Mozs SEO Tools
I’ve been slowly working my way through Cory Zue’s blog and am really enjoying the journey he has had with his various side projects. One article that proved extra-useful was this one on SEO. In it, he mentioned Moz’s SEO pages such as their beginner’s guide and free tools. It’s the tools that I wanted to talk a little more about, here, though.
For this post, I am just going to briefly show some of the (to me, interesting) things it can tell you about your site, and specifically, my site: logicalmoon.com. Starting here, I plugged in logicalmoon.com and was immediately presented with the following:
What a surprise! The first thing that caught my eye was my spam score at 11%. That’s both odd and depressing because there shouldn’t be anything spammy about my site, or so I thought.
My domain authority of 9 means that I am a massive light-weight and a bazillion websites will be considered more authoritative that me. I shouldn’t be too shocked, I guess!
Linking domains are external sites that link to mine. At 1,000 or so, I cannot believe that there are so many so I suspect a lot of those are nasty link sites.
Lastly, the the ranking keywords at 147 probably means I am all over the place with my blog! I must admit, I like to write about what I learn and I like to learn about a lot of stuff, so that isn’t unexpected.
Once logged in, I took a look at the first section under Linking Domains which shows the following:
One thing I noticed was simplecast.com. That looks like a podcast site and it is! I’ve had links/references to podcasts sites in the past, but that was a long time ago, so didn’t know what to expect with this.
Digging a little more deeply by clicking on the down arrow on the right, we get a hint as to what this link was:
As you can see, PHPUgly seem to have linked to something I wrote. I subscribe to their podcast but haven’t listed to more than a couple. So what was the actual link? On their page I found this:
Super cool! I listened to the podcast and found that they had linked to an article I wrote back in 2018 on Composer security. Watch the podcast and you can hear it kind of mentioned around the 40 minute mark. No other links look that interesting, so let’s take a look at something else.
How about spam scores! Yuck. Well, clicking on that on the left menu, we can see which sites are causing mine to rise in the spam index. In this case, it’s these:
I made the mistake of clicking on one of those sites and can see why they score so highly. What do I do about these linkers though? I’m not sure. Anyone have any ideas?
One more - top pages, under Link Research.
This is really interesting. You can see on the right that these pages are returning 404, but why? The URL references an uploads folder so these must have been linked when I used to use Wordpress. Again, what do I do? Eek. They are linking to my images to so be honest, I don’t really want them hotlinking to my site, but I know I could resolve this with some rules in Apache.
Having used this site, I am left with more questions than answers, to be honest. It also shows just how much you can glean with tools like these, so it makes me wonder whether paying for the Pro service (at least for a while,) might be useful.
Take a look at your site and see what you can find out for free.
Hi! Did you find this useful or interesting? I have an email list coming soon, but in the meantime, if you ready anything you fancy chatting about, I would love to hear from you. You can contact me here or at stephen ‘at’ logicalmoon.com