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I miss this tool from my PC !! I would love for them to develop a MAC version now but that just ins't a reality yet. Nice suggestion. I would have done said the same thing!

Oh - and it's affect the domain negatively.. when cleaning up your site directories via robots.txt. Its actually better as I explained below

Hey Mark,

It's good practice to disallow access to any folder/content you don't want indexed as well as anything that has any security involved (login's, databases etc).

It will also keep the most important pages from the domain in front of the search spiders eyes, while keeping poor content out of the indes. This helps the domain on a site authority level provide valuable content and information to users.

Lower ranking pages, can cause the domain to be pulled down by serarch engines (Google and Bing have attested to this already) as they want businesses to focus on high value content - which leads to better user experience.

Cheers!

I would also take the time to clean up your XML Sitemap file for crawling, just in case. It'll be better for you to keep track of any files/URL's you don't want indexed by the search bots.

Just good practice

Nice answer Simon. I would have said the exact same thing! Avoid at all costs, would be my advice.

Hey Mark, exactly. Keep your KW target focused, and work in long tail options to gain a few positions on that level, while building up the brand site, level, content strategy etc.

I would use this targeted style on each and every page of the domain, to help with consistency as well. You can explore tougher keywords later as the domain gains some authority..

That should help you out and get the domain ranking for it's brand. The hyphenated domain will take longer tho, based on all my tests. You need to work in signals which authenticate that with the domain/brand.

Cheers!

Nice touch !

HI Mark,

Give it some more time. A few weeks isn't that long, even with the rate at which crawlers on the web. The domain is also hyphenated, which search engines take longer to index. It's a trust issue (spammers use hyphenated, or multi-hyphenated domains often), which causes.

I would suggest build a few links online to the domain  (social, news, PR, article, forums and blogs) that link to the domain using the company Brand name. This will help raise a few signals to the engines about the domain, it's authenticity (about brand). More than likely, within a few days to a week after some work has been done, will begin to gain some traction.

Also - note, on the homepage of the domain, use a structured TITLE tag, and include the brand name at the tail end within the 70 char limit. Following this format for the whole domain will also help the domain gain trust to the engine - as the domain is hyphenated. My research and tests for this have always proven successful when working with these types of domains. Just takes longer to gain that trust.

Keyword - 2nd keyword - brand name.

Doing a mix of these, will help the domain start to gain traction for the brand name and populate that through the engines rankings.. shouldn't take long after that.

Because this domain is hyphenated - I would also register the domain name for 10 years in advance. This will help show the engines that it's planned to stick around for the long term.

Hope all this helps Cheers!

As Russ said, there really isn't a tool for this. It takes time, patience and good data sorting after exporting the needed info. I currently have one of my SEO's working on a project very similar to this (researching, analyzing, exporting) back links and breaking the 5K down into categories so we can see the various information. Most of the backlink analysis was done with Moz, and Raven - and he did a great job presenting the data to me this week on Tues.

It's a long process, but worth the time, effort etc. You'll really get a good look at the data and with the various outputs from Moz in the OSE tool - you'll see domain and page authority as well to help prioritize them as you break them down into various spreadsheets.

I think if you go this route, your data will be much cleaner and prepped for use.

Agreed. Build a potential list in Excel, and use a free source tool to plug various one's in to hopefully find somethat that works.

I would do the market and keyword research first for whatever you are trying to buy/build, to ensure you get the best possible mix for domain name to keyword relevancy

Other than that, any domain tool with most companies will work in order to spit back variations, or substitutes if certain ones are not available.

Cheers!

Many people experience the 'google Tease', where for days at a time, in blocks you will sometimes see these bumps in traffic. A recent article talking about this, I put in below.

I bet, more than likely  - this is the case.. but you could go back over trending data and look to see if it has happened before and if you see patterns in the these traffic increases

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-tease-14587.html

Cheers. Hope this helps a little.

Oh - I should also add that you should block any and all IP's in GA tracking that might screw the data (remove your IP, friends or office IP's, network IP's from people you know etc)... so clean the data up.. if you haven't already

Hey Hawk,

Better give it some time. Your profiles won't just show up in the SERP results because you create a brand account. You need to build up that account with content, video's, twitter feeds.. become active in your niche, get invovled with others who you are following, who follow you etc. It's not going to happen overnight and without some work on your part will probably take longer than you hope. No one could put an exact # to this type of request because there are too many factors. Create some create account and share some equally great things, and stuff will happen

Yep, I agree with Casey.. don't go this route at all. Feature the article on 1 site only and use this to promote your 'awesome' piece of content to the world Cheers!

I like this answer! LOL 'go to war'.. when and if it happens you site is affected. I would also 'log' the date you caught these, so you can go back historically if traffic drops happen and associate this with the inbound link buy someone obviously did.

Thanks for clarifying Megan! I'll make sure to keep that in the back of my head for next time when helping out. I really wasn't sure, but had a feeling the data would be lost when a new profile was created.

Cheers!

Hey Nichank,

This is a tough one to answer, as to whether Google would look negatively on this. My bet is yes. Because the lnik is using

, and hiding content links using anchor text, my bet with recent algorithm changes, panda and freshness is that it will look upon these.

The only good thing that may save you here is they pointed 'thousands' of these links - which in itself makes the site linking to you (or sites) look like link farms - which Google would also detect and determine to be valueless' to the user - thus - nullifying thier efforts.

This might also revolve around the 'niche' industry your in, which could also play a part in Google's determination and action on such links.

This would make a really great test from an SEO perspective. I think I'll add this one to my books for 2012! If I find any results - I'll make sure to come back with some concrete answers

A good link I found to support Google penalizing the site linking to you more (because they are using hidden text and links) within their pages.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66353

Hi Matt,

This can be a great thing for you - if the old dormant domain is till being crawled, still indexed, and still has inbound links built to the site over time.

Adding a page to his site, and with unique relative content might pass back some value - but if the domain has been dormant for some time - the 'juice' value has probably fizzled a little (along with the site's rankings) for the market KW's he was targeting.

Is he planning to give you the domain? Perhaps sell it to you? If so, and he wanted out - I would do a domain and page by page level 301 redirect from his old dated site - to your domain. This would help pass through all the page link value as well as the domain - helping correct any 404's errorrs that might occur and help search index'es to map out the new 'address' of the pages on your site as the location - also pushing through those links and value to your domain.

Run a 'crawler' on his domain to map out the whole site - and then create an excel doc to map any relavant pages, info etc to pages on your domain and prep a 301 file to handle the redirects.

If that's a route he's willing to go, that's more or less what I would do to salvage any value from his domain/site and pass it along to yours.

If not - a page on his site, with a link back, will do just that  - provide a link back from an older/dated and not maintained site which won't do all that much for you in the grand scheme of things.

Hope that helps

Hey KJ,

These are good read/resource to start :

http://www.mcanerin.com/en/articles/301-redirect-iis.asp

http://authoritylabs.com/blog/solving-canonical-problems/

Cheers, Rob

HI Gene,

Once you figure out this list from the data gathering - you'll need a tool to build, and run against that list (or lists if broken out by channel), so you can show the client where they position in the ranks.

You can use a tool like the MOZ (rank tracking utility in PRO) although I find this tedious as you can't build a singular report as easily when compared to something, say like RavenTools (this is another tool my team uses for site rank audits) or AWR (Advanced Web Ranking)

You could also go about getting an independent software like AWR (yearly licenses which can be costly) which isn't cloud based, and I prefer this software over any other. The flexibility of this program is great, and the custom reports are fantastic for moulding as needed to export data in multiple formats. You can take it anywhere, and provided you have an internet connection, run it anytime you like.

Looking over the current KW list they rank for (also looking at Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Tools (if you have this setup) is a good place to start Nice call Brian!

you might also want to take that list you extract, and build out an excel file using the MOZ 'keyword analysis and difficulty tool' to map our the competitiveness, and difficutlty score for each keyword, so you can organize them in terms of performance (and attribute that to either short and long tail KW traffic). You'll also extract some nice data through the API from Google on Exact and Broad match phrase search volume

Hope this helps. Cheers.

Rb

Moz should keep the old data in that existing account - but you won't be able to port it over to the new profile/domain tracking (and I don't think you would want too) if it's a new client.  I'm guessing you build a 'campaign' for tracking in the PRO account level tools?

I'm not 100% sure on the integration of Moz' and if it can be ported over. I also suggest reaching out to the support teams with a quick email.

If they don't want to share the old account - get a new one going and track your efforts against that of the older metrics. In time - you should be able to run comparative data (manually of course) in Excel to show trending, jumps, bumps etc.

Cheers