Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Here's a recent post about best practices for link building with directories that might help you.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-link-directory-best-practices

Hi Diane,

Have you tried any of these? Joomla has an extension directory that lists several pinging extensions. Also, a Bing search on [joomla ping] turned up several useful results with detailed explanations.

http://extensions.joomla.org/search?q=ping

OpenSiteExplorer crawls a portion of the web, then processes what it crawls, then updates on about a monthly basis. It can be up to two months for your links to show, and sometimes not all of the links show. The next update is on February 29th.

OSE won't show you every link you have, but neither does Google. OSE does offer you a lot of valuable metrics and insights into links and domains that Google does not.

Unless it happened to show up in your feed (in which case you can see a note that it was sponsored), to my knowledge, there's no way of knowing it was paid. I asked Marty from Aim Clear and a couple of other people about this last spring, and they weren't aware of a way either. If one post has 3000 FB likes, and all the other posts by the page have about 10 likes, you can guess that they did something, however.

I'd put the links out there straight. I don't see anything for you to worry about at all. You're curating the links, you feel they are valuable, let Google know they are valuable and trusted links.

A starting place would be the Learn SEO tab on SEOmoz (http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo). That will help explain some of the terms your seeing in your report. The Beginner's Guide to SEO will help you learn about SEO so that you can either do the work yourself, or understand what an SEO pro is telling you.

Nux,

Do feel free to ask a question in private Q&A. It's private, so it is not indexed, and not visible to anyone but SEOmoz staff and associates (who are all under NDAs) and yourself. You can name the sites in question, and get a bit more of a personalized response and some direction there in addition to what you're getting here in public.

You get one private question a month as a pro member, and this sounds like it could be a good reason to use that private question credit.

Hi Kynduvme, I'll take a stab at this, and let others add their comment as well.

Branded keywords are generally those of your brand, such as your company name or a product name. For example, my husband and I run a business called Strike Models where we sell model warships that shoot and sink each other. For us, "Strike Models" is a branded search. If I see that in my analytics, I know that someone is searching for me because they have heard of our company.

If I see "model ship plans" or "rc battleships", that's not a branded search. I'm appearing for some of my keywords, and the people may not have heard of my particular brand before. It's usually easier to rank for your branded terms, and thus helps separate that out from your other keywords.

Does that help?

edit: here's the post we made when branded keywords were introduced:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/introducing-branded-keyword-rules-and-metrics

Today's YouMoz looks at ten examples of good linkbait pieces and dissects why they were successful. It might help you get a couple of ideas for your pieces too.

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/10-extraordinary-examples-of-effective-link-bait

SEOmoz maintains a list at http://www.seomoz.org/article/recommended.

There is a bug that's being worked on right now, and I think a fix will be out within the next day.

Often I'll find Q&A questions indexed in less than an hour. Google tends to be pretty speedy with their indexing of this section.

April 10th! Our calendar is at https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345964-linkscape-update-schedule

This post from a year ago might be of interest to you. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-online-marketing-with-giant-infographic-11928

The Page and Domain authority calculations are updated when Linkscape is update. Usually that's on a monthly basis, but it's been two months since the last update. The next update will be later this week, and you should see some metrics change then.

I'd vote for doing the rewrite to the lowercase version. This gives you a couple of added benefits:

1. If people copy and paste the URL from their browser then link to it, you're getting all the links going to the same place.

2. Your analytics based on your URLs will be more accurate. Instead of seeing:

urla.htm 70 visits
urlb.htm 60 visits
urlB.htm 30 visits

You'll see

urlb.htm 90 visits
urla.htm 70 visits

We're having an issue with LInkscape right now, which OSE (and other tools) uses. We're working on it right now. Keep an eye on the SEOmoz twitter account (@seomoz) for updates.

Keep in mind you're only seeing the Toolbar Page Rank, which updates only a few times a year, and isn't an exact reflection of the constantly-updated real PR that's internally calculated by Google.

I'd also check out Meathead Movers at http://www.meatheadmovers.com/. I can't speak for all of their tactics, but I know one thing they do is create local content for many of their areas. For example, the Santa Maria page (which is my hometown) http://www.meatheadmovers.com/movers/santa-maria.aspx  includes a video they shot about Santa Maria style BBQ, information about the city in their own words, resources, etc.

They sponsor local athletics, especially at Cal Poly, and also work with the battered women's shelters to help move women out of bad situations for free. I don't know if they get any links from this, but it's something that they could go after that would be very natural.

I'm not affiliated with them, beyond using them as a case study for a blog post and talk about negative keywords earlier this year, and having read about them in the local paper when I still lived in the area.

I would certainly redirect those pages! If you're on Wordpress, I suggest the Redirection plugin. It's easy to set up those redirects, and also has a feature where you can monitor your 404s and set up redirects from your 404 logs.

Hi Shaun,

Since you put this in the category of SEOmoz tools, I'm assuming you want an SEOmoz crawl. We do offer a custom crawl that will do up to 3000 pages on demand, with results in a couple of days (or hours, depending on the size of your site). Check it out at http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test.