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You can set geotargeting in Google Webmaster tools. Subdirectories with a gTLD is a supported solution and duplicate content shouldn't be an issue; however, we have had canonical problems with English pages across .com, .co.uk and .com.au ccTLDs.

Google claims that they're smart enough to understand that your subdirs are for different countries but I'd strongly recommend changing the content as much as possible. Use different spellings, sentence structure, etc, let the client know that it's also better for visitors to see customised content rather than a general marketing copy.

You can read more about the Webmaster Tools settings here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=182192#2

Thanks for the detailed info! It'd be great to receive updates like this.

What if I link bombed your website? Every month I pay someone $5 on fiverr.com and buy thousands of super spammy black hat links. Not just your website, the top 5 in the SERP for a certain keyword that I want to get ranked for.

I run a test like this before. Link bombed a website with 15,000+ links, reported to Google but nothing happened so far. It would be too easy for competitors to ruin each other's online reputation with spammy links.

In less competitive online markets (like smaller countries) businesses often start 6-8 websites selling the same product or service. They present unique content on each of these websites and they do link building for each website but because the competition isn't as strong as in the US market, they can get first page rankings with directory and article submissions. When it's successful, they are present on the first page with 3-4 different websites.
They are pretty careful because they register the domain with different companies, hosting is on different server with different IPs, so it's completely white hat and Google doesn't recognise that the owner is the same.

Totally agree. It's confusing for the clients because we use PA/DA in the monthly reports and the recent DA drops resulted in questions, whether we're doing a good job or not.

I always explain that the authority values are relatively calculated and their website is compared to the other websites in the OSE index but numbers are just numbers and when a well trusted graph starts declining, I'm always in an inconvenient situation.

It would be great to hear more info about OSE updates, especially because we, the PRO users, support the development.

You can read more about OSE here, and the update schedule is here.

The last two index updates were also index clean-ups. Some of our clients lost a few dozen linking root domains and thousands of links. One client had 34,000 links before the index update, now 25,000.

They often remove the lower quality sites from the OSE index, so probably that's the reason for the drop in linking root domains.

Yes, Google allows you to change location but it seems like the search results are still different, probably because Google uses your IP address as a variable.

I use a VPN provider which has 50+ servers around the world and use their VPN servers as proxies.

Hi Lewis,

Tracking correct local search results requires proxies in every state and city which is a significant cost. Basically they need a proxy server in every city because Google identifies local searches on city and suburb level too. Having computers all over the US running keywords ranking reports is simply too expensive.

If they had proxies in every state, then which city should be targeted? For example: California. LA or San Francisco ?

I'm afraid you have to wait for the next OSE index update. I don't know how to trigger it to index websites. Sometimes I have the same problem, even when the website has a campaign.

I suggest that SEOMoz should prioritise PRO users' websites and make sure that their websites get indexed. For example, a website that is present in a live campaign should be queued for the next OSE index update. We pay for the index updates, don't we?

"We start crawling from the top down until we've crawled 59,000,000,000 pages (which is about 25% the amount in Google's index).

Therefore, if the site is not linked to by one of these seed URLs (or one of the URLs linked to by them in the next update) then it won't show up in our index. Sorry!"

More info here

Also, the OSE index updated every 4-6 weeks, so don't expect immediate results.

Sorry, I forgot to remove the .au

The most important and easiest step is to use Google Webmaster Tools. Go to Site Configuration, then Settings and set the Preferred Domain to either www or non-www.

Google:
"The preferred domain is the one that you would like used to index your site's pages. If you specify your preferred domain as http://www.example.com and we find a link to your site that is formatted as http://example.com, we'll treat that link as if it was http://www.example.com."

If you have access to .htaccess and not afraid to use it, then the following will help:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html
RewriteRule ^(.*)index.html$ http://www.yourdomain.com.au/$1 [R=301,L]

This redirects the non-www domain to the www version, and also redirects the index.html to the www version. Edit accordingly..

First Rate and Colombus in the same thread.

Find a local SEO company or a freelancer with good reputation. It's always better to meet sometimes, discuss the project and talk maybe once a month about the project.

Probably you'll have to pay a one time fee to start the project, on-site SEO, etc, then a monthly payment for link building, new content, social media and reporting.

OSE is being updated every 4-6 weeks so new links will be showed after the next update. The next update is scheduled on the 23rd August. You can check the update schedule here: http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345964-linkscape-update-schedule

OSE doesn't cover 100% of the Internet so that can be another reason why your links aren't showed. Read more about OSE here

Do you guys know the Bad Neighborhood tool? It's a pretty simple tool and I use it to quickly check websites for links, dodgy anchor texts and anything suspicious. I would implement a similar method in the DA calculation.

I'm afraid you misunderstood my post.

I know that it's only a link metric but since DA and PA is becoming a standard in the SEO world, future updates should consider more variables in the calculation, because online advertising professionals often use and refer to the mozbar for site comparisons.

"DA is mainly a measure of link counts based on the linking page's DA/PA"

Probably it's more than that. The [DA specification page]( It uses a machine learning model to predicatively find an algorithm that best correlates with rankings across thousands of search results that we predict against.) talks about machine learning and that's exactly where this spammy site analysis could improve the calculation. Algorithmically it should be too complicated to filter spammy sites and lower the value of links coming from those pages.

This post is just a tip for SEOMoz' further improvements, because I do like the team and their tools. A software can be improved by continuos testing and by talking about the weaker parts.

In the meantime my colleague asked me how I would differentiate between spammy and valuable blogs.

My answer was:

These blogs are easily identified as spammy because there's a dodgy 200 word content and hundreds of comments. Every nick name is a link with "smart" anchor texts. The comments are only a few words long and these pages have roughly 4-500 links. ...so it's pretty easy to algorithmically identify these websites as link farm.

I used a black hat link scraper that uses a list of free-to-comment spammy blogs.

Combine the site analysis with this list and you have a nice negative list of domains.

I use DA and PA every day for reporting, researching and most of the time it's a pretty good metric to compare domains and pages but recently I did an experiment and I was surprised when I saw the results.

Two months ago I "link bombed" one of my old, unused websites with thousands of spammy blog comment links. Before the attack, its DA was 21 with a few hundred links.

In August, after the recent OSE update I checked the website again and I was quite surprised to see DA 61 as a results of 8340 links.

A DA value over 60 is considered pretty strong and it's interesting to see that spammy blog comment links could change it so significantly. Someone who doesn't know the history of the domain might get interested in advertising on such websites because the mozbar shows a high DA value.

I know it's difficult to algorithmically differentiate between spammy and valuable blogs but a future OSE update could focus on this issue.

Let me know what you think.