Thanks guys. I thought that may be the case as all the ones I've seen have been cut. Is there even a set character count, as I could potentially write one that would at least look neat if cut early? Or does it depend from search to search?

As you say, this seems like something they maybe should look at, because while you would undoubtedly lose real estate by cutting all meta descs, you also lose a chunk by having your call to action cut, often in nonsensical or messy ways (I'm aware that this can happen anyway, but anything we can do to minimise this is always welcome!)

Thanks again!

Hey Mozzers!

Something occurred to me the other day was that, while we can write title tags and meta descriptions to be within the character count and therefore appear nice and neatly in the SERPs, when Google et al decide to pull subpages out as further site links, it seems to still pull the normal meta description but with a far lower character count. As this looks untidy and could potentially impact CTR, is there a way I can amend the preferred text for the shortened version, via Webmaster Tools, for example?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Nick.

Hi fellow Mozzers!

I am just in the process of adding various reviews to our site (a design agency), but I wanted to use the ratings in different ways depending on the page.

So for the home page and the services (branding, POS, direct mail etc) I wanted to aggregate relevant reviews (giving us an average of all reviews for the home page, an average of ratings from all brand projects and so on).

Then, I wanted to put specific reviews on our portfolio pages, so the review relates specifically to that project. This is the easiest to do as the hReview generator is geared up for reviews that come from one source, but I can't find a way of aggregating the star ratings to make an average rating rich snippet.

Anyone know where I can get the coding for this?

Thanks in advance!

Nick.

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your response. I have used both Xenu and Screaming Frog before, and they are great for searching a whole site within your niche where every broken link / missing resource is an opportunity. This is probably an easier thing to explain using an example:

We do work for a chain of care homes. If I go to, say www.carehomes.co.uk and check for missing links, I know that all the results will be an opportunity to make contact and build a relationship with a webmaster in the care home niche. So there's no need to filter these, but rather just to work my way through the list trying to build as many valuable new contacts as possible.

But if I run a missing links search on the BBC, it may bring back hundreds or thousands of results, but only one or two will be related to the care homes industry and therefore present an opportunity to reach out. So that's the aspect I'm enquiring about - going to a site that covers a range of topics and quickly finding opportunities within that relate to my niche.

Hi Jon,

Thanks for getting involved - having read your great blog, it's cool to get your take. Love the idea about then building relationships with all the others who link to that missing URL.

But my question remains the same - while I understand that there's more to it than the initial link, and there are greater opportunities when it comes to relationship building as well as link building, I am keen to get a handle on the best way to find missing resources, broken links etc within a certain niche; so I know how to use search modifiers to look up various sites, resources etc within our niche, I'm less clear on how to go to larger sites (BBC, wikis, Mashable etc) that cover many topics and find out whether opportunities are available within my niche.

Also, is there a Firefox friendly tool that's similar to DHP?

Thanks for any extra help you can give!

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your reply. I had stumbled across that site earlier and found it to be very useful. And yes, I agree that the tactic is a great way to outreach and relationship build as well as a simple like for like - although the issue of quickly finding such sites within a certain niche still applies.

It seems that Domain Hunter Plus gets some of the way there, but I'm running Firefox rather than Chrome, so any alternatives would be cool.

Hi fellow mozzers!

In an effort to ensure we're exploring every avenue when launching our new website, I was hoping to find some useful broken links / resources that we could incorporate into our link building.

We have used the standard tools for this (W3C, Xenu etc), but they all seem to have the same issue in that they reveal all the missing links on a site (although some don't actually tell you the page they are on), but you still have to sort them to see if the links/ resource is related to your theme.

When you're on a niche site, this obviously isn't an issue, but on a site like Mashable (to use the example given in a recent SEOmoz blog) it could result in wading through hundreds of links to find one relevant one right at the end.

Is there a tool that allows you to specify what theme links you are looking for from a site, or better yet one that allows you to check multiple sites for multiple missing themed links in one go?

Or is the best way to export the list and just search the document for certain keywords?

Hi Barry,

Thanks for your swift response on this. The pages certainly seem to be getting cached correctly, and when we initially took over the SEO and made wholesale changes to the site, there were huge improvements, so it looks for all the world like the main pages at least are being looked at.

But I think you make a good point about getting it solved anyway so we can identify any problems that may be occurring / will occur later.

Hello all!

While doing some routine health checks on a few of our client sites, I spotted that a new client of ours - who's website was not designed built by us - is returning a 500 internal server error when I try to look at the robots.txt file.

As we don't host / maintain their site, I would have to go through their head office to get this changed, which isn't a problem but I just wanted to check whether this error will actually be having a negative effect on their site / whether there's a benefit to getting this changed?

Thanks in advance!