Should I put rel=publisher on UGC?
-
My website has a main section that we call expert content and write for. We also have a community subdomain which is all user generated.
We are a pretty big brand and I am wondering should the rel publisher tag just be for the www expert content, or should we also use it on the community UGC even though we don't directly write that?
-
Spencer, a most excellent question IMO.
I am going to stick my neck out here and say use it on both. It took some thinking and digging for me to wrap my head around it, but I think I have it:
You should only use rel=pub on one page of the site. Given that, you use it on the one that is your brand or which has the most traffic, gets lots of plus ones, etc. But, you said this: We also have a community subdomain...
I think the subdomain should be treated as its own site and let it also have rel=pub to the G+ of your main site. The individuals who write, whether for UGC or your experts writing will be rel=author for their pieces.
By doing it this way you can aggregate the plus ones to your G+ from all which gives your site a better profile in the eyes of the Google. This opens a lot of doors for you (at G's choice obviously. Now, I am certainly open to being wrong, but if you think about it for a moment it makes sense in this way: If your firm owns multiple sites (we are a marketing firm and we own a few properties ourselves outside of the main site) but your brand is what owns them, then you can be the pub of all. Again, the individuals writing will be the rel=author.
I look forward to more comments. Most excellent question for forcing us to think. -
I would surely (and only) use the rel-publisher field on the professional writer content and tie that into the Google+ profiles to have your listings and content stand out in SERP results, but would stay away from trying to get that tied together in the UGC section. Just my 2 cents, but without regular postings by UGC and tying that into the Google+ profiles of those writers who contribute, I don't think you would get the value back.
If these writers in the UGC are frequent, invite them to contribute to the PRO section of the site as 'guest' bloggers or writers. Just some suggestions I would follow myself
Hope it helps!
Cheers!
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.
Related Questions
-
Rel=dofollow and rel=nofollow
Hi, I found a link pointing to my client's site that looks like this: <a <span="" class="html-tag">href</a><a <span="" class="html-tag">="</a>http://www.clientsite.com" rel="dofollow" target="_blank" rel='nofollow'>Anchor text Could someone tell me if this links acts as a dofollow or as a nofollow? It's the first time I see such a link and I don't know how to handle it. Best regards, Edimar
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Noriel0 -
Case Sensitive URLs, Duplicate Content & Link Rel Canonical
I have a site where URLs are case sensitive. In some cases the lowercase URL is being indexed and in others the mixed case URL is being indexed. This is leading to duplicate content issues on the site. The site is using link rel canonical to specify a preferred URL in some cases however there is no consistency whether the URLs are lowercase or mixed case. On some pages the link rel canonical tag points to the lowercase URL, on others it points to the mixed case URL. Ideally I'd like to update all link rel canonical tags and internal links throughout the site to use the lowercase URL however I'm apprehensive! My question is as follows: If I where to specify the lowercase URL across the site in addition to updating internal links to use lowercase URLs, could this have a negative impact where the mixed case URL is the one currently indexed? Hope this makes sense! Dave
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | allianzireland0 -
What does this kind of rel="canonical" mean?
It looks like our CMS may not be configured correctly as there is an empty section in the rel="canonical" rel="canonical" href="{page_uri}" /> Will having the above meta tag be harmful to our SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | voicesdotcom0 -
Where to put a page ID in a URL?
Hello, My company is going to change URLs to example.com/category or example.com/product. When we will change the URLs to product or category pages somehow we have to check whether the requested page is from category table in DB or from products table (this gives much speed to page load time). So we have to choose how to make the different product and category pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | komeksimas
Programmers said that we need to insert id to URL. So the question is: Which is the better way to place an id to an URL? example.com/product-name?id=111 example.com/product-name/111 example.com/product_name-111 Or maybe we should use some other punctuation mark to separate id from product name? p.s. I have read Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs by Google and it still didn't answered which is the best for all of the pages. Somehow others solve this problem by typing only the names to the URL, but could anyone tell what that technology should be?0 -
Should I remove all rel=nofollow links?
I have a 60 page site that had some nofollow links sprinkled throughout, 50% of which are probably on its mailto: email links. Should I remove all nofollows all in one go, or just the mailto links first, and later the others? Or has anyone had any negative effects in 2012 from this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emerald0 -
Any penalty for having rel=canonical tags on every page?
For some reason every webpage of our website (www.nathosp.com) has a rel=canonical tag. I'm not sure why the previous SEO manager did this, but we don't have any duplicate content that would require a canonical tag. Should I remove these tags? And if so, what's the advantage - or disadvantage of leaving them in place? Thank you in advance for your help. -Josh Fulfer
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mhans1 -
Maximum of 100 links on a page vs rel="nofollow"
All, I read within the SEOmoz blog that search engines consider 100 links on a page to be plenty, and we should try (where possible) to keep within the 100 limit. My question is; when a rel="nofollow" attribute is given to a link, does that link still count towards your maximum 100? Many thanks Guy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Horizon0 -
Rel="prev" and view all question
Okay, I've read the posts by Google about the new prev, next tags and the suggestion for using a view all option. I've also read the posts here on SEOMoz on the topic but none of them quite address what we have. First, Some of our main categories are very large (over 6000 pieces of jewelry) so a view all option would take forever to load be completely useless to a visitor. Second, our category home pages provide (here's an example😞 A description of the category with links to important sections and articles A row of new items A dozen of the popular items from the category. Links to related articles if applicable. So we have a real category home page with content instead of just categories that start immediately with pages of product. Should we set the canonical url for all of the browse pages to the main category page, create a view all page or just use the next and previous rel tags with the category home pages as the first in the series?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanTheScot0