Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Brian - I can't really get behind the idea of cheap, non-targeted, non-value-add content that's purely to drive clicks for SEO. Here's my issue with that logic:

• Pay $3, get a crappy-mediocre article
• Build links to your site that come from non-authentic, non-editorially endorsed sources
• Earn a few rankings and start getting traffic from SEO
• SEO traffic is high bounce rate, low satisfaction, and low conversion
• The engines eventually discount your links because they're non-editorial
• The poor user/usage metrics from the high bounce rate (due to low content quality) affect rankings badly as well
• Endgame: You've spent a small amount but gained very little

Compare this to high quality content tactics:

• Pay $1,000 to get a single fantastic article, maybe including an infographic or at least some great visuals and compelling research, unique viewpoints, an author with a brand name, etc.
• The content naturally attracts links, social shares, email traffic, etc.
• The clicks on it from all sources stay a while, read it, share it, spread it further and add more value to the site
• Readers bookmark, subscribe to the RSS feed (they don't want to miss more articles like this one) and come back regularly, building your traffic over time
• Search engines rank the content well based on all factors - links, social stuff, user/usage data, content analysis, etc.
• Your rankings stay steady when others drop, and you win as the engines get better at identifying the "good stuff"
• Users who find/visit the page think more highly of your brand and are more likely to convert, take action, etc.
• Endgame: 1 great article is worth hundreds of mediocre ones, and the traffic is high quality and valuable too

I'd always aim for the absolute highest quality possible. A single fantastic piece of content can drive so much value to a business on the web that it's never worthwhile, IMO, to underinvest here.

Just my $0.02!

Also - some good posts on this topic:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/great-content-for-seo-simpler-than-you-ever-imagined

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/debating-the-value-of-great-content

Hey gang - there's a thread going around the SEOmoz engineering + help teams on this topic today. We're researching what happened right now, and Kate Matsudaira, our VP Engineering, has promised to leave a reply once she's got the full story. We'll try to be as transparent as possible here and as fast as we can as well, but Linkscape investigation can take some time due to the massive complexity of the system.

Thanks for posting responses and please do keep suggesting sites we're missing, pages we might not have crawled but should have, large drops in metrics (particularly if/when they're outliers to the rest of your competitors/other sites in your sphere).

Thanks much!
Rand

p.s. Normally, I'd be much more involved in this myself, but today's my anniversary with my wife and we're on vacation in Southern Oregon. Don't worry, though, I only take one each year, so typically I'm better able to respond fast.

Hey Jen - I'd be very, very wary of doing this, given how much Google's been cracking down on blog networks, e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=private+blog+network&tbs=qdr:w

I've also seen Google's responses to re-consideration requests include statements to the effect that the penalties may be lifted faster if the abuser includes details on what SEO services, blog networks, and links they used/acquired. Thus, Google's creating a strong incentive for anyone penalized to share their acquisition techniques privately. My guess is this will mean lots more penalties and devaluation coming soon.

If possible, I'd urge you to consider spending the time, resources and energy you'd give to this project on something else.

I'd also probably say that SEOmoz public Q+A might not be the most ideal place to conspire to build black hat link networks (for obvious reasons)

Hi Brian - that's not quite accurate. It isn't that DA scores are all going to go up - in fact, many of the ones that were higher in our last couple indices probably should have been lower, and this is more a correction/normalization. As I noted in another response here, following a single DA score can be very unrepresentative of reality vs. following many scores in a niche across competitors. DA fluctuates as Google updates their ranking algorithm because DA uses machine learning against Google's SERPs (and ~once a year) we retrain our model.

Domain Authority scores aren't great ways to know how you're performing in SEO in absence of context, but they can be very good to see how you're performing against other sites in your industry or with whom you're competing in search results.

Every new index we produce has lots of scores going up and down because the link profiles that correlate best with ranking higher in Google change, the links we discover change, the sites that get penalized or that grow rankings substantially change, etc. Domain Authority is less like a fixed metric that grows as you grow your link profile and more a relative metric that changes as the web and Google change.

Hope that helps!

Also, notably, Moz Analytics is way, way better than the old Pro app (so many more features, way better charts, new landing pages report that helps get back <not provided="">data, and more) :-)</not>

Hi Boogily,

A) In terms of ToS, I'm not 100% clear. I know that Google has been strict about automated rank checking programs installed on a user's local machine, and they've enforced that a bit through technical and guidelines means. However, they've been unclear about companies like Moz, Searchmetrics, GetStat, AuthorityLabs, Conductor, Brightedge, Yield, RankAbove, and hundreds of others which provide this data in their software. I suspect they don't love it, but tolerate it and haven't taken action for over a decade now.

B) On the API front, check with GetStat and AuthorityLabs. I believe they both have rank data offerings from an API standpoint. Moz doesn't offer that and probably won't in the future, either.

Cheers!

Hi Seomvi - yes, definitely a challenging problem, especially since you're thinking preventative rather than reactive (which is very wise!).

My advice would be to consider creating some form of threshold for forum content before you expose it to Google. For example, you could have a litmus test that says, if a forum thread has <500 words or fewer than 2 unique replies, apply a META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW" to the page header. In that fashion, you keep algorithms like Panda from perceiving your forum as having lots of thin content/low value pages.

For PR flow and crawl budget, I'd generally worry less. Google's gotten very adept at identifying forums, crawling them effectively, and understanding how to handle that type of content/link structure. That said, you might try using rel=prev/next to help with Google's crawling.

Wish you all the best!

I LOVE this comment Corey. I think this is a great, succinct way of describing the disconnect between what experienced marketers have learned about having success in inbound channels (SEO, social, community, content, etc) and what businesses often think about marketing on the web (I just want people to buy).

The truth is that over time, it will be increasingly hard to have any success in these worlds unless you're willing to commit to inbound as a strategy and that means content in some form or another. Without content, there's no opportunity for SEO (unless it's black hat SEO), no opportunity for social media growth (unless it's merely buying ads), no opportunity to take the power content has to earn trust, likability and familiarity and convert those exposed to your brand into potential customers and potential evangelists.

Id gave a couple presentations recently that might be helpful to explain this more deeply: http://hackersandfounders.tv/RDmt/rand-fishkin-inbound-marketing-for-startups/ and http://www.edsocialmedia.com/2012/05/rand-fishkin-connecting-inbound-marketing-for-exceptional-return/

Hope those help.

Unfortunately, it's my belief and experience that one cannot simply "sell your product" without marketing, and if you want to compete in inbound (non-paid) channels, content is a requirement and great content is the competitive advantage.

Hi Overthet0p - no, I wouldn't worry about the URL shortener at all. Remember that spam score doesn't indicate whether something is necessarily spam in Google's eyes - it just tries to show features that are correlated with things we've seen Google penalize/ban. So, a Spam Score of 9/17 means that we saw ~72% of sites with that many triggers get penalties/bans in Google. But, that also means 28% of sites we saw with 9/17 flags had no penalties. If you've manually checked the site and feel it's not a problem, changes are it's fine!

It will likely be a few months at least before we can broaden outside the US, and maybe some more before we get to non-English languages. Sorry about that! We will get there; just need to do a lot of work to make it happen.

Hey gang - sorry for my delay. As Keri noted; been a tough few days for me on the personal/family front.

Re: link building. My understanding is that Jarrod/TLB offer both the classic paid link services (at least I think they still do, not sure), which I'd be generally against and more white-hat style link outreach/content-marketing type link building, which I'd generally support. The former can be effective short-term, but can have dangerous results in the long run (Penguin's only the most recent example). The latter is usually of strong, lasting value, not just as a way to boost SEO, but as a way to help many inbound channels (referring link traffic, social media, branding, PR, etc).

Cheers,

Hi Stephen - when it comes to blogs, especially Wordpress blogs with paginated categories, Google's gotten plenty good over the years at knowing that the full post is the correct version. The category pages on moz.com/rand don't show the full content of the post, don't earn the same links, and do link to the individual posts, so it's really not a concern to noindex them (and, in fact, it might prevent crawling/indexation that I want Google to be able to do).

e.g. I want Google to be able to index https://moz.com/rand/category/archives/startups/ and https://moz.com/rand/mixergy-interview-startup-marketing-reaching-early-adopters-burnout-more/ even though the category page has a small snippet from the Mixergy post.

In these cases of cases, the right pages are ranking for the right queries, and Google's doing a good job of recognizing and differentiating categories vs. posts.

Hope that helps!

Hi Dean - not sure we could (or would want to) segment Q+A or the blog/YOUmoz to create a sub-section specifically about sites being penalized by Google spam updates. However, it sounds like some folks in this thread, like Georg below, may take this upon themselves (which is awesome).

Little known story - SEOmoz's more prominent focus on community began in earnest after a large exodus of members from another forum way back in 2004.

Hi Dmitri and Juan - perhaps this way of explaining it will help:

A good analogy might be how rankings work for countries in various categories. For example, if Japan is ranked as having the world's best healthcare in 2015, and they improve the quality of their healthcare in 2016, are they guaranteed to still be #1?

Not necessarily.

Maybe the #2 ranked country improved even more and now Japan has fallen from #1 to #2 despite actually improving on their healthcare quality. Maybe countries 2-10 all improved dramatically and Japan's now fallen to #11 even though they technically got better, not worse.

PA and DA work in a similar fashion. Since they're scaled on a 100-point system, after each update, the recalculations mean that PA/DA for a given page/site could go down even if that page/site has improved their link quantity and quality. Such is the nature of a relative, scaled system. This is why I encourage folks strongly to watch not just PA/DA for their own pages/sites, but for a variety of competitors and sites in similar niches to see whether you're losing or gaining ground broadly in your field.

The score system has to be relative (we can't use absolutes or we wouldn't be able to have good correlations against Google - we'd just have another system that counts links or counts linking domains or the like). If PA/DA aren't working well for you as metrics, I'd encourage you to use something else - link counts or counts of linking domains/IPs or the like. The purpose of the DA/PA metrics is to track against Google, and over time, you might see lots of fluctuation up or down that doesn't necessarily mean you're doing better/worse. That's why the comparison process and understanding what the metrics do and why they're different than raw counts is important.

Hope that's helpful!

I can't help but agree with you. Over the last few years, we've consistently had terrible delays releasing indexes, and despite a team of people way smarter and more talented than me working their tails off to get it right, we haven't had success making it work regularly yet.

This latest index cancellation is embarassing and it sucks. We produced an index, but when we looked at it, a huge problem had arisen that we couldn't see until processing was complete (another problem with our indices is our inability to get a good sense of what they'll look like until they're done which takes 20+ days of processing after a crawl). I'll detail that in a Q+A thread soon (once I get the full rundown and plan from our Big Data team) and then share around.

In any case, you have my sincere apologies and deep regrets. We'll keep trying to get this right, but just FYI - we've simultaneously been building a new index system that's more real-time (like Google's, Ahrefs, Majestic, etc) that can still calculate metrics like MozRank and Page Authority. We've made a lot of progress on it, but it's still probably 6+ months away from launching, so we'll have to deal with the old Mozscape system until then.

Hi Greg - totally hear you, but strongly, strongly disagree

I worked personally on the scores for both and I can promise that the old KW Difficulty tool's numbers just aren't right. The old tool frequently over or understates the difficulty of ranking, and it relies on metrics that are outdated (age of domain? yech). I would strongly advise you to switch to using the metrics from KW Explorer. They're more accurate, the spread is better (the old KW Difficulty tool scrunches up scores so almost everything is between 30-70, when it really should be a wider spread), the other metrics are way more useful (CTR % and volume), and the accuracy of the metrics fetches is solid too (sometimes, old KW Difficulty doesn't even grab data correctly).

A few examples:

• "Harry Potter" - old tool says 80, KW Explorer says 89 (not a huge difference, but you can see what I mean about the scrunching effect -- clearly this KW should be one of the highest difficulties possible)
• "calendar app" - old tool says 62, KW Explorer says 76 (on a hand review, I think we'd all agree 76 is far more accurate; this is a very tough keyword)
• "northwest moss garden examples" - old tool says 47, KW Explorer says 33 (this is one of the easier keywords out there, with lots of low DA sites in the results; I think 33 is far more indicative of reality)

I know it's tough to make a switch or trust something new, but having studied these both closely and worked on the design of the metrics and data for both, I can assure you KW Explorer's Difficulty metrics are head and shoulders above the old tool.

Howdy gang,

As you might have seen, we've finally been able to update the Mozscape index after many challenging technical problems in the last 40 days. However, this index has some unique qualities (most of them not ideal) that I should describe.

First, this index still contains data crawled up to 100 days ago. We try to make sure that what we've crawled recently is stuff that we believe has been updated/changed, but there may be sites and pages that have changed significantly in that period that we didn't update (due to issues I've described here previously with our crawlers & schedulers).

Second, many PA/DA and other metric scores will look very similar to the last index because we lost and had problems with some metrics in processing (and believe that much of what we calculated may have been erroneous). We're using metrics from the prior index (which had good correlations with Google, etc) until we can feel confident that the new ones we're calculating are correct. That should be finished by the next index, which, also, should be out much faster than this one (more on that below). Long story short on this one - if your link counts went up and you're seeing much better/new links pointing to you, but DA/PA remain unchanged, don't panic - that's due to problems on our end with calculations and will be remedied in the next index.

Third - the good news is that we've found and fixed a vast array of issues (many of them hiding behind false problems we thought we had), and we now believe we'll be able to ship the next index with greater quality, greater speed, and better coverage. One thing we're now doing is taking every URL we've ever seen in Google's SERPs (via all our rank tracking, SERPscape, the corpus for the upcoming KW Explorer product, etc) and prioritizing them in Mozscape's crawl, so we expect to be matching what Google sees a bit more closely in future indices.

My apologies for the delay in getting this post up - I was on a plane to London for Searchlove - should have got it up before I left.

Hi Kevin - the index update should be live as of right now (probably only a few hours after you posted this message). We aim to have one index update per month, so 12 per year. We had a catastrophic failure on our early January index, so it had to be abandoned (noted here: https://moz.com/products/api/updates), but the team has been working hard to fix issues and prevent others from arising. Unfortunately, it's often the case that we encounter new/unexpected/never-before-seen issues that need to be addressed. Frustrating, but unavoidable as best we can tell. Obviously, we will continue to do our best to get these indices out on time.

As far as the future goes, it's hard to say. We have a bigger team now than we last year -- 4 folks work full time on the Mozscape index and 4 are working on the next-generation version of the index (which will update in near-real-time), and we certainly have much better monitoring and operational structures in place. But, as I noted above, it seems that the errors/issues we face are always new and unique - things we've never seen before in the 100+ index runs we've had over the last 8 years. I can tell you we're building processes to identify problems before they happen, and that we're better staffed, and that we have engineers on-call 24/7 to fix issues if they crop up, but processing full-graph metrics on a full-scale web index whose shape and composition can vary wildly means there's still uncertainty and probably always will be. Our job is to keep reducing that uncertainty and finding optimizations, while we rebuild the full system in the background to eventually replace the old, batch-processing system that's at the core of so many of our challenges.

Hope that helps.

Welcome to Moz! I love your website - very lovely. I was poking around for a content area - a blog, maybe some videos, articles, interactive content, etc. but didn't find anything (although I might not have known where to look). In the modern web world, attracting links, shares, attention, and media is challenging - there's a lot of competition out there, and I think you might be in a niche where that makes sense. I realize it's not entirely analogous, but checking out http://www.beardbrand.com/ and what they're doing content-wise might be helpful.

Wish you all the best!

Hi Antonio - a lot of sites, particularly in the e-commerce field, face precisely this issue. What I've seen be most effective is what Amazon, BestBuy and many others do, which is to create a single page for any product and include editorial/user reviews and more detailed information when it's available and when it's not, leave that area open for future additions of content. This way, you have a single version of any given page and you create a positive association with the crawlers and humans that some/much/most of your content/products will eventually get a good, rich description.

You can also use Saibose's suggestion in combination if you'd prefer having this content in separate, embedded "tabs" on the page that all resolve to the same URL. Check out a code sample and example of this in action here - http://dhtmlkitchen.com/scripts/tabs/tutorial/navigation.jsp

Best of luck!
Rand