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As proposed by a number of people here, I have moved from WordPress.com to a self-hosted WordPress blog. I have also installed the SEO All in One plugin. This has been up and running for a month or so.

My problem is that it is generated many (thousands) of warnings through my PRO Dashboard for Crawl Diagnostics. Specifically, I have a huge number of "Overly-dynamic URL" warnings. A typical URL is as folows:

http://www.wednet.com/blog/2011/10/07/do-us-a-favor-dont/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=do-us-a-favor-dont

This has three querystring parameters, all generated by WordPress automatically.

Here's another significant issue. With the SEO All In One plug in I can control the SEO-related parameters for each post (title, meta description, etc). However, WordPress generates a ton of virtual URLs which I can't (as far as I know) directly control. For example, the following page is a category page with all the posts for a single category. This is generating warnings because the meta description is missing. However, I do not know how to control such parameters since the page is automatically generated.

http://www.wednet.com/blog/category/ceremony/

These type of warnings dominate the stats I have through my dashboard. How can I resolve these?

Thanks.

Mark

Thank you for the response. I do not have a robots.txt file. I'm not following how the Google crawl rate effects this (but would love to learn why). I thought that is only used to define how often Google itself crawls my site and has nothing directly to do with SEOMoz. Also, it is not how often the SEOMoz crawl takes (it starts on time each Saturday) but, rather, how long it takes to complete. For two of the last three weeks it has taken almost 48 hours from start to finish.

Thanks again.

Mark

I have had my site registered for a long time (since January 1995) and in that time we have built a good number of incoming links. We have a vendor database that we expose as a service to our visitors, which numbers around 5,500. These sites vary dramatically from low-end, Mom-and-Pop type web sites (some ugly in the extreme :)) to nationwide, established vendors.

Back in the day, we had the basic tactic to request a link to our site if the vendor wanted to be listed in our vendor database. We stopped that practice years ago but still have many sites linking to us.

The quality of some of these sites is very poor. I want to come up with a strategy for dealing with these. To that end, some questions:

• How "costly", from an SEO perspective, is a poor quality site that links to our site?
• What metric(s) should be used to assess the quality of sites linking to us?
• If possible, for the aforementioned metric is there a "bar" we might try to hit? For example, would it be useful to request removal of links where <metric>is less than x? What is x?</metric>
• Given that we have thousands to assess, is there any report I can create to identify these sites?
• Is it generally preferred to have vendors link simply to our home page or is it more effectice to have them link to particular pages on our site (each vendor can generally be associated with a "topic" on our site).

In short, I am willing to go through this process if there is real value in it.

Thanks.

Mark

Once again the weekly crawl on my site is very slow. I have around 441 pages in the crawl and this has been running for over 12 hours. This last happened two weeks ago (ran for over 48 hours). Last week's crawl was much quicker (not sure exactly how long but guessing an hour or so).

Is this a known issue and is there anything that can be done to unblock it? Weekends are the best time for me to assess and respond to changes I have made to my site so having this (small) crawl take most of the weekend is really quite problematic.

Thanks.

Mark

Still running and approaching two days now

My first month trial is up today. This has got me thinking about whether to continue. 40+ hours just seems too much or a small web site such as mine.

Mark

Thank you, Joshua. Just to clarify this is not the initial crawl (that happened a couple of weeks ago). This is the third week for me. I am pretty sure the first two were way quicker than this,

Thanks again.

Mark

Mine started yesterday afternoon and it's now almost 11pm on Sunday. 30+ hours and still not finished (and no progress indicator). 438 pages quoted as being crawled. That's not normal - right?

I have made a bunch of changes based on last weeks crawl so I have been eagerly waiting for this to finish But 30 hours?....

Thanks.

Mark

Thank you, Kate. Yes - that's exactly what I was after. A good, thorough explanation of the challenges involved and a response we can all use, not just the original poster of the thread. Thanks again - much appreciated.

Mark

Thank you for the response. But doesn't that rather downplay the overall value of SEOMoz?

Another example - beyond keywords rankings - are the crawl diagnostics. SEOMoz did a great job of highlighting some issues with my site and I've been tackling them iteratively However, it's really irritating to have the "beat a deadline" to make any changes by a Saturday - and if I miss it have to wait two weeks to see the results.

I am not sure just switching to another service is the answer I'd to see a more responsive SEOMoz service.

Thanks.

Really quite disappointed with the response to this thread: http://www.seomoz.org/q/possible-to-force-the-seomoz-ranking-report-to-update

Three of us expressed an interest in this but the response was for (only) the original poster to create a ticket and the question was closed to any further discussion.

Might I request that SEOMoz folks read the thread? There is a general question and three of us have requested some feedback. It is very clear that more than one person is interested in the answer Just asking one of those individuals to open a ticket and get a response for himself doesn't seem very customer-centric (well, beyond that first customer).

I'd really appreciate an open and public discussion as to whether SEOMoz can support updates more than once a week and, if not now, whether it intends to in the future.

Thanks.

Mark

I a kind of guessing that this is something of a FAQ but as a trial user right now this is one of the more frustrating elements of SEOMoz. Like you, we just added a bunch of keywords (80+) and it's pretty frustrating to wait a week before we can see any form of results.

Similarly for the crawl diagnostics. SEOMoz did a good job of identifying a bunch of issues and we've made changes but having to wait a week to verify things are fixed seems a great shame.

Thanks.

Mark

Thank you. Yes, that's pretty much the plan I am executing now. Right now I'm struggling to get this working with the URL rewriting module in IIS 7 but I am sure it's possible.

Thanks again.

Mark

Thank you, Alan. I want to make sure I understand this.

I have full control of my DNS zone entries. I currently link a CNAME record for blog to the <myblog>.wordpress.com. My hope is that I could:</myblog>

• Update the DNS entry to point to my own server (so, blog.<mydomain>.com would just be directed to that machine)</mydomain>
• Implement some sort of server-side redirect that translates the old format to the new format.

This way I have no reason to keep WordPress.com in the picture (with the redirection service) - I basically just create new links to www.<mydomain>.com</mydomain> and have all old links redirected as above.

Would that not work?

Thanks again.

This is more of a technical question than pure SEO per se, but I am guessing that some folks here may have covered this and so I would appreciate any questions.

I am moving from a WordPress.com-based blog (hosted on WordPress) to a WordPress installation on my own server (as suggested by folks in another thread here).

As part of this I want to move from the format blog.<mydomain>.com to www.mydomain.com\blog. I have installed WordPress on my server and have imported posts from the hosted site to my own server.

How should I manage the transition from first format to the second? I have a bunch of links on Facebook, etc that refer to URLs of the blog..com format so it's important that I redirect.</mydomain>

I am running DotNetNuke/WordPress on my own IIS/ASP.Net servers.

Thanks.

Mark

OK, it looks like I will have to bite the bullet and host WordPress Looking at that now but a few more SEO-related questions...

With WordPress.com I set up the domain feature such that my blog was at http://blog.<mysite>.com</mysite>. The default installation for WordPress (if I host it) seems to be http://www.<mysite>.com\blog</mysite>. Are there any specific SEO-related drawbacks to using the second format? I have no idea how easy it is to modify the installation to support the first format but I am happy to switch to the second if there are no drawbacks.

Also, given that Google, etc has crawled against my WordPress.com blog (so, the first format above) would you anticipate a penalty in switching from the first format to the second? Would this not show up as (yet another) duplicate content hit and, if so, how long would this typically take to work itself out  (once the first format above is no longer available)?

Thanks again.

Mark

Thank you for the response. Yes, that is pretty much the way I've been thinking about this but...

• The perfectionist in me wants to "get to zero". This may not be possible or even necessary but converging on that is something I'd like to consider.
• More importantly, if I accept these issues - and maybe I have no choice - then I have a TON of noise and it's difficult to see the important stuff. So, to my surprise, I have THOUSANDS of errors and warnings. If new ones come up they migh be very important - but if all my "accepted" warnings are still there I may well miss them.

If I come to the conclusion that these issue for WordPress are non-factors (and I am not there yet) then it would be good to be able to "hide" these from the dashboard so that the remaining, hopefully actionable, ones are not hidden in the noise.

Thanks,

Mark

I am in my 30 day trial and very interested in my results. I think I am probably in a small minority in having the same web site up and running for approaching 17 years (registered in January 1995 :)) but only now am I looking at SEO seriously (to the extent that I want to learn more myself, as opposed to having others promise great fortune!)). Anyway, before committing to SEOMoz on an ongoing basis I want to understand just how actionable the information on my dashboard is. With that in mind, here's the first of what is (hopefully) a series questions that about low-hanging fruit I might be able to check off quickly.

I recently brought up a new blog on WordPress.com (note - hosted by WordPress, not a self-hosted implementation). I have had this blog running for less than a month and have just 18 posts. And I am being overwhelmed with thoudands of errors/warnings from SEOMoz. These fall into a few categories:

• Duplicate content: As I understand it, each TAG I associate with a single blog post creates a unique URL. For example, if I have a single post with tags for "flowers", "wine" and "cakes", I get URLs generated such as <blog url="">/flowers, <blog url="">/wines and <blog url="">/cakes. Obviously, tagging posts is a common scenario. Must I just accept these duplicate content warnings?</blog></blog></blog>
• Title element too long: These are self generated by WordPress.com and the default format includes the date the post was submitted (which takes a bunch of characters followed by the title used). Many of the posts are well over 70 and this seems really easy to do.
• Missing meta-description: As far as I can tell, Wordpress.com doesn't give me an option to specify these.

So, must I just accept these issues if I use WordPress.com (which, again, seems like a very common scenario) and how negative is this to me?

Thanks.

Mark