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What you touch on is a major flaw with every rank tracking tool I've ever used, because the national results for local focused keywords might not be what actually ranks in that city.  That said, it's one of those "it's as good as it's going to get" kind of things, and it at least gives you a good baseline.

Now I want to add to what Martijn suggested above to not track the spin-off pages, because those individual locations are incredibly important to the people at those locations, the focus isn't all on the homepage.  Fortunately Moz has an old tool that can help you, though you will likely hit a limit (my current limit is 100 keywords tracked) based on your account level with Moz.

It's the old Rank Tracker, which still exists and it is seperate from the Campaign Level rank tracker, using this tool you can track a single keyword to a single URL, so it's not just showing you keywords for the entire campaign, just a nice straight forward "how does X rank for Y" and it'll e-mail you if you set it up to do that.

Moz Rank Tracker - https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/researchtools/rank-tracker

The important thing to test when submitting a sitemap like this is whether or not Google accepts it.  Once you submit the URL through Webmaster tools for the sitemap, just follow up and make sure the URLs you're saying are here have shown up in their indexed pages list.  As long as these match your intended submission, or a big enough sample does if it's a huge sitemap, you should be fine.

Equally as important, if not more so, is making sure that 100% of the old URL paths have been 301 redirected to their new homes, especially especially especially when you have domains with a higher authority being retired for a better sounding domain name, you want to seed the authority for the new site, not just 301 all the URLs to the homepage or something, but go through every old indexed page and make sure they have been forwarded.

A fun trick for this is to use authority tools like Moz or Ahrefs to determine which old URLs had the most links, and that way if you are completely strapped for time you can at least make sure that say your top 100 URLs with the most authority have been fully forwarded to their intended replacement - of course doing ALL old URLs redirected to their new URL would be best.

Hoping you did this with the migration but figured I'd cover it just in case.  Hope this helped!

Cheers,

Hi Neil,

I quite like Sucuri as a tool for monitoring a website as to whether or not it has been blacklisted by any of the malware/hacked tools.  I don't know this to be fact, but my professional observation is that even if a manual action has not been placed by Google but those other web sources say "We don't trust this site" then that can have a negative impact on that site's rankings even though Google hasn't reviewed it manually.

We've had sites that were repaired also stay on one platform or another's blacklist for weeks after the problem was removed just based on how those tools work, some may require clean scans for two weeks, for example, before fully signing off that the site has been repaired and that the malware or whatever won't just pop back up due to poor server security.

I would check out those sources first, make sure you don't see a blacklist by any of those big security companies, and then work on disavowing any of the bad links to the now deleted pages, and making sure you clean up your indexation so any 404'd pages are properly forwarded and the sitemap is cleaned back up so as not to be throwing errors.

A little spring cleaning after those types of issues goes along way, especially if you're 100% sure you aren't blacklisted by any of the website scanning tools.  I wish we knew exactly how they interfaced with Google, or how much weight they gave, but I have observed what you are describing and found that it wasn't Google's shit list but say Norton has the site flagged and Google doesn't, it's a pretty safe bet that Google at least knows about it and they become a little wary.

Hope this helped!  Cheers.

Hi Heather - I think I understand what you're asking, and if I do you are asking about a way to flag certain links that you find while reverse engineering other websites as "potential links" that you could reach out to in some way to gain a link?

To my knowledge Moz tools do not offer a "Flag for Prospecting" option that saves a URL so you can come back to it later as a potential link lead.  Our outreach team (link builders) use Google Docs to keep spreadsheets of links that we either attempted to build, or that we found that we should build, or obvious links that we didn't have, and then we color code those spreadsheets based on what our success was with that link.  Red being an outright failure - such as a paid link that we disregarded once we found out they wanted to be paid - or maybe Yellow being a link that we reached out to and it might go up some day but we hadn't heard back and don't want to spend too much time chasing if it's a lost cause.

What you're talking about (I think) would require you to be able to flag links across multiple researched sites, and I just don't know of a tool that has a "mark for later" type setting in the link analysis.

And yes, it would be rather odd for a website to have only one internal followed link.  It is possible that something funky with their CMS has all links no-followed, but even then.

Hi Becky,

So first it is important to note that the Moz Link Index (MozScape I think it's called?) is not a complete picture of all the links on the internet.  So if you see a website ranking better than yours, but you have better links according to Moz, try checking a tool like Ahrefs.com as a "second opinion" on what links each site has.  Sometimes the best ranked sites only have a handful of links, but they're incredibly focused links from valued sites in that industry.

A great example of that is Moz itself, none of my local competitors have written content for Moz over the years, so even if they have some really good links, or even more links, the few links I have earned by having YouMoz content promoted to the main blog (and just the YouMoz content itself) have given me some very specific valuable links from Moz, arguably the most authoritative website on SEO that exists.  So that one link is just worth a ton in Google's eyes, vs. my competitors who haven't earned that link themselves (even though they could, probably easily, but don't tell them that).

When you're asking about internal links vs. total URL links, unless it specifically says "internal" links or "external" links it probably means all links.  Internal links (just covering all the bases) are links inside your website to other pages inside your website, ie a link from your "homepage" to your "about us" page.  That is a sitewide link internal to your website that is probably in the menu of every page.  Only links that are internal would be counted that way, and it's a safe bet that the Moz tool has found 100% of the internal links on your site.

Now external links - again the Moz tool may or may not have found all the links on the entire internet that point to your site and your competitors sites - but those are links from when another website links to your website, from one domain to your domain.  So when we're evaluating value in a link report, we're saying "Okay this guy has 50,000 links and I have 12 it's probably going to be impossible to compete with him for these primary keywords".

Alternatively, you may say "I have 500 links and this guy has 3 and he's kicking my ass, what gives?!"  That comes back to the fact that not all links are created equal, again similar to how my competitors might have more links than me, but I just have better links.  I've done guest posts, I've been interviewed about SEO, we monitor HARO religiously for anything SEO or marketing related, etc.  Our links are few (because we rarely focus on our own stuff) but they're of such a high quality that they make up for the lack of volume (in many cases).

Now saying all this - and forgive me if I said anything you already knew, I just wanted to be sure I covered the basics before moving on just in case - your question is ultimately "Can I trust the SERP Report as a means to show me how my stats rate vs. the sites I am trying to beat on Google?"

I'll go un-vague and just say... No.  You can't.  You shouldn't rely heavily on that tool as a means of generating a "To-Do" list for your website in order to help you rank.  Link metrics are incredibly important, arguably worth more than anything you can do to your actual website (outside of creating outstanding shareable content) but at the same time not all links are created equally, so if you are using the SERP tool and saying "I have better numbers than person in Rank #1, I should be doing better than them" you are going to wind up pulling your hair out.

There are hundreds and hundreds of factors that go into Google's algorithm, maybe less broad there are dozens of factors that we generally look at from a "low hanging fruit" perspective on what we should change to improve our rankings.

I always run the on-page Grader tool from Moz when I am comparing pages, to see if there are any obvious keyword problems or if the Title tag is lacking in focus.  The Title tag is incredibly important.  One of the biggest resources that Moz creates is their Search Ranking Factors report, so if you wanted to review your website vs. that report, you might find some items where you know you are lacking and then that gives you an idea of what should be on your ToDo list.

The SERP Report isn't going to be a good gauge of like... if I go from 50 to 150 links I will beat competitor X, because that assumption is based on all links being equal, which they are not.  Google cares about the age of links, the authority of the linking site, the relevance of the content, the social shares of the content, etc, etc.  Everything has a footprint online so the bigger the footprint the more noise it looks like it's making the better it is assumed to be.

This is probably way more of an answer than you wanted, but there you go.  I recommend you dive into the Search Ranking Factors report from 2015 and see if anything there pops up as severely lacking on your site, and see if you can target those items to make a big difference.  Just keep in mind, even that report is based on the opinions of hundreds of SEOs so while it is really good, it is not a guarantee'd roadmap for ranking well - there are few guarantees in search.

Moz's 2015 Search Ranking Report - https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/search-ranking-factors

Hope this helped!

More importantly, you want a healthy ratio of Followed and No Followed links.  If all of your links are followed, it will look like it was done on purpose.

Look at your competition and see how many of their links are followed, vs. not followed, and try to keep a somewhat similar ratio.

No Follow links are a natural part of the Internet, so if you focus your SEO on ONLY building Followed Links, you're going to be doing great Link Building, but overall horrible SEO, because your profile will look manipulated.

No Follow Happens.  Embrace it.

More importantly, you want a healthy ratio of Followed and No Followed links.  If all of your links are followed, it will look like it was done on purpose.

Look at your competition and see how many of their links are followed, vs. not followed, and try to keep a somewhat similar ratio.

No Follow links are a natural part of the Internet, so if you focus your SEO on ONLY building Followed Links, you're going to be doing great Link Building, but overall horrible SEO, because your profile will look manipulated.

No Follow Happens.  Embrace it.

If you open Google and you type in site:competitor.com and click search you'll get a list of every page (and a count at the top) of every page that is in Google's index.

If your competitor has more pages than he did last time, he is either adding pages, adding content, or doing SOMETHING to cause his volume of pages indexed to go up.

Hope that helps!

Thrilled to help!  I know it's a pain, but it's worth it!

Remember that Open Site Explorer assigns authority based on links, not based on any algorithm like Google's where the content, the relevance, the known link profile, etc are all factored in.  So just because you're seeing a competitor having a lot of spammy links doesn't mean that spam is what you want to be replicating.

The 5 types of links you reference, #3 is article marketing and #4 is Black Hat, considered Exact Match Anchor Text link buying.  Violates Google's Webmaster Guidelines, not that you'll always get caught, but it is not white hat SEO.

You're trying to replicate what the competition has done, and that's a common stance of SEO's at a certain experience level, who aren't quite at that stage to build link bait, spin viral content, etc, the things that generate the valuable top level links that supports your more spammy directory links and blog commenting, but you need that 25% or so quality diferentiating links that cause your site to stand apart, true links, links that show that you deserve that ranking, and didn't just spin some SEO tools to spam your way to the mid-teens.

SEOmoz has some great articles if you search for them on the more advanced Link Building tactics and I recommend you check out LinkLove videos that Distilled put out, that is if you can't make it to the event itself.

You want to re-submit the new sitemap.

It's also a good idea to redirect ALL URL's not just the "important ones" as many of those URL's may have had links or references elsewhere and if you don't redirect that URL not only does Google find the dead link and attribute that to your domain, but you're also missing out on passing that links authority on to your new site.

It's a pain in the ass, but trust me, the more time you spend fully re-directing the old URL's to the new appropriate pages, the happier you'll be.

Picking your channels is always important.

My recommendation for on-site video is to publish the videos into your existing sitemap on the domain you want to rank for, and file a video sitemap with Google.  Video results are often given priority over text results and so Google will feature your video content because many sites just don't have a video function and they see great results from clicks and so forth when it comes to video.

Having a YouTube channel is also good, but it has to be a part of your strategy to keep it going.  Do you want people to comment on YouTube or on your site?  Do you want people searching to be able to find your site, or your YouTube page?  You want to funnel the traffic where you want it to go, and of course on your own site you can control the Calls to Action and things of that nature.

Here is an excellent SEOmoz blog from Kate Matsudaira that talks about creating a video strategy and some of the options and opportunities for success using video.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/creating-online-video-strategy

Hope this helps!

The top three gainers from the farmer update was Amazon.com, eHow.com and NexTag.com.

There is a pretty complete article on the visibility changes here from SELand.
http://searchengineland.com/who-lost-in-googles-farmer-algorithm-change-66173

NexTag specifically is a very old property, going back to 1999.  The authority built up from being one of those older properties has to carry a lot of weight.  The majority of the losers from the farmer update are content farms, but where we see eHow survive I'd wager comes from eHow being the origin of many pieces of the content that is being farmed out.

This, to me, relates to Local Search.  Sites like Localeze are the source of much scraped data that other directories use to show addresses, business categories, etc.  So Localeze as the source for this data has authority, where the individual pages that it enters data into does not have that same authority, and protection.

Duplicate content can be tracked to an origin, the time the post was made, the time Google first crawled it, etc.  So in NexTag's case, being the origin for so many things, I'd say it was safe.  NexTag is also very trusted by Google, they have had a Google Shopping relationship for years because Google, and this is just my observation, but Google feels they can trust NexTag's system to deliver a viable product when their links are clicked.

I'd wager also that NexTag had a much better link portfolio than the losers, so those trying to copy the NexTag model were shot down in favor of the original provider.

Again, these are my best guesses based on the data.  Hope it helps.

Cheers,

Hi Becky,

So first it is important to note that the Moz Link Index (MozScape I think it's called?) is not a complete picture of all the links on the internet.  So if you see a website ranking better than yours, but you have better links according to Moz, try checking a tool like Ahrefs.com as a "second opinion" on what links each site has.  Sometimes the best ranked sites only have a handful of links, but they're incredibly focused links from valued sites in that industry.

A great example of that is Moz itself, none of my local competitors have written content for Moz over the years, so even if they have some really good links, or even more links, the few links I have earned by having YouMoz content promoted to the main blog (and just the YouMoz content itself) have given me some very specific valuable links from Moz, arguably the most authoritative website on SEO that exists.  So that one link is just worth a ton in Google's eyes, vs. my competitors who haven't earned that link themselves (even though they could, probably easily, but don't tell them that).

When you're asking about internal links vs. total URL links, unless it specifically says "internal" links or "external" links it probably means all links.  Internal links (just covering all the bases) are links inside your website to other pages inside your website, ie a link from your "homepage" to your "about us" page.  That is a sitewide link internal to your website that is probably in the menu of every page.  Only links that are internal would be counted that way, and it's a safe bet that the Moz tool has found 100% of the internal links on your site.

Now external links - again the Moz tool may or may not have found all the links on the entire internet that point to your site and your competitors sites - but those are links from when another website links to your website, from one domain to your domain.  So when we're evaluating value in a link report, we're saying "Okay this guy has 50,000 links and I have 12 it's probably going to be impossible to compete with him for these primary keywords".

Alternatively, you may say "I have 500 links and this guy has 3 and he's kicking my ass, what gives?!"  That comes back to the fact that not all links are created equal, again similar to how my competitors might have more links than me, but I just have better links.  I've done guest posts, I've been interviewed about SEO, we monitor HARO religiously for anything SEO or marketing related, etc.  Our links are few (because we rarely focus on our own stuff) but they're of such a high quality that they make up for the lack of volume (in many cases).

Now saying all this - and forgive me if I said anything you already knew, I just wanted to be sure I covered the basics before moving on just in case - your question is ultimately "Can I trust the SERP Report as a means to show me how my stats rate vs. the sites I am trying to beat on Google?"

I'll go un-vague and just say... No.  You can't.  You shouldn't rely heavily on that tool as a means of generating a "To-Do" list for your website in order to help you rank.  Link metrics are incredibly important, arguably worth more than anything you can do to your actual website (outside of creating outstanding shareable content) but at the same time not all links are created equally, so if you are using the SERP tool and saying "I have better numbers than person in Rank #1, I should be doing better than them" you are going to wind up pulling your hair out.

There are hundreds and hundreds of factors that go into Google's algorithm, maybe less broad there are dozens of factors that we generally look at from a "low hanging fruit" perspective on what we should change to improve our rankings.

I always run the on-page Grader tool from Moz when I am comparing pages, to see if there are any obvious keyword problems or if the Title tag is lacking in focus.  The Title tag is incredibly important.  One of the biggest resources that Moz creates is their Search Ranking Factors report, so if you wanted to review your website vs. that report, you might find some items where you know you are lacking and then that gives you an idea of what should be on your ToDo list.

The SERP Report isn't going to be a good gauge of like... if I go from 50 to 150 links I will beat competitor X, because that assumption is based on all links being equal, which they are not.  Google cares about the age of links, the authority of the linking site, the relevance of the content, the social shares of the content, etc, etc.  Everything has a footprint online so the bigger the footprint the more noise it looks like it's making the better it is assumed to be.

This is probably way more of an answer than you wanted, but there you go.  I recommend you dive into the Search Ranking Factors report from 2015 and see if anything there pops up as severely lacking on your site, and see if you can target those items to make a big difference.  Just keep in mind, even that report is based on the opinions of hundreds of SEOs so while it is really good, it is not a guarantee'd roadmap for ranking well - there are few guarantees in search.

Moz's 2015 Search Ranking Report - https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/search-ranking-factors

Hope this helped!

Hi Ahirai,

This is a great question and something that comes up quite a bit.

Google has some basic forgiveness for Plurals, but you want to mix up your keyword placement at least a little bit so that you're not 100% exact match (this is my opinion, others might disagree).  Naturally, websites are going to reference keywords in partial match and exact match formats, and my belief and in my experience I've seen Google give credit for partial match keywords above and beyond simply following the SEOmoz Report Card.

What also supports this is your inbound link anchor text.  Diversity is everything.  You want to have some nofollow links, you want to have some exact match anchor text links, some brand name anchor text links, some partial match anchor text links.  Google doesn't respond well to 100% Exact Match thinking.

We're all taught, in link building, that No Follow is bad, but what if all the competitors have 30% NoFollow links on average, and your site has 0% NoFollow links.  That might sound like really good SEO, but you've created an unnatural Backlink Profile.

So mix up your usage as best you can, within reason, and use a majority of exact match keywords, but also use a few iterations and variants as well.

We get so hung up on the keywords themselves, but often just as important is the words that are around the keyword, the "Trees" that support your "Landscaping", etc.  You have to look at the bigger picture.

Hope this helped!

And yes, it would be rather odd for a website to have only one internal followed link.  It is possible that something funky with their CMS has all links no-followed, but even then.

I'm a huge fan of the SEOmoz Report Card, and what I would say is that it rates your page for the provided keyword, not for variations.  The Report Card is meant to be a tool, and like any tool, the user and the users brain is an intended element.

I would say that if your primary exact match searches prefer a plural, over a non-plural, you primarily optimize towards the plural, but you also build anchor text links that support both.

If I were in your shoes and I got an F, I would go in and use the non-prefered phrase in an effort to reach a "B" or a "C" letter grade from the report card tool.

Google does discriminate against plurals.  I just ran a test using one of our clients, with the plural, and then without, and they were #1 for the plural, and #2 for without, with someone else ranking #1.  The plural does matter, thus if you're targeting the plural, and you were given an F by the Report Card tool, you will get SOME credit for Partial Match usage, but probably not enough if you're optimizing based on on-site factors alone.

Remember, per the 2011 Search Engine Ranking Factors, on-site SEO only make sup what, maybe 16% of the sites total ranking?

My best answer is a balanced strategy, with a diversified backlink portfolio that covers multiple bases of anchor text, both exact and partial match, plural and singular.

Cheers!

I pull my local rankings locally.  Or rather, our interns do.

Excuse me?  All I said was I have our interns pull the rankings manually, not have them pulled by an automated tool.

How does that imply I need to grow up?  You pull them manually in order to give the most accurate, non-national, non-personalized results.

I even agree with your post that things like SEOmoz' Keyword Difficulty tool is biased towards national brands as sometimes you're going to get geo-specific results that are augmented by Google Places and as it stands the current national rank checker isn't capable of capturing that data or adding in that zip code or city variable that pulls data to a specific set.

Not sure where your hostility is coming from at all.