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You may be suffering from Canonicalitzation. There's a post about it here http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization

You should use mod rewrite to redirect a subdomain to the root domain, not 301. I would remove the 301 and with time your position should be restored.

I have the chrome toolbar installed. In the SERP a site I was looking at had 686 links from 12 domains linking to the root domain. When I checked this site in OSE with filters set to all pages in root domain it shows 65 links from 12 domains.

Can anyone explain the difference?

I'm using Wordpress, which insets the rel=cannonical tag on every page, and they are pointed correctly, so I I'm OK, right?

I started a web app campaign for a site that I recently finished. It had no errors or warnings, but issued rel=cannonical notices for every page on the site.

What does this mean?

I had actually tried this but wasn't happy with the results. Some of the phrases were accurate, but most of them didn't exist on the site. It seems to be emphasizing similar or related phrases as opposed to those taken from the actual content.

I need a tool or a method that will let me know what a search engine thinks the overall theme of the site is about. Sort of like the keyword extractor, but on a site-wide basis.

Does anyone have any sugestions?

It's a valid question. I've been a web developer since 1996 with an interest in search long before the term SEO was coined but am not very active on SEO Moz so my profile doesn't present me as being very knowledgeable.

Bear in mind that, as in life, people are participating in this forum for all kinds of reasons.

SEO Moz is a great resource, and as you take advantage of it you will start to form your own opinions. Ask questions when you are stumped, and look for a consensus among helpful answers. That's what I do.

I'm a long time (15 years) web developer, and have drifted into search in the last years. I've seen a lot of things come and go. If this were my project, I'd avoid a custom solution that puts you at the mercy of a developer.

Look for something that's stable,  and popular, with a large developer pool. In my opinion Wordpress is great for point of presence sites, but is not yet there for eCommerce.

Although I am a developer, ff this were my project, I'd go with Drupal and something like Ubercart. You may not get all the customization you want, but you won't wind up beholden to a developer either.

Thanks to both of you, as this validates my logic.

Nothing preventing me per se, but in spite of this being a reasonably sized company, I deal with a marketing manager who doesn't understand the importance here. My real challenge here will be to convince her that it's important enough to set up another hosting account

Apologies in advance for the complexity.

My client, company A, has purchased company  B in the same industry, with A and B having separate domains. Current hosting arrangement combines registrar and hosting functions in 1 account so as to allow both domains to point to a common folder, with the result that identical content is displayed for  both A & B. The current site is kind of an amalgam of A and B.

Company A has decided to rebrand and completely absorb company B. The problem is that link value overwhelmingly favours B over A.

The current (only) hosting package is Windows, and I am creating a new site and moving them to Linux with another hosting company. I can use 301's for A , but not for B as it is a separate domain and currently shares a hosting package with A.

How can I best preserve the link juice that domain B has? The only conclusion I can come up with is to set up separate Linux hosting for B which will allow for the use of 301's.

Does anyone have a better idea?

Thanks. I've used Link Assistant and it works well.

I was thinking more along the lines of something that would track the progress of links I had requested rather than the status of links already acquired. Stuff like date, URL of potential link, action I took, link text used/requested, status of request, person I had requested the link from, etc.

If anyone has a good resource please let me know

I've been using spreadsheets to track my link-building efforts and am looking for a better way to do this. Does anyone have suggestions?

I use a social media plugin to link my blog to my social media profiles, and there is an option to make these links nofollow.

I'm not worried about losing link juice to my social profiles.

Is there any advantage in this case to using nofollow?

Are there any articles or tutorials here about how to build links? The only two methods I've been able to uncover are using OSE to analyze competitors backlinks and directory listings. I'm thinking there must be other ways.

Hi Jack. My experience has been that aside from social signals and high value directory submissions, your primary method will be to use Open Site Explorer to reverse engineer the backlinks of your competitors. You can download the OSE results as an Excel spreadsheet and manipulate them there if you have some familiarity with Excel.

Since they are nofollow, are blog comments worth while making in a link-building campaign? Seems to be some controversy about the amount of value nofollow links add.

I've been tracking my link building activities in a spreadsheet using these columns: Date, URL, Action Taken, Status, Link Text used/requested.

Can anyone share different or better ways of tracking what links you have requested and how you keep track of them

I have done this, and my results have been  reflected in SERP's for two months. My question is when will OSE reflect this?

I thought that was the purpose of this forum