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Hi Chris,

Thanks for your response. I have used both Xenu and Screaming Frog before, and they are great for searching a whole site within your niche where every broken link / missing resource is an opportunity. This is probably an easier thing to explain using an example:

We do work for a chain of care homes. If I go to, say www.carehomes.co.uk and check for missing links, I know that all the results will be an opportunity to make contact and build a relationship with a webmaster in the care home niche. So there's no need to filter these, but rather just to work my way through the list trying to build as many valuable new contacts as possible.

But if I run a missing links search on the BBC, it may bring back hundreds or thousands of results, but only one or two will be related to the care homes industry and therefore present an opportunity to reach out. So that's the aspect I'm enquiring about - going to a site that covers a range of topics and quickly finding opportunities within that relate to my niche.

Hi Jon,

Thanks for getting involved - having read your great blog, it's cool to get your take. Love the idea about then building relationships with all the others who link to that missing URL.

But my question remains the same - while I understand that there's more to it than the initial link, and there are greater opportunities when it comes to relationship building as well as link building, I am keen to get a handle on the best way to find missing resources, broken links etc within a certain niche; so I know how to use search modifiers to look up various sites, resources etc within our niche, I'm less clear on how to go to larger sites (BBC, wikis, Mashable etc) that cover many topics and find out whether opportunities are available within my niche.

Also, is there a Firefox friendly tool that's similar to DHP?

Thanks for any extra help you can give!

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your reply. I had stumbled across that site earlier and found it to be very useful. And yes, I agree that the tactic is a great way to outreach and relationship build as well as a simple like for like - although the issue of quickly finding such sites within a certain niche still applies.

It seems that Domain Hunter Plus gets some of the way there, but I'm running Firefox rather than Chrome, so any alternatives would be cool.

Hi fellow mozzers!

In an effort to ensure we're exploring every avenue when launching our new website, I was hoping to find some useful broken links / resources that we could incorporate into our link building.

We have used the standard tools for this (W3C, Xenu etc), but they all seem to have the same issue in that they reveal all the missing links on a site (although some don't actually tell you the page they are on), but you still have to sort them to see if the links/ resource is related to your theme.

When you're on a niche site, this obviously isn't an issue, but on a site like Mashable (to use the example given in a recent SEOmoz blog) it could result in wading through hundreds of links to find one relevant one right at the end.

Is there a tool that allows you to specify what theme links you are looking for from a site, or better yet one that allows you to check multiple sites for multiple missing themed links in one go?

Or is the best way to export the list and just search the document for certain keywords?

Cheers Ryan,

That's kind of what I suspected - most of the best practice things that also affect SEO in some way (alt tags etc) we're already doing, and we were going to put together a press release highlighting the extra accessibility lengths we've gone to that will hopefully get a bit of attention. So as long as I'm not missing anything, that's cool!

Thanks for those links Ryan. the W3C is what we us for checking DDA compliance, but I guess it's good to have other sources as a sanity check. My question, however, largely relates to the Google Accessibility search and the SEO benefits of ensuring we're compliant? As I said, I could only find old posts on the subject so I didn't know if it had gone the way of other Google initiatives from days gone by?

Thanks for that, looks very thorough. I should probably have pointed out that all our sites are DDA compliant anyway, but given this company runs care homes it seems more important - especially if it gives us a rankings edge over the competition.

Hello there,

One of the sites we do work for is a chain of care homes. We are in the process of adding a page reader so any visitors they have who are visually impaired will find it easier to access the info they need.

We're doing this from a usability point of view more than anything (given their target audience), but while looking to see if there were any accessibility news sites /directories we could leverage for some links I came across mentions of the old Google Accessibility search. It seems to have been before my time as an SEO, so I wondered:

• is this still relevant, or has it just been assimilated into the regular algorithm (the only mentions I could find were very dated)

• if relevant and separate from the main search, are there many who use it

• what other things should we take into account when trying to optimise for this (assuming it's still relevant, of course)

Cheers guys!

Hi Dan,

I had been looking into both of these tools, but UBL seemed to have prompted a fair few people to say they'd paid the listing fee but had never seen their citations appear, so I'd put that on the backburner.

As for the Express Update USA, we're based in the UK - do you know of an equivalent?

Cheers!

Hi fellow mozzers!

We are currently relaunching our website and are in the process of ensuring all our local citations are up to date and consistent. In doing so, I've noticed that there are still countless listings under our old address, which probably isn't doing our local rankings a whole world of good!

I have been hunting these down by searching "company name" "old address" to bring up any references, but I wondered if there was a tool to find these quicker, in the same way Whitespark finds citation sources to begin with? Similarly, is there a tool that flags up listings that have the correct NAP info, but that has maybe been formatted differently enough so as to cause consistency probs?

Thanks all!

Hello fellow Mozzers!

I just wondered if there was any way of finding out what terms / videos people are searching YouTube for in the same way as getting rough traffic numbers using the AdWords Keyword Suggestion tool? Or even a trends-type tool to give rough indicators as to which terms are currently more popular than others.

And what people's opinions are on whether to go after terms that people are frequently putting into YouTube, or terms that are popular in general and hope your video appears in the universal search?

Cheers guys,

Nick.

Hi Barry,

Thanks for your swift response on this. The pages certainly seem to be getting cached correctly, and when we initially took over the SEO and made wholesale changes to the site, there were huge improvements, so it looks for all the world like the main pages at least are being looked at.

But I think you make a good point about getting it solved anyway so we can identify any problems that may be occurring / will occur later.

Hello all!

While doing some routine health checks on a few of our client sites, I spotted that a new client of ours - who's website was not designed built by us - is returning a 500 internal server error when I try to look at the robots.txt file.

As we don't host / maintain their site, I would have to go through their head office to get this changed, which isn't a problem but I just wanted to check whether this error will actually be having a negative effect on their site / whether there's a benefit to getting this changed?

Thanks in advance!

Hi there. We've been approached by a company called AdInsight, selling their Clarity product for tracking phone calls. It seems to offer a great solution in terms of knowing what keywords are actually effective, and would be particularly useful for a number of our clients whose websites have traditionally low conversion rates on the sites themselves, but which (anecdotally, at least) seem to drive business.

I read up on the kinds of software these products usually use, and found numerous concerns on the negative effects on local search (which is why I looked it up to begin with). Their rep, who talked me through the system, said part of the set up involves setting a default number for people without Javascript, and that each number is used once so is unlikely to be indexed.

I then asked if this counted as cloaking, and he assured me that numerous SEO companies use this product, as do major websites with large internal web teams, and that they would not do anything to compromise their sites. My question is two-fold:

1. Has anyone used this product, and if so did it have negative effects on the local search side of things.

2. Would this count as cloaking, or is it an accepted method of tracking web conversions?

Thanks in advance

Another thing that has occurred to me with this - it's not so much whether the links are passing value / negative value, but more that the anchor text is telling the search engines that our site may be a place to buy viagra, vicodin etc - and surely that's never a good thing?

Thanks for your response. We are obviously about to start on the white hat link building side of things - that was how I stumbled upon all the spammy links. According to OSE, they are actually passing quite a lot of benefit, but I would think this is only for a limited period of time.

Unfortunately they do seem to point to the homepage in about 99% of cases, so the 404 is not an option. Also, I can't really see what these other sites are getting out of the set up - they are linking to us with terms implying we sell viagra, vicodin etc, when we're a five star hotel. Seems very odd?

Hi there. We have recently taken over the SEO for a five-star hotel who rank very well already for a lot of their main terms, largely down to the fact they have decent off-site strength (as yet very little on-page optimisation has been done, so they aren't appearing for some quite key terms). This off-page strength includes around 2000 links, giving the home page an authority of 63 in the OSE tool. However, upon looking at the links to check they were pointing to the most relevant page etc, I notice they have A LOT of spammy links, pointing to their site with anchor text like 'cheap cialis' or 'buy valium'.

Clearly these aren't the kinds of links that should be pointing to a five-star hotel, but should I expect to see much of a drop by attempting to remove these links? We obviously want to clean their link portfolio up, but I'm not sure they would be too happy if all their top rankings disappeared - even if only temporarily, and even if done with the best intentions.

I ask as none of the other sites we handle SEO for have had such a proliferation of these links, so I've not seen the ramifications in full.

Any help would be much appreciated, along with advice on the best way to remove these links.