Welcome to the Q&A Forum

If these are relatively new pages, then they may not yet be included in the linkscape index, SEOmoz won't have calculated these stats for the page. What's the Domain Authority?

I'm sorry, I don't have any evidence from the user experience point of view,. although I would also be interested to see the results of any studies.

I will say that from a site management/maintenance point of view it makes sense to try and keep the code as clean as possible. I've been involved in project were a considerable chunk of the cost was incurred due to the amount of time and effort that was required to unravel the mess even before any new changes were made!

Hi Simon. Your on-page optimisation is just one of many factors. Just sorting out the on-page optimisation isn't going to be enough.

I notice from doing a keyword difficulty report that your chosen keyword seems to be highly competitive. The ranking sites have many more inbound links than you.

I also note that your page and site overall has very few inbound links and as such a low authority.

If you're going to want to compete for this keyword you're going to have to build some good quality inbound links. A good place to start may be by analysing your competition to see where they are getting their links from. Looking them up in Open Site Explorer is a great way to do this.

Hope this helps.

You can find the SEOMoz helpdesk here:

http://seomoz.zendesk.com/home

There's a menu option to submit a request there too.

Full SERPS report give you the following for each of the top 10 entries in the SERPS:

Page Authority, mozRank, moxTrust, mT/mR, Total Links, External Links, Followed Links, No-Followed Links, Linking Root Domains, On-Page Analysis Grade, Broad Keyword Usage in Title, Broad Keyword Usage in Document, Keyword Used in URL, KW in Domain, KW Exact Match, Exact Anchor Text Links, % Links w/ Exact Anchor Text, %Linking Root Domains w/ Exact Anchor Text, Partial Anchor Text Links, % Links w/ Particl anchor Text, Partial Anchor Text Root Doms. % linking Root Domains w/ Partial Anchor Text, Domain Authority, Domain mozRank, Domain mozTrust, DmT/DmR, External Links to this domain, Linking Root Domains to this domain, Linking C-Blocks Domains to this doman, Tweets, FB Shares and Google Plus One Shares!

This will give you a much broader picture of the current state of play.

If you're looking to purchase this domain, then I'd ask questions about what you're planning to do with it? Changing the content / structure etc will potentially cause changes in the SERPS. I'd certainly want to have a better understanding of why the site is ranking in the position it is.

Why are you purchasing the domain?

I wouldn't purchase a domain just based on the ranking position. I'd want to know how much traffic (in total) the domain gets and how much traffic the core keywords get. I don't know if you're in a position to request this information.

Hi James. I think it might be worth taking a slightly broader view when assessing the competition. Remember that it's not just your link profile/authority that's causing your to rank at your current position, but also other factors such as the relevance and freshness of your content.

You've got PRO access, so I'd recommend starting with a FULL SERP report in the Keyword Analysis tool. It'll cost you one of your 50 monthly credits, but will give you a fuller view.

Given the backlinks / authority numbers you've stated I wouldn't be surprised if you slip down the rankings, but without knowing the full picture it's hard to say.

What I would say is that I wouldn't recommend that you stop link building because you're at the top of the rankings. A drop in your link acquisition rate could be seen as a signal that your content is less popular/relevant.

Can you give us details of the keywords and your site?

Hope this helps.

Hi Ally,

Looking at the picture that was attached the question, I think they are asking why SEOMoz isn't showing that they've updated the rankings report. (It says it updates every Tuesday, but is still showing Tuesday 17th as the last update)

I don't think he's talking about the movements of the individual ranking keywords.

There's a calendar that shows when the next linkscape updates are planned:

http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345964-linkscape-update-schedule

My rankings update on Tuesdays too and have been updated - if yours are still not showing an update then I'd log a support ticket as it should be automatic.

I'm not sure I see much value to either users or search engines in content that is 60% the same as an existing product page. I would also be worried that such an article would undermine the product page and cannibalise your important keywords.

Is the article targeting any specific keywords or niche?

It's had to repond without seeing the product page or the article, but can the article be reworded to be less about the product and more about the prospects needs/problems and the benefits of your product and then link to the product page for all the nitty-gritty details.

I don't see much value just repeating the content. The article doesn't exist in isolation does it?

What's the purpose/goal of the article? Can it not be re-worded to feed people into the relevant product page and into your conversion funnel?

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)

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!

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.

I don't think the URLs are an absolute disaster.

Before making any changes like this you need to understand the potential risks and clearly define what it is you are trying to achieve.

Look at how many links/linking domains each of your pages have. It's these deep links that are both the most valuable to the pages and also the ones most at risk.

How many pages do you have on your site, how much organic search traffic do you already attract? Where are you currently ranking for your chosen keywords?

If you've got lots of deep inbound links and the URLs aren't causing a significant problem then I don't think I'd take the risk. Even if it all goes well, you'll lost some "link juice" in the redirects.

What will be the return on investment of your time re-structuring your URLs and 301 redirecting all the content to the new pages vs the potential loss of rankings/traffic?

Hope this helps.

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'd go for the content at the top too normally as you want your keyword rich content to be as close to the top of the page so that it is treated as a little more relevant.

That said, there is quite a lot of text and in this case I can see that visitors might arrive on the page and only see the text above the fold. In which case I might look at a compromise of splitting the content with some above the items and some below.

Don't just think about the SEO value, but also about how your actual human visitors are going to experience the site.

I'd also surpress the text on the second+ pages on the navigation. People don't need to read it every time and there's a risk of duplicate content issues.

Of course the most important thing to a new blogger is getting some traffic. There's little point writing articles unless people are reading them.

Work on getting some backlinks to your blog. At the moment Open Site Explorer is only showing links from 4 domains and pretty much all of these links are no-follow (no-follow links are not seen as an endorsement and pass little authority to your site.)

I'd look at making some connections with other bloggers out there and see if you can do some guest posts. This is a great way to get backlinks and also get your content/name in front of people. You want to target blogs that cover related subject matter and have a good number of subscribers.

Hope this helps!

From a "pure SEO" point of view, whitepapers (like any rich content) can really help get some good long-tale content on the site, and may earn some links if they're good.

My personal view is that whitepaper are more useful when it comes to conversion.

Whitepapers can be used to support your offering/your proposition by providing evidence that you've understood the prospects needs, delivered a great solution to ther problem that delivers real benefits to the customer. (and explain the unique benefits of your solution that they wouldn't have received from your competitors)

Such whitepapers, like other good content may attract links too (unless they're hidden behind a subscription form)

Well presented solutions to problems that your target audience experience are of interest to people who, as Casey mentioned, may be willing to provide their email address, join a mailing list in order to receive the whitepapers. Think about the value of building such a mailing list for the business.

I'd take a step back and think about what you're trying to acheive and how you can use white papers to support these goals.

Hope this helps.

The instructions are near the bottom of the page:

In order to use Fetch as Googlebot, you'll need to have added and verified your site in Webmaster Tools. Then, follow these instructions:

1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
2. On the Dashboard, under Diagnostics, click Fetch as Googlebot.
3. In the text box, type the path to the page you want to check.
4. In the dropdown list, select the type of fetch you want. To see what our web crawler Googlebot sees, select Web. To see what our mobile crawler Googlebot-Mobile sees, select cHTML (this is used mainly for Japanese web sites) or Mobile XHTML/WML.
5. Click Fetch.

Once googlebot has fetched your page you'll have a "success" link that you can click on to see what Googlebot saw.

This will be the header, including the server response code and then the html that googlebot received.

What this doesn't tell you is how this was interpreted by Google, of course this is where SEOMoz's on-page reports and crawl stats can help detect errors and way your can improve your on-page optimisation.

What's to stop google from finding them? They're out there and available on the internet!

Block or remove pages using a robots.txt file

You can do this by putting:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

in the robots.txt file.

You might also want to stop humans from accessing the content too - can you put this content behind a password using htaccess or block access based on network address?