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Every backlinks tool - Webmaster Tools, Majestic, AHREFs, OSE, etc. - will give you different results because they all have their own index. You can't rely on one to get a complete picture. The best method is to get backlinks from as many sources as you can, compile them in one list, remove duplicates, and then start reviewing.

Was it just reporting as flat or did it actually go flat? Big difference there.

We operate 2 ecommerce sites. The About Us page of our main site links to the homepage of our second site. It's been this way since the second site launched about 5 years ago. The sites sell completely different products and aren't related besides both being owned by us.

In Webmaster Tools for site 2, it's picking up ~4,100 links coming to the home page from site 1. But we only link to the home page 1 time in the entire site and that's from the About Us page.

I've used Screaming Frog, IT has looked at source, JavaScript, etc., and we're stumped. It doesn't look like WMT has a function to show you on what pages of a domain it finds the links and we're not seeing anything by checking the site itself.

Does anyone have experience with a situation like this? Anyone know an easy way to find exactly where Google sees these links coming from?

There is no one best tool for looking at backlinks. AHREFs seems to have the biggest dataset, but they'll all give you different results. If you really want to see what you have, use OSE, Majestic, AHREFs, and any others you like, put them all in one spreadsheet and remove duplicates. Then you'll have your true backlinks picture.

We have a similar situation with one of our sites. Almost all our products come in multiple colors when we recently redesigned/relaunched on Magento, we did a canonical on all variations to a main parent SKU (generally the black version since it's almost never out of stock).

But we ran into the problem of Google only indexing the parent version and none of the rest, so we weren't coming up on any long tail searches. We've since changed the caonicals so every product points to itself and are hoping to get more indexed, plus we're considering ways to add more unique content to each color variation of a product.

I have the same thing - 2 of 5 active campaigns, all our keywords, but no campaigns there.

Update - using the big green button when I first logged in took me to the page with nothing, but navigating to it by entering a campaign via Pro, then clicking the link to test Moz Analytics worked and brought everything up.

We have wild fluctuations like that for our sites every week, and many of them are not accurate when checked manually - sometimes they're more than 10 positions off. And then sometimes the changes as showing it out of the top 50 is completely wrong.

A Moz team member looked at our campaigns said we just have highly volatile keywords. That seems kind of ridiculous to me, it's not like we're in a super super competitive niche.

Ours do the exact same thing. Keyword rankings for one of our campaigns were reported today and there were fluctuations from down more than 48 to up more than 26. One term is ranking 17 in Bing and 7 in Yahoo - and Bing dropped this week while Yahoo increased. Some terms rank on the first page for Google but not even the top 50 for Yahoo and Bing, and vice versa.

And then we have the whole issue of accuracy. This morning, one of our mid-level keywords reported as position 4 in Google with an increase of 9, but I immediately checked and saw that it was 14 (not logged in, non-personalized, location-neutral, etc). This happens every week.

A Moz team member looked our account and said our keywords are just highly volatile.

I don't know what else to say other than you're not alone. It's frustrating.

Nobody has any experience with this?

We're about to set up enhanced sitelinks for our main site but I'm not sure about the best way to do this given the duplicate URL rule.

Ex. we have a campaign for X category of products. X category has 13 subcategories and each subcategory has 4 ad groups. So in total, campaign X category has 52 ad groups in it.

We planned to do a sitelink for every ad group, so 52 for this X category of products. But the duplicate URL rule makes this difficult considering how many will be in a single campaign. Making them links to related subcategories isn't possible as we'd run into duplicates really fast. Same with About Us, Contact Us, etc.

What's the best way of approaching this?

No change in traffic to our sites, just normal weekly patterns.

I've had to do this for our dev sites before - you'll be fine. Like you said, add the dev site in WMT, do a remove site by leaving the field blank, and proceed. It won't take your main site out of the index.

We use an IP filter in GA.

How many of you routinely have inaccurate data in your Moz Pro keyword rankings reports? I just checked 5 of our terms that came in this morning - yes, it's a not logged in, non-personalized, incognito, cleared cache search - and none of them actually ranked where Moz said they ranked.

One was listed in the top 5 and wasn't even on the first page. One was listed at position 3 but was actually at position 8, a big difference when it comes to CTR. And the report will have stuff like our brand name not ranked at all one week, then jumping by 45+ positions the next week, then gone the next week. And it doesn't fluctuate like that.

I get that the reports are general to what most people see, but should such big disparities be expected?

This comment on the SEL article sums it up best - http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-once-again-1s-have-no-direct-impact-on-rankings-170200#comment-1010348314

C-blocks basically refer to where an IP address is located. C-blocks are like the neighborhood and sites that share it are basically your neighbors. More linking c-blocks is better.

See my original post - I did that and in its WMT it still shows pages indexed.

One of our dev sites get indexed (live site robots.txt was moved to it, that has been corrected) 2-3 weeks ago. I immediately added it to our Webmaster Tools and used the Remove URL tool to get the whole thing out of the SERPs.

A site:devurl search in Google now returns no results, but checking Index Status in WMT shows 2,889 pages of it still indexed. How can I get all instances of it completely removed from Google?

Hard to give an answer without seeing the traffic graph for the time periods you mentioned the drops. If the drop in May was around the 22nd to 25th, it likely was a Penguin update. We got hit by it at that time.

Other things could've been dragging the site down over the last year and then Penguin may have hit and caused the free-fall. Definitely get rid of the directory links and any other links you think Google might penalize you for in the future.

Exactly right. One of our sites has ~52,000 backlinks and the vast, vast majority are now considered bad in Google's eyes (years ago they weren't). We have a competitor who has only ~600 backlinks but they outrank us on some main keywords. They have some spammy backlinks, but we have a lot more so it's hurt us more. It's definitely quality over quantity of links.