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These are the ones I recommend:

1. Moz: https://www.youtube.com/user/MozHQ
2. Brian Dean: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCx7J37QuXsGL7QG6SMIpqKg
3. Ahrefs: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWquNQV8Y0_defMKnGKrFOQ

My only response would be this. Sometimes it can work especially in the short run, but is often penalized. I would wait until the next penguin update comes out and take a look at the competitors site again. Again, not linking site wide from the footer is not a hard-and-fast rule but more of a general best practice.

The problem is that these are not editorial links per se. As such they are at constant risk are being devalued or penalized by Google.

You can roll the dice and sometimes see a short-term victory. But more often than not you risk getting burned.

Great question! We do often see a positive correlation between the number of followed outbound links and higher rankings (though I'm not sure we've scientifically measured this recently). Anecdotally, we hear this often as well. Most famously when the NYTimes made external links "followed" which was followed by an increase in traffic/rankings.

It's an interesting perspective. Looking at the pages+links, they all look trustworthy and normally I wouldn't see a reason to nofollow them, especially since they are all editorially controlled by you and your team.

Linking equity is a concern, but I honestly doubt you're saving anything by making them nofollow, especially since Google updated how they handle PageRank sculpting back in 2009.

Not that there aren't legitimate ways to preserve and flow link equity (such as including internal links withing the main body of text instead of sidebar areas/navigation) but in this case I think leaving the links follow won't hurt at all.

Hi Amelia,

Great question. It doesn't mean your site is spammy, it simply sounds like your link profile likely looks like a lot of sites we see that do happen to be spammy.

My guess is that in order to rank better, you may want to work on increasing your visibility by attracting more external links to your site. Does that sound reasonable? (Additionally, this would eliminate most of the spam flags)

It's a big task, but a few resources that may help:

• https://moz.com/blog/category/link-building
• https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building
• http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

Hope that helps!

The study was looking at the correlation between the amount of HTML and higher Google rankings. Although I don't believe it's an actual ranking factor, we typically find a small but positive correlation with longer content pieces. The simple explanation being that longer content has more "stuff" to rank for, and there's a corresponding correlation to longer content and links earned, which also helps with rankings.

Interesting note about iframes. Google typically attempts to associate the content of an iframe with the originating/hosting site. How this plays into how Google interperets the "link" from this site - I have no idea, but I doubt it's very harmful.

There are a few possible reasons Google might adjust rankings after seeing a change in your title and meta descriptions. Among them: (keep in mind these are only possibilities)

1. The algorithm determines that the page is less relevant to the target query keywords

2. The title change deviates from earlier anchor text pointing at the page, meaning the page might not be as relevant to the query

3. Over-optimization

4. After changing your title+description, you experience a lower CTR in search results. In theory this could lower your rankings. But because you describe the old title/description still showing in SERPS, this is less likely

5. The drop in rankings is temporary, or is unrelated to any changes you made.

If Google is still showing the old title/description, #5 is a strong possibility. You may want to check Google's cache of the page to see if it's picking up on the changes. Depending on the site this can take anywhere from a few hours to several weeks.

If nothing else, you can always change the title/description back to the original version and test what happens.

We observe only a small correlation between HTTPS sites and higher rankings (like 0.04) - so there's very little apparent pure SEO benefit. It really seems to be the "tie-breaker" Google claims, though this difference may increase in the future.

Hi Jason,

I've been involved with a number of migrations (including this site, moz.com) and in my own experience I've seen anywhere from zero traffic change to a loss in the range of 8-9%.

Google says that in theory, you shouldn't lose any traffic, and several large publishers I've spoken with can attest to this.

In practice, HTTPS migrations can be complex, and with more moving parts the potential to do things less than perfectly can escalate. If you mess up your 301s or create confusing redirects, the potential for reduced traffic is real. My general advice is don't let the migration to HTTPS scare you, but proceed with caution. This post may help: https://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl

Hi Bob,

Great question. I wrote a post a few months back about this when SEOmoz re-released it's Directory List - most of the advice still applies today:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-link-directory-best-practices

I don't think directories are inherently bad for SEO, although their value has certainly diminished over the years. That said, I generally stay away from "general" directories and stick with niche specific directories. Some general rules to follow:

1. Make sure the directory is editorial - if they accept anyone, you don't want to be there.
2. Be sure to make directories only a small part of your overall link building effort. An old rule of thumb used to be 2 regular links for every directory link. I might go 4 to 1 just to be safe.
3. Be wary of directories that let you choose your own anchor text. Not only are these directories usually lower quality, but over-optimized anchor text can lead to penguin dangers.
4. Check the ratio of MozRank to Page Rank. The closer this ratio is to 1, the less likely the directory has been penalized. For example, a directory with a homepage Mozrank of 6, but a PageRank of 1, probably has had an algorithmic or manual action taken against it by Google.
5. Niche specific directories are best. If you run a nursing home, try to get in directories of nursing homes.

In short, it's fine to use directories, but be cautious, and use them in moderation. Think of them like sprinkling salt over your larger link building efforts.

Hi Loren,

I took a peek at your website, and checked some things behind the scenes using my super-awesome administrative powers here at SEOmoz. It looks like one of two things happened.

1. Rogerbot encountered an error when crawling your site
2. Your site had trouble with rogerbot.

In either case, you probably want to contact the help team (help@seomoz.org), especially if the problem persist in the next crawl report.

On another note..

Those extra-long title tags might cause some crawlers a little confusion. I'm not saying they're bad for you, but I doubt they are helping you much from a search engine point of view. Undoubtedly, I'd say with near certainty that Google is not indexing the entirety of your title tags. Paginated lists like this are tough to get indexed properly. If folks are actually searching for these obscure part numbers, perhaps this is the only way to scale it. That said, I would encourage you to experiment.

I'd also recommend performing a site audit. A good resource would be: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-perform-the-worlds-greatest-seo-audit

Also, our Learn SEO section is a good place to start.

Hi Waqid,

Yes, if you create a mobile site that is accessible, search engines may discover and crawl it. There is a lot of debate surrounding this, but if they discover duplicate content, you might be dinged in the rankings.

This is a problem with 10,000 solutions.The best practice today, and one that search engines are leaning towards, is a SINGLE URL approach, in which you use CSS style sheets and HTML5 to get your content to display correctly across all browsers, both desktop and mobile.

In reality, this is often more difficult than is practical, so workarounds are required. At a minimum, if you do build separate pages for mobile, make sure they contain the rel=canonical tag pointing to the original URL of your main site. That way, if a search engine discovers these pages, they won't penalize you for duplicate content and will be able to give proper attribution.

Bryson Meunier has a blog on the subject of mobile SEO that's pretty insightful. You can find it here.

http://www.brysonmeunier.com/

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Hi Matthew,

Thanks for the detailed answer. Some good advice here, but I can't say I agree with everything. In particular, it's a pretty broad statement to say that Social marketing has nothing to do with SEO. We know Google uses social media to discover new content, social shares are highly correlated with rankings, and Google has incorporated many SEO-like features into Google+ that have implications across the broader algorithm.

Also, social signals are greatly incorporated into personalized results and local SERPs.

There's a few other points. But I guess we both agree to learn as much as you can and question conventional wisdom. We agree more than we disagree.

Anything with "Link Exchange" in the title should be bumped to a Spam Score 100

Those are really, really horrible links. I'd probably disavow them just to be safe. On the other hand, unless you've received a manual action notice in Google Webmaster Tools, it's quite possible those links aren't hurting you at all and Google is simply ignoring them.

On the other hand, those links are just awful.

Hi Diane,

To be honest, I wouldn't expect much SEO benefit out of this site.

The type of articles submitted give the impression of a low-quality article directory. The other red flag is they seem to accept just about anyone with very little editorial oversight. In the past, evidence suggests that Google tends to not place much value on links from sites like this.

If you're looking to attract traffic, I'd spend a considerable amount of effort to ensure you're creating high quality, relevant value on your site, and then sharing/engaging by perusing a more specific audience, as opposed to a general article directory.

For example, you could use Followerwonk to find influencers in your specific niche, and try to get your content in front of them.

If you're looking for ideas/inspiration, here's a good place to start: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/content-and-blogging

Best of luck with your SEO!

Hi Max,

As you know, SEOmoz uses a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to host our static content. This greatly improves the load time of our pages by distributing our content across a cloud network, and results in an improved experience for users.

If I understand your question correctly, you have set up a CDN and have created duplicate content issues.

To solve this, it's important to set up your CDN only to serve static content, like images, stylesheets and javascript. That is what a CDN is designed for. Do not duplicate your entire site - your HTML - as this will cause duplicate content issues.

If for some reason you need to replicate your entire HTML, then there are some steps you can take to mitigate the damage, although it's going to depend on your exact circumstances.

For example, you can set full URL canonical tags so that all your mapped CNAMES point to your primary URL.

To revert back to one copy of your HTML, you might want to put 301 redirects in place on the duplicated content (pointing to the original) before removing them from the CDN.

But even these aren't ideal solutions. It's best just to serve your static content, and only one version of your HTML.

Hi Amit,

This is an important question, and how you address these errors and warnings depends on your experience level and the needs of your site. It's also a tremendous opportunity to further your SEO education.

For many folks like yourself, the best thing to do is to tackle each one of these issues one at time, learn from online resources until you are a near expert, then move onto the next one.

Each site is different, so there's no "one size fits all" solution. The exact "fix" will always depend on too many variables to list here, but here's some tips to get you started.

1. 4xx Errors. The best thing to do is download the CSV of your crawl report and open it in a spreadsheet program. Find the URLs that cause the error, and in the last column find the "referrer". This referrer will tell you the URL that the bad link was found on. If you go to this page, you can usually find where the broken link originated and decide if it needs fixing.

2. Too Many Links - This is a warning, not an error, so you may choose not to fix this. To understand the warning further, I recommend reading this article by Dr. Pete:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

If you decide that you should address the pages with too many links, you can then start to decide which links you should remove.

3. Canoncial  - Finally, these are notices, which aren't necessarily bad, we just want you to know they are there. For a little background, you might want to read the following:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

Hi CJ,

302s, by definition, don't have page titles (because they redirect - there's no title on the page)

So the URL listed there is the URL. This is a little confusing because of the formatting on the SEOmoz report. By default it displays "Title" "URL", but this obviously doesn't work in the case of redirects. Something our UX people should probably take a look at.

Anyway, whats more important is how to fix this.

1. Download your crawl report in CSV format.

2. Open the CSV in Excel or similar program.

3. Search for the URL: http://www.example.com/www.example.com

4. In the last column you'll find the "referrer" information. This is the page that the broken link was found on.

5. Go to that page on your website. Find the broken link. Fix. (unfortunately, I can't tell you how to do this step.)

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO!