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  • Hi, we are actually building a new microsite that will live on promo.domain.com.  The site will have a promo for about 5 days and will be changed for a new promo after 5 days. Considering that the site www.domain.com has a high autority (67) and is well indexed in search engine, should I try to optimise this site for keywords such as promo "keyword" rebate "keyword" cheap "keyword" even if the site will be optimized for those keywords only for 5 days. We are already doing PPC campaign on these keywords but I am wondering if Google will have the time to rank us in the top 10 results in those 5 days or if I am loosing my time. My other option is to leave the TITLE of this site always the same like Groupon is doing and focus on very generic keywords.  Which option do you think is the best?

    Technical SEO | | Adviso
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  • Hi, today SEOMoz crawled our site and it interfered with an email campaign that we sent out and pretty much brought our site to a crawl (seoMoz even reported numerous 4XX errors). Is there a way to tell the crawler to only allow indexing between certain time periods?

    Moz Pro | | RugsUSA
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  • I have 1 main site with many many city/state pages within the site. I would like to use this site as the 'website' on the google local places pages for all my branch office locations, however I am worried that if my domain authority isn't high enough for the site, google will think I am spamming 'google places'. Are there any best practices I can follow to do this? Ideally I would like my blended search to show www.site.com/boston not as www.site.com

    Image & Video Optimization | | ilyaelbert
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  • I have mysite.net and mysite.com......They are both the same age, however, we always had it so that the mysite.com address forwarded to the mysite.net address. The mysite.net address was our main address forever. We recently reversed that and made the mysite.com address the main address and just have mysite.net forward to the mysite.com address. I'm wondering if this change will affect our rankings since a lot of the backlinks we've acquired are actually pointing to mysite.net and not mysite.com (our new main address)???

    Technical SEO | | B24Group
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  • (1) Can I use OSE to see the number of links per month a site acauired over the past year (month by month)?  For example, I might be interested if I see a competitor acquired a surprisingly high number of links during December, 2010. (2) Can I use OSE to see the a list of links a site acquired during a specific time, such as December of 2010?  For example, if I see a competitor suddenly acquired an unusually high number of links in December, 2010, I'd like to see a list of those links, to figure out how they acquired those links. Thanks!

    Competitive Research | | GregMoore
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  • The SEO moz is showing an error on one of the sites within my SE Moz account campaign under Crawl Diagnostics: Title tag missing or empty. No problem here but the file associated with this issue is sitemap.xml and that just dose't look right as as far as I know xml files are title tag free. I've searched around and i've  been able only to confirm my initial thought that sitemap.xml dose't use a title tag .. like any other xml. is this an issue ? (the error that is) or i should let it slide. can it be fixed ? if yes, how ? Thanks !

    Moz Pro | | eyepaq
    1

  • There's a "brands for:" section that appears above the first organic listing for certain search queries.  For example, if you search for "dedicated servers" in Google, you will see that a "brands for:" appears.  How do you get listed there? Thanks, Brian

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | InMotionHosting
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  • I don't know if these two scenarios are any different as far as SEO is concerned, but I wanted to ask to get an opinion. On my website: http://www.rainchainsdirect.com you can see there is a top menu with "About" "Info" "Questions" etc.  Some of these links lead to further pages that are essentially a indeces for multiple further links. My question is: in terms of SEO, is it better to A) have all links (that are now on the pages that the menu links lead to) displayed in a drop down menu directly from the top menu (and bypassing an intermediate page) or B) to have it as it is now where you have to click to an intermediate page (like "rain chain info") to get access to the links (and not have such a large drop down menu) Is there a difference in terms of SEO?  In terms of useability it almost seems like a toss up between the two, so if there were better SEO value to one of the other, then I would choose that one. By the way, I know that the way it is structured now is strange, where there is only one drop down that leads to the same page as the top menu item, but that will be fixed, fyi. Thanks!

    Technical SEO | | csblev
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  • I have reviews on Yelp, Insiderpages.com, and Citysearch.  All of my contact information matches up, but Google does not seem to be finding them and adding them to my Google Places page.  Is there anything I need to do to make this happen?

    Image & Video Optimization | | vinnyb2000
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  • I am thinking to Add Sub Domains to get better rankings for Local Searches. So I will develop City Specific Sites with Specific Language. For Example qatar.wisnetsol.com. IT will be in Arabic. If my Good standing and Ranking on Google for wisnetsol.com will help my subdomain to rank better? if we setup wisnetsol.com/qatar, how it can target Qatar in Google Webmaster tools? Will links for qatar.wisnetsol.com and wisnetsol.com are seprate? What do you think about this strategy? Is it good or bad?

    Technical SEO | | Khuram
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  • Hi Mozzers. I've a client that has done a little bit of mess rewriting the URLs of its site. In fact, also the data base driven URLs are rewritten, but the dev forgot to change the space with "-", so that now the 95% of the URLs are like this one: http://www.portalesardegna.com/search/Appartamenti e Residence/ Obviously not really a pretty URL. I am not so sure if this issue has an SEO consecuences (in fact, the site ranks pretty well also with those kind of url), but I am thinking more on usability issue. Could you suggest me any easy fix to this rewrite problem?

    Technical SEO | | gfiorelli1
    2

  • For one of our sites we are considering restructuring the urls. This is about a Greek site and we are toying between the following options: a) English URLS e.g. www.domain.com/cars b) Greek URLs e.g. www.domain.com/αυτοκίνητα c) "Greeklish" URLs (Greek words spelled with latin characters) www.domain.com/aftokinita Normally we would imagine option b is the best since it would reinforce the main and most relevant keyword that is already present within the page content. We see many people search in google using greeklish (e.g. they are lazy to switch the keyboard locale all the time). Since we would also like to capture this part of the SE traffic but cannot obviously write in "greeklish" within our main page content maybe option c is a good compromise?

    International SEO | | achatzakis
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  • Hello, Please let me know what are the exact right steps in order to get rid of the duplicate content issues related with: www.domain.com/index.html same as www.domain.com  without creating an infinite loop. Do you have a step by step guide posted within seomoz including 301 redirect for non www to www for all urls and index.whatever to main domain name without going into a infinite loop ? btw how to you spot the loop ? is it obvious like never ending refresh of the home page ? thanks a lot !

    On-Page Optimization | | eyepaq
    2

  • Hello, We have a clients site who we are trying to rank for 10 keywords accross 20 towns so a combination of 200. What would be the best way to tackle this. Their url is www.abbottclarkeifa.co.uk. Thanks Shehzad

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gareth_Cartman
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  • Hi, We regularly write articles on our website and then submit them to different websites with link backs or sometimes without link backs. If google crawls these websites and our website, will it penalise us for duplicate content? Does it make a difference if we put link back to our site or not? If Google sees it as duplicate content, what should we do as a solution? Thanks

    Link Building | | Essentia
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  • Hi, After the last week Google algotithm update, my web site index appears on 4th position when I search for site:www.domain.com If I make a simple search for domain or domain.com it ranks on first position. Is this a sign of a penalty ? What would be the cause ? Thanks

    Link Building | | tranquilito
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  • Hello you suggest http://www.tynt.com/publisher-tools/copy-and-paste-to-share-content/ in your pro tipps but I wonder why you are not using it for your own blog under seomoz.org. I noticed that when somebody copy and paste something form my blog a strange code is added to the link: Expample: http://www.janik.cc/webdesigner-blog/2011/02/sample/#ixzz1FQvadWNV Is the #ixzz1FQvadWNV maybe not that good in a seo view of point?

    Technical SEO | | MichaelJanik
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  • Has anyone noticed any changes since the Farm Update from Google allegedly affected 11.8% of all US queries? Seems like we got some extra long tail traffic from the US - but its too early to tell if that is a coincidence or a more permanent change. I guess its one of those days where its good not to be a content farm 🙂

    Algorithm Updates | | ThomasHgenhaven
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  • I deal with primarily small businesses in the construction and maintenance industries and I'm looking for some advice. Traditionally in these categories you find absolutely awful websites with the below attributes, all ranking 1-5 in the SERPs. Weak/Limited content No blog Awful title tags Minimal backlinks Poor on-site optimization Ect. In most cases I am going to assume that these sites have been indexed for the last ten years, and that is why they are retaining such high rankings. My issue is trying to compete with them! So far I have worked to have my client's website submitted to and accepted by all of their competitor's backlinking site (which didn't take as long as you might think). I've also listed my client in several of the top paying and free directories (dmoz, joe ant, ect.) and still I see limited results. Lastly and most annoyingly my clients website, according to SEOmoz is currently leading the domain authority race in every category. Does anyone have a suggestion as to what is going on.

    Technical SEO | | calin_daniel
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  • Hello, Seomoz did a crawl of my whole page, but under in page analysis grade rankings there have been no crawls? how can I initiate one?

    Moz Pro | | AdamGymyGym
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  • Hey guys, First of all, a big thanks to SEOmoz and the community.  I've been an avid reader for about a year now and have seen some great improvements. I'm always focusing my efforts on strategies that work well for my niche.  Although I've come accross one of my competitors that doesn't seem to have much going for him, although he ranks very well.  His root domain is ****E and the URL where (seemingly) spammed links point to is ***.  If you do a site: command he has 1000+ pages although most consist of "events calendar" (empty).  Also, I ran some of his content through copyscape and there seems to be multiple versions of it throughout the web. After all this, he ranks very well for money keywords in our niche, although his on-page is horrible so there are many opporunities I've capitalized on. Is there something I'm missing?  I'm trying to find the value in his website but its not very clear to me since his backlink profile is (seemingly) junk and his on-page goes against all I was told to implement.

    Technical SEO | | reegs
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  • Hey guys, I'm not too sure if I'm over-thinking this, but I've seen no-follow being used with SEOmoz and I'm looking to implement this  myself.  Most of my links point to my root domain (yes I'm working on building links to deep pages) so would it make sense to 'limit' or 'no-follow' links on my root domain so that only the most important pages are being passed link juice? Thanks

    Technical SEO | | reegs
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  • A very active news website has a very active blog as a sub-domain. For all good SEO reasons, they want to transfer the blog from a subdomain to a subcategory. Now, the issue is this blog is very active, updated daily and lots of people comment on it. So how should the website go about making this change while causing minimal seo loss and ensuring that the commenting process remains active and on going. A detailed answer would be much appreciated! Thanks! I cam accross this blog post that guides on how to change a subcategory to a subdomain: http://devilsworkshop.org/moving-a-wordpress-blog-from-a-subdirectory-to-subdomain-preserving-permalinks/. Any words on this would also be appreciated!

    Technical SEO | | RishadShaikh59
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  • In looking at my latest seomoz crawl, I see that I have a bunch of pages being reported as duplicate content. Turns out a number of my blog tags share the same <title>as pages on my site. I added a couple of images to illustrate my point.</p> <p>Blog: http://imgur.com/YlxrI</p> <p>Page: http://imgur.com/H2zyc</p> <p>Any recommendations on what I should add to my Tag titles? My pages need to rank ahead of my tags. Should I go w/something as simple as Name of Post I Boarding School Blog Tags?</p> <p>Any help is much appreciated!</p> <p>Thanks,<br />Peter </p></title>

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peterdbaron
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  • I know and use very often SEOmoz OSE. My question is about non-SEOmoz tools wich can detect a specific domain backlinks and all kind of parameters especially the IP of the backlinks. So: what do you use/recommend?

    Link Building | | AndrewStarlike
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  • Hi all, Someone just tweeted how succssful this site has been for them.  Interesting model, but what happens after you stop paying?  Goobye rank?  I was wondering if the group has had any experience with this site. Thanks, Doug

    Link Building | | DougKirk
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  • Hi all, I'm new to SEO and excited to see the launch of this forum. I've searched for an answer to this question but haven't been able to find out. I  "attended" two webinars recently regarding SEO. The above subject was raised in each one and the speakers gave a polar opposite recommendations. So I'm completely at a loss as to what to do with some domains that are related to a domain used on a live website that I'm working to improve the SEO on. The scenario: Live website at (fictitious) www.digital-slr-camera-company.com. I also have 2 related domain names which are parked with the registrar: www.dslr.com, www.digitalslr.com. The question: Is there any SEO benefit to be gained by pointing the two parked domains to the website at www.digitalcamercompany.com? If so, what method of "pointing" should be used? Thanks to any and all input.

    Technical SEO | | Technical_Contact
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  • I've just been asked the question and didn't have a great answer, what a great reason to try the new Q&A! We have a .com domain based in the UK but we'd like to optimise for Australian searches. Are there any tips about useful practices to carry out on the site to highlights it's relevance for Australian users?

    Technical SEO | | eazytiger
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  • I haven't seen any consistent information regarding DCMI tags for organic SEO in a couple of years. Webmaster Tools obviously has a rich set of instructions for microdata.  Has there been any updated testing on DCMI or information above the whisper/rumor stage on whether engines will be using Dublin?   As a final point, would it be worth going back to static pages that haven't been touched in a couple of years and updating them with microdata?  It seems a natural for retail sites and maybe some others, but what about content heavy pages?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jimmyseo
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  • We are a large charitable organisation which has not paid too much attention to SEO guidelines in the past and as such have a number of websites that have been built by external development agencies. The question that we would like to ask is how this is affecting our SEO. The sites that have been built previously have been created on subdomains and we know that this is an issue. Subdomains are considered separate sites by the Search Engines and not all equity is passed from the subdomains to our main sites, especially as our internal link structure is poorly constructed. However if we had put the sites under our main website URL in subfolders would we still be reducing our page rank and link equity as the pages are hosted by the companies that built them often in a different programming language (Open Source rather than Enterprise) and sometimes in a different country. One company that we asked to build pages for us recently said that it was no problem with SEO because they would put the content in an iFrame to one of our main domain URL in a subfolder but I know that iFrames pass all link equity to the company where the site is actually located/hosted. What are the brilliant SEOMOZs communities thoughts on this? Thanks very much. EDIT - 1100hrs. Thanks to all the responses so far, but we've not quite got to the root of the issue - sorry it's probably the way I've phrased the question.  Essentially we host our own website but our internal team does not have the resource to build all the functionality required by the business.  So if we need a platform that manages our events or a platform that manages our community it has to be built externally then integrated into our existing structure as it would cost too much / take too long / potentially don' t have the expertise to do internally.  External companies tend to have the best functionality but then we are directing our visitors to their sites.  So we are asking them to integrate their sites into ours for an extra fee but what we are trying to find out is whether or not this is worth it in terms of search equity for our site if we only lose visitors once they have arrived at our site and are then directed off...?

    International SEO | | tgraham
    1

  • Hi If the same content is placed on different URL's for the purposes of providing information on different channels (i.e mobiles), or has been translated into a different language (but is still the same content), do the serach engines still count this as duplicate content and will a canonical URL have to be tagged in these instances? Thanks in advance for your assistance.

    Technical SEO | | jimmyseo
    1

  • Hi all, Our business has aquired a new domain name because there are several organisations closely related to ours that use similar domain names to target a niche group of users.  We would like to use this new domain name to link to an existing website with content targeted at this user group as we feel that they will be more comfortable getting to the content via this new URL. After a useful search in these forums the majority of SEOMOZ gurus suggest that the new URL should be redirected to our current site using a 301 and we are happy to do this.  However do we have to link the URL to our homepage or is it acceptable to link to a subfolder within the domain and then targeting content on this page to the user niche? Thanks for any input. Kind regards. Edit 11:38 The old url is oldcommunity.charity.com (we know having a subdomain is bad) this is where we manage all community engagement. The new url is www.newparticularcommunity.com and we would redirect this to oldcommunity.charity.com.  The reason we have bought www.oldparticularcommunity.com is because the url is used by other charities for community engagement and is recognised by the community we are targeting.  We are redirecting to our old site because we do not want to engage with them on this new url as our old site oldcommunity.charity.com already does this and can cater for the new community and perhaps they haven't realised that we can.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tgraham
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  • The website of the travel platform is well designed and looks serious - without any adsense or suspicious links on it. So does the email newsletter of them. But I checked the domain in OSE and saw not less links which came from more or less linkfarms with very often the same anchor text. Would you suggest your customer to submit on the platform?

    Link Building | | petrakraft
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  • Many websites - especially those done in foreign countries by non-native English speakers - have many grammatical and idiomatic errors in the English copy. How important is that to conversions (actually convincing the customer to buy, etc.)  Is the poor English a turn-off, a cause for distrust or discomfort - or do people not care? I'd be interested to hear people's personal opinions (the more the merrier) and if anyone has a more global perspective backed by research, testing, etc - that would be great, Thanks in advance!

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | debi_zyx
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  • I have just recently spoken to an SEO consultant who is pushing the opinion that more internal links would be better for me. They are particularly focused oin aligning a large number of content articles that I have developed over the years, and getting more keyword focus, and more links (inpage within site) onto these pages.  I have to agree on a certain level that maybe this large base of unique content is unedr utilised. What is the general opinon, more internal links are better?

    On-Page Optimization | | Jurnii
    0

  • A few pages get a lot of external links and rank well (when site:domain.com) but i do not want that those pages rank well (these are blog pages and we are in E-commerce) Can i redirect these pages to other pages which are more important to me and customers because google see only the link or is google so smart that they see a realtion between the page from which i get the links and to the page in my webste In that case i rename the old pages.

    Link Building | | turnon
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  • Our newspaper website has an extensive readership in the US, UK, Australia and UAE. Should we go for a mobile web app? Is that worth the investment considering the fact that you have to design different apps for different devices. Or does a mobile version of the website work fine? Also, are there any specific guidelines that you shoudl follow when designing web apps with regards to SEO? Also, if you could point out some good resources for getting web apps designed, that would be great! Thanks, Rishad.

    Branding | | RishadShaikh59
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  • Now, there are a number of do's and dont's when it comes to internal linking, but do those rules apply to news websites that have to interlink relevant news stories, primarily based on their relevancy to the user and the value that they have to provide rather than keeping the idea of page rank sculpting in mind? What's your take on this?

    Link Building | | RishadShaikh59
    0

  • Our site fell from grace last July and landed on page five of the Google search results for our primary keyword. For 6 months I tried a number of strategies with no results, including reconfiguring our site based on the SOEmoz on-page grading tool. More recently, after receiving your advice in a Q&A, I took down all of my paid links and submitted a reconsideration request to Google. Interestingly, 3 days later we popped up 20 spots. This left us on the top of page three. Better than page 5, but still not prime time! A few days ago (two weeks after our reconsideration request was submitted) I got a message back in my Webmaster Tools, that they had completed a review of our site - but oddly enough they provided no info on the outcome, positive or negative. And there has been no additional movement in the rankings since I received the message. Was the original 20 point jump the result of the reconsideration request, or just a coincidence? Or, is it possible that they did a review and the results will only occur later during some organic re-indexing process? What do you think?

    On-Page Optimization | | JimSkychief
    0

  • This is just a quickie: On one of my campaigns in SEOmoz I have 151 duplicate page content issues! Ouch! On analysis the site in question has duplicated every URL with "en" e.g http://www.domainname.com/en/Fashion/Mulberry/SpringSummer-2010/ http://www.domainname.com/Fashion/Mulberry/SpringSummer-2010/ Personally my thoughts are that are rel = canonical will sort this issue, but before I ask our dev team to add this, and get various excuses why they can't I wanted to double check i am correct in my thinking? Thanks in advance for your time

    Technical SEO | | Yozzer
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  • In PHP, I'm wanting to store a session variable based upon a link that's clicked. I'm wanting to avoid query strings on pages that have content. My current workaround is to have a link with query strings to a php file that does nothing but snags the variables via $_GET, stores them into $_SESSION, and then redirects. For example, consider this script, that I have set up to force to a mobile version. Accessed via something like a href="forcemobile.php?url=(the current filename)" session_start(); //Location of vertstudios file on your localhost. Include trailing slash $loc = "http://localhost/web/vertstudios/"; //If GET variable not defined, this page is being accessed directly. //In that case, force to 404 page. Same case for if mobile session variable //not defined. if(!(isset($_GET["url"]) && isset($_SESSION["mobile"]))){ header("Location: http://www.vertstudios.com/404.php"); exit(); } //Snag the URL $url = $_GET["url"]; //Set the mobile session to true, and redirect to specified URL $_SESSION["mobile"] = true;header("Location: " . $loc . $url); ?> Will this circumvent the issue caused by using query strings?

    Technical SEO | | JoeQuery
    0

  • Hi, I have an issue that can be solve with a canonical tag, but I am not sure yet, we are developing a page full of statistics, like this: www.url.com/stats/ But filled with hundreds of stats, so users can come and select only the stats they want to see and share with their friends, so it becomes like a new page with their slected stats: www.url.com/stats/?id=mystats The problems I see on this is: All pages will be have a part of the content from the main page 1) and many of them will be exactly the same, so: duplicate content. My idea was to add the canonical tag of "www.url.com/stats/" to all pages, similar as how Rand does it here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps But I am not sure of this solution because the content is not exactly the same, page 2) will only have a part of the content that page 1) has, and in some cases just a very small part. Is the canonical tag useful in this case? Thank you!

    Technical SEO | | andresgmontero
    0

  • Hi Everyone, This question is about URL best practice for multilingual websites. We have www.example.com in English and we are building the exact replica of English site in German www.example.de. On the Geman site, we are considering to translate some portions of the URLs for example last folder and file name as seen below: example.de/folder1-in-english/folder2-in-english/folder3-in-german/filename-in-german.html Is this a good idea? Will this help SEO and user experience both? or the mixed languagues in URL will confuse the users? Google guidelines say that this should be ok. Would love to get feedback from SEOMOZ community! Thanks, Supriya.

    International SEO | | Amjath
    0

  • Hi mozzers, I am currently working on a phd, and one of the professors asked me for help. He would like to know how many Danish school websites (n=1500) links to a certain section of a government website (the relevant section has around 1600 pages). The problem is, that the government website is coded very poorly from an seo perspective with lots of strange URL variables, entailing OSE can't give valid data. So, what would be the best way to check how many of the school websites link? Throw all 1500 website through Xenu, or is there a smarter solution? Maybe the link out feature on Bing? Any suggestions will be greatly appreciate. Thanks!

    Algorithm Updates | | ThomasHgenhaven
    0

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