Welcome to the Q&A Forum

There have been a number of Linkscape updates since September and each of them is generally accompanied by a blog post (sometimes more than one) providing data and explanation of changes in methodology, new features etc.

The Linkscape Update Schedule provides a calendar of planned releases for the future.

The most recent post on the Interim Linkscape Update for January provides information on the release which occurred less than a week ago.

The October Linkscape update brought with it new features for Open Site Explorer.

November saw two LInkscape updates - this one in the first week of the month and the second in the last week of the month.

This post on updated Page Authority & Domain Authority explains the significant changes in the calculation of these metrics which were introduced with that second update in November.

If you want to keep up with future updates the easiest way would be to subscribe to the RSS feed for the SEOmoz Daily Blog ...then new posts will come straight to your inbox or reader when updates are released. Another option is to follow @SEOmoz on Twitter as updates are always notified there.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi callassist,

You are correct in assuming that the SEOmoz crawler does not distinguish pages that are noindexed.

There is a simple explanation of the reason for this in a response to this thread by Daniel Deceuster.

As you will see there, a feature request is already in play for a feature to allow users to "turn off" the pages they wish to ignore in their reports (and this would be an example of where that will be very useful). If you follow the link in the previous thread, you will be able to keep updated on progress with the feature request.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hey Robert,

It's all good & a whole lot hotter down here

Hi Ryan,

All great advice here (wearing out my thumb up guys!).

Just wanted to suggest that you try running the keyword terms it help and computer help. I just ran them in the Google Adwords Keyword Tool (exact match) and it returned some related terms with decent search and low/medium competition that could work for you.

Also, any time you are struggling to come up with the right terms for a site, try just asking people you know what they would search for if they needed ".................". Sometimes the bleedingly obvious can be the last thing we think of and other times people come up with what I think are the weirdest terms that are frighteningly common!

Once you have chosen some terms that might be suitable, you can also use the Keyword Difficulty & SERP Analysis Tool to help identify the strengths & weaknesses of sites already ranking in the Top 10 for that term. If you have not used the tool before, Rand's post The Best Kept Secret in the SEOmoz Toolset gives a good explanation of how you can use it.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Glad to help

Hope it's an easy fix.

and apparently in unison!

Hey Jake,

SNAP!

Sha

Hi Gajendra,

The Pro App identifies two types of duplicate Errors (the red button in your Crawl Diagnostics Summary). These are Duplicate Page Content **(**a significant amount of content on the page has been identified as duplicate) and Duplicate Page Title (page title only has been identified as duplicate).

Duplicate Page Title errors are most often an internal issue, where many pages in the site have been given the same page title.

Duplicate Page Content errors can be either an internal and/or external issue. It may be that identical pages within the site are visible via multiple URL's, AND/OR the content on pages may be a duplicate of content on other websites. This happens a lot with sites that use product descriptions, content feeds etc from other sites.

To identify the actual URLs where duplicated content has been detected, click the Red error button in the Diagnostics Summary and you will see a list of pages where the error has been identified. In the second column, you will see a blue link which tells you how many duplicates there are for that particular item. When you click the link you will see a full list of URLs which are duplicates.

There are a number of things which can cause duplicate content errors on a site - many are due to the way the site is structured or functions. To really understand what is happening and how to deal with it, you should read Dr Pete Meyers' landmark post Duplicate Content in a Post-Panda World.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Jeff,

The 301 Redirect is not reported as an Error in the Pro App, but a Notice.

You can see this in the Crawl Diagnostics Summary where you see the big Red, Blue & Yellow buttons.

Notices are listed in the yellow section.

For each of the sections there is a short explanation and the Notices section reads as follows:

Notices are interesting facts about your pages we found while crawling.

So what this means is that items listed in the Notices section are simply highlighted to ensure that you are aware they exist. The 301 redirect from the non www root domain to the www sub-domain is normal practice to ensure that the pages in your site are not seen as duplicates of each other by search engines. So, there is no need to be concerned about the 301 redirect highlighted in your Pro App Report.

The Errors(red)  and Warnings(blue) are the issues that can have an impact on the SEO health of your site.

The explanatory notes explain this:

Errors - Pages with crawl errors are often difficult for search engines to crawl, index and rank.

Issues listed as Errors should be dealt with and eliminated as quickly as possible.

Warnings - Pages with crawl warnings are often penalized by search engines.

Issues listed as Warnings may be a problem for your site, but in some cases (for example where you know that you have added 302 Redirects for a specific purpose) you may just say to yourself, "yes, that is the way I want it to be" and choose to ignore them.

When you are looking at each individual page in the Pro App reports, you will find a tiny blue Help link  at the top right of each page (directly above the export link) which will take you to an in-depth explanation of that particular Pro App feature.

Also, if you are ever concerned about something in your reports, you can always ask a question here in Q&A or email the Help team direct at help@seomoz.org. Those guys are awesome and always happy to help out, as are the many members & Associates who lend a hand here in Q&A.

Staff also cruise through Q&A from time to time, but with so many questions posted each day, if you have an issue that needs staff input it is a good idea to email the help team and make them aware of it as soon as possible.

I hope that helps.

Sha

Hi Ralzaider,

Some great recommendations & info here already, especially from Kane, but just wanted to add:

When I hear "online ecommerce sales" I start worrying about duplicated product descriptions fed from manufacturers.

So, if this is an issue for your site, I would put your person to work on writing interesting unique product descriptions for every item in your online catalog. Since you are lucky enough to be paying a tiny hourly rate for their services, I would even consider an investment in product to give to them as samples so that they can actually see, touch and feel the products, try them out etc before writing about them. If you have hundreds or thousands of products, perhaps just identify the most important ones to provide as samples.

If unique content isn't an issue for your site, then I would go with the other recommendations in this thread first.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Henning,

There is an issue in play from the latest Linkscape update which was released today. The issue is affecting PA & DA in Open Site Explorer.

The Moz team are working on the problem now.

If you want to keep updated and find out when the issue has been resolved you can follow @SEOmoz on Twitter (or check the SEOmoz Twitter stream from time to time).

If you have issues at any time and think there may be a problem, you can also email the Help team direct at help@seomoz.org

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi blocker0408,

There is an issue that has been identified with the Linkscape update which occurred earlier today. This means that Page Authority & Domain Authority in Open Site Explorer are off at the moment.

The engineering team at SEOmoz are working on the problem and will update as soon as the issue is rectified.

You can follow @SEOmoz on Twitter to keep up to date on what is happening with the issue and that way you will know when things are back on track.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Leigh,

On-page report summaries in all of my campaigns are functioning normally.

If you are seeing no results at all in the summary for on-page, then there may be a problem with the campaign itself.

You will need to email the Help team directly and ask them to check on the campaign for you. It might help to attach a screenshot of what you are seeing to help them identify the issue.

Email address for the Help team is help@seomoz.org.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi,

It is quite possible for Page Authority to be higher than Domain Authority as the two are independent of each other. PA is essentially a measure of how likely an individual page is to rank, while DA applies across entire domains & sub domains.

To understand how PA & DA are calculated and what they actually mean, take a look at these resources Page Authority and Domain Authority.

SEOmoz recently introduced an update to the calculation of PA & DA which has brought a higher level of accuracy. You can read this post about the improvement - Introducing SEOmoz Updated Page Authority & Domain Authority. This one goes into some depth as to the reasons & methods used in calculating both.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Hitesh,

Are you by any chance using the Google Analytics plugin for Wordpress from Yoast?

Your problem sounds quite similar to that described by Joe in this recent Q&A thread

After a great deal of investigation, Joe reported that he was using this plugin and this was a known issue.

If you can rule out the plugin first, then we can investigate further.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Elke,

An initial Pro campaign will take up to 7 days to complete and will crawl up to a maximum 10,000 URLs for the root domain or sub domain that you choose to set it up for.

The Crawl Test tool is intended to provide a "quick start " option, which will report against the same diagnostic information, but for a limited number of URLs (3,000 & max of 2 domains per day). This allows you to get started on tidying up site issues while waiting for the full crawl to complete.

Since the Crawl Test tool allows you to run the quick crawl for any subdomain, it can also be useful for taking a look at the health of established sites you may be quoting on etc.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Gary,

Great answer from Daniel.

One thing that you can do is to create a list of noindexed pages in excel, then add all pages identified by SEOmoz as duplicates and run a simple comparison in excel. This will identify any pages that do not match. You will easily see whether the new pages in the report can be ignored.

There is already a feature request in the works with the SEOmoz engineering team which will enable us to "turn off" pages that can be ignored (like those that are already noindexed). In the meantime, keeping track of the pages you can ignore is probably the best option.

You can keep track of progress by following updates on the Feature Request here.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Garry,

I can vouch for the fact that Rand even responds to people who email him weird & crazy questions & requests...and when I say responds, I don't mean "thanks very much for your input & have a nice day".

From my own experience I can say that where warranted, it has been more like "Holy response from the whole Company Batman!" 8D

Modest as he is about his own accomplishments, there are a lot of CEO's who would do well to take a few lessons from Rand on dealing with clients.

Sha

Hi Gary,

If the two pages are identical (or close to identical), you could add a canonical link element to one of them as an alternative. Just choose the one that you wish to be seen as the preferred page and add the code in the HEAD of the other to identify it. Here is an example of the code you might use to identify your new page as the preferred page:

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi D4,

Rankings are affected by a host of factors, not the least of which are personalization and localization. Given that different people search for different things in the normal course of things, it is quite likely that two different people searching on different computers will get different results.

I would be very cautious about conducting repetitive searches every few minutes as you have described, because in the end, it could be you and your helpers that are influencing what you see in the rankings!

It is important to remember that Google and Bing both utilize click through data from the SERPs to inform rankings. Every time your site is returned in the results, but not clicked-through and every time a searcher clicks through, but quickly returns to the search engine, Google and Bing are gathering information that suggests your site is not seen as relevant or helpful by searchers. Constantly running redundant searches like this could eventually have a negative impact for your site.

I would say that you might be better served by conducting an in depth analysis of the pages concerned and putting the focus on improving them. If you get this aspect right, rankings and traffic will improve naturally over time.

Hope that helps,

Sha