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Category: Content Development

Ask and answer questions around the topic of content development for SEO.


  • I've noticed that Google News has withdrawn the necessity for there to be a minimum of 3 numerical digits in the URL if you submit the content via a new sitemap. Is this 100% correct? I'm working on a site rebuild for a client that is where submission to Google News will be instrumental in their strategy. Are there are difference between UK and US submission as this is UK based?

    | PerchDigital
    0

  • SEOMoz creates transcripts of videos, but would you recommend creating a text transcript if you create a podcast that is 15 minutes or longer?

    | SparkplugDigital
    0

  • I am planning to write an article that refutes some claims made in another article.  The original article is a 20 page pdf.  What I plan to do is to take quotes from this PDF and then under each quote write my arguments for or against the quote. If I take direct quotes from the article, is Google likely to see this as duplicate content?

    | MarieHaynes
    0

  • Does the search engines have a preference for pages with long or short copy? (Assuming our short copy fulfill the basic keyword requirements) While a long copy, enable us to include more long tail keywords, i find that most people prefer to read a short copy. We currently try to keep each page short and give the reader an option to explorer further with links to more detailed pages.

    | petersen
    0

  • What is the shelflife of a blog post SEO wise and Google wise?

    | sarenausa
    0

  • I have been suffering majorly from the Google algo change, as I lost more than 50% of my traffic of my largest site. Since then I have been focusing on rewriting pages, and adding new ones. New pages are all of high quality up to 2,000 words each, and the improved pages used to be thin content pages, rewritten to about 1,000 words. All content is 100% unique. I have noticed Google still has the old pages cached, dated to more than a month back, despite new pages (linking to some of the old) being indexed. Anyway, I am pretty much desperate by now, and coul really use some advice how to fight this. FYI, I got some budget available and a writer stand-by. Thanks, Giorgio

    | VisualSense
    0

  • Which one should i use to start my blog on my own domain name?

    | IM_Learner
    0

  • In Danny Dover's book, Search Engine Optimization Secrets, he talks about how every page on your site should be at least a little linkworthy, or it is just sucking link juice from the rest of the site and not contributing any. Does this mean that creating a lot of content, (like a daily news article on your site that summarizes industry news or something similar) is not a good SEO strategy? Should you limit the amount of content pages on your site unless it can attract links or hits on one of your target keywords? Thanks!

    | SparkplugDigital
    0

  • Hi, If i use same terms of use and privacy policy content across my websites, does it amounts to duplicate content issues? Does it affect my websites in any manner? Regards

    | IM_Learner
    0

  • Currently I use All-In-One SEO and I quite like how simple it is to setup and it's stable. Is that still one of the best ones? What are you using these days? Is it worth stripping out the superfluous meta tags that Wordpress now puts in? Is there any value to adding meta descriptions to all my Tag pages and if so, is there a good plugin that will auto magically create unique descriptions for these pages? Same goes for my paginated archives. Thanks!

    | flowsimple
    0

  • So I recently took over an in-house SEO role and began some house cleaning. I found a few places that had copied or duplicated our homepage content. Naturally I reached out to them to ask them to remove or change the content. Today I come to the office and one of the sites I had requested to remove the content, had fired back at me that I was being rude, threatening and I should go f**k myself. As if this wasn't enough this guys was an upper level manager (managing director) and knows the upper management where I work. Now I have people in my company pissed at me, when I thought I was doing the right thing. Am I in the wrong or what? I had simply asked to remove or change the content and that failure to do so could result in legal action. I understand that it could have been misconstrued as a threat (which it wasn't intended to be) but its seems like a pretty immature response from a higher level person. Any thoughts or advice on what to do next?

    | Gerad
    0

  • Hello Seomoz team, i'm french and so my english is not very good ;-). I work for a brand site and we publish content about our products. The problem is : as a brand site, many sites that sell our products, copy our content. And we have duplicate content. And since these sites have worked SEO, they put in place rel canonical tag. as a brand, how to avoid being accused by Google duplicate content? tanks for you answer. I hope it's clear. Take care Denis

    | android_lyon
    0

  • Hi This again is probably a naive question, but here goes anyway.  I've searched around a lot to find out how to use 'Technorati' with my companies blog posts, i.e.extend their reach.  I have discovered, from lots of querying, that WordPress does an automatic RSS feed which 'Technorati' will automatically pick up on once it has been told of an update to the blog by WPs automated Ping. In a WP forum I found a discussion about the problems of getting your blog into 'Technorati'. http://wordpress.org/support/topic/tags-do-not-update-technorati/page/2?replies=52 In it basically it states that you blog post should be there.  If it isn't it is due to errors in coding on an individualized theme.  I ran a W3C validater suggested, that did pick up 90 errors for my 'home' blog page.  The link even explains in practical terms how to correct the errors. However, the designer is not convinced this is the problem.  As a novice I don’t know if this is the reason for definite.  Does anyone have an opinion on this problem?

    | catherine-279388
    0

  • We are looking at integrating a blog into our website. Unfortunately, our content management system is very clunky and not set up to quickly publish blog style content. I'd like to use Wordpress and set up the blog as a subdomain of my company website. Our URL is www.blockandcompany.com so the blog URL would be www.blog.blockandcompany.com. Is it correct to say that if the blog is set up this way, the search engines will see the regular website and the Wordpress hosted blog as one big site? I want to use the blog to write keyword-rich content, but I don't want to divide my SEO "equity" between two separate sites. Any advice?

    | Blockinc
    1

  • I added SSL to my wordpress blog because that was the only way to get a dedicated IP address for my site at my host. Now I am noticing Google has started indexing posts both as http and https. Can some one please help how to force google not to index https as I am sure its like having duplicate content. All help is appreciated. So far I have added this to top of htaccess file: RewriteEngine on Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} ^443$ RewriteRule ^robots.txt$ robots_ssl.txt And added robots_ssl.txt with following: User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /  User-agent: * Disallow: / But https pages are still being indexed. Please help.

    | rookie123
    0

  • i have submitted my url how much time u guys will get to reveal my site site up ??

    | TQR
    0

  • My blog was on wordpress.com for over 18mnths and I have just moved it to my domain - rankings are charging as a result - up and down! My current concern is my google.co.uk search position for garden art - my home page http://www.gardenbeet.com  has been number 2 for over 12 mnths - now my blog is number 2 http://www.gardenbeet.com/garden_design_blog/garden-art/ this is not the best landing page to generate sales from my shop - any suggestions?

    | GardenBeet
    0

  • We use several copy writers for regular blog posts and they do a great job. They rewrite breaking news stories and keep them as unique as possible to avoid duplicate content. When it comes to writing text for pages on websites they dont half take there time. I will need one to write a page of 2000 words at some point. Do you think that is a unfair task and what time limit would you look for on this. I am thinking 7 days. Whats the best ways of managing Copywriters to get the best out of them and making sure they keep content fresh.

    | onlinemediadirect
    0

  • I run an advice website where users pay to receive advice from me in an area that I am quite skilled and trained in.  It is a very popular site and I get a good number of paid questions each day.  I currently have a premium option for an answer within 5-15 minutes (available if I am online), a standard option where they get an answer within 24 hours and a free section.  There are only so many questions I can answer in the free section and so it is made really clear that only a small portion of the free questions get answered, and you have to wait 7-14 days for an answer. Yet, each day I get many questions in the free section....way too many for me to answer.  I choose questions to answer that will benefit my site's SEO.  The rest are all declined. I keep thinking that there has to be a way to capitalize on the fact that many users each day (probably a couple of thousand per month) are willing to give me user generated content. I don't want to publish the questions without an answer.  I don't want my site to look spammy. I was thinking of creating a forum where users could ask their free questions and other users could offer help to each other.  Then, I could jump in where necessary.  (Hey..this kind of sounds like SEOMoz in a way.) But, I'd love any other thoughts that you guys have!

    | MarieHaynes
    1

  • It looks for me that WordPress sites get to rank better for some reason ... I dont know wil you will agree with this one with me or not. The question is... do they hold their rankings for the certain keyword with a time? or they lose them as fast as they get them? Shouldn't be content rank the same across all platforms? Content is a content and it dosent matter how it's presented? is it the case with google? For example: Create Wordpress site for only 3 products, provide good content for those 3 products... and sell them with some of shopping cart plugins (any recommendations on the plugin?) Will I get rankings faster and keep them?

    | DiamondJewelryEmpire
    0

  • My eCommerce site is: http://www.furnacefilterscanada.com to provide informations a create links for SEO, i launch http://www.furnacefilterscanada.info/ over WordPress. After ready the new SEOmoz book, I realize .info is not a TopDomainName and it might be see has spam. What do you thing? Should I keep the domain spend time on this blog or should I go a buy a new domain? Since I learn it this, my blog was lauch, but i didn't post on it, I'm affraid I will loos time. Thank you for your advice and recommendations, Jean Nichols

    | BigBlaze205
    0

  • Hello I have a number of sites on Wordpress which all still use the post tag feature. Is this something that I should really be avoiding due to duplicate content issues in the url's of the site, or is it still something that can help SEO wise? I only ask as I did a crawl diagnostics report on SEOmoz and it found that 48 of my title elements were too short due to these tags in the URL's. If you do all suggest I keep using them, should they be 3 odd words which are keywords? Thanks in advance.

    | mozUser1469236629285
    0

  • Is it worth the effort using your own domain for a Google blog? After adding my own domain to a blog I see a boost in ranking, maybe the url has more value without the blogspot extension, or that  Google might treat the (max.10) pages you produce under your own domain as "independent"  thus giving you the chance of building your own domain trust...?

    | vibelingo
    0

  • We are starting a corporate blog and were discussing the best place to put it in terms of the URL. Would http://blog.companyabc.com be OK, or is another structure better? Like http://www.companyabc.com/blogtitle/?

    | KnutDSvendsen
    0

  • We are planning to launch a competition where bloggers can blog about our products and about our company. One winner will be selected to win a gift card to our web shop. In order to participate the blogger has to put a link to the blog post that points to our front page or into one of our product pages. Does Google have a guideline against such "link acquiring" methods?

    | EuropeanSEOguy
    0

  • Having read Rand's post about the canonical tag I very much wish to use it to advise Google that the duplicates created during archiving (due to the fact that the posts have multiple categories) are just copies. I understand the theory, but can't transfer it into practice!  Could someone give me an idiots guide as to how to add the tag and to where.  My site produces approx 10 - 20 blog posts per week.  Each has at least 2-4 categories applied to it.  They are archived each month, at which point I have  a big jump in duplicates in my campaign panel. Help! C:\Users\Catherine\Desktop\me_small.gif

    | catherine-279388
    1

  • What is the best practice in regards to content for e-commerce blogs on the same domain as the web-store (blog.storename.com)? What balance of content should be on the blog vs. the item & section pages or doesn't it matter?

    | MEldridge
    0

  • Sorry to ask this question again but I left out some background info...... My blog sits at www.gardenbeet.wordpress.com I have been using the blog as my main linking page for my main website at www.gardenbeet.com  - the blog links to relevant sites in both blog articles and on the side of the blog. The blog links to industry websites that in turn link to my main website at www.gardenbeet.com. If I was to move the wordpress blog to my own domain will my mainwebsite loose its strength. Will all those blog links pour my link juice out of my website? Will the current three way links become two way links and thereby lesson their linking importance? Is the previous recommendation (combine the blog and the main website) still the best course of action? Should I keep the two sites or perhaps close entries on the existing blog and start another on my own domain? thanks for your time AGAIN

    | GardenBeet
    0

  • My blog  sits on the wordpress domain http://gardenbeet.wordpress.com/ - it has good page rank and has around 300-400 visits per day  - should i move it to my website or Should I start a new blog? i have a page set up for it on my website but it now has good rank http://www.gardenbeet.com/content/design-blog.html - and now want to keep this URL am a bit confused - what is the best strategy in terms of SEO?

    | GardenBeet
    1

  • Hi, I have a client who has thousands of pages on his site - 50,000+. It is a news website so most of these pages are old news articles and blog posts that receive very little traffic. We are moving to a new content management system and are debating on whether or not to keep all that old content. So far our decision is to keep the content that has gotten at least 100+ visits from Bing or Google in the last 6 months but dump everything else. This amounts to around 30,000 or so pages most of which have several links pointing to them. My question is from an SEO standpoint is that okay to do? We'd not only lose pages but links as well. Part of me thinks that in light of the Panda update getting rid of old content that is good but not great could about help out the site (we do great in the SERPs and actually got a bump in traffic after the Panda update to new articles/posts). However, we obviously don't want to cause problems and that is why I'd appreciate the thoughts and ideas on the best way to handle this major downsizing in content. Thanks!

    | Matthew_Edgar
    0

  • My site has been in Google News for about 3 years. Over the weekend, I received this message from Google Hi John, We periodically review news sources, to ensure Google News offers a high quality experience for our users. When we reviewed your site, mainstreetmonroe.com, we found that we can no longer include it in Google News at this time. We reviewed your site and are unable to include it in Google News at this time. We can't include sites that don't have a formal editorial-review process for submitted content. If this exists on your site, please let us know where and we'll be happy to review your site again. Mainstreetmonroe is scheduled to be removed from Google News for a period of at least 30 days. After this 30-day period has elapsed, you can re-apply for inclusion in Google News provided your site meets our guidelines. We appreciate your assistance in this matter. Please note that you'll still be able to find your site in Google Web Search and other Google services. Thanks for your interest in Google News. Regards, The Google News Team What exactly do they mean? I submitted my website news section, but they have been displaying our forum area in the news too. I think the forum is what GN is talking about. What is the best way to fix this problem? Move the forum to a subdomain? Website: http://www.mainstreetmonroe.com/ Forum: http://www.mainstreetmonroe.com/Voice/forum.asp?FORUM_ID=2

    | JohnBeagle
    0

  • Does anyone know of some good plugins for wordpress for self hosted video?  Thanks in advance!

    | JasonJackson
    0

  • A lot of SEO is focusing on content these days and having unique blogs and articles. I understand how this would be great for a search engine, but doesn't that leave out businesses that are not there to make content but only want to advertise their services?

    | musillawfirm
    0

  • Is it better to set up a blog using a sub folder on the website's domain or by using a subdomain: http://www.domain.com/blog/ http://blog.domain.com

    | yourspares
    0

  • If i have content on my site and the same content duplicated on my facebook pages, will google treat this as duplicate content? At the moment when i copy and paste a line of text from the content on my site Facebook is returned first.

    | Turkey
    0

  • As I write blog articles for my site I often come across a situation where I'm quoting something from another site, or using a piece of data from that other site to make a point. I know it's nice and courteous to link to the source when I do this but from a pure SEO point of view, does it matter? Is there any benefit to linking from my site to other sites that are related and authoritative on the subject I'm discussing? I know I'll bleed off a little link juice to that external site that would otherwise go towards my internal links on the same page, but are there other benefits to linking out to known good sites? Is that any kind of signal to Google that I'm playing in a good neighborhood?

    | scanlin
    0

  • Is anyone aware of a website that has a PHP Spinner with a built in thesaurus? I've looked all over the web. Would be handy to be able to drop snippets of articles in there, have it spun - then I can just fix the broken english and post it.

    | craven22
    0

  • I am looking to add new content to pages that I currently have on my website.  The content on these pages was taken from another provider and my idea is to rewrite the content to make it unique. Because it is duplicate content, these pages don't get much traffic. Should I add the new content to brand new urls or just change the content on these (already indexed urls). The issue has seen these pages contain duplicate content. If the content simply changes, will it recognise these pages as having unique content?

    | MattBB12
    1

  • Hi guys. I have a client that has one main site, with the domain IMOWOOD.PT (Portugal), and then we have the domain IMOWOOD.COM (redirecting to .PT). The problem is (that i verify using site:imowood.com) in Google, apeears that the domain .COM have a lot of indexed pages! This will penalize the 2 pages right? Because the duplicated content (?). What i want to know is... if i have 1 domain (the one i want to be index) what should i do, to do a proper redirect from the .COM to the .PT, making the .COM not indexable? Right now the .COM only redirects @ index page. Dont know why... I've used the domain redirect @ my cPanel. So... whats the best practise for domain redirect? Thanks!

    | comercialroldao
    0

  • (By Google Traductor) Hi, within our community we have developed a news service (www.agroads.com.ar/noticias/) where we had about 30 sourcesrss. News grouped into categories and generate an internal link to see the details (and also a link to see the full story in the appropriate media). It is our first experience with a news site and wanted to know:
    1. We keep track of all news from all media? (would be creating agreat sitemap in the future:)
    2. We must clarify in the sitemap that are sources of news?
    3. Google may consider it duplicate content?
    4. We're taking data from different source types (html, video andpodcast), we must differentiate this content to index? Any other suggestions would be welcome.
    Greetings!
    Robert

    | romaro
    0

  • If our pages are to have roughly 30% of non-original textual content, can we be penalized by Google? Or are we OK as long as this non-original content is relevant to the pages?

    | Quidsi
    0

  • I'm sitting on several hundred PLR articles that, with a bit of editing, would fit well into on of my sites. This site otherwise produces new unique content every week, including videos, news and articles. These PLR articles are very popular, copyscape shows at least 30 other sites are using some or all of the pieces, but the articles themselves are the sort of information pieces that don't really get old or change over time. Never having gone for the direct use of PLR articles (have spun quite a few unique pieces in my time though), I'm wondering if there could be a negative effect to using them? We're not in Google News or anything so don't have to worry about that, just wondering if it would diminish the effect of my unique pieces at all?

    | StalkerB
    0

  • I am just curious if any of you use the premium themes such as Genesis or Thesis, if so why did you move to those themes?  Also what is the real benefit to one of those themes?  I know both claim to help with SEO, but I can't really understand exactly how other than the code may be more efficient.

    | copykatrecipes
    0

  • Two years ago, some articles and blogs were written and submitted to certain tech and news sites relevant to our field. Will it be fine to submit those to other sites now. It is our content only and not some one else, but would it be penalty to submit the copy to other article sites whereever those articles/content are relevant today also?

    | sayeed
    0

  • How good or bad is it for google (my most important friend on the internet , but i like you too guys) if the subdomain gets a total different IP adress lets say main domian start with 213.xx.xxx and subdomain starts with 83.xx.xxxx Thanx in advance

    | turnon
    0

  • I'm submitting my site to Google News, have a few questions for creating my sitemap. The majority of my articles (800) are in a category called 'Disability News' (which is one of my main keywords). Around half of these posts are we're automated RSS feed posts (first 200 words of an article directly copied with a link thru to the original). The past few weeks I've been posting tons of unique content so I was thinking about moving all duplicate content into a category called 'Syndicated News' and excluding that from my Google News sitemap. Is this advisable? or should I just leave it as is?

    | craven22
    0

  • So I am curious as to what benefits to each of these plugins would outweigh one or the other. I began using the Tweetmeme plugin for our main blog because it offered the option to use our own bit.ly pro short code. +1 for branding. Plus I think there is some value in having your site and link on tweetmeme, but  I overheard that Twitter's own Tweet Button for blogs offers better SEO than the Tweetmeme for blogs. I am out of my area of expertise. Any thoughts?

    | Thos003
    0

  • I am currently compiling material for a creative session where I will sit down with our client's PR team and look at ways to maximise SEO value while they do their usual PR work. Apart from obvious link inclusion in the written material (resource box / in-text) what are the other tactics that can be used to help SEO? I am not only thinking about content but also distributiuon and technology / platform as well. My (random) thoughts are around: Talking about specific website locations, features, media Generating curiosity Using existing media contacts and chanels as link opportunities Using interesting and user-friendly yet smantically rich content Use of synonims Referring to related terms and concepts Integrating social media Referring to PR material in blog and social media? (maybe bad idea) Note: I've recently been introduced to platforms such as HARO and MyBlogQuest (by Peter Gregory in this related posthttp://www.seomoz.org/q/are-press-release-sites-useful) and wondering if there is anything else out there that's new and exciting?

    | Dan-Petrovic
    1

  • Hi, I run http://ablemagazine.co.uk - we also put out a print magazine every 2 months (the biggest disability magazine in Britain) This means we have loads of unique content (around 30 feature stories and 30 news stories every 2 months) Just wondering how I can use this to my advantage? I've been social bookmarking the feature stories (reddit, etc) and a link to all my unique stuff on facebook/twitter. Just wondering if there's anything else I should be doing? Thanks

    | craven22
    0

  • Hi! I don't have any idea about how many keywords is appropiate to include at a photograph's title, alternative text and description and how much does it affect to SEO. Could you help me? Thanks.

    | juanmanolo
    0

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