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Hi Jason - I'm going to agree 100% with the other answers here. Rebranding to a new domain that is keyword-rich is likely to have no positive impact, and will in fact negatively affect your rankings (the domain move usually costs some amount of rankings and organic traffic to every site we see do it, at least for a few months). A new domain will also be harder to build links to, especially one that sounds like it's keyword-stuffed rather than a true representation of the business.

I will admit 100% that sometimes, Google gives exact match domains some benefit, but it's small, and most of it comes from the links that point to those domains. If you had the link equity and anchor text that your competitors do, I believe you'd outrank them considerably with your site. I try to think about it from the perspective of a searcher:

• Would I rather click "flowerssf.com" which is higher in the results, but sounds a little generic and un-trustworthy?

• Or would I rather click "rossirovetti.com" which sounds authentic, high quality, and like a real brand?

Many times when we see results like these, we find that the brand names that resonate more with searchers actually do better than their ranking position would suggest. Sometimes, over time, this even leads to better rankings.

My advice in your situation is to focus on the delta between what your competition is doing offsite (earning more links, from more places, with more precise anchor text) and on-site (generally more content, less keyword-focused, more brand focused, more serving the searcher).

As an example, https://farmgirlflowers.com/ ranks at the top of the organic results when I search "flowers san francisco" and they're clearly way more brand-focused than flowerssf.com. They also have a very brand-focused description: "All of our clients were thrilled with the deliveries. I love that Christina and her team work hard to support small farmers too! I highly recommend Farmgirl Flowers." vs. RossiRovetti's "Flower Delivery San Francisco | San Francisco Florist and Bay Area Flower Delivery | Rossi & Rovetti Flowers Since 1871." (I don't think they even used a meta description, just let Google grab something from their page!)

IMO, focus on brand, on delivering a better site experience, content that better serves the searchers, and earn links from across the web with whatever tactics you feel can be most successful for you/your market, and I think you'll be in solid shape.

Yeah - I'd say the inability to customize the titles and meta descriptions is a dealbreaker by itself. That said, it shouldn't be impacting indexing -- could be that Google's crawled those pages but determined they don't have enough unique content, enough link equity, enough positive user/usage signals, or a combination of these, to keep in the main index.

At this point, though, I would probably consider migrating. Wordpress is still my first choice for the customization abilities, but Hubspot's a good one, too.

The numbers you received in your second screenshot are the same ones I'm getting, and they're pretty similar to what I see in Moz's Keyword Explorer (which bolsters AdWords data with clickstream serach data). I don't know that AdWords is going crazy though - the first screenshot you showed had keywords in the 4-600 range that now show ~1,000 searches? That's not a massive swing, and we know Google uses buckets, even though they show numbers (as Russ Jones pointed out here: https://moz.com/blog/google-keyword-planner-dirty-secrets).

It wouldn't surprise me if these keywords are just on the edge of the buckets Google's defined, and thus swing between one volume number and another.

Hi Will - that's not entirely how I'd frame it. Mozscape's metrics will slowly, over time, degrade in their ability to predict rankings, but it's not as though exactly 31 days after the last update, all the metrics or data is useless. We've had delays before of 60-90+ days (embarrassing I know) and the metrics and link data still applied in those instances, though correlations did slowly get worse.

The best way I can put it is - our index's data won't be as good as it normally is for the next 20-30 days, though it's better now than it will be in 10 days and was better 10 days ago than it is today. It's a gradual decline as the web's link structure changes shape and as new site and pages come into Google's index that we don't account for.

Nope. We still don't believe them and still have overwhelming evidence that Google doesn't consistently treat all pages on multiple subdomains the same way they do URLs on the same subdomain. They've said for years that it doesn't matter, but the evidence and data are clear. Putting content on multiple subdomains will almost certainly cause it to perform worse in Google than keeping it all on the same subdomain.

The comments here show some nice examples of folks who have moved their content to a single sub/root domain and seen big traffic bumps from search as a result: https://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday

Well, here's the complex thing - every time we share anything about the DDoS - on Twitter for example, or in the press (including when that NYTimes article was published), the DDoS crew hits us again. This weekend was insanely hard. Our tech ops team are staying up 30 hours in a row, missing meals, missing their families. It's pretty horrifying, and it's been going on for months.

It was only the first time they wanted a few hundred, then they emailed for thousands, now they don't even email anymore - they're clearly just out for revenge because we've been helping other companies to stop them using what we've learned.

My bias was to want to share that stuff, too. Unfortunately, if we do, not only do we risk more attacks, but we risk the attackers finding new vulnerabilities based on what we say we've done. It's an all around very sucky situation, and one of those times when we simply can't be as transparent as we'd like.

Fastest way?

Create content (research, data, tools, apps, infographics, presentations, video, etc.) that's so amazingly remarkably badass good that everyone on the Internet can't help but share it everywhere.

Think like these guys:

• http://blog.okcupid.com/
• http://unbounce.com/blog/
• http://www.emarketer.com/blog/
• http://nymag.com/
• http://www.economist.com/

What they have in common is that they're all content/resource hubs. It's hard to spend 10 minutes browsing them without finding something you want to share with people you know.

That kind of content creation and then the finding/building of a community who loves it is the essence of great web marketing AND the fastest way I know to build domain authority.

Thanks Greg - I hear you on the comparison graphic side. I'll see what we can do about upgrading the UI/UX of that longer term.

Hi Joseph - yes, I can answer that. We took ~14 days to process this latest index, which is very good news. However, we are having some trouble with the uploading process again - our technical operations team is working with the big data team to try and uncover the source of these problems. If we can get it fixed and working (in the past, the upload step took ~12 hours, now it's taking us 3-4 days), we should have much more regular index releases.

Right now, we are feeling confident about Nov. 17th, and once we complete the upload we'll have a good picture about data quality and whether we might be able to release early (which we think is quite possible IF quality looks good and these upload issues get sorted).

Hi Papa -- Google's number is for paid search. They're just telling you how much competition there is for the paid/AdWords results. Moz's KW Explorer tells you difficulty for the organic (non-paid) results. They're two entirely different things! More here: https://moz.com/help/guides/keyword-explorer

FYI - Rank Tracker appears to be back up and working for me. Not sure if we have the "all clear" from engineering, but you might want to give it another spin. I was able to successfully get the right rankings back on my queries just now.

All of these software products offer rankings and/or backlinks data:

• SEOmoz
• Hubspot (which Google Ventures has invested in)
• Ginza Metrics (which Matt Cutts is an investor in through YCombinator)
• Brightedge
• RankAbove
• SearchMetrics
• Conductor
• AuthorityLabs
• Majestic SEO

It's hard for me to imagine that anyone who uses any of these products would suffer a penalty or de-indexing from Google. The only time we've ever seen anything like that in the SEO world has been with paid link building services, where sites using a network or a product to articificially inflate their links have been put on notice or sometimes penalized/banned. SEOmoz has never offered a product like that, and won't in the future. I'd chalk it up to bad information (or possibly a complete lie to get business, but I hope that's not it).

Yes! We've had this ability since day one Just click "create or upload a new list" and you can create a list of hundreds or even thousands of keywords for analysis and comparison all at once.

Hey Matt - I can get into some of the nitty gritty details on this.

Basically - we've been having trouble of all kinds with Mozscape, and while our team has indeed been working around the clock, the reality is that it's an old, clunky, hard-to-understand system that needs to be replaced entirely. That work is also going on, but as you might imagine, has a separate team on it, which means the Mozscape team's bandwidth is split.

Mozscape has crawling trouble - we've had issues with our own crawler design, specifically with spam that's fooled our crawlers (it's designed to fool Google, obviously, but has caught us, too), and biased our index. We also had an issue where some code was commented out that helped us recrawl important pages and other issues (along with a couple of longtime engineering departures) made that invisible to us for a good few months (even with it fixed, it will take an index or two to get back to normal). We've had other issues with hardware and bandwidth restrictions, with team changes, with unintentionally excluding important sites and important pages on sites due to erroneous changes on our end, with robots.txt interpretation mistakes. You name it. It's been pretty frustrating because it's never a single issue coming up again and again, but rather new issues each time. The team currently on the Mozscape project is relatively new -- we had almost complete turnover on that team in the last year (a combination of voluntary and non), so there's a lot of rampup and trying to understand what things do, and fix old problems, etc. I'm sure as an engineer you're familiar with those types of challenges, especially when the documentation isn't pristine.

IMO - those are crappy excuses. We should be better. We will be better. I don't provide them to pardon our shitty quality the last few months, but rather because you said you wanted detail, and I do love transparency.

I think we're going to have a tough slog until the new index system comes out (likely this Fall). I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we can repair each new problem and that few others arise, but the past 6 months have made me wary of overpromising and under-delivering.

BTW - it is true that the ML model means there's lots of DA flux as the goal is to be as accurate as possible with Google's changes, so if we see a site with certain types of inputs matching patterns of sites that don't rank as well, that DA will drop. Given that Google's rankings fluctuate all the time, that our crawlers fluctuate a lot (more than they should, as noted above), and that the link graph changes constantly, a lot of flux in DA is to be expected. That said, the new model will have DA refreshed daily, rather than monthly, and will also have history, as well as a way to dig in and see what inputs are big in DA and how those have changed. I think all of that will help make these shifts vastly more transparent, even if they continue to be high (which they should so long as Google's own flux is high).

One thing I am working on with the team - a different kind of score, called something like "domain visibility" or "rankings visibility" that tracks how visible a site's pages are in a large set of Google rankings. I think that score might be more what clients are seeking in terms of their overall performance in Google, vs. their performance in the link graph and how their links might be counted/correlated with higher/lower rankings.

Hi Don - probably not, at least not in the near future. Curious about how you might use that data if it were offered separately? Is segmenting Google News sources vs. Yahoo! News sources when looking at fresh links/mentions valuable?

Note: For NPR or CNN or any individual domain, you can already do that! Just use the site: operator, e.g. startups site:npr.org

Hi Bijana - that's really frustrating and you have my apologies. When I reviewed Squarespace (which, granted, was 18+ months ago now), I didn't encounter that issue, but I also don't remember how deep I dove trying to update Meta Descriptions. I'd say it's definitely worthy of bringing up to their support folks, and for what it's worth, you can tell them I'd strongly endorse/recommend making that change, too.

If there's pages to which you don't have access that are duplicates, you may just need to ignore them. Right now, we don't have a good "ignore this issue" system in Moz Analytics, but it's something we're working on (just behind a bunch of other customer asks that are priorities).

If you can access those pages and want to fix them both for Moz but, more importantly, so Google and other engines don't see duplicates, check out these two pieces on fixing dupes: http://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content and (specifically related to Moz Analytics campaigns) http://moz.com/help/guides/search-overview/crawl-diagnostics/duplicate-content

Hi Sarwan - if you're not seeing those in Google's index, it suggest they can't crawl/index that content. You can test it out via Fetch as Google, which will show you what's Google's seeing. With video content, I might suggest using a text transcript, like Moz does on our Whiteboard Friday.

Hi Stuart - in the search bar, on the right-hand side, there's a drop down to change the search engine. Unfortunately, volume data is for US only right now, but we're looking into expanding that over time.

Hi Humanique - you don't absolutely "need" a canonical tag on every page, but it is recommended. For example, say I had the URL: https://sparktoro.com/contact and I used a tracking parameter when I shared it on Twitter, like this: https://sparktoro.com/contact?share=twitter. Technically, it's a new URL, but it should be treated exactly like the regular version by search engines. Rel = canonical is a way to do that.

You want to take the cleanest, most standard version of any page's URL and make that the one in the canonical tag in the header. Then any alternative versions that crop up through social sharing or tracking or any other way can be easily canonicaled to the right version. Again - you don't have to do this, but it is recommended by search engines and most SEOs.

All the best!