Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Josh!

Thanks for posting in Q&A! Just to clarify, are you referring to your _pages _crawled in Moz Analytics?

Samuel pretty much nailed it up there. I'd only make one change—that particular Help article is actually referring to the Link Analysis section of the old Pro app. You can find the corresponding article, updated for Moz Analytics, here:

http://moz.com/help/guides/links

For an excellent overview of all the tools in Moz Analytics, you can also take a look at our Getting Started guide, which can be found at http://moz.com/help/guides/getting-started.

Does that help at all?

Hi Esteban,

You got it! Try running a Full SERP Analysis Report on the keyword. You'll get a snapshot of the SERP, as well as a breakdown of how each ranking page is doing on their rank signals. Feel free to come back here if you're not sure what it's telling you.

Matt

Hi Kimberly,

Thank you for coming here for help! I definitely understand—we all started somewhere, and there's a lot of information in your account.

Most of our educational materials can be found in the Learn section. Specifically, though, the best place to get an understanding of SEO, and inbound marketing in general, is The _Beginner's Guide to SEO. _It's a solid overview of the concepts, and can be pretty easily read in an afternoon. Then, for drilling into specific concepts and techniques, I suggest spending a little time in Moz Academy. The videos are very engaging, and should give you a good idea of how to apply what you'll learn in the Beginner's Guide.

That should give you a great background in inbound concepts and terminology, and make your time in the Help Hub and Moz Analytics much more valuable. If you get in there, though, and aren't sure how to get going, Cyrus Shepard has outlined a basic SEO process in "How to Rank: 25 Step SEO Master Blueprint."

Of course, feel free to ask questions if you get stuck again!

Hi John,

Welcome to Moz! Thomas definitely has you on the right track, but I've got a few recommendations of my own.

If you'd like to brush up on SEO and inbound marketing in general, I absolutely recommend reading through the Beginner's Guide to SEO, if you haven't before. It offers one of the best introductions available to the basics of SEO, and can be pretty easily read through in an afternoon. Cyrus Shepard's "How to Rank" is another great learning resource, and presents a more practical explanation of the SEO process. Then, of course, there's Moz Academy, which Thomas already covered.

It sounds as if you may have already seen it, but the Getting Started section of the Help Hub provides an overview of each of the tools we have available, including quick video introductions and documentation. I suggest looking it over once, then checking back whenever you feel confused about a tool or feature.

Finally, here's the basic process I tend to recommend to folks who are just getting started:

1. Set up the Brand & Mentions section of your account to get it started collecting data.

2. Add your competitors to the Links section of your account, in order to get their link metrics tracking, as well.

3. Use the On-Page Optimization section of your campaign, and particularly the page grade recommendations to get the on-page elements of your site under control. I recommend checking out Rand's post on the "perfectly optimized page" for pointers.

4. Use Crawl Diagnostics to work out anything that's causing issues for web crawlers.

Where you go from there will depend on your own goals and strategy.

Does that help at all?

Hi Dusan!

You're definitely on the right track, though I'd make a few adjustments to those metrics. To tell whether changes to your on-page keyword targeting were worth it, I'd suggest focusing on rankings changes and traffic.

While Page Grade will tell you whether a page is compliant with keyword targeting best practices, it won't tell you whether that keyword targeting is positively affecting your rankings or traffic. Page Authority, MozRank, and MozTrust are link metrics, and don't consider any on-page or keyword targeting factors, so they really won't do anything to show the effects of your on-page optimization.

Does that help?

Hi there!

This depends on your particular needs, but I would suggest blocking those query parameter-containing URLs in robots.txt. If you think it's important for search engines to crawl them, you could just block Rogerbot, and you shouldn't see duplicate content warnings about those pages anymore. Personally, though, I'd block those URLs entirely.

Hi Jon,

Sorry to leave you hanging! To be honest, I really don't know; it's not something I've ever tried to do. I'll look around, though, and let you know if I find anything out.

Matt

Just noting that this discussion continues here:

http://moz.com/community/q/ongoing-duplicate

Hi Pete!

Without knowing quite a bit more, I'm going to have to agree with Peter. I took a look at your account and the site, and I'm not seeing rel="canonical" anywhere on the site. If that is how your Web company initially solved the issue, it looks like it's since been removed.

I took a look at the crawl diagnostics CSV, and it looks like a lot of the issue is due to the ecommerce platform itself. This may be difficult to fix, but it also should be extremely harmful. In a lot of cases, though, it looks like there are very minor variations on the same URLs causing them to be picked up as duplicates—for example, a version of a URL with one capital letter is showing up as a duplicate version of the same URL without a capital letter. Rel="canonical" should definitely help with that.

Matt

Hi there!

I'm so sorry for the inconvenience! You can read all about this particular issue in this thread:

http://moz.com/community/q/loss-of-google-adwords-api

Matt

Hi Dustin,

You're right—in general, a drop in DA that corresponds with a drop in your competitors' DA is most likely due to changes in the Mozscape index (though not the algorithm so much). It's best to look at DA less as an absolute value than as a benchmark against the competitors in your space.

Matt

For sure; I understand. You may be able to get more information from the Brand & Mentions section of your account, though I'm not 100% sure what tool you could use to get a full list from the past few years.

Hi Jon,

I'm afraid I'm not presently aware of a tool that does exactly that, but you may have some luck with Fresh Web Explorer and the Brand & Mentions section of Moz Analytics. Both track unlinked mentions of your brand.

There was also a Whiteboard Friday late last month on link reclamation.

Apologies if you've seen all that before.

Good luck!

Matt

Hi Kieran!

That's a great question! The issue is that Google's API no longer provides us that sort of traffic data, so we simply don't have it to show. We substitute Bing's data in order to give you something to work with.

When you have Google selected as your search engine, though, you will see accurate Google rankings. It's just the search volume that's missing.

There's a bit more information in this thread.

I hope that helps!

Matt

That would do it! Try this in robots.txt:

User-agent: Rogerbot
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Keep in mind that this will only block crawlers that obey robots.txt. Once Roger crawls your site, it may be a good idea to lock the dev site down entirely.

Well, it stands to reason that something must've changed is order to cause such a huge increase. Looking through the list of duplicate URLs, I'm seeing a lot that could be fixed by rel="canonical". There's enough of them that adding a canonical link to each would be a huge undertaking or require some careful coding. I'm wondering if this increase could've been partially caused by someone removing rel="canonical" from a lot of pages.

For example, I'm seeing a lot of this:

http://www.health2000.co.nz/shop/aromatherapy/lemongrass-essential-oil/P4494/C56

vs.

http://www.health2000.co.nz/shop/aromatherapy/lemongrass-essential-oil/p4494/c56

The only difference between those URLs is capitalization. The first, capitalized version is the one that appears on your XML sitemap. I'm not 100% sure why both versions would be appearing to Roger—it may be an issue with the CMS—but a rel="canonical" on the former pointing to the latter would solve that problem.

Now, that doesn't look to be the only issue, but it _is _a large one.

Let me know what you find out!

Hi Pete,

Sure thing. Sorry it's taken so long!

May I ask what, if any, changes were made on the site between the 21st and 25th of October? In particular, were there any changes made involving rel="canonical"?

Hi Pete,

Sorry for the delay! I just wanted to let you know I'm looking into it, and should get back to you shortly.

Matt

Hi Brian,

Welcome to the Moz community! We're glad to have you.

There's a lot going on in your account, so I can understand if it looks a bit overwhelming at first. A great place to start improving your site's on-page SEO is our On-Page Grader, which gives an overview of how well-optimized any page is for a given keyword. It's in Moz Analytics under Search -> On-Page Optimization. You can read all about the tool and how to apply its data at moz.com/help/guides/search-overview/on-page-optimization.

Of course, on-page optimization is only one of many factors that affect SERP rankings, and the Keyword Difficulty Tool can provide some guidance on where to go from there. It can tell you how how much work you can expect it to take to rank for any given keyword, as well as a snapshot of your SERP competitors. I'd suggest running a full analysis on your most important terms, which will provide an idea of where your competitors are beating you—on-page SEO, backlink profile, etc. That helps to give some direction to your online marketing work. You can learn all about that tool at moz.com/help/guides/research-tools/keyword-difficulty.

Keep an eye on your crawl diagnostics report, which tells you what issues with your site may be affecting its crawlability. It can be found under Search -> Crawl Diagnostics.

Here are a few resources for learning the Moz toolset and inbound marketing:

• The Moz Analytics Help Hub - Videos, written guides, FAQs and glossaries for all aspects of Moz Analytics
• The Beginner's Guide to SEO - A reasonably quick, thorough introduction to inbound marketing concepts and best practices
• Moz Academy - A collection of brief video lessons teaching inbound marketing concepts and skills

Finally, as others have mentioned, this Q&A is a great pace to get answers to your questions, and the Moz and YouMoz blogs consistently post useful information.

I hope that helps!