Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Wayne,

When you choose Root Domain, you get three results DA (Domain Authority) DmR (Domain mozRank) and Dmt (Domain mozTrust) for the entire domain.

When you set it to Subdomain, you get only DmR and DmT for the active subdomain. For example, if the URL in the address bar is www.yourdomain.com, then the DmR and DmT are for the www subdomain only. If the URL is another.yourdomain.com, then the DmR and DmT are for the another subdomain only etc.

You can check this by setting your MozBar to "Root Domain" and going to http://googleblog.blogspot.com/.

Once the page is loaded, change the MozBar setting to "Subdomain" and you will see the results change. Then, replace googleblog with www and you will actually see the results change and change again as the page redirects to yet another subdomain.

kinda fun actually

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Joe,

My guess (and purely a guess) would be that perhaps it is coming from text that is commented out in your Wordpress template. You could check the code and see if you find it there.

I ran the SEOmoz Term Extractor tool for a couple of individual pages and it doesn't appear in the list of targeted keywords.

If you can identify exactly where it is coming from (or establish that it is definitely not included repetitively in your code) you could try asking at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters whether this is a known issue or something to be concerned about.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi CP,

If you wish to use robots.txt to block crawlers, then your two robots.txt files should be as follows:

For your http protocol (http://vistastores.com/robots.txt

User-agent: *
Allow: /

For the https protocol (https://vistastores.com/robots.txt

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Personally, I prefer to use the noindex meta tag for page blocking because it is a more reliable way of ensuring that the pages are not indexed.
(Never try to use both at once)

This link explains the difference between the two:
[Google Webmaster Tools Help.](http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35302 "Robots blocking crawlers")  

Hope that helps,

Sha

```You can use a robots.txt file to request that search engines remove your site and prevent robots from crawling it in the future. (It's important to note that if a robot discovers your site by other means - for example, by following a link to your URL from another site - your content may still appear in our index and our search results. To entirely prevent a page from being added to the Google index even if other sites link to it, use a [noindex meta tag](http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=61050).)

Hi Salman,

If you haven't already seen it, there is a great Whiteboard Friday video from Rand about Pagerank and what you should and shouldn't use it for. In the video, Rand talks about the things that Ryan mentioned in his answer, the points you asked about and a few other things.

Here is the link: What is Google's Pagerank Good For?

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Ryan,

The "lost" post is one of a couple of issues I have been talking to the help team about during the past week. If you haven't already let them know that it happened, might be helpful if you could do that.

Seems there's a little gremlin in there somewhere

Sha

Hi Diane,

As Dunamis suggested, this is a Google Maps implementation.

In this case, the webmaster has built a separate page with the search options (hometown, postcode etc) and the embedded map, then pulled it into the page using an iframe.

It is quite easy to see exactly how they have done this if you look at the code:

View source and search the source code for iframe. When you find that line of code, you will see a link to the page in the iframe. Click the link and you will see the source code for the external page, which shows you how it works and where the map is coming from - the Google Maps api.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi,

This video from Matt Cutts talks about how Google will best handle the 301's and how long it might take.

If the site is large and database driven, then using database lookups to generate your 301's would probably be the best solution. Long lists of 301's have a potential to create processing issues - not to mention the pain associated with having to create them!

I would also do the work to at least attempt to get external sites to change any existing links. Given the legal ramifications, I would not want to leave any anchor text out there for the other party to take issue with if I could avoid it. (I would also keep a detailed record of all the work done in this area, just in case there is any kind of legal challenge).

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Mike,

A 301 Redirect must always be implemented on the server where your content originates.

Basically, it is "catching" the request for a page and saying "send this request to this other page". 301 Redirects happen at the page level, not the domain level. So as Malachi said, it is always best to redirect specific page to relevant replacement page if possible.

For you, the solution is slightly different, since your originating content is hosted within the Yahoo! Store system.

This Yahoo! document provides the information you need to implement a 301 Redirect from your store to an external domain (toward the bottom of the page). Look for the heading To add a domain redirect for a domain registered outside of Yahoo!:.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Mike,

The only way to limit the content included in a campaign is to choose "subdomain" when you set up the campaign. So, the only way to limit the campaign to just one page, would be to create a separate subdomain with just that one page in it, but I am curious as to why you would want to do this anyway.

The errors highlighted by crawl diagnostics are largely easy to identify (or irrelevant) in a single page.

If the page you have been working on is live, then you can check it using the On-page Report Card for the specific page.

To do this:

Once inside your Campaign, choose On-page and then the blue Report Card link at the top of the page.

Select the primary keyword from your list (any loaded in your campaign) and type in the URL of the page, then generate your report.

While the Report Card is primarily about optimization for the chosen keyword, it will also highlight things like URL & Title length, number of internal and external links, meta description etc

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Nigel,

As I understand it, the warnings in the crawl report are simply intended to alert you to things that you may not otherwise be aware of on the site. Basically, it is telling you that Roger encountered a 302 (temporary) redirect when trying to access those URL's.

If your robots.txt is functioning the way you intended, then you should see this in the "blocked by robots.txt" section of the Crawl Notices. If this is not the case, then it would indicate that perhaps your robots.txt is not correctly configured.

If you want to know exactly how Rogerbot interacts with the files on your site when crawling, you could email the help team help [at] seomoz.org and ask.

There is a very good post from Lindsay on Robot access in the SEOmoz Blog which is definitely worth a read.

Hope that helps,

Call me paranoid, or maybe a control freak, but noindex meta tag is my friend

It's gonna have to be a damned persuasive argument to get me to use robots.txt.

Seen too many disastrous mistakes!

Sha

Hi Jonathon,

At this point you have done nothing untoward and obviously produced a site that was seen as valuable and shared in a purely natural way. If you were to start trying to influence people to remove your links, then you would actually be manipulating the link profile, which is what the search engines don't like!

Now that we know exactly how you came by the links, I would definitely follow the steps Ryan mentioned, starting with a reconsideration request.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Jonathon,

I would agree with James (oh and Ryan too!) that the sudden addition of that number of links may alter your link profile in such a way as to signal to search engines that there may be some kind of manipulative link building practice going on.

Something that is likely to make this appear even more like a manipulative practice would be if the Lion's share of the anchor text used to create the links to your site is identical, for an exact match keyword term etc.

One thing we should clarify is that while this may be having a negative effect upon your rankings, it is not really a "penalty" as such. Basically, the algorithm is seeing a sudden and unnatural looking change in your link profile and adjusting your ranking as a result. If Google has manually applied a penalty for any reason, they are now informing webmasters through notifications in Google Webmaster Tools. Manual penalties usually only happen if you are doing something really overt like buying or selling links. As Ryan mentioned, if the directory is part of a paid link system, it would be an issue. In that case I would expect to find a message in Webmaster Tools.

If it were me I would leave it be for a while and see what happens.

First, provided the directory is not a problem, with 20,000 targeted referral links out there, your potential for increased conversion ready traffic is greatly enhanced anyway.

Second, I would expect that with a little time and maybe some more gradual and diverse links added to your link profile (and no more major spikes), your rankings will tend to come back anyway. If they don't begin to improve (or continue to worsen) within a month, I would bring it to Google's attention by filing a Reconsideration Request. This link is the latest from the Webspam Team on the current process.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hey Carin,

Thanks for taking the time to follow up on this for us.

I figured the answer would be something along those lines, but didn't want to leap in with speculation.

Much appreciated,

Sha

Thumbs up!

Hi Jon,

While it is difficult to pinpoint exact reasons for traffic fluctuations without detailed information on the site, there are some things that come to mind.

First, since one of the pages you mentioned relates to the Rugby World Cup, I would check the originating country(ies) for the traffic. It is quite possible that the visitors were interested in betting on matches involving a team or teams who have been eliminated, or whose playing schedule has been less frequent in recent days.

Also, when I took a look at the Metrics for your site in Open Site Explorer, I noticed a few things that could certainly be negatively affecting your rankings.

1. The anchor text distribution for the small number of external inks that you have is quite narrow. This Whiteboard Friday Video gives a good explanation of using a diverse range of anchor text.

2.All of your links are followed. Cyrus gave a good explanation of the negative correlation for high percentage of followed links in this video.

3. When checking the load speed of your home page with the Mozbar, I see that it took 13.5 seconds to load the entire page. The impact of page load speed is also mentioned in the video on negative ranking factors above.

4. All of your external linking root domains are from dot com domains. This means that your link profile does not really have any diversity. Justin Briggs wrote a great blog post which explains the signals that search engines take into account when looking for low quality sites. In the explanation he talks about the importance of a diverse natural link profile.

My guess would be that a combination of all these factors is responsible for your drop in traffic. While the playing schedule is not something that you can control, all of the other things can be improved with a little work.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Yes, me again

Well, you need your main menu to be crawlable so that the pages on your site are indexed.

You could analyze all of the links on the page(s) to see if there are any links that can either be removed or no followed. This would help to reduce the watering down of link value for each link on the page, but if there are no links that you can edit without creating problems with crawling, then it is best not to mess with them.

The most important thing is to work on building good links from other sites.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Since the intention of alt text is to help the user understand what the image is about, it should use natural explanations which utilize a range of variations on your keyphrase(s).

Keep it natural and keep the user in mind.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi CP,

What you are seeing is the internal links between pages on your site.

When I checked your home page using the Mozbar I see more than 200 links (most are from your sidebar menu). I also checked one of your product pages and see almost 190 links on that page too.

Your other sites may have less links per page, the menus on them may be built in a different way, you may have more external inks than internal, or Webmaster tools may just not be showing them to you (Google says that we will see more links in Webmaster Tools than using a link: search in a browser, but still may not see all of the links that they are aware of).

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Cisaz,

Company profiles are not yet available in Google Plus.

Private profiles were opened to the world in the past 24 hours.

Word from the Plus team with the announcement is that the Business offering will not be far away.

Just need to wait a little longer

Sha