I can personally recommend DeepCrawl, its an amazing tool. Use it almost every day.
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Andy-Halliday
@Andy-Halliday
Job Title: Owner
Company: Indago Media
Favorite Thing about SEO
Always being on my toes and looking forward to whats new
Latest posts made by Andy-Halliday
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RE: Fastest way to get new backlinks recognised by Moz?
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RE: Error with the MozBar
Thanks Vijay, its only on my windows machine (I really only use it for Server Log Analysis) and the above seems like to much work. Its working fine on the Mac - so will just install and leave it off the windows machine.
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Error with the MozBar
Hi Mozzers
I am geting this very annoying message keeps popping up
"Confirm
Oops!
Something went wrong while trying to get your API Credentials. Please try again or check out the Help Hub if you are still experiencing issues"
Issue is I cant even read it on my screen as it gets cut off and there is no scroll so had to copy and past into word to be able to read it.
I had the issue for the last sever hours, is this my account or more general.
Thanks
Andy
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RE: How long does it take to rank easy keywords?
Million dollar question - firstly does your site deserve to rank. Do you actually answer the query or is it a 50 word answer and your just hoping Google will rank you. You need to be writing 10x content (https://moz.com/blog/how-to-create-10x-content-whiteboard-friday)
Assuming you have a decent answer, the next question is. How often is Google crawling your website (the only way to find out is to look in your server logs). It could be that Google hasn't even crawled the page yet, if it hasn't crawled the page its not going to rank.
Finally assuming you wrote a great article and Google has read it, how authoritative are you in this niche. If you website is all about cars and suddenly you write an article about pens because its low competitive and you want the traffic, Google is smart enough know to understand you have probably written the article for SEO traffic and probably won't rank you high.
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RE: How do you delete an admin user in wordpress that wont delete
They don't happen to have multiple logins (different users) do they and keep creating a new user for themselves.
I would recommend changing your password, and then looking at all the other users - do you know them or can they be deleted.
At least you did it the right way and created them a login, the amount of people I know who they just sent across their own login details.
If its not the first option, please let me know I do have another idea - but the above idea is the easiest to explain and fix.
Thanks
Andy
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RE: Find all external 404 errors/links?
If you dont have access to the logs that could be an issue - not really any automated tools out there as it would need to crawl every website and find 404 errors.
I haven't tried this - so its just an idea. Go into GSC download all the links pointing to your site (and from places like Moz, Ahrefs, Majestic) and then chuck that list of urls into Screaming Frog or URL Profiler and look at external links and see if any are returning a 404. Not sure if this would work - its just an idea.
Thanks
Andy
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RE: Find all external 404 errors/links?
Hi
The best way I have found is to look in your server logs, its the only true place to find out what Google is doing on your site.
Download the logs and look at all the 404 errors - quite simple and depending on size of your logs can take you around 5 minutes worth a work - the longer time period you can analyse in your logs the better.
Thanks
Andy
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RE: Do You Work At Home As An SEO Or Have An Office?
I run an in house team for a large ecommorce company in the UK. We all work from the same office. I love having the team around me to bounce ideas of and debate new ways of solving problems.
I can fully understand how you feel, yes they are not yours and the site I work for I don't own - but I have put it a lot of long hours making the site as good as an experience as possible - I would hate for someone to come in and take control.
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RE: Screaming frog Advice
Thanks, I tried all the tips on the screaming frog site, but I have just tried to 2 pages a second and lets hope that work.
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Screaming frog Advice
Hi
I am trying to crawl my site and it keeps crashing.
My sys admins keeps upgrading the virtual box it sits on and it now currently has 8GB of memory, but still crashes.
It gets to around 200k pages crawl and dies.
Any tips on how I can crawl my whole site, can u use screaming frog to crawl part of a site.
Thanks in advance for any tips.
Andy
Best posts made by Andy-Halliday
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RE: Does a link in facebook count as a backlink?
Nope, they don't.
Good article here explaining it in more detail: http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2325343/matt-cutts-facebook-twitter-social-signals-not-part-of-google-search-ranking-algorithms but basically any link from Facebook or twitter does not help your rankings.
Would be way to easy to manipulate to get rankings.
If your new to link building, then this is a great beginners guide to it: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links
Thanks
Andy
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RE: Can the disavow tool INCREASE rankings?
Very good question and this has been covered in this great moz article: http://moz.com/blog/after-penalty-removed-will-traffic-increase
Will it help, maybe not in the short term - but if you do nothing you are running the risks of being penalised further down the line and losing all your rankings. Thats the worse case, the best case is by removing the old links your rankings increase. I would never really leave bad links, as you will always be looking over your shoulder waiting for Google to strike.
Remove them and then concentrate on getting some quality links to your site to help boost rankings.
With Google you can never really predict anything any more and you won't really know the outcome till you have removed the bad links.
Worse case: you remove the bad links and your rankings don't improve - but your no longer looking over your shoulder waiting to see if you have been hit by the next update.
Best case: You suddenly jump up in the rankings and you no longer care about the next update, you actually look forward to them, to see which off your competition has been hit.
You will probably get neither of these by removing them, you will probably see a little improvement but nothing massive and you won't have to look over your shoulder.
I know I haven't really answered your question - but even if Google was to answer this question, they would only be guessing as they can't 100% accurately say what will happen as its all machine learnt.
Andy
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RE: Is it reasonable to not give an SEO access to our CMS?
no its not being unreasonable - what happens if the SEO guy changed something and broke the website - would would the client ring up and moan at the SEO guy or the web design agency.
If the guy was willing to take responsibility for his changes, then they would be unreasonable, but why would they allow someone to edit their work and potentially break the site - only for them to get moaned at.
SEO is 'secret' anymore - so I don't get what they guy has from not willing to work with the agency. To me it sounds like he will be doing stuff he isn't willing to share so either black hat techniques or doesn't actually knows what he is talking about so was going to bluff it until the client clicked on that the guy was b*ll shitting.
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RE: Is it reasonable to not give an SEO access to our CMS?
I agree, I wouldn't have given them access without trusting them, all it takes is for them to alter one line of code and the site could crash.
Sometimes SEO's ( and I used to be like this but have changed) look at SEO in silo and don't think about how the changes impact other parts of the business / website - so a change that is good for SEO isn't always good for the website or the business.
So nope, I wouldn't give him access - our developers don't allow me access, I have to put a business case forward each time to get changes done, which has to be present and approved by senior management. Without this I could ask for a change which could cause a lot of issues.
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RE: Do You Work At Home As An SEO Or Have An Office?
I run an in house team for a large ecommorce company in the UK. We all work from the same office. I love having the team around me to bounce ideas of and debate new ways of solving problems.
I can fully understand how you feel, yes they are not yours and the site I work for I don't own - but I have put it a lot of long hours making the site as good as an experience as possible - I would hate for someone to come in and take control.
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RE: When you change your domain, How much time do I have to wait for google to return the traffic used to have?
Hi
Sorry there is no 'x' date that I can give you. It all depends on Google and whether you have done all the 301s etc correctly.
When you say you are doing 'link building' strategies what do you mean, maybe this is the problem if your have got a bad link somewhere?
I wouldn't recommend going back - you wouldn't get the traffic back to what you had and as the 'experts' said it would cause you more problems.
I would check all the 301s are correctly, did you actually change anything on the site at the same time or was it just the url that you changed?
Thanks
Andy
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RE: Blog comments - backlinks - question
"So how to get backlinks than ?" - this bugged me, what have you been doing upto now to get links, if you have been performing black hat techniques (http://www.pushon.co.uk/articles/top-5-white-hat-and-black-hat-search-optimisation-techniques/) then it might be worth giving up on your domain, and starting with a new domain (especially if you have a penalty) or trying to remove the penalty before you start doing any of the below.
there are many ways to get good quality links without guess blogging. Ive never done guest blogging and wouldn't do it on low quality sites, writing a great article on youmoz is different and can get you some links, but that is a different debate (see here http://moz.com/community/q/could-posting-on-youmoz-get-your-penalized-for-guest-blogging
I could spend days writing a huge articles about ways of getting links without guest blogging, but I will keep it relatively short.
1. How about writing and producing great content on your website that people want to link to.
2. If you sell products, send them out to some influential people in your niche and ask them to review (not guaranteed to get a link, but usually works)
3. Out reach, contact people in your niche and offer advice to help their articles and see if they can quote you.
Below is some great articles on helping you, I would also recommend watching Rands WhiteBoard Friday and subscribing to Matt Cutts on Youtube
http://moz.com/blog/google-traffic-links
http://moz.com/blog/earn-higher-rankings-without-content-creation-whiteboard-friday
http://moz.com/blog/filthy-linking-rich-how-to-passively-attract-valuable-links
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Going to Mozcon - what to do in Seattle
Hi
I know this isn't technically an SEO question, but wanted people's advice.
As I am flying half way round the world I am actually arriving on the Friday and have Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday to go and explore Seattle.
I plan on going to watch a baseball game and visit the home of Starbucks (and I hate coffee, but thought might as well visit), but what else would people recommend doing / seeing in Seattle.
Thanks in Advance
Andy
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RE: Backlinks from newpapers that requires subscription
Hi
That link is pointless from an 'link building' point of view, however I still go after links from places like the Sun even though I know they are behind a paywall because they drive a lot of traffic.
So if your looking at it from an old school SEO point of view - they are a waste of time, but if you are interested in traffic and sales then these links are still very important.
Thanks
Andy
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RE: Will Moving Categories Affect SEO
if i understand the question correctly and you are changing manufacturer. You have the potential to lose traffic as your page will no longer contain the text 'old manufacture name', so therefore wont rank for it this term.
If your urls aren't changing you shouldn't lose to as much visibility as any links etc pointing here will still be valid.
The only area where you could lose visibility is in the old manufacturers name if this had more search volume that the new manufacturer.
Previously Head of SEO and Web Analytics for Ebuyer.com - is the largest independent online retailer of computer and electrical goods and currently SEO Manager at Satsuma Loans. Have also set up my own agency to help small local clients near by.
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