Category: Content Development
Ask and answer questions around the topic of content development for SEO.
-
If I write a article for a client and use Social Book Marking software, will this add value (or does the value depend on how ofen it gets shared)?
I'm about to start experimenting with bookmarking software. My first step is trying Ping.com (because it's free), but I am also keen to try Onlywire.com (which comes at a cost- darn). My questions are: when I create an article for a client and post to all these social sites will this make a difference? Or will it only make a difference if people share the article? Has anyone been experimenting with social bookmarking software that can tell me what results they have had and how they got there? Thanks a mil!
| 2Stroke0 -
What is your favorite SEOmoz blog post of all time? And why?
I'll go with this post by Rand: White Hat SEO: It F@$#ing Works
| ThomasHgenhaven1 -
Mobile Sites / Useragent detection
I've got a question about how search engines declare that they're mobile browsers... Our website is based on wordpress, and uses the caching plugin W3TC to send a different site template to mobile useragents - i believe from the HTTP useragent string; (the same content is served on every page whether it's a desktop or mobile - just different themes). After having this mobile site online for a few months, we're a little confused as to why google still shows the instant preview of the desktop version for mobile users, and it doesn't show the little mobile phone icon in our SERPs for mobile devices (it's as if it doesn't realise the mobile site exists). I was reading today that the "old" method of serving different content based on the browser is to use the HTTP useragent string; and there's a "new" object checking method which is more robust (although I can't find a lot of information about it). Can anyone explain the "new" method? Would this be the reason that google is so far ignorant of our mobile site?
| AlecPR0 -
URL loss
Hi, Our site contains some subsites in subdirectories. One of these sites, joins content from our partners' blogs. Now we have about 51.900 results on Google for this subsite. We are thinking about change the format of this subsite, but we are worried about the number of URL's that will be lost. The question is, the search machines will "punish" us for these losses and affect all domain ? Regards, Juan Santos
| kauelinden0 -
What is the Best Practice for External Links?
We are currently in the process of reviewing our site on a number of fronts, and part of that involves adding quality content to our product category pages where necessary. Our practice so far has been to add relevant content, and in this content externally link to a couple of relevant, related sites for that category (avoiding the use of keywords we are trying to rank for). Should we be doing this (externally linking)? And, if so, should these external links be NoFollow? So far, we have seen mixed results for our efforts.
| Robdps0 -
What are you doing to convert blog readers to inquiries/leads?
I'm curious what tactics people are finding successful in converting readers into leads, inquiries, or sales. Anyone feel like sharing?
| BedeFahey1 -
Harder and harder to get articles approved on My Blog Guest
Hi People, So I got a My Blog Guest account (paid) and have now for a while, I do back the service as its a great system and works well BUT mods are making it very hard work. I put up around 20 articles a month on this site which costs me £300+ to have produced by a professional copywriter and the standard is very high, I get feedback from bloggers commenting on how good the articles are because of the quality of the content (articles are 500 - 550 words). So all I ask in return is 1 link in the body and 1 link in the byline. I ask the copy writer to put a particular keyword somewhere in the content where it best fits, if its a top 5/top 10 article the keyword sometimes fits best in the first few paragraphs before it flows into the list. This is where the problem is: Now these articles are good, they have to be as there for a company with products in major high street retail stores so quality is not an issue. If I put the link in the first paragraph I get these kind of responses: "Linking from opening paragraph is rude to say at least" If I put the link in the second paragraph I get these kind of responses: "Please move your body link to the bottom of the article or better the byline" "The normal procedure is to Hide articles with links in the first few paragraphs like this one...Please edit to put the link in the second half of the article" "Links should be in the second half of the post" Then the articles are taken down until I do what they say! It's my article I can put the link where I want its up to the blog owner whether they want it or not, its not the content you want to administrate its the quality of the blogs, I got users private emailing me asking me to buy links, I've got users applying for articles where there using blogspot and wordpress free sites with content scrapped from the web. I think they got bigger problems then a link in the second paragraph and not the third.
| activitysuper0 -
Article submission - where can you submit articles for FREE???
Hi guys, Can anyone please help! Can anyone tell me if there are any cheap or free places where I can submit articles to help me get good rankings or improve my rankings?? Any help be much apprciated! Thanks Gareth
| GAZ090 -
Why does Magento Admin show 39,000 records (database only has 5000 products)
Can anyone please help me understand why my Magento admin shows over 39,000 records but i only have 5,000 products on my site? I am really struggling with trying to figure out how this happened. thanks
| Prime850 -
Is it worth to change a blog from a subdomain to subfolder?
We have a blog in a subdomain since some years and we are thinking about moving it to a subfolder, to see if we can boost the main domain (incoming links + fresh content). Could be worth it?
| Montse0 -
Having Blog and Forum for Store is Beneficial or Not
Hello ! I am building a cosmetic store. I have blog.storename.com , forum.storename.com. i started both to make my store content rich. On my blog we are personally reviewing cosmetic products. and forum user are sharing experience and problems related to beauty..... But i was reading this post http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/uncover-competitors-using-multiple-sites-for-multiple-first-page-rankings . it has this " Alright, Google dislikes pages, subdomains, and domains with substantially duplicated content. Got it. " Any way my content is not going to be dup at all. but Product which we are reviewing on blog. ll also be on our store for sale. and might be people sharing own experiences about same product on forum. do u think i should worry?
| vinku0 -
Where can I find places to guest blog?
I have done a couple of guest blogs but I have come up dry as of late. Any tips on where to find blogs interested in linking for content?
| ibex0 -
What is the Best Way to Become a Guest Blogger?
What have you found to be the best way to convince quality blog sites with authority to let you become a guest blogger for their site? I know that providing samples of quality writing is key. But other than that, what is the best way "in"? I have a handful of quality writers at my disposal and also write myself, but I'm trying to find effective ways of convincing established blogs to let me write for them. Please send me your best, most creative suggestions! What has worked for you? Thank you, Afshin Apples of Gold
| applesofgold0 -
How often should content be updated
With all of Google's recent algo updates (or ranking updates, whatever they're calling it now), we've obviously been looking into changing our content strategy and shifting it from quantity to quality. How often would you say is ideal for website content updates? i.e. should we be updating once a month? Once every couple of months? This isn't a blog - just a regular services-oriented site. My take on it is that it should be as often as organically possible - and that means something different for everyone. At the same time, we want Google coming back frequently to crawl the site. Thanks!
| eyecarepro0 -
Content being copied from our product page hurting our site overall?
On our product pages, he have short descriptions and some bulleted lists. Resellers of our products, and many other sites who are not resellers are copying this content, often verbatim. While I'm not as concerned for the product pages themselves as we're hoping the category pages will rank, does this duplication of our content hurt our site overall? FWIW, our brand name is in our domain and often also shown on these sites that copy the content.
| minutiae0 -
Page hidden in SERPs
As well as unique content, we carry press releases (contracts with PR companies) Some pages don't show up in SERPs - but sometimes a few or even hundreds of other sites do. At the end of the search, google shows this: In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 109 already displayed.
| loopyal
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included. When the search is repeated, using that link, the page often shows up in the top 10 or top 20. I believe this is a site problem, not a page problem. We are often one of the first to publish the release.0 -
What's the best way to include a pdf in your post?
I have some posts where I'd like to include a downloadable pdf....what is the best way seo wise to do this? I was thinking of just putting the file on my server and than just including a link to download it, but I'm thinking there's probably a better way. Any thoughts?
| NoahsDad0 -
Duplicate content because of tag
Dear Expert, I use several tags in my single post (www.rumahapp.com), for example when i post something about new game release i would use these tags: Publisher name, game rating and game genre. The problem is seomoz crawl my page and said that i have duplicate content between http://www.rumahapp.com/tag/com2us/ and http://www.rumahapp.com/tag/homerun-battle-2 how do i solve this? is this mean that i shouldn't use tag in my post? thank you
| Gundud0 -
What is your opinion about: SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2 (WP plugin)
The purpose of this plugin is to strengthen our On Page SEO by adding new internal linking to the blog post using the most popular keywords used by search engine visitors to find the blog post from a search engine ( incoming search terms ). We can also display the most popular & recent search terms in the sidebar to get a side wide internal linking to the corresponding blog post. New since version 1.25: Automatically convert popular search terms into Post Tags.
| cdrdz870 -
Please Explain "Rel Canonical"
I have a travel blog that ranks well for lots of keywords. In my "Notices" section of this site, I found that every page has a rel canonical issue sort of flagged. What does this mean? How can it be fixed? It doesn't seem to bother my traffic, but it'd be nice to have it tidied up. Thanks! The site is www.journeybeyondtravel.com/news
| journeybeyondtravel0 -
Problems after spending three days out of line.
My site was offline for three days and now my pages are like 404 but theoreticallynow online, this usually happen? Mi pagina estuvo fuera de linea durante tres dias y ahora mis paginas estan como 404 pero teoricamente ya estan en linea, esto suele pasar?
| cdrdz870 -
Recos for SEO friendly blog for asp.net environment?
Can anyone recommend a blog platform for asp.net server environment that has SEO friendly components/plugins available? Client is migrating a Wordpress blog at wants recommendations as the internal requirement for the project is that the blog is hosted on asp.net. Thanks in advance for the help!
| MRM-McCANN0 -
4XX (Client Error) Double URL Link Problem
Hi, I have a wordpres site and have 140 4XX (Client Error) errors such as: http://www.campervanhire.com/advertise/http:%2F%2Fwww.campervanhire.com%2Fadvertise%2F http://www.campervanhire.com/australia/camper-van-hire-australia/http:%2F%2Fwww.campervanhire.com%2Faustralia%2Fcamper-van-hire-australia%2F The bulk are all the same problem, different urls but all duplicated with %2F at the end. Not sure how they were generated or how fix this?
| 360360
Any info would be great! Thanks in advance, Malcolm0 -
Should I publish several blog posts at once or stagger?
I have several blog posts that I want to publish (40 or so). For freshness is it better to stagger their publication over several months or is it fine to publish them all at the same time. The comments are closed.
| AndreB0 -
Duplicate content on forums?
I am creating a forum. I am concerned that when I create the forum, users will copy content from other places to post onto my forum. How negative/bad is this in terms of google eyes? I am concerned when people copy press releases and re-post it to the forum. Should I make a rule that all content must be typed and not copied? Or is a little copying okay?
| sseibel0 -
Wordpress Ping List, does pinging Google Help? Could it hurt?
So I was looking at updating my ping list in WP. Some of the lists I have come across have a lot of "blogsearch.google" What does a WP site risk in pinging all of these google properties?
| Thos0030 -
SEO guide for journalists
I am looking for a white paper or similar focused on helping journalists (online) writing better and more SEO-friendly content. If you know of anything or anyone who might be of help I would love to hear from you.
| jpndk0 -
How to use articles effectively in a blog.
I wanted to start a blog so I could get some longer tail search term results. I am a knowledge expert in my area but am very busy as an entrepreneur so I had been putting it off for some time. It occurred to me that I might be able to outsource the article writing and I have started doing that. I have either come up with or have approved the topics. I am a very critical editor and demand high quality writing. The articles are all original. We are proofreading everything to make sure the articles are of high quality and inform readers about the subject. I plan to only put external links in the articles that link out to the sources for the information that was used to write the articles. We are also using pictures info graphics and video where possible. I plan to close the comments because, while we have had a website for some time and get some visitors (2500 per month) we are new to blogging and do not have a following that would post comments. My questions is this.......will these be viewed negatively by Google? I think this will be good content but I don't want to do anything to negatively affect us.
| AndreB0 -
Meta descriptions and conversion rates
Hi, does there exist any good data on the correlation between the meta description and having the same text in the body text (as pre-ample in bold, for instance) and conversion rates?
| vibelingo0 -
How to make use of blog networks?
I read on a forum recently that someone was using blog networks as his primary tool for SEO. I'm not sure what he meant beyond this, however... Can anyone provide tips on how I might use one, and which are some of the best? Thank you very much in advance.
| ZakGottlieb710 -
Adding External Blog Feed
I have a client who's a member of the Loopnet.com community. They have a place on their profile to add an external blog feed. Our question is does adding the RSS feed from an external blog have any SEO value or do we run into issues with duplicate content with the same blog posts published on two different websites?
| John_Ellis0 -
A site review please
Hi, first post here so hope i have posted this in the right place. From reading the forums a number of people have asked for site reviews and received some very good feedback so I thought I would jump aboard too. One of my companies, Digital Cow, is based around the world of affiliate marketing and had been doing very well until recent Google changes killed the whole process of making sites based around other people's datafeeds. Through considerable testing we have countered this by increasing the blend of duplicate content and unique, niche related, content. As a result a website we launched about 2 months ago is currently getting around 350 unique hits a day but seems to have stagnated. We know the potential is there for thousands of daily hits on this site and well over 20,000 hits a day on all our websites, but we are having issues with Google at the moment. One week we could be position 10 for a keyword, next position 90, then back to position 10 again and so on. In the last week some 95 keywords moved up the ranking and 62 moved down - we are seoing for a couple of hundred keywords. A small sample of some of these words and our ranking for them are listed below bodysuits women 13
| Grumpy_Carl
tumbum 14
bright leggings 18
bright tights 18
bridal hold ups 19
opaque hold ups 20
girls in leggings 21
pretty polly hold up 21
fish net hold ups 22
slimming tights 22
tum bum 26
magic knickers 27
toeless tights 28 and there are many more. The website in question is www.brighttights.com. If anyone could spare a moment to offer their opinion on what they think of the site re seo that would be most welcome. Given it's an ecommerce site there are limits to the content we can add on the homepage. Many thanks Carl0 -
What's the best blogging platform?
I've always used Wordpress without really giving it much thought, but I'm open to trying out a different platform for a new blog. Can anyone give me some advantages or reasons to move to a different platform? Thanks!
| PeterAlexLeigh0 -
Issues with copying online forum reviews on own website
Apologies- I asked a similar question the other day but did not word it as clearly as possible. We are looking at having a text box of 'What customers say' on our product pages using reviews written about us online (to remain factual) and wanted to know if this created any issues relating to search engines finding matching content on two separate websites? Will this have any SEO implications as effectively we are 'plagiarising' the content in the eyes of the bots even though it is just customer opinion of our own products right? Thanks in advance.
| jannkuzel0 -
Is It Necessary To Spin My Original Articles -- For Top Article Directory Distribution
Is it Necessary To Spin My Original Article For Top Article Directory Distribution like from Isnare if I have no interest in ranking for them just getting traffic form internal visitors, syndication oppty's for webmaster and ezine publishers ? I was told that it is not necessary to spin my original articles that were indexed in my blog before they are distributed to the 2 top article directories ezine articles and goarticles and the other top 13 or 15 --- If true - why ? and if false -- why ? I am not looking to rank in article directories my purpose is for syndication purposes and also any traffic I can get internally from visitors to the article directories. So would the article directories frown on me if I am submitting the same article from my blog to all other article directories as is straight from my blog. I
| helpwanted0 -
Will using online forum reviews create duplicate content issue?
We are looking at having a text box of 'What customers say' on our product pages using reviews written about us online to remain factual and wanted to know if this will create duplicate content issues? Thanks in advance.
| jannkuzel0 -
Guest Blogging
Hey Guys, I've been reading about the power of guest blogging and it seems like a fun way to build links. However, finding blogs that allow guest blog posts is a bit tougher than I thought. I read about MyBlogGuest.com and some other guest blog networks. Are these legit and am I on the right track when searching for blogs that will allow a guest post? Thanks!
| GoldStarGames0 -
Not accepted in Google news.
Hallo, Our website was not accepted by Google news although we are confident that our site meets all the requirements. We see several other gambling sites already appearing within Google News’ pages, and we contend that, in most cases, our reporting is both timelier and more relevant. We hope you can give us any feedback. http://www.hetpokerspel.nl/nieuws Regards, Thijs Weinands
| Tit0 -
Press Releases and Duplicate Content on Event Related Site
I have a site that lists events. I ask those submitting events to submit original content if possible, but frequently they submit press releases which are already published elsewhere. I rewrite some of the press releases, but do not have time to rewrite every press release that comes my way. I want my users to get a comprehensive list of events, but I don't want get a penalty for duplicate content. What is the best solution?
| andywozhere0 -
OPINION on forum software phpbb OR vBulletin?
Anyone recommend one over the other? If so, why? I don't care about price.
| Francisco_Meza0 -
What should I look for when hiring a blogger?
In the past I’ve made many mistakes when hiring content writers/bloggers, the end result is that my targeted traffic is no better off even after investing several thousand dollars in to it. I have a blog with 400+ posts, each being over 500 words of unique content yet my traffic is under 30 a day. I use wordtracker for my keyword research so I don’t think that is the problem. Instead of hiring cheap writers from eastern European countries I want to hire people that know what they are writing about, someone that is an expert in the niche, someone like Rand Fishkin and Dr.pete for SEOmoz, always enjoy reading their posts and that is what I want on my own blog. I always refer new writers to this post >> http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization and have recently had someone complete 40 articles for $200, but this isn’t what I want. I want people to come to my blog, enjoy it, and be satisfied with what they have read. I don’t want people to read the junk I have produced by someone that has no idea what they are writing about. The Panda updates have affected me in a negative way so it’s now time to change. I have attempted to hire “good bloggers” before. $25 an article sound reasonable? I now felt like I was getting scammed which was maybe due to lack of direction as the articles I was getting were not satisfactory. Is it better to have a writer physically come and work in my office? Or is it ok just to pay someone by the article at the comfort of their own home? So the simple question is how do I find great bloggers?
| JimmyJones0 -
Blog Commenting Best interface
Hi All, In your opinion what are the advantages and disadvantages of Livefyre Facebook comments system Disques Thanks, John
| johnshearer0 -
Root page not coming up first
Hello. Any idea why site:www.bestprice.gr query doesn't bring the www.bestprice.gr as the first result? Could it be that the site is under a penalty? Thanks.
| phaistonian0 -
Best way to resolve duplicate content issue?
Not sure about what to do about this - I have a client who has a ton of pages (around 1200) which are all City specific pages, for long-tail search. These are all written with paragraphs in the format such as: Order to [City] today. So every page has essentially the same content. The site also only has 1562 pages, so with 1200 of them being City-specific same-content pages, that can't be good. However the problem is that these pages still rank very well (usually Position 1 or 2) for the terms they're targeting, and bring in enough traffic and revenue to justify their purpose. We also have Country specific pages, and these are all with unique content, rather than the scripted content on the City pages. So for example, for Italy we might have: Italy Page (Unique Content) Rome (Duplicate Content) Milan (Duplicate Content) Venice (Duplicate Content) etc. (Duplicate Content) For a low traffic country (Austria), we tried to 301 the City pages to the Country page, but that only resulted in us seeing a drop in search results for the city keywords, from (usually) Position 1 to more like Page 3 or 4, so quite a drop. So, without writing 1200 pages worth of unique content, what would your advice be?
| TME_Digital0 -
Can free article sites damage my reputation
Hi i have been submitting a lot of fresh articles on free article sites and they have been picked up which is good but my problem is, i am finding loads of these sites who have picked up my article using some sort of article rewrite programme and my articles look like they have now been written by a two year old. I want to know if this is going to spoil my reputation and i would like to know why people use these programmes when they do not even make sense.
| ClaireH-1848860 -
Company Blog Killing our Rankings?
Our product is organic, eco, natural etc. Our blog covers organic, eco, natural culture. Sounds like a winner right? But what if we sold jars and our blog rarely talked about jars because jars are Boring? In webmaster tools, our keyword significance for the word organic is ranked 1st but for the word jars we're ranked 41st . Should i be placing our blog on a subdomain to make sure Google starts placing more emphasis on our jars? ie content on our site rather than content on our blog?
| schmeetz0 -
Block Low Quality Pages?
What are your thoughts on blocking (in robots.txt) and/or noindexing low-quality pages to defend against Panda, assuming you can't remove, redirect, or add quality content to it? Also, assume there are no external links pointing to these low-quality pages, no social shares, and zero incoming organic traffic. Has anyone had experience with this as a solution to Panda?
| poolguy0 -
Emailing content to posterous
Posterous is setup to syndicate my content to my personal WP blog. After reading information on SEOmoz, I realize that Duplicate Content is not a good thing. Should I stop this process? Note: The way it works is I email a post to posterous and it posts it there and on my WP Blog and create a FB post and a Tweet.
| CMCD0 -
What are the advantages/disadvantages of a blog residing on a website as opposed to free-standing and linked to site
I have a cleint with a web site and with 3 freestanding wordpress blogs - should we be housing those blogs on the site? should we combine them (its an insurance compnay with several business units). thanks
| thirsty30
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.