Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Donnie,

I was going to say that all those people clicking the down thumb just to irritate are simply part of the deal and in the end have little effect...

Until I discovered 5 minutes ago that apparently they are rather more organized than I thought, having diligently ensured that every one of the 30 thumbs up on one of my comments have been negated  by exactly 30 thumbs down!!

LOL ..the only thing funnier than people being so inflamed by my offering dissent on that subject is the fact that there are those who would spend time making sure they negate the view of anyone who agreed!

Oh well...bracing for the next avalanche

hmmm...but then again, maybe it's just a strange bug in the profile page since they don't match the post ...I think the thumbs are out of control!

Sha

Hi Ketan,

Never too late...we're still here!

Hi d25kart,

You will find the reconsideration request form in Google Webmaster Tools - you will need to be logged in to the account for the site in question. Make sure you read all of the instructions carefully before submitting.

You can also use the "Fetch as Googlebot" feature in Webmaster Tools to check whether there is any problem with crawling specific URLs. The feature is under Health in your Webmaster Tools menu. If a URL is successfully fetched, you can then click "Submit to index" to add it (and linked pages) more quickly.

There are limitations on the number of submissions you can make in this way per month, but it is definitely worth utilizing this method to check for issues that might be preventing indexing and to add pages to the index quickly.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Kevin,

Just a few things to think about...

1. The best thing you can do to improve the situation is to move your client's focus from "Rankings" to "Results"... Is the new site getting traffic? Clearly the UI you have built should be much better for conversion. Does the new text stack up on the conversion front? Whatever the rankings, if the client starts seeing trackable conversions from the new site, the tension will ease quickly.

2. Have you taken advantage of the "Fetch as Googlebot" feature in Google Webmaster Tools and the Bing version in Bing's Webmaster Central to get the pages of the new site crawled and indexed quickly?

3. A 301 is called a Permanent redirect. It is not intended to be reversed at will, but it is intended to inform search engines that the old URL should be de-indexed  and replaced with the new.

4. I would be looking fairly closely at the backlink profile of the old site for two reasons. 1) To see whether there are local citation links in the mix so you can make a more informed decision about the need to use a 301 2) To see if the old site is in line for a penguin slap in the near future

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Robert,

There is a "Getting Started" video intro to the software which will give you a place to start on this page where you will also find information about the weekly Welcome Webinar with Moz staff.

I would recommend that you also sign up for the next Welcome Webinar  so you can ask any questions you may have about the different tools in the SEOmoz toolkit and how you can use them.

There is a Welcome Webinar every Friday morning and you will find a button on that page to Reserve your Spot at the next one.

When using the Pro App, if you need a little clarification of how a particular tool works (for example if you are in the On-page Tool area) you will find a tiny blue "Help" link at the top right of the page that will take you to the help page for that tool.

If there is anything that hasn't been explained by the video or help pages, you can email direct to the Help team - help at seomoz.org. They are actually pretty awesome and always happy to help you out.

There are also a lot of great SEOmoz resources that will help you get your head around it all... The Beginner's Guide to SEO is one of the best. It is included in the list of resources in this thread from a while ago.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi again Matt,

Actually, you don't need to be using the 301 at all. A simple rewrite will do what you are wanting.

If you do it like this:

RewriteRule ^vacancy/([0-9]+)$ vacancy.php?id=$1 [L]

your URLs would be a lot more friendly.

The resultant URLs would look like this:

/vacancy/12345

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Matt,

The 500 Error is caused by the "space" in  [R=301, L]

Should be [R=301,L]

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Ennovation,

This is a known issue that does happen occasionally with campaigns. I have had the same problem with a client site that turned out to be an "edge case".

Whenever you have something happening in your Pro campaign that does not look right, you should contact the Help Team direct. You can use the Support tab on the left of the screen while in your campaign, or send an email to help at seomoz.org.

Make sure that you let the Help Team know the campaign that is affected (campaign number in the URL, or domain name) and the problem you are having. They will be able to take a look at it for you and let you know when the issue is resolved.

In my case, there was a little engineering magic and the next crawl yielded the correct number of pages

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi GYMSN,

The most obvious explanation would be the content itself.

If you are following the general idea that pages are for "evergreen" content and posts are for "news", then it follows that the content in your posts tends to be much more topical than that in your pages.

If the content happens to also be timely (appears before others), fresh (up-to-date) and well written/good quality, then it should rank well and may even have a little potential for virality if very topical.

This would easily explain a significant difference in rankings.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Thanks Keri & Miranda,

Great to see some of these user enhancements are in the pipeline

I was like Ben & found the "questions I've asked" & "questions I've answered" right at the beginning of my Q&A adventure. I'm now feeling really bad for EGOL & Alan having spent all that time doing so much Q&A the hard way

Really wish I had mentioned it somewhere in an answer!

Sha

Hey Alan!

...and we miss your awesome answers, but it puts a smile on my face when you are able to drop in

Sha

Hi Pol360,

Excellent answer from Anthony and big thumbs up!

If you are looking for a tool that will let you know when you have new links, you might want to take a look at Linkstant, a cool tool put together by Tom Critchlow & Rob Ousbey from SEO consulting company Distilled.

You won't get all of the Moz metrics available in Open Site Explorer once the Index is updated, but in the meantime you will at least know instantly when new links are created

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Naomi,

Since the problem is happening when you are using the On-page Tool, I would suggest you send an email direct to the SEOmoz Help Team providing the URL, keyword phrase and campaign number (if there is one).  Any time that you are seeing results from the tools which seem strange, it is a good idea to ask the Help Team

The address to send your request to is help [at] seomoz.org

Hope that helps,

Sha

Ah, but that is the beauty of getting one question per month

When you are just starting out there can be a whole lot of very simple technical issues that could be hurting or slowing down your progress without you even knowing.

I actually used my first private question to ask about a nagging feeling I had and something weird I was seeing in Open Site Explorer results for a new client's e-commerce site.

An Associate answered my question and pointed out a fundamental flaw in the Template the client had used which was stopping it from being crawled beyond the first level!

That question paid for itself many times over.

Just pick one of those things that has been nagging at you and ask...you could be totally surprised

Sha

Hey Rand,

Bad news for someone...I'm cooking up a doozy at the moment!

Hi again Alan,

I would pretty much have to agree with all that's above. It really must come down to ROI and for someone who is just running a single site, then the decision you're faced with is how much up-front investment you are prepared to make and whether you are prepared to sustain that investment in the long term.

While all of that is obvious, I thought I would share the one thing included in the SEOmoz Pro subscription that I think is potentially the most valuable and perhaps the most under-utilized by Pro members...

1 Free Private Question per Month!!

Yes, I made it bold and underlined it because this is the one feature that could provide you with the professional input that changes your business completely. The pity of it is that many members completely forget about their private question. Maybe this is because they don't realize it actually means you can ask a question and have it answered by a member of the SEOmoz Staff or Associate.

Yes, that means you could actually have the help of someone as awesome as Dr Pete,  John Doherty, Jen Sable-Lopez, Keri Morgret, Casey Henry, Michael King, Gianluca Fiorelli, Dan Shure, Cyrus Shepard and many more...

Even Rand Fishkin?

Yes. Even Rand answers private questions. The fact is, your question will be assigned to a person on the SEOmoz team who has the skills and experience to best help you.

Obviously, your private question needs to fit within the subject categories available here in Q&A and you should be careful not to waste it on something you could as easily get answered here in regular Q&A. With that in mind, I would consider the potential value of such a benefit to your business and think carefully before giving it up.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Glad to help anytime Simon.

I know it's probably hard to believe right now, but I'm sure it won't be long and you'll be explaining stuff to others here in Q&A!

Once all the pieces start to fall into place everything becomes much easier to understand and if you spend some time around the SEOmoz community you'll be flying in no time!

Here's a post with links to all of the most important resources here are SEOmoz which might help you find your way around.

Look forward to catching up with you around the community

Sha

Hi again waspman,

No worries...it takes a little getting your head around when you start out

As Chris confirmed, the root domain is waspkilluk.co.uk.

The most common subdomain is the www, which is standard, but you can also create other subdomains if you wish.

Perhaps the most visible real world example of a site that uses subdomains is Google -  which uses subdomains to manage each of its specific products within the site. If you take a look at the URLs when you are using Google products you will see examples like places.google.com, maps.google.com, blogger.google.com, webmasters.google.com, www.google.com etc.

A subdomain is referred to as a "third level" domain, created within another domain. As a rule, each level of a domain is defined by the dots (.) appearing in reverse order within a URL.

So, in the Google Maps example:

the Top Level Domain (TLD) is .com

the second level domain is the chosen domain name google

the third level domain (or subdomain) is maps

In your case it is a little more complicated. You have an extra level in your domains because your Top Level Domain is the country designator .uk so your second level is actually .co, but for the purposes of understanding subdomains it won't hurt for you to think of .co.uk as your top level domain.

Generally, most small sites don't require extra subdomains, so often the only subdomain in play is the www.

Matt Cutts has a simple tutorial on the parts of a URL that makes it much easier to understand what is going on at a glance.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi waspman,

No, you are absolutely not doing anything wrong

The simple answer is that you are acquiring links primarily to the sub-domains and not the root domains.

To explain:

"mozRank is SEOmoz's global link popularity score. It compares the relative link value (ranking power) between URLs on the Internet. It is similar in premise to Google's original PageRank metric but is updated more frequently and offers greater precision."

You can read more about all of the SEOmoz Metrics at the Open Site Explorer explanatory page.

So, if you go to Open Site Explorer and run a query for your sub-domain you will see the number of external links to that URL. If you then remove the www and run the query for the root domain you will see that there are 0 links to that URL.

Since mozRank = link popularity - it should be higher for the sub-domain because that is where the links are pointing, and of course you want to ensure that your links are always consolidated to just one domain. So, things are exactly as they should be.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi JU1985,

Good call from Donnie!

I would be keeping both pages live and adding a unique explanation to each page that lets them know that the product they searched for has been superseded by Widget C.

When deciding on the right solution for any issue like this, the first thing to consider is the effect your solution will have on the user. Ask yourself "If I search for Widget A and land on a page that offers Widget C, what will I think?".

The answer for me is that I will most likely assume the result is incorrect and return to the search engine looking for a better result. That is not the best user experience possible and therefore unlikely to provide the best conversion rate possible.

So for me, any solution that simply delivers the client to a different product without an explanation (301 or rel=canonical)  is least preferred.

The key to good business is good customer service - essentially being as helpful to your potential customer as possible. If a customer arrived at your offline store and said "I'm looking for Widget A", would you push them quickly across the store and say "here's Widget C"? Or would you explain that "Widget A has now been superseded by Widget C" and provide Widget C for them to look at?

The more you can emulate the offline store experience in your online store, the better the chance that the customer will feel comfortable buying from you.

Incidentally, I would make sure that the Widget C description added to the pages includes a Buy button and sufficient information that the customer can proceed to purchase without having to go to the Widget C page.

Hope that helps,

Sha