Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Don't forget about analytics. It can be helpful to have some directory structure so you can look at various aspects of the site in aggregate in your favorite analytics package. If you have categories of /golf-clubs/, /golf-shoes/, and /golf-towels/, with having them in a directory structure you can look in aggregate about how all of the pages about golf clubs are doing on your site. Lunametrics has a post at http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2010/09/22/designing-google-analytics-friendly-site/ with more ideas.

Here's a quick note about the stars. Right now, they're just a direct replacement of the labels that we displayed for each level.

They had been:
Aspirant
Contributor
Journeyman
Authority
Guru
Oracle

We updated the Journeyman and Guru names, and displayed stars instead of labels for each level. It took me months of working here to remember which label stood for which level, and I saw many times people thinking someone's name was Journeyman or thinking they were an author because they had a Contributor status.

Tweaking the stars for the levels is something we can certainly look at in the longer term. For right now, we think it's an easier way to display the participation level of users without relying on terms that may not be familiar to all of our users, especially the international users.

For the top users, we added the condition that they have at least 25 mozpoints. Previously, if someone had one mozpoint and logged in within the last 60 days, they were listed in the top users. Now they need to have at least 25 mozpoints to show up on the list. There are only 20 points possible for filling out your complete profile, so now the people on that list have actually made some type of contribution (usually a comment or Q&A question) to the Moz community.

I hope this helps explain the stars and points a bit more for everyone!

I'd also suggest reading the Beginner's Guide to SEO, written by SEOmoz. This will give you a good background on SEO so that you can implement it on your site, and understand how to implement it for your customers as well.

Just wanted to leave a quick note saying that SEOmoz has upgraded our Link Directory! You can view a post Cyrus wrote with more information about the directory update and link building via directories at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-link-directory-best-practices

http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection can help. You're specifically looking for the "Redirecting Canonical Hostnames" section.

Briefly, google considers the following as different pages, even if they are the same.

example.com
www.example.com

Other fun things that can also happen are having all of these pages have the same content, but you can use the following URLs to get to that one piece of content:

example.com
example.com/
example.com/index.html
www.example.com
www.example.com/
www.example.com/index.html

Hope that helps!

Not rankings, but consider user experience, especially with mobile. If someone is looking for somewhere to eat in the next two hours and they're using their phone, they're going to want a page and site that makes it easy to find information about the location, hours, etc. You might also bring that aspect to the customer and let them know the potential conversion issues (unless you're already planning something for mobile -- the existing site looked just like the desktop site on my iPhone right now).

The ability for multiple people to use one account is in development, but is taking a little longer than expected. I don't have an estimated time on it yet, but it is our most popular request and we're all eager for it to be rolled out.

Good question Thomas. I'm not sure about this, so I've assigned this question to the help team and will have them come over and give an answer when they have a chance (they normally don't visit Q&A unless an associate or staff member flags a question).

Let me see if I understand. You want to take a new domain with no authority or history and put machine-generated text on that and have it outrank real sites that have original content and established history?

I'd stay far, far away from doing that if you actually want a defensible site that will survive against algorithm changes that focus on low-quality content. There are other forums that may give you more help with this, but the focus SEOmoz staff and community members generally have is making your sites for the users, not to outsmart the search engines.

What's the value proposition for your users? Take another look, and think about why should the search engines deliver your site as a result, when the search engines want to deliver sites that make users happy with the engine.

For a time (October-December 2010, if not earlier), the AdWords Keyword Tool was ignoring keywords that were not commercial in nature, and there was much outcry from the community. For the following two links, the first link is from when they removed non-commercial intent and lists several keyword alternatives. The second post is an update, with information about how Google has improved their keyword tool. This may be one of the reasons you've heard people say not to trust the results.

http://www.aimclearblog.com/2010/10/07/r-i-p-google-keyword-tool-long-live-seo/

http://www.aimclearblog.com/2010/12/21/safe-for-seo-hacking-fixed-google-keyword-tool/

The best themes for page rank are the ones that are easy for you to install, so that you can spend your time writing quality content to help your visitors convert and to earn links. There's no magic theme that will tell Google "this site deserves a high PR".

Keep in mind that Domain Authority is a Moz metric, and not something that is used by the search engines to help judge a site. We try to approximate what the search engines value, but doing things solely to get an increase in DA without adding real value to the site isn't going to be of much help in the search engines.

Things to look at in addition to Moz metrics are: are your clients making more money from your efforts? Are they getting more leads? Are more people visiting their site? Are people staying longer? Has the conversion rate increased? Are you making their phones ring more? Those are also quite important metrics.

Hi Chenzo,

We've actually just back a report as spam button in the PM system that you can use for this. This account also triggered some other systems we have, so I've already banned it. Thanks for letting us know! I've gone and removed some of the information, but will leave the question up so people know what to do if they do get spammed.

Keri

Hi Ming, Not disclosing the links does raise red flags. One way to look for links is to verify your site in Google Webmaster Tools and see what links show there. Open Site Explorer will show some links, but it does take longer to show up. I've asked another SEOmoz associate with more experience in this area to contribute additional comments.

Do make sure you use the canonical URL in your links, however. You don't want to be linking to several different versions of the same URL.

If Google didn't exist, how would you write this for your users?

If your website was solely based on people typing in your URL or getting a referral, would your users want a separate page for "How to lose ten pounds" and "how to lose 10 pounds fast"?

Is this an affiliate site or are you selling something that's the same for all of these keyword options?

As a regular person, I would think the answers to the queries about losing 10 pounds and losing 100 pounds would be fairly different, if the page was actually attempting to answer those questions.

In person, if you're at MozCon or SMX Advanced, where Roger comes out to visit. Otherwise, he'll tweet you a virtual hug if you remind him when you're at 50 MozPoints.

Thanks for your feedback everyone!We really appreciate hearing how you use Q&A and how you'd like to see it improved.

I do go back at times and ask if people have had their question solved or if they're looking for more help. An automatic way to ask the person this after a certain number of days would be a great feature to have, I agree. Our system does notify people when they get a new answer, and suggests to them to mark an answer helpful.

Even though I don't comment on many of the questions, I do read nearly every question and answer that comes into Q&A. I flag questions that have no answers or questionable answers for another Associate to come and review, I give lots of thumbs up (and an occasional thumb down), and endorse good answers (and need to do that more).

One factor in some of this is that if a person came in on a free trial, asked a few questions and took time to implement them, by the time they figured out if their problem was solved or they needed more help their free trail has expired and they can no longer comment on Q&A questions. When I have extra time, I start looking through questions that are still marked as unanswered that are either 7 or 30 days old, and follow up to see if there is an answer to the question and the OP just didn't mark answered, ask if followup is needed, etc.

Please do continue to give your suggestions here, both for the software system and for the administration. We are looking even if we don't comment, and really do find the feedback helpful.

This is one flaw of OSE, that domains like wordpress.com, blogger.com, weebly.com, etc. have high domain authority that don't necessarily have any influence on the subdomain in the eyes of the search engines.

Also in OSE, make sure that you're only looking at links to the subdomain, not to the root domain (which would be all of weebly.com).

A quick clarification, for others who might have the same question. You'll keep your MozPoints, but only have access to Q&A if you have over 500 MozPoints or have a paid account. Karl, you've got well over 500 MozPoints, so you'll still be able to use Q&A.