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We noticed this too, and we're investigating what happened and will keep people updated with the status. Edit: We rolled back a change we made, and this is now fixed.

Hi Juan,

Have you looked through the link building section in the Beginner's Guide to SEO at http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links? There is a lot of good information there.

There is no easy solution where you download a piece of software and increase your rank. You may see rankings increase in the short term, but then likely will need to spend a considerable amount of time removing these links after getting a notice from Google about unnatural links.

Also, review Google's guidelines about content. Under Link schemes, they discuss unnatural links that violate the guidelines (http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356). These links include:

Forum comments with optimized links in the post or signature, for example:
_Thanks, that’s great info!

• Paul
  paul’s pizza san diego pizza best pizza san diego_

Google also frowns on user-generated spam, including "Spammy posts on forum threads" and "Comment spam on blogs" (http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2721437&topic=2371375&ctx=topic)

Dr. Pete wrote a good post about this at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many that should help answer some of your questions.

Moz Page Authority is a separate metric. Sadly, we have no pipeline from Google where they tell us exactly what they think of a site. We update our metrics about every month, so it may take a couple of months to see authority changed to a new page in Moz.

Lots of people are reporting this in the forums. Barry Schwartz writes a post about it on Search Engine Roundtable at http://www.seroundtable.com/google-webmaster-tools-link-count-16315.html.

spyonweb.com will also look for the same Google Adsense and Google Analytics codes/accounts across sites.

Hi! The logged in part would be my guess as well. Can you ask your client to use her browser in an incognito mode and preform the same search? That will help remove some of the personalization.

Thanks for clarifying things! It can look a bit odd to come to a two-year-old question on the day you join and have a link to a product with no context.

Quick correction: EGOL's title is Content Director, but he does not work for Moz as either staff or associate (though we're thankful he dedicates so much of his own time to Q&A).

That assumes that you can get a link to your website from a guest post on Moz.

The page actually feels like it has too much information about what the actual surgery involves, and too little information about the hypnosis. How long does it take, both in how long is an individual session and how many sessions does it take? What is the cost? Does the hypnosis ever wear off? For what percentage of people is it effective? Do people have to travel to your office, or do you come to them?

How is the page for conversions? Ranking isn't everything, as in the end you are still trying to make money and have people inquire about your services. You might consider an a/b test and test a page that is more focused on the user and less on the search engines, and see if you get more people calling to inquire about your services. This page has a lot of extra content that is off-topic and appears to be written for the search engines (especially that huge footer) and isn't written for the person considering the service.

I was searching on freedownloadhub linkexchange and happened across this thread. It look like the site has taken down all of the link exchange pages. They still return a 200 (found) response code, but have the following text:

Link Exchange Update

Due to changes in Google's ranking rules this service has become outdated. Due to a number of requests to de-list URLs, we have decided to end this service.

As well as the Mozinar Ruth did at http://moz.com/webinars/domain-migrations-lessons-from-the-moz-transition

If you go too cheap, you're going to get content that could do you more harm than good. I've had people in Q&A ask why a site wasn't ranking, and I went to look, and there was content like "think before you beverage" instead of "think before you drink".

From a user's point of view, if that's all one title tag, it looks fairly stuffed and spammy. Google has been known to show a title tag of its choosing in the SERPs if it thinks the one coded is too spammy.

He's hiding over at http://pro.moz.com/tools/crawl-test for the moment. We'll be working on making him a little easier to find again.

We have been having some issues this weekend that have resulted in some outages; a couple of things went wrong at the same time. We'll have updates and more information tomorrow when everyone is back in the office. So sorry about this!

To everyone who contributed to this thread, thank you! I'm humbled to see that there have been 12 responses in 12 hours to this question, on a Saturday, and on a (US) holiday weekend.

Thank you all for your answers, your time, your encouragement towards each other and towards all of the people in our community. I'm awed by all of you tonight.

Go for sites that have readers who are interested in your subject area. YouMoz is a great place for a case study about your marketing efforts, but submitting a post about how to close you swimming pool for the winter and what chemicals to use will get your submission deleted and your account banned -- even if it's a great post that gives information that's really helpful and has relevant links.  You're looking for a place where your content is a good match for the site.

How about focusing on the keywords and products that make you money?

My husband sells kits for model warships that shoot and sink each other. A high-volume keyword would be battleship, but that doesn't get us any sales. A low volume keyword would be uss iowa 1:144 scale turret cover, but that's a low-priced item that's not going to help us too much. For us, a different keyword makes much more sense.