DMOZ help
-
So yesterday I got a DMOZ editor account. I would like to know if Google indexes the editor profile pages on DMOZ:
http://www.dmoz.org/public/profile?editor=
here are some examples
http://www.dmoz.org/public/profile?editor=thehelper
http://www.dmoz.org/public/profile?editor=raph3988
http://www.dmoz.org/public/profile?editor=skasselea
I would like to know if it is worth while to build up this page so it will pass link juice. And can anyone tell me how frequently Google crawls for new editors (if that's possible?)
-
Hello,
I wouldn't bet on it, but there's no harm in trying
-
You can confirm this yourself.
First, do a Google search for site:http://www.dmoz.org/public/profile?editor=
You see the meta descriptions aren't indexed in the results? Instead, Google puts a default message, with a link to this page.. https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156449 - check that out. Note the paragraph:
"While Google won't crawl or index the content of pages blocked by robots.txt, we may still index the URLs if we find them on other pages on the web. As a result, the URL of the page and, potentially, other publicly available information such as anchor text in links to the site, or the title from the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org), can appear in Google search results."
So whilst they may appear in Google's index (and indeed the OSE one) because of the links pointing to them, the content isn't crawled at all (by any spiders that obey robots.txt).
-
Oh yes he is correct, good call Neil, I had no idea that the robot.txt would be publicly accessible. I actually never seen a site have their robot txt visible.. I guess it's the "open source"...
-
Can anyone co firm this?
-
Take a look at their robots.txt - http://www.dmoz.org/robots.txt
They disallow the /public and /editors subfolders. The editor pages, whilst indexed by Google, aren't crawled.. so whilst the location of the pages themselves is indexed (because of links to those pages), the contents of the pages aren't indexed. This means any links on the page too, obviously..
For this reason, I don't agree with Reload Media. For me, there's no point expending any effort promoting the page for link equity benefit.
The fact they show good authority on OSE is something of an anomoly. They can accrue authority (and indeed Google PR) from their inbound links, however, they are a bit of a dead end, due to the fact that no actual content is indexed.
-
Hi Raphael,
Well done on getting an editor account. Remember with great power comes great responsibility
Yes they do get indexed. The way to check this is to Google the url in "" i.e. "http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.dmoz.org%2Fpublic%2Fprofile%3Feditor%3Dthehelper"
Some of those editor pages have great Authority. http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.dmoz.org%2Fpublic%2Fprofile%3Feditor%3Dthehelper
If it's related to your niche, then would be worth pursuing.
Hope that helps
Iain - Reload Media
-
Using http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization, you can check individual pages, in the keyword field I put the helper and in the URL I put http://www.dmoz.org/public/profile?editor=thehelper... So it seems like it does get indexed : )
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Moved company 'Help Center' from Zendesk to Intercom, got lots of 404 errors. What now?
Howdy folks, excited to be part of the Moz community after lurking for years! I'm a few weeks into my new job (Digital Marketing at Rewind) and about 10 days ago the product team moved our Help Center from Zendesk to Intercom. Apparently the import went smoothly, but it's caused one problem I'm not really sure how to go about solving: https://help.rewind.io/hc/en-us/articles/*** is where all our articles used to sit https://help.rewind.io/*** is where all our articles now are So, for example, the following article has now moved as such: https://help.rewind.io/hc/en-us/articles/115001902152-Can-I-fast-forward-my-store-after-a-rewind- https://help.rewind.io/general-faqs-and-billing/frequently-asked-questions/can-i-fast-forward-my-store-after-a-rewind This has created a bunch of broken URLs in places like our Shopify/BigCommerce app listings, in our email drips, and in external resources etc. I've played whackamole cleaning many of these up, but these old URLs are still indexed by Google – we're up to 475 Crawl Errors in Search Console over the past week, all of which are 404s. I reached out to Intercom about this to see if they had something in place to help, but they just said my "best option is tracking down old links and setting up 301 redirects for those particular addressed". Browsing the Zendesk forms turned up some relevant-ish results, with the leading recommendation being to configure javascript redirects in the Zendesk document head (thread 1, thread 2, thread 3) of individual articles. I'm comfortable setting up 301 redirects on our website, but I'm in a bit over my head in trying to determine how I could do this with content that's hosted externally and sitting on a subdomain. I have access to our Zendesk admin, so I can go in and edit stuff there, but don't have experience with javascript redirects and have read that they might not be great for such a large scale redirection. Hopefully this is enough context for someone to provide guidance on how you think I should go about fixing things (or if there's even anything for me to do) but please let me know if there's more info I can provide. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | henrycabrown1 -
Manual Penalty Reconsideration Request Help
Hi All, I'm currently in the process of creating a reconsideration request for an 'Impact Links' manual penalty. So far I have downloaded all LIVE backlinks from multiple sources and audited them into groups; Domains that I'm keeping (good quality, natural links). Domains that I'm changing to No Follow (relevant good quality links that are good for the user but may be affiliated with my company, therefore changing the links to no follow rather than removing). Domains that I'm getting rid of. (poor quality sites with optimised anchor text, directories, articles sites etc.). One of my next steps is to review every historical back link to my website that is NO LONGER LIVE. To be thorough, I have planned to go through every domain (even if its no longer linking to my site) that has previously linked and straight up disavow the domain (if its poor quality).But I want to first check whether this is completely necessary for a successful reconsideration request? My concerns are that its extremely time consuming (as I'm going through the domains to avoid disavowing a good quality domain that might link back to me in future and also because the historical list is the largest list of them all!) and there is also some risk involved as some good domains might get caught in the disavowing crossfire, therefore I only really want to carry this out if its completely necessary for the success of the reconsideration request. Obviously I understand that reconsideration requests are meant to be time consuming as I'm repenting against previous SEO sin (and believe me I've already spent weeks getting to the stage I'm at right now)... But as an in house Digital Marketer with many other digital avenues to look after for my company too, I can't justify spending such a long time on something if its not 100% necessary. So overall - with a manual penalty request, would you bother sifting through domains that either don't exist anymore or no longer link to your site and disavow them for a thorough reconsideration request? Is this a necessary requirement to revoke the penalty or is Google only interested in links that are currently or recently live? All responses, thoughts and ideas are appreciated 🙂 Kind Regards Sam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sandicliffe0 -
Help: How to optimize my duplicate category pages
Hi all My category pages will showcase the same products how do I go about optimizing these pages so they don't show up as duplicate content? Would appreciate your all feedaback! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
Help with Robots.txt On a Shared Root
Hi, I posted a similar question last week asking about subdomains but a couple of complications have arisen. Two different websites I am looking after share the same root domain which means that they will have to share the same robots.txt. Does anybody have suggestions to separate the two on the same file without complications? It's a tricky one. Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Whittie0 -
Unexplained Drop In Ranking and Traffic-HELP!
I operate a real estate web site in New York City (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com). It was hit by Penguin in April 2012, with search volume falling from 6,800 per month in March 2012 to 3,300 by June 2012. After refreshing content and changing the theme, volume recovered to 4,300 per month in October 2013. There was a big improvement in early October 2013, perhaps tied to a Panda update. In November 2013 I hired an SEO company. They are reputable; on MOZ's recommended list. After following all their suggestions (searching and removing duplicate content, disavowing toxic links, improving the site structure to make it easier for Google to index listings, re-writing ten key landing pages, improving the design of the user interface) ranking and traffic started to decline in April of 2014 and crashed in June 2014 after an upgraded design with improved user interface was launched. Search volume is went from 4700 in March to around 3800 in June. However ranking on the keywords that generate conversions has really declined, and clicks from those terms are down at least 65%. My online business is severely compromised after I have spent almost double the anticipated budget to improve ranking and conversion. A few questions: 1. Could a drop in the number of domains lining to our site have led to this decline? About 30 domains that had toxic links to us agreed to remove them. We had another 70 domains disavowed in late April. We only have 78 domains pointing to our domain now, far less than before (see attached AHREFs image). It seems there is a correlation in the timeline between the number of domains pointing to us and ranking performance. The number of domains pointing to us has never been this low. Could this be causing the drop? My SEO firm believes that the quality of these links are very low and the fact that many are gone is in fact a plus. 2. The number of indexed pages has jumped to 851 from 675 in early June (see attached image from Google Webmaster tools), right after a site upgrade. The number of pages in the site map is around 650. Could the indexation of the extra 175 page somehow have diluted the quality of the site in Google's eyes? We have filed removal request for these pages in Mid June and again last week with Google but they still appear. In 2013 we also launched an upgrade and Google indexed an extra 500 pages (canonical tags were not set up correctly) and search volume and ranking collapsed. Oddly enough when the number of pages indexed by Google fell, ranking improved. I wonder if something similar has occurred. 3. May 2014 Panda update. Many of our URLs are product URLs of listings. They have less than 100 words. Could Google suddenly be penalizing us for that? It is very difficult to write descriptions of hundreds of words for products that change quickly. I would think the Google takes this into account. If someone could present some insight into this issue I would be very, very grateful. I have spent over $25,000 on SEO reports, wireframe design and coding and now find myself in a worse position than when I started. My SEO provider is now requesting that I purchase even more reports for several thousand dollars and I can't afford it, nor can I justify it after such poor results. I wish they would take it upon themselves to identify what went wrong. In any case, if anyone has any suggestions I would really appreciate it. I am very suspicious that this drop started in earnest at the time of link removal and the disavow and accelerated at the time of the launch of the upgrade. Thanks, Alan XjSCiIdAwWgU2ps e5DerSo tYqemUO
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Help with homepage SEO please
Hi I have been looking after this site www.kids-academy.co.uk for 3 weeks now. I spotted that links were a major problem with the site and started to strip out the black hat inbound links straight away. I have also been doing some onsite optimisation for the main areas I have been asked to focus on. This saw results within a week for the subpages which is great. however, the design of the site meant there were no landing pages for the categories and the menu is a permanent "fixture" called a megamenu. I have advised /landingpages were needed not only for the ease of the end user to find what they need but also for SEO. Now the issues I have are that due to the menu style, it sees every one of those links within the homepage - over 200 links! I am wondering if I should nofollow some of them, or get them to change the style of the menu as surely this is having a direct result on the homepage and landing pages just not being seen at all within Google (as normal - Bing and Yahoo love the site). There is a lot of work to do on this site, but I would have thought to have seen some movement on the homepage at least by now. Any help is much appreciated. (Please note, there are some duplicate pages on there at the moment as I amalgamated some of the pages together last night and need to redirect these but I am having issues with redirect loops so those are not a contributing factor as this is a recent change). Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LeanneSEO
Leanne0 -
Accidental Noindex/Mis-Canonicalisation - Please help!
Hi everybody, I was hoping somebody might be able to help as this is an issue my team and I have never come across before. A client of ours recently migrated to a new site design. 301 redirects were properly implemented and the transition was fairly smooth. However, we realised soon after that a sub-section of pages had either one or both of the following errors: They featured a canonical tag pointing to the wrong page They featured the 'meta noindex' tag After realising this, both the canonicals and the noindex tags were immediately removed. However, Google crawled the site while these were in place and the pages subsequently dropped out of Google's index. We re-submitted the affected pages to Google's index and used WMT to 'Fetch' the pages as Google. We have also since 'allowed' the pages in the robots.txt file as an extra measure. We found that the pages which just had the noindex tag were immediately re-indexed, while the pages which featured the noindex tag and which were mis-canonicalised are still not being re-indexed. Can anyone think of a reason why this might be the case? One of the pages which featured both tags was one of our most important organic landing pages, so we're eager to resolve this. Any help or advice would be appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robmarsden0 -
Google penguin penalty(s), please help
Hi MozFans, I have got a question out of the field about www.coloringpagesabc.com.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MaartenvandenBos
Question is why the rankings and traffic are going down down down the last 4 months. Costumer thinks he got hit by google penguin update(s). The site has about 600 page’s/posts al ‘optimized’ for old seo:
- Almost all posts are superb optimized for one keyword combination (like … coloring pages) there is a high keyword density on the keyword titles and descriptions are all the same like: <keyword>and this is the rest of my title, This is my description <keyword>and i like it internal linking is all with a ‘perfect’ keyword anchor text there is a ok backlink profile, not much links to inner pages
- there are social signals the content quality is low The site to me looks like a seo over optimized content farm Competition:
When I look at the competition. The most coloring pages websites don’t offer a lot of content (text) on there page. The offer a small text and the coloring pages (What it is about :-)) How to get the rankings back:
What I was thinking to do. rewrite the content to a smaller text. Low keyword density on the keyword and put the coloring pages up front. rewrite all titles and descriptions to unique titles and descriptions Make some internal links to related posts with a other anchor text. get linkbuilding going on inner pages get more social signals Am I on the right track? I can use some advise what to do, and where to start. Thanks!!</keyword></keyword> Maarten0