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As many of the comments here note, any link schemes like this where dollars are exchanged for links directly are dangerous. We've seen Google pursue link methods like this aggressively - Penguin, the blog network bans, the banning of iAcquire for their link network, etc.
Some folks here note that they do work in the short term - that's true. Just don't use it for any site/brand you care about long term or for which you don't have high risk tolerance.
Hi Vinod - looked through the other thread. I'd say the advice you got there was really solid. The content of that site is not very unique or valuable, the linking tactics you used were partially spammy, partially just low quality (directories, article links in syndicated directories, etc), and the effort put into the site overall feels subpar.
SEO in fields like pharmaceutical can be incredibly spammy and manipulative, thus looking at the top ranking folks (who usually only last a few days to a few weeks) is actually a terrible idea. Unlike in other spaces, overwhelming quantities of spam links and other manipulative tactics reign and Google appears uninterested in regulating this like they do in other markets. If it were me, I'd try to be one of the few legitimate, non-black-hat sites there, but I recognize that the spammers are likely to keep ranking with the churn-and-burn strategy, so it's up to you.
I do like your idea of starting over with a different type of site - perhaps a topic you're very passionate about that's less spammy?
Cheers,
Rand
We're certainly working on crawling more and more deeply 
I'd say we'll have between 35-75% of the links that Google knows about (depending on where you're getting your links from - if it's low quality stuff, especially deep pages on spammyish pages, it's less likely).
In terms of delay in picking up new links - if you got a link today, it would likely be in the Jan. 4th index (because we're actively crawling for that index and haven't started processing). However, it's also possible that we've already crawled that part of the web in the last week or two and it wouldn't be until the next index (late January/early February).
Thus, anywhere from 20 (at the very fastest) to 60 days (at the very worst) is the speed of OSE's pickup of links.
I always want to be empathetic to the fact that for a small business, $99/month is a serious expense. Put in your shoes, I'd be thinking about your usage of the following:
If you're using 2+ of these regularly, it's likely worth staying and examining whether you're getting value and keep coming back. If not, then probably wise to drop the service (and hopefully we'll earn back your business as we keep growing our value/tools/data/info and your business scales, too).
Hope that helps!
All the testing, research and examples I've seen in the past few years (and even the past few months) strongly suggest that the same principles still hold true.
Subdomains SOMETIMES inherit and pass link/trust/quality/ranking metrics between one another
Subfolders ALWAYS inherit and pass link/trust/quality/ranking metrics across the same subdomain
Thus, having a single subdomain (even just domainname.tld with no subdomain extension) with all of your content is absolutely ideal from an SEO perspective. It's also more usable and brandable, too IMO.
Hi Kyle - really sorry to hear about your experiences. I'm not certain you're an anomaly, but it definitely sounds like you've gotten very unlucky to have such a rough combination of outages. In September, we did have rank tracking broken for a couple weeks. Crawl data has been accurate for 95%+ of campaigns and on time, but there have been a few that needed those manual refreshes (perhaps you've been caught in that bucket several times somehow, which must totally suck - I'm really sorry for that).
AdWords pulled their API from Hubspot, Raven, and SEOmoz all around the same time, so none of us have that access anymore. Thankfully, you can just click over to the public tool and grab it, but I know it sucks not having it right in the KW Diff tool.
The weird one is KW Difficulty itself - that should be returning results successfully. We've had an odd few hours each month where it's busted due to SERPs changes or hardware issues, but it's showing 99%+ uptime on our end. Rank tracker's odd as well - we've been seeing a few odd results, but it's working for nearly everyone (I get my report every week without fail).
In any case I can tell you that there's a whole team dedicated just to making sure that our uptime is high and that as problems/anomalies arise, we fix them fast. That team's called "production engineering" and there's 4 full time engineers there. We also have a larger engineering team that's working on a new version of the software that we believe will be A) a big step forward in features/UI/UX/etc and B) much more reliable and consistent - we're aiming for 99.99% uptime as a goal on all services, even when engines make weird changes on us. I can't guarantee we'll hit that right out of the gate, but I know this team can eventually get there.
To wrap up - it flat out sucks that you had to deal with this. We should be better. We're working on it, and I really appreciate all the effort you've given to stay with Moz. If you do choose to go somewhere else, I'd totally understand and empathize, but if you stay, I promise that we'll have continual improvement.
I would do it only for the most trusted of brand name directories - Yahoo!, Better Business Bureau, and maybe Best of the Web, but probably very little else.
Hi Matt - I don't think it's paranoid - it's a reasonable concern. That said, I can say that SEOmoz's plans for the long term do not include removing rankings data. We will be running a survey next week to gauge the relative importance of this data to our community, and then considering this over the next few weeks, at which point, I'll likely have more info to share.
Regarding Raven - I totally empathize with their tough situation and decision and I wish them all luck and success. They've been a great competitor for years, constantly pushing us to get better, and I hope that doesn't change.
See the attached image, showing a comparison of SEOmoz.org's search traffic from Google over the past 6 days and the prior week.
I can totally understand your frustration. Being transparent, as a founder, the speed at which this project is going is infuriatingly slow. We've prioritized it numerous times in the past 2 years, only to see crisis after crisis (or roadblock after roadblock) hold us up. The delay with the new website and Moz Analytics from 2012-2013, the issues with the Moz Analytics launch into 2014, then permissions and user issues, followed by billing challenges... It's been very tough to see.
However, there's no excuse for not delivering what is, literally, the number one most requested feature. In Q1 of 2015, this was, once again priortized, and we've asked dev teams to put aside their other work to implement it (there's a ton of cross-team requirements so every group - research tools, Moz Analytics, Local, Inbound Engineering, Test, TechOps, etc - has to do work to make it happen). This coming Monday, Chris Young from our product team is presenting the plan to the management team (myself included, even though I'm technically an individual contributor these days). I don't know if we'll get this out by April (the target we established at the start of January), but I feel confident it will happen in Q2.
My sincere apologies for the delay and thank you for holding our feet to the fire - I'll be sure to refer to this thread in our Monday meeting.
I have to admit that while it can be frustrating to see some of those very basic questions here (and around the web), it's also inspiring to see how many great people jump in to help point folks in the right direction.
Obviously, a company, particularly a venture-backed one like ours, is supposed to earn revenue, scale, etc. but the best and most exciting part for me is feeling like we really can make a difference in our mission to educate and provide the tools for smart, dedicated people to become talented marketers. I'm humbled by how much time and effort is put in by so many people here in Q+A, and hopeful that we really might be moving the needle toward making people across the web better at this challenging process.
In terms of the "evolution" you speak of, Steve, it's my sense that we've got some opportunity there, too. Linkscape + OSE (and competitors like Majestic) helped provide some metrics that shifted a bit of focus off of PageRank and made SEOs think more critically about how we evaluate pages and links. I want to believe we could do that with KPIs if we built the right kinds of reporting dashboards into our software and opened access to more people as well.
If you have suggestions, we're all ears (you can email me personally, too).
Hi Juan - If I had to guess, I'd say we probably had some issues crawling the sites where your links were (most likely errors on our end, though it's possible the sites themselves had issues, too) over the summer, and we've now rectified it. We're continuing to improve with future indices, and you should see us getting more consistent about this with each release.
Funny you should mention this. On a thread with some engineers last night, we noted that the shutdown could bring a lot more traffic, and they're planning to scale up the infrastructure (we're in the cloud so it's pretty much all on-demand anyway) to make sure no one has a subpar experience
Radi - I hear you, dude. OSE's backend index, Mozscape, hasn't kept up as well as I'd like with being able to process as much of the web's links and pages that we need to get a comprehensive picture. I think that's why a lot of folks also use Ahrefs and Majestic to bolster their link data. Mozscape is good at a few things those others aren't - Page Authority and Domain Authority are quite good (very well correlated with Google's rankings), Spam Score is a very useful metric, and OSE has a lot of metrics like MozRank and MozTrust that you can't get elsewhere.
But, the downside is that calculating those metrics is a hugely computationally expensive process. Every few weeks, Mozscape takes all the links and URLs it's seen the last 90 days and starts a processing run that takes 20-30 days. When it finishes, we get a new index. We can't overfill that system with too much data, or it breaks 
What we need is more resilient, real-time system that can scale with hardware, and that's what the team's been working on.
In the months ahead, you should see Mozscape improve (particularly for US and English-language links and websites), and around the end of the year or beginning of 2017, we expect to have a system that can process large numbers of links in real time.
Apologies that our tech hasn't kept up with the needs on this. Despite a huge investment over many years, we've not yet been able to launch what's needed, but we're relentless and we'll keep at it until we get there. We know it's too important to give up on.
Donnie's spot on. A decade ago, I used to build Flash websites and became familiar and fast with the software. Thus, I still use it to create diagrams, flowcharts, wireframes and most of the graphics you see in my posts. It's certainly not professional quality, but it's quick and effective for simple blog illustrations.
That said, I probably wouldn't recommend Flash as an actual graphics tool to anyone. Most designers I know cringe at the thought of using an animation program to make simple 2D diagrams.
Message received
Emailing you now - and a huge congrats sir! Thrilled to have you here.
It isn't YOUTube, but we did cover http://www.wistia.com which allows you to make embeds that point back to your site, automatically creates Video XML Sitemaps for you and generally rocks
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/video-seo-basics-whiteboard-friday-11080 and http://www.seomoz.org/blog/creating-online-video-strategy are both good posts on the topic.
Teachstreet doesn't fit the profile of a lot of other sites that got hit. Were some pages affected and others not? If you could show off a dozen or so of affected vs. not, that could really help sort out the issue (and possibly give us a roadmap to help).
That sucks Dave! Teachstreet has been getting so good lately, too.
I don't think I could get by without the mozBar. It makes my SEO browsing so much faster and I always feel like a power-SEO in front of others when I can show it off, particularly the page overlay vs. having to click "view source" or "inspect element" to find issues on a page.
Hi Miranda - I'm not sure whether the AMA made a recording of the webinar available. I checked out their site and couldn't find it, so it's possible they may not be making it public (or didn't record). You could try emailing the folks over there - alibb@ama.org was my contact.
Best of luck!
