Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Edward - yes the online 'ONLY' was staring me in the face - this is more suited to companies with a physical presence. Still important to have consistent NAP wherever it is listed but not so much on locally only focused directories.

I have seen this before in Moz Open Site Explorer and the "Links" section of a Moz Pro Campaign as well. This appears to be an error and I believe can happen when Moz OSE counts a 301 redirect or a URL shortener (like goo.gl) as a linking root domain, but not as an External Inbound Link. You are most likely still correct in your understanding if you were thinking that the linking root domain number is the total number of unique ".com's" that are linking to your website, where as the number of External Inbound Links are the total (according to Moz's data) number of links from all websites and pages, including all multiples on different ".com's".

I like the banner idea. Maybe what I'd do is use a canonical so people could still view the article, but then also put in a banner.

Yeah definitely not with a client website lol

This is what I was looking for, thank you.

Search Appearance > Structured Data.

Thanks. I tried reinstalling it a few hours ago and that seemed to fix the issue

Haven't tried that, but that's not a bad idea, thanks. I assumed I wouldn't hear back.

For anybody who's curious, my editor got a link from an external source pointing to our home page. Her name, next to a link to Edwardsturm.com, must have decreased my site's relevance for the branded keyword of my name. The decrease in rank for this branded keyword happened at the same time that my editor was mentioned in this external source, so I'm assuming they're related. Kind of crazy.

Hi Edward, Google Adwords looks at fraudulous clicks and makes sure that these clicks are not using the budget of your Adwords campaigns. Even in their own budget reports/ campaign spend reports you can find a small piece at the bottom that will provide you with more information on what kind of credit you got back form clicks that they analysed as being fake.

To add on to Gaston's Reply, Wikipedia is up that Top 10 or 20 sites that could do everything wrong ( in fact some do ) regarding SEO and still rank number 1, Google's reasoning for this is basically, their too big to fail. If people started not seeing wikipedia pages, heads and traffic would roll. So since Google knows that traffic will continue as long as certain sites are always listed, they will overlook their SEO issues. I don't know for how long though, as I see pages from wiki that are awaiting deletion ranking on page 1 and 2 sometimes, not to mention the sometimes completely inaccurate information on some of wiki's pages, although rare doesn't boast well for SERPs relevancy. So to put it in otherwords, Wikipedia is above the law...

Thanks for following up!

First and foremost, you want to avoid SEOs who don't understand Google's Webmaster Guidelines.   Now, that might sound like a stupid requirement because "doesn't every SEO understand the webmaster guidelines?"  Fact is, they don't and that is why huge numbers of websites are suffering from Panda, Penguin and other penalties.  In many cases their SEOs did that to them because they built spammy links, made spammy content, etc.  Hiring an SEO is like picking up a snake and hoping that it isn't a rattler.  Be careful and know your snakes and understand webmaster guidelines so you can look at the work that the SEO is doing for you and determining if it is going to get you into trouble. Next, there are lots of SEOs who will take on any job at any budget.  You might go to one of them unknowing the competitive level of your websites niche and tell the SEO that you have $5000 per month to spend.... and your niche is "digital cameras".   Your SEO needs to gauge the cost and methods of becoming competitive in that niche and bring your site into the money and earn a positive return sometime before your funeral.  Digital cameras?  Is that a $500 per month or a $5,000 per month or a $50,000 per month or a $500,000 per month attack?   If the SEO accepts you at $500 or $5000 per month then that SEO probably doesn't know what it is really going to take to become competitive in that niche, or he just cares about milking you for your money month after month and just stinging you along for as long as he can.   Here you have ignorant SEOs who will take your money and work for you not knowing that the amount you are paying isn't enough to fund a proper attack.  Then you have the ones you don't have the integrity or the courage to turn down paying work even if they know that the budget isn't enough to move the needle.  They just want your money.

Hi there! Tawny from Moz's Help Team here. First off, I highly recommend checking out this great post from Rand about how to interpret fluctuations in Domain and Page Authority - it also does a really good job of explaining the size and shape of our index, and some of our limitations: https://moz.com/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scores The short version is that we're always working to make our Mozscape Index as Google-like as possible, including growing the index's size, but we're limited by how much time it takes to process all the metrics we return for the links in our index. We're working on improving our crawlers, and thus our index, all the time! I don't have a good ETA for a bigger, badder, more expansive index, but rest assured that it's on our roadmap and something we're actively working on.

That's true. This compiler is very reputable as well, but it's in a not super popular niche, so bloggers aren't going to be writing about it a ton. It's reputable, but undiscovered. From my understanding, Google would like all sorts of reputable information for the KG. The question is, with things that aren't as popular, how does one achieve this? Thanks.

Ahh I see. Sorry then, this isn't something I have actually tried for myself or any clients so don't have any data to give you that would be useful I'm afraid. -Andy