Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Should be all fixed now. Sorry about that - we're launching a new index, and there seems to be some hardware issues. We're trying to reverse engineer the source of the problem. On the plus side, a new index should be out soon.

Hi Kingalan - first off, I'd recommend checking out http://moz.com/blog/understanding-and-applying-mozs-spam-score-metric-whiteboard-friday which will give you a pretty good overview of what Spam Score is and how it works.

I wouldn't worry about firing two flags - Moz triggers a few, and many good sites do as well. If they're things you want to fix anyway, go for it, but Spam Score flags aren't about saying "this is necessarily bad" or "this definitely needs fixing." It's merely identifying features that, when added together, show correlations with sites we saw Google penalize/ban.

As far as your links go - that distribution seems fine to me, too. If you want, you could look at the highest flag count links and if you believe they're problematic after manually reviewing, go ahead and give them the boot (via disavow or getting the site to remove them). The flag count is merely to help you order your manual review - it should never replace the process of actually looking at those links and determining which should be kept/removed.

Yeah - the new links you see via "just discovered" will take longer to be in the main index and impact metrics like MozRank, Page Authority, Domain Authority, etc. It's not that they're not picked up or not searched, but that they don't yet impact the metrics.

And yes - will check out the other question now!

Hi Joshua - I think you're talking about https://moz.com/learn/local/citations-by-category

Appears to still be working!

Hmm... I'm not sure I like that as much as getting the product page indexed and known by the engines as the canonical version. Perhaps you could produce the RSS feed/blog with the reviews, but use rel="canonical" on those pages to point over to the product pages which include the reviews? That would be a way to potentially have your cake and eat it too

Tragically and frustratingly, it's been pushed back again. Right now, it's supposed to be delivered by the end of September, but I'm honestly not putting a lot of faith in the promises I hear after so many delays. Apparently, this project is massively harder, more complex, and more time-consuming than anyone at Moz imagined or predicted You have my sincere apologies and my genuine frustration alongside yours. I'm very disappointed we couldn't deliver this by now.

Hi Joseph - you'll get no arguments from me on any of these fronts. I think if you've been using Moz exclusively or primarily for the link data component, you should request a refund by emailing help@moz.com (they'll be happy to provide one). Totally concur that our service the past 60 days on the link data front has not been acceptable.

I don't think we have them by state (and I can't find anyone else who uses state as the geographic denominator), but we do have https://moz.com/learn/local/citations-by-city, which categorizes citation sources by city. Perhaps that can be useful?

Hi mztobias - I think we just got that flat out wrong. Not sure why our crawler missed your contact page, but clearly it did. Hopefully in the next index, that will be rectified. I don't have the ability to manually edit the score/notation, but once we recrawl the site and update our index, it should be fixed.

Sorry about that!

We are both in the same boat there. I, too, desperately need this next index to get us on track and provide excellent value. If not, I think we're going to lose a lot of customers, and I'm not sure people will trust us for a long time on link data.

You have my deep and sincere apologies for the frustration and professional challenge Moz has caused. We have an obligation to do better, and I damn sure hope the team is up to delivering on that obligation.

It really depends on your goals from here. Are you looking to boost traffic from social sites? If so, you're going to want to learn what your audience wants and start creating it, sharing it and participating in conversations on these platforms to earn their trust and engagement.

If your goal is to provide customer service and reputation tracking/management, you can set up alerts through services like Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts) and many other services (this Quora thread is quite helpful on tools that can assist on that front: http://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-free-tools-available-to-track-Twitter-mentions-and-ideally-sentiment)

If you're seeking to boost SEO rankings using social media, you'll need to build up an engaged contingent of friends/followers who will share/like/tweet your content.

Some good resources include:

• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/social-media-marketing-facebook-twitter-arent-enough
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/comparing-seo-social-media-as-marketing-channels
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-visual-tour-through-the-basics-of-social-media-marketing

Best of luck!

Great discussion and suggestions here already, but I wanted to add this post in case you haven't seen it: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tactical-seo-how-many-termsphrases-should-i-target-on-a-single-page

There's lots of good stuff in the comments there, too.

I have to agree with Russ. I think the old KW Difficulty model was making that keyword look stronger than it is, and the new one, while maybe a bit low, is more accurate. I'd also suggest, as Pete did, that using any keyword in isolation is unwise. Compare scores for similar terms you might target in the same sector, against the same sorts of competitors, and use that relative data -- KW Difficulty, and indeed PA, DA, and keyword volume, are all far more useful as comparative metrics than absolute ones.

That doesn't surprise me - Majestic has a larger index than Moz (theirs is actually the largest among active 3rd party indices, then Ahrefs, then us).

https://moz.com/blog/big-data-big-problems-link-indexes-compared this is a pretty good resource comparing the strengths and weaknesses of the various indices, and https://builtvisible.com/comparing-link-data-tools/ is also a good, third-party review of the three. There are strengths and weaknesses to each, but if raw link coverage is your goal, I recommend Majestic.

Hi Spencer - I think there's some awkward phrasing combined with the challenge of parsing the true meaning/intent of your question on this one. I'll do my best to answer what I think you're asking.

A shortened link, by default, does not lose its ability to pass link juice, PageRank, trust metrics, anchor text signals or anything else an engine might associate with a link. If it did, all these years, our TinyURL links (which existed long before any social stuff) and all those 301 redirects (which are essentially how shortened URLs function) would have failed. Clearly, they didn't, nor do bit.ly, j.mp, t.co, etc. type links today.

If you're asking if, by placing a shortened URL on a normal webpage and linking to it, the target of the 301 redirect loses out compared to a direct link, the answer is no. If you're asking whether nofollowed links in Twitter tweets or profiles that contain shortened URLs (or that exist elsewhere in the social web and may not be followed or even crawlable by engines) lose value, the answer is "it depends," but also "probably."

All that said, at one point in time, a Google representative did note that 301 redirects and rel=canonical tags do lose a small amount of the PageRank they pass to another page compared to a non-redirect/canonical. We're of the strong opinion this is between 1-10% of the PageRank value, though we also suspect that other link signals, many of which are often more important than PageRank nowadays, are unaffected. This is my opinion only, and we can't know for sure whether Google still puts this slight dampening on redirects/canonicals.

Hope that helps!

Gotcha. This is a total guess, but I'd venture to say that PageRank is probably passed in the same quantities (mozRank definitely is).

Page Authority is harder to say because it doesn't actually "flow" - it's a metric we calculate AFTER the rest of the link graph and the metrics are done processing and represents a machine-learning based algo with inputs of every other kind of link metric. One of these could certainly be the ratio of images to text links or the existence or non-existence of both, but as with any machine learning system, it's hard to know what's actually (even for the folks who wrote it!)!

We do follow robots.txt, but Feedburner actually allows and enables crawling of many of these, so we crawl them. There's a robots.txt for http://feedburner.google.com/robots.txt but the one for feeds.feedburner.com, feeds2.feedburner.com, and feedproxy.feedburner.com only exclude items as such: http://feeds.feedburner.com/robots.txt

I'm not sure if Feedburner intended to block all crawling/indexing of content on their domain with the disallow /~a/. Robots.txt. Google doesn't appear to support the tilde ~ in their specs: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_txt, though other resources indicate it would only show things relative to the /a/ directory. Certainly all the apps and services that crawl Feedburner feeds in order to show the blog posts and content would be disallowed if Feedburner did block everything there. Google seems to be crawling plenty of stuff there, too: https://www.google.com/search?q=moz+site%3Afeedburner.com

For this reason, we try to show these in OSE. It's very hard to know if these URLs do or don't pass link value directly, but the original source almost certainly does... Definitely one of the tougher special-cases out there. Many site owners/webmasters/marketers want to see these links,  so we've biased to displaying them.

I hope we might actually have that 11/17 index out a little bit early. We've made a lot of fixes and optimizations, and, fingers crossed, it looks (so far) like it's making a difference in terms of speed to index processing completion.

Hi Chris - totally understand your question. The key is that the brand name is included in the search query and the test (in that particular case) was less about using the social networks for rankings, but to see if search volume itself and CTR could influence rankings (which it appeared to do).

You can read more about the experiment on search volume and CTR here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/experiment-google-rankings-w-search-volume

And more on the experiment to influence rankings with Google+ and Twitter here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/do-tweets-still-effect-rankings

Those should help clarify.

Cheers!

Rand