can you get links from a number of other, preferably high authority sites?

A good place to start is looking at who's linking to sites similar to yours. Look up your competitors sites in Open Site Explorer and see where they are getting links from. Maybe you can get links from those sources too.

Hope this helps.

This is usually because your site hasn't been crawled by the SEOmoz's mozscape crawler so doesn't yet appear in their index. If it's not been crawled then you won't get any statistics.

Majestic SEO doesn't seem to have identified any links to your site either.

Is this a new site? Have you managed to get any links to your site yet?

The best way to get your site included in the mozscape index is to make sure you get some links from sites that are in the index with a reasonable domain authority themselves.

I take it that the crawl errors you're getting aren't preventing Moz from crawling your entire site?

HI Matt. I don't know when the next Ranking Factors review is likely to be. It's described on the "Learn SEO" page as "biennial" so we may not get an update until next year.

What I would say though is that you shouldn't confuse the contribution of Social to Search Rankings and the contribution of Social to a good Inbound/SEO campaign.

I would say that while the influence of Social is increasing, it's still only a minor ranking factor (although this can depend on the market/niche). Of course, you can get indirect benefits by sharing content that then creates links etc)

Google's SPYW obviously gives social and personalised search, a bump.

The main benefit of social is the ability to extend your reach. The more reach you have the easier it's going to be to get your message across to potential customers. If you're going to sell anything you need to be where your customers are. Of course, the value of this depends on whether your customers are (or are likely to be) using social.

If you've got the time/resources/budget etc, then you might as well get started building your social presence, but I would say that you need to think about your goals, and your customers. Understand what's important, put a plan together and try to do it in a controlled, consistent manner! As well as opportunities, there are also risks!

Looks ok to me. I did a search for (with the quotes) "Weber 522053 - Electric Barbecue Q 140 Grey - Online Shop"

The Title was the full title as you described. I think tried doing a site: search on the the domain and the specific url and again saw the full title.

Google can do some weird stuff tot he title if it thinks that that the title does not accurately reflect the content of the page or its relevance to the search query.

This one is looking ok to me though.

You'll need to wait until the link has been indexed. SEOmoz have a roughly monthly index cycle for updating the linkscape index. The next index is due at the end of the month. (There was a slight delay and a slip of the schedule)

Even then, your link might not show up if it wasn't caught by the index process this time. You may have to wait until the March update before you link shows up.

This doesn't mean that you're not getting the benefits of the link though.

I know SEOmoz  are working on a more dynamic update, but I don't know any timescales for that.

My advice? Play the long game, keep link building / promote you site and you'll see the benefits over time.

Interestingly Majestic SEO Site Explorer shows no data from it's historic index, but shows 2 referring domains, 85 Backlinks from it's "fresh" index.

Keep building the links!

Have you read the Beginners guide to SEO? Chapter 7 covers the link building basics:

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

Good place to start is looking at your existing (real world) relationships to customers/suppliers etc and see if there are any opportunities there to get them to link to you.

Then you can always look at your competition. Take a look at their sites in Open Site Explorer and see where they are getting their links from. Is there anything there that you can replicate?

As for the Crawl errors - I'm guessing that the error your getting is a duplicate page title warning? Looks like your quote.php page is generating lots of pages with the same title "Quote or sample request | Quote StickerApt"

Don't think this is a major problem at this point - it's not a page that I'd expect to rank for a keyword. You've got your individual product pages to do that.

How far have you got with determining the keywords you wish to target? How are your PPC ads performing? Which ads/keywords are delivering the best customers?

Here's Google's help on sitelinks:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=47334

Removing less compelling pages from your site links (such as your privacy policy or about us) page might be useful IF it means that you'll get one of your core services/offerings in it's place, but as Robert says, you can't control which pages get displayed.

The Google Analytics/Top Pages report will give you a view as to which pages are the most popular.

Hi Dana,

When you click on the checkout button - what's the mechanism for taking people to the https:// site. Is it just that the checkout link uses https:// in it's link? Is there some javascript wizardry you're particularly concerned about?

Even though googlebot follows this one link to the https version of the cart, it will still have all the other links on the previous page queued up to follow (non-https) so I don't think this will stop the crawl at that point. It would be a nightmare if googlebot stopped crawling hte entire site everytime it went down a rabbit hole!

That's not to say that you wouldn't want to consider no-following your checkout button. I'm sure neither you, nor google want to the innards of the cart pages to be indexed? There's probably other pages you'd rather Googlebot spent it's time finding right?

My take on the Google blog about understanding Javascript is that the aim is to try and do a better job discovering content that might be hidden by Javascript/Ajax. It's a problem for google when the raw html that they're crawling doesn't accurately reflect the content that is displayed in front of a real visitor.

Really don't think that having your directory entry in bold is really going going to make much/any difference and it seems like a high price to pay for the privilege.

But, it depends on how much direct traffic the directory might send your site. If it's a respected niche directory that is actually used by real people then there may be some benefit. if putting your entry in bold increases the click-through. How many other entries are in bold?

Personally, I'd be sceptical that there would much value here either. (I'm not an advocate of paid directory listings in general)

Might be fun to ask the directory owners to provide some click-through statistics before you part with your cash!

Also think about what else you can do with the money (the opportunity cost). Could you use the money to create some great unique content? How many links would such a piece of content need to get you before you got a better return on investment than a directory listing?

Hope this helps.

If you've got things like duplicate title and meta-description's going on then I'd certainly take a look at fixing those. Being able to manage these two tags is vital to managing the way your pages will appear in the search results. (And your title tag is an important ranking factor).

Normally, if your page doesn't validate then it's not a major problem and search engines won't penalise you for it. If however, your page is so badly crafted that the html errors, and general page structure makes it difficult for the search engines (and humans) to read your page then you're going to suffer.

The key is to make sure that your site/page content is accessible. How accessible is your page to someone with disabilities, using a screen reader etc.

You've got to make sure that the search engines can understand what your page is about or your page won't be seen as a relevant page for any search terms...

How bad is it? How does google render the page in it's instant previews (you can check this is Google Webmaster tools)