Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Charles,

Sorry to see that your question hasn't been answered yet!

I just stumbled upon it way down in the list, so am assuming that you still need an answer.

First, you are absolutely correct in deducing that the default Traffic Data report is based on weekly data from Google Analytics.

You can also see Monthly data by going from the report you see in the campaign overview to the Traffic Data page (either click See Full Traffic Summary, or click Traffic Data on the Pro App menu bar).

Once on the summary page, you will see that there is a selector at the top which allows you to change the filter to monthly instead of weekly.

It is important to remember that these Analytics results are for the preceding period (ie the past 30 days, not month to date).

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Robert,

Great answers here already, but I just wanted to perhaps give a little different perspective on your problem...

I know it is very frustrating to see what is happening, but I would be focusing on traffic and conversions rather than rankings. In the end, if you have a home page link embedded in body copy on a high authority site, it is quite possible that you will see an increase in traffic from referrals. If this were me I could care less about a couple of ranking positions!

With the effects of localization and personalization on today's SERPs, it is impossible to know exactly what result each person sees anyway.

Also, have you checked whether the link is followed? If it is not, then the effect upon your site won't be as great as you expected, but the potential for referrals is still enormous

Hope this helps,

Sha

Hi trickyzoo,

Awesome information from Ryan on this one!

Given your industry, and the fact that you do have some budget, one other thing that could make a big impact for traffic, links, brand visibility and in the long run, overall authority of the site is the development of a phone app that people can't bear to be without

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Vishal,

I am not aware of there being a separate RSS Feed for the Q&A Section, but the best way to verify that would be to email the SEOmoz Help team  help@seomoz.org.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi blitzna,

It is highly unlikely that any of the comments he is submitting will ever be posted anyway, since most bloggers either hold them for moderation and would delete without approving, or they constantly monitor comments and immediately delete anything spammy.

The very first thing that you should do is share your SEOmoz referral link with your guy so that he can sign up for a PRO Trial. At the very least, he will get exposure to all of the content on SEOmoz (including Q&A) and learn some good things about link building. Even better if he sees the value of the membership and decides to sign up - and earn you $100 Referral!

With regard to your question:

The only time that blog commenting is really effective in link building is when you are able to make real contributions to build your authority and reputation. The prerequisite is always that you have something of value or interest to say and that it is totally relevant to the content of the post. Of course, for this to be effective, the blogs (or forums) you choose to comment on must be high visibility and seen as authoritative.

If you think that the problem is really just his inability to write well in english, then you could try another way of approaching the problem:

1. Get him to send you his responses for editing before he posts them (if you feel he has the knowledge to make a valuable contribution on your behalf)
2. Get him to identify posts that you might be interested in contributing to.
   He could either find the posts and send you the links so that you can drop by the blog and add the comment yourself, or if it is difficult for you to do that - perhaps you are likely to be interrupted, don't want to spend time reading other comments etc - he could send you the content of the post and you could type your comments at a convenient time and return to him for posting.

The value of the links themselves will not have a huge impact for your site, but the fact that you become more visible as an authority in your industry is quite likely to result in people becoming interested in you and your business. The overall outcome is that you will quite possibly gain links naturally through increased visibility of your content, social sharing etc.

In addition, I would point him to the SEOmoz SEO Web Directory List and this post from Cyrus about using SEO Link Directory best practices.

If Local search is important for your business, you could also suggest that he try the free version of Whitespark Local Citation Finder to identify any other local citation sources that might be relevant.

With some good exposure to the resources available here on SEOmoz and a good team approach, it is quite likely that you can improve things for your site as well as for your SEO guy

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Diane,

I like the way Ryan thinks! ...but I am hoping we won't have to go to the length of having to resort to a content bomb.

The lesson in a situation like this is to realize that being a good white hat SEO unfortunately means needing an understanding of some of the tactics used by black hats or maybe just a little help from some friends

Since there is obviously an issue with your content being copied, the first thing I would do is to implement Authorship markup across your entire site. By doing this you ensure that any content that is "borrowed" is immediately "outed" to the search engines because it doesn't have an external link from your Google profile page, which acts as verification that you are in fact the author of the content. Matt Cutts and Othar Hansson have given a really easy rundown on implementation in this Google Webmaster Help video

For the moment though, it would be better if you can avoid making any changes to the site until we can identify all of the issues in play.

BTW ... I think I have an inkling of what might be going on here ... is there a programmer or designer who is or has been involved in the development of the site besides yourself?

In the meantime, I'm continuing with a diagnostic based on the information we have and will let you know as soon as I have confirmed my suspicions or otherwise.

Hang in there,

Sha

Antonio,

Ryan has explained this perfectly.

For a more detailed explanation of methods for controlling page indexing, you could read this post on Restricting Robot Access for Improved SEO

It seems from your comments and questions about 301 redirects, that there is some confusion on how they work and why we use them.

A 301 redirect is an instruction to the server which is most commonly done by adding a .htaccess file (if you are using an Apache server).

The .htaccess file is read by the server when it receives a request to serve any page on the site. The server reads each rule in the file and checks to see if the rule matches the existing situation. When a rule matches, the server carries out the action required. If no rule matches, then the server proceeds to serve the reqested page.

So, in Ryan's first example above, there would be a line of code in the .htaccess file that basically says to the server IF the page requested is /apples, send the request to /granny-smith-apples using a 301 (Permanent) Redirect.

The intent of using a 301 Redirect is to achieve two things:

1. To prevent loss of traffic and offer the visitor an alternative landing page.
2. To send a signal to Search Engines that the old page should be removed from the index and replaced with the new page.

The 301 Redirect is referred to as Permanent for this reason. Once the 301 Redirect is recognized and acted upon by the search engine, the page will be permanently removed from the index.

In contrast, the request to remove a page via Google WMT is a "moment in time" option. The page can possibly be re-indexed because it is accessible to crawlers via an external link from another site (unless you use the noindex meta tag instead of robots.txt). Then you would need to resubmit a removal request.

I hope this makes clearer the reasons for my response - basically, the methods you have used are not "closing the door" on the issue, but leaving the possibility open for it to occur again.

Sha

Hi Diane,

Ryan's response is spot on and his suggestions are excellent.

If you can provide the URL(s), then we can take a look and see exactly what is going on with the referring page(s).

If you don't want to share the information publicly in the Q&A, you can private message each of us through your SEOmoz profile page.

If you ever think that someone has access to edit pages on your site without your permission, the first thing to do is to check with your service provider whether there are any active ftp accounts that you are unaware of. I have seen situations before where people have managed to get a "back door" set up and then it is as simple as logging in and changing pages without your knowledge.

Given that this involves a legal dispute, if we can do a proper diagnosis and trace the source of the errors (or if there happens to be a back door in place), then you would be able to:

1. issue a cease and desist
2. better secure the server against unauthorized access
3. Ban any ip addresses identified as malicious

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Greenman,

I would guess that your problem is most likely caused by the fact that you have used the robots.txt method to block the pages you removed.

robots.txt is not the most reliable method of ensuring that pages are not indexed. Even though robots.txt tells bots not to crawl a page, Google has openly stated that if a page is found through an external link from another site, they can be crawled and indexed.

The most effective way to block pages is to use the noindex meta tag.

So, the simple answer is that there are links out there which still point to your old pages. Just because links are not highlighted in OSE or even Google WMT, does not mean that they don't exist. WMT should provide you with the most accurate link information, but even that is not necessarily complete according to Google.

Don't forget that there may also be "links" out there in the form of bookmarks or favorites that people keep in their browsers. When clicked these will also generate a 404 response from your server.

If you know that you have removed pages you should add 301 redirects to send any traffic to another relevant page. If you do not know the URL's of the pages that have been removed the best way to stop them from returning 404's is to add a catch-all 301 redirect so that any request for a page that does not exist is redirected to a single page. Some people send all of this traffic to the home page, but my preference would be to send it to a custom designed 404 or a relevant category page.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi,

I don't use Blogger myself, but I'm thinking that this answer to Blogger question on noindexing archives might give you a viable workaround?

Hope it helps,

Sha

Hi Matthew,

When you are the originator of the content, the most important thing is to be able to show the search engines that you are the author.

There are some people who are producing great content and actually being outranked with it by sites who have "borrowed" it.

If you implement the rel=author meta tag for all of your content, then you are claiming it as your own. Do this when you create it and even if people use it they will be "outed" with the engines.

John Doherty posted recently in the SEOmoz Blog on Social Network Spam and Author/Agent Rank

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Brenan,

Social is worthless if it is not, well, Social!

The most important facet of using social media is building authority and/or recognition in your space. This kind of authority brings a raft of benefits, not the least of which is the fact that people will want to share what you share...

At a minimum I would pick the two that "work" best for the individual (or company they represent), and start participating in those in a meaningful way. If that works out, then try adding another and see if it also works for you. How many you can realistically manage to make a real contribution to will become clear over time.

My personal view is that a profile that looks like it has been deserted is more likely to do harm to your reputation than good.

Cyrus talked about managing profiles as part of a link building strategy in a blog post just last night. There is also some discussion relevant to your question in the comments on that post. Of course, there are some directories in the SEOmoz resource list that fill the bill for your co-worker too

In short, give yourself a big thumbs up on this one and send your co-worker a link to the post as well!

Sha

Happy to help

If you strike any issues let me know.

Sha

Hi Jaycie,

Google's view of the issue is that you should have a robots.txt file in order to eliminate the risk of your web host dealing with requests in an unexpected way and returning something strange.

Matt Cutts talked about robots.txt in this Webmaster Help Video last month.

Hope that helps,

Sha

You're welcome.

Happy to help

Sha

Hi Sandeep,

Keyword Rankings are updated every Wednesday and On-page reports are available on demand for any keyword that is loaded in your campaign and any page that you choose to enter.

Crawls Diagnostics are usually updated weekly on whichever day of the week you originally set up the crawl, but crawling is currently disabled due to a major outage on the weekend. There is a post in the Blog about the outage, which SEOmoz staff are updating from time to time to keep us  all in the loop.

Once crawls are re-enabled things will go back to the normal weekly crawl schedule.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi again Chris,

OK, well that makes it interesting!

First, if the list of 301's in your .htaccess file numbers in the hundreds, then there is definitely cause for concern about the effect it might be having on your load times.

The .htaccess file is read from top to bottom until a rule is matched. The first one that is matched will be used and no rule after that will be checked. Obviously, if there are hundreds of rules to check, this can cause processing bottlenecks.

Now there are some things you might be able to do to alleviate the problem IF you have the right conditions.

1. If your rebuild involved the relocation of an entire directory or directories which still contain the same pages as before, you can write a 301 Redirect for all pages in a directory with a single line of code

2. If there is a database behind your site and you have some means of matching pages from the old URL to the new (for example, is there a unique product ID for each page?) then you can use database lookups to write the redirects on the fly. This will eliminate the processing bottlenecks, but can only work if you have a reliable means of matching the pages.

3. If you have only one competition or offer at a time, then you could use database lookups to match any page with say, "competition" in the URL and 301 it to the current competition page (and the same with "offer").

4. For unknown links from external sites you can use a "catch-all" 301 to catch any other page that returns a 404 and send it to a single page (you put this rule at the very end of your .htaccess so it is the last to be matched). You could send these all to home, a generally relevant landing or category page, or a specially designed 404 page. The most important thing is that the page you redirect them to is as relevant as possible, or provides options that may keep the visitor on your site (search, menus etc). I prefer not to send these "random" 404's to home as they are likely to bring an  increase in bounce rate. Since bounce is now acknowledged as a ranking factor, I prefer to keep any traffic with a higher probability of bouncing away from pages with the highest Page Authority (PA).

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Ed,

You can use the On-page tool to optimize for any keyword term as long as it is loaded into the keyword list in your campaign.

By default the On-page tool offers a report card for every keyword already loaded that it finds relevant to your home page. You can create Report cards for individual pages and keywords by digging a little deeper into the tool.

To use the tool for specific pages:

G****o into the On-page tool and you will see the Summary view. If you look right above the big heading On-page Optimization, there are two blue text links. Choose Report Card.

Now you will see a selector which allows you to choose any keyword from your campaign list and enter the URL of any page in the site.

Click Grade my On-page Optimization and voila! Roger will fetch your Report Card!

Wherever you are in the Pro App, if you need instructions, look for the small blue "Help" link toward the top right (just below the Pro menu bar). The Help page for the On-Page tool is at this link

Hope that helps.

Hi BaseKit,

What is the reason for there being so many 404's?

Did you move your site or rebuild your site structure? Do you have a lot of pages that are removed after a short time?

The answer to these questions will help to know what is the best approach for your situation.

Sha

Hi Matthew,

You just need to email the SEOmoz Help Team direct at help@seomoz.org and they will be able to sort it out for you.

Hope that helps,

Sha