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Need a bit more info. Is it an html sitemap (for users) or a sitemap.xml for robots? And you're saying that the sitemap shows up in the SERPs but other pages on your site do not? What is the query you're doing? Is the site new? Does the root domain point to the pages you think should be showing up in the SERPs? Give us a few more details...
It only updates when Linkscape is updated, about once every 4-6 weeks. The schedule is here: http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/w/page/25141119/Linkscape-Schedule
Last update was Apr 5, so next will probably be mid-May. I believe SEOmoz is working on making the updates more frequent as many of us would love that...
You can't go crazy and do just that, or do 10,000 instances of that with no other types of link building. Yes, having comment links looks natural. Up to a point. And it depends if the links are on human moderated boards or on spam farms. The latter will produce no value. If you can get a link to pass moderation from a credible site then it has value. Your comment will need to add to the discussion and often the moderators won't allow links in comments or they will no-follow them to discourage spammers.
You can't get sandboxed for what points to you (if that was possible you would just do whatever was necessary to sandbox all of your competitors). You CAN get sandboxed for pointing into bad neighborhoods, and pointing to web wings or reciprocal linking with bad sites could fall into this category.
There's no short cut. Work on getting valuable links from real sites. Give them come unique content (guest blog article, perhaps) in exchange for a link back. It's more work, but it's white hat and the link will pass real juice to your site.
Don't do it. Yes, they will be spammy, low-quality, and pass extremely little (probably zero) page rank. The directory pages are probably not indexed and if they are they are probably devalued. And if there are 65,000 of them then they're probably all owned by the same guy, in some templated database style, with the same C-class IP address. Google is wise to this and doesn't index or doesn't value those kinds of links.
It's a question of whether they still have the external links pointing to them, and how you handle those references. If you correctly 301 redirect all those old inbound links (which may point to subpages that no longer exist) then you will still get the link juice. If, however, all those inbound links result in 404 errors then you will not get the link juice from them.
If you buy an old domain where all the existing exeternal links point to the root then you should be good on the link juice. But if you have a situation where you're buying an old domain that had deep links (from the outside) that you're not going to maintain then you could lose a lot of juice.
Also, keep in mind that PR hasn't been updated in a long time. Impossible to know what it's current value us (mozRank is more up to date than Google toolbar PR).
I entered your url into majesticseo and the backlink tool there says you had no backlinks before June of last year, and today you have almost 4,000. What does your link profile look like? Do you have a good distribution of social, themed, and no-follow (all of which is what 'normal' looks like) or do you have a bunch of low quality backlinks that were penalized in the recent Google changes?
Well, I'm listed in DMOZ along with my competitors. Why would google.com.sg show a different set of DMOZ listings? Maybe this is just random, or perhaps nothing I can do about it. I was merely trying to get the same (relevant) links my competitors had and was wondering if there's anything I can do to affect google.com.sg's showing them but not me...
I ran the SEOmoz Competitive Link Finder tool for my URL and 5 of my competitors. The #1 result (where 3 of my competitors are listed but I'm not) is google.com.sg. Here's the URL where they are listed:
http://www.google.com.sg/alpha/Top/Business/Investing/Derivatives/Options/Research_and_Analysis/
All 5 of us are US-based companies. Why would 3 of them be listed in the Singapore version of Google but not me? Is it common practice to add your URL to all local versions of Google, or should submission to the main google.com be enough?
What is the domain authority of the competing site compared to yours?
When you say your link profile is better in terms of number and quality, what about trust? Have you compared the mozRank and mozTrust of the 2 sites?
For your link profile, can you give us the number of external followed links, followed links root domains, and unique C-class IP addresses that point to you and them?
What is their domain age compared to yours?
Lastly, if you added all your links recently it might take some time for the rankings to reflect that. Does the rate of link acquisition look normal for you and for them, or have they been adding them steadily over time whereas you added a whole bunch within 2 weeks?
Need a bit more data...
I assume you're talking about referred traffic from Google. Have your rankings changed for your most valuable keywords? How long were you at 100/day? Was it a couple months, and then suddenly dropped to 2/day? Either your rankings dropped, or your competitors increased. Look at individual keywords and see if your position has changed in the SERPs.
Paul, I assume you mean making the image file name the same as the alt text? And both for the phrase that the page is optimized for, right?
You may want to read this page before you go down that path (talks about redirecting one directory to another): http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3205094.htm
I might use something like this in an .htaccess file on the domain that you want to send to the other domain:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
You can leave off the "%{REQUEST_URI}" part if you just want to send them to the home page of the new domain.
As I write blog articles for my site I often come across a situation where I'm quoting something from another site, or using a piece of data from that other site to make a point. I know it's nice and courteous to link to the source when I do this but from a pure SEO point of view, does it matter?
Is there any benefit to linking from my site to other sites that are related and authoritative on the subject I'm discussing? I know I'll bleed off a little link juice to that external site that would otherwise go towards my internal links on the same page, but are there other benefits to linking out to known good sites? Is that any kind of signal to Google that I'm playing in a good neighborhood?
I would like that, too. Especially for things like new C-class IP addresses that link to my site for the 1st time, or new root-level domains that link to me for the 1st time. Would be great if OSE's data included "date link was discovered" for each link. Then we could begin to tie together new links with changes in rankings.
I haven't tried an xml sitemap; I will try that. Thanks for the response...
I have a site, called SiteB that has 200 pages of new, unique content. I made a table of contents (TOC) page on SiteB that points to about 50 pages of SiteB content. I would like to get SiteB's TOC page crawled and indexed by Google, as well as all the pages it points to. I submitted the TOC to Pingler 24 hours ago and from the logs I see the Googlebot visited the TOC page but it did not crawl any of the 50 pages that are linked to from the TOC.
I do not have a robots.txt file on SiteB. There are no robot meta tags (nofollow, noindex). There are no 'rel=nofollow' attributes on the links.
Why would Google crawl the TOC (when I Pinglered it) but not crawl any of the links on that page?
One other fact, and I don't know if this matters, but SiteB lives on a subdomain and the URLs contain numbers, like this:
Yes, I know that the number part is suboptimal from an SEO point of view. I'm working on that, too. But first wanted to figure out why Google isn't crawling the TOC. The site is new and so hasn't been penalized by Google.
Thanks for any ideas...
What is the lag time for changes to a site to be reflected in Google webmaster tools Diagnostics section?
They pointed out some duplicate titles which I fixed a week ago and yet they still show up as an HTML Suggestion. What has your experience been with making changes and then seeing them reflected in the HTML Suggestions section?
My site is crawled every day, including the pages I have updated with new titles. Seems like it takes a while for the data to trickle into Webmaster tools, no?
Well, Google is obsessed with returning the best 'relevant' results they can. That's what makes people want to use their engine, is the quality of the results. I can't point to an article where they say "we're using LSI" but I guarantee you that a building full of PhDs at Google is doing everything they can to increase the quality of the results they return. LSI (or something like it) has to be a component (if not the major driving force).