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Hi Nextman,

You actually found a bug in Open Site Explorer that we are in the process of fixing. Binary files are mistakenly being counted as links. It's a known problem and is already being reduced, but you'll still see some of these for the next couple of months. Here's what Rand has to say about it as part of his larger post about the Linkscape Update.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/november-2011-linkscape-update

As I noted in the September index update, we have had some serious issues when crawling deeper on large domains and encountering binary files that contain code our crawler recognizes and treats as a link. To help stop this problem, we applied a black list to this index to stop a large number of the files folks had reported to us (our estimate is that ~40% of binary files are now removed). However, we know there's still more than a few of these in the database of links so we'll continue cranking away on solutions to remove them all. Our hope is to have them reduced in the next index (November) and nearly eliminated by the December index. If you're ever curious about the next/previous updates, you can always see data for them on our Linkscape calendar.

Hi Jean,

I saw your help desk ticket in from Friday regarding billing, and added a note for our team to look at this question and address it when they look more into your billing question. Sorry for the troubles, and you should be hearing back from us today.

Hi! Thanks for your contribution to this older thread. We ask that when you have not written the answer yourself, but have used another source, that you please give attribution to that source. It appears this list was last updated about a year ago and is from http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2010/03/19/list-of-social-media-management-systems-smms/, correct?

The best solution is to do a 301 redirect to your preferred URL (likely the one without the index.html). That way people never see the index.html URL, never link to it, and all the juice goes to the other URL.

To be able to give you instructions for this, it's best if you can tell us what type of server you are on (such as IIS or Apache), or if you can give us the URL we can figure it out from that.

If you're not able to do a redirect, the canonical tag is the second best choice. Users will remain on the /index.html page, but at least Google then knows that it's the same page as /,

Hi Gary,

One answer would be footer links. It looks like there are links to that site in the footer of http://www.newportoc.com/ that could account for thousands of links but be from only one root domain.

For the future, I'd suggest using something like Code Monitor (https://polepositionweb.com/roi/codemonitor/index.php) to monitor for any changes to your live or staging robots.txt. I've been in situations where too many people had access to the site that didn't know what they were doing, and getting an alert within 24 hours that someone changed something in robots.txt really saved us.

This is probably one to email to the help desk staff at help@seomoz.org and ask them directly. So sorry you're seeing problems!

Everything should be working now. If you're still having any problems, please contact help@moz.com. Thanks!

Here's a good starting place for learning about Linkbuilding: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

Does the server return a 503 not available when it goes down at least? Or is it somehow set to show a 404? You want to make sure it's showing a 503 to the bots so they know the server is down and not that the pages have been removed.

Hi Brandon,

Have you read this recent post by SEOmoz about directories (which includes a link to our directory of directories)? http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-link-directory-best-practices

What country is the target for this website? Your profile looks like you're from the UK. If you're targeting people in the UK, you might want to specify that, so we can help give you recommendations that better suit your area. If possible, you generally want hosting in the country you're targeting.

You can do up to two custom crawls a day on any subdomain if you'd like to force a crawl, though they can take a couple of days to finish. Here's the URL that you're looking for. http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test

The Beginner's Guide to SEO at http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo is a good place to get an overview of SEO and increasing your links.

I'm looking at their Our Method page at http://www.quickseoresults.com/our-method.php. It looks like their method focuses exclusively on link building. They brag about how many PR6-9 sites they get your links on, but this is an interesting paragraph they add:

If you are familiar with even basic SEO, you would know that it is useless to get links from a page with hundreds of outbound links but it’s not useless to get low value or no-follow links because they help construct an organic looking link profile. In the eyes of Google - less manufactured + less commercial = better rankings.

Their services include: wordpress blog posts, social profiles, forum links, web 2.0 blog posts (and this differs from wordpress blog posts how??), blog comments, bookmarking, monthly reporting, and SEO tips for your site.

Their facebook page has over 31,000 likes. The administrator of the facebook page asked for people to respond to a question recently, and in the comments said "So there are still real humans here :D" which doesn't lend confidence to me that all of those likes are very natural.

Keep in mind that the links themselves do not have pagerank. Also, are the links from a page itself that has a toolbar pagerank of 8, or from a site whose homepage has a toolbar pagerank of 8? Sure, I have a link to my business website  (which ranks on the first page of Google if I choose the right keywords) from a stanford.edu address. It's a subdomain on stanford's site that got fewer than 100 visits in the last year. Doesn't mean that the link does me a bit of good, but I can make it sound great when I say I have a link from Stanford an a .edu link.

The best thing to do now is contact help@seomoz.org and let them know your account username and the campaign that is having problems, and they can look into it for you.

Hi Jassy,

Could you also send an email to help@seomoz.org so this can be logged with the help desk? That will get a help desk person to respond to you, and also help us with any trends that might be going on.

Thanks!

In my honest opinion, I'd classify it as not something I'd spend my time or money on. That's not going to be my target market, they're not going to be accounts that are interested in what I have to say, and it's not going to do me any good when it comes to making money or getting my message out to the right people.

There's a good discussion about this in a very similar post from a few hours ago at http://www.seomoz.org/q/should-i-make-all-my-non-money-pages-no-follow. The short answer is that a couple years back it may have helped, but not anymore.

You do want to index them, as you want the search engines to see that you have a privacy policy, and both the privacy policy and about us help the engines trust your site just a tad more.