Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Do Q&A 's work for SEO
-
If I create a good community in my particular field on my SEO site and have a quality Q&A section like this etc (ripping of MOZ's idea here sorry, I hope it's ok) will the long term returns be worth the effort of creating and man ageing this. Is the user created content of as much use as I think it will be?
-
As an early member of Moz, I can tell you that what brought me back to the site everyday was the blog and the comments on the blog. However I rarely commented on posts, I didn't didn't answer or ask any Q&A, and I didn't use the tools very much (although I used free tools at other sites pretty often) but I thought they provided a lot of credibility. The content was very high quality and taught me to do my job better. You could tell that quite an investment was being made in the content and that there was a dedication to it and the community.
It's my feeling that it was the content and the tools that developed nurtured a community Q&A section--it didn't just spring out of nowhere. A lot of work first went into building a community where a Q&A section could flourish. I think the long term rewards will be worth it as long as you're in it for sake of building a community and not for the sake of any SEO value the community can provide.
-
Do you think you'd be able to attract authority figures in your industry to support your Q&A sectrion?
-
im in the equestrian industry and there is a number of thriving fourums out there however like all forums the quality of info is dubious and as yet the Q&A style of community has not yet been made. I feel this is an opertunity I could work with.
I realise that its a long game and will take lots of work. My main worry is that we are a retailer and that people may not trust our Q&A as we are retailers and no matter how much we separate our sales hat from our community element I feel it may not work. The fact that it has not been done make me think it is worth a try.
Any examples of an ecommerce site with a thriving community attached that would be a good model to emulate?
-
User Generated content can work amazingly well, even just being able to entice people to leave great comments on your articles can pretty awesome.
You do have some challenges through:
1. Cultivating a community.
Lots of website/webmasters have the thought - "Wouldn't it be good if I had a forum" and after getting things up and running are surprised to find that nobody's participating and the forums are dead.
It's a bit like organising a party, getting in the cheese and wine only, to find you've over estimated your popularity and end up drinking alone with the brie.
Do you have an audience in mind. What are their goals and needs. Would they expect to satisfy those goals by coming to you?
I think you'll find it a little harder than you imaging to "create a good community".
2. Differentiating yourself from others
If you're "just like the next guy" then why should anyone use your Q&A? How can you stand apart and offer something different and valuable to everyone else? There's little point just trying to copy someone else - they're already off and running and you're likely to be playing catch-up.
Unless you have something unique and valuable to offer (and be honest about this!). What's your value proposition. What's in it for your audience?
One tactic would be to cater to a very specific niche. One that is super-targetted to your own business offerings. This has pros and cons of course. The smaller the niche, the smaller the potential income. However, you'll be better able to specialise and become relevant to that niche.
3. Moderating and feeding
User-generated content sounds fantastic - just sit back and watch all this awesome content being created before your very eyes.
It's not quite as easy as that. Moderating and maintaining your community will take time and effort. So you'll need to make sure you have the resources available and the desire to do so. Managing people can be unpredictable and difficult so don't consider user generated content in any form as a quick win.
As well as moderating, you need to keep your audience focused and engaged. It's not going to be quick either.
All this can take you away from free earning work, and your business goals so do keep the opportunity cost in mind.
-
I think it's a great way to develop future content. If you have good analytics tracking on your Q&A (or FAQ section for some sites) you can take the questions that get a ton of traffic and make posts out of them for your main site. Also, if you have a particular section/topic that gets a ton of questions about it (ie panda, penguin, hummingbird, etc) you could develop a webinar for the people that come to your site.
As you develop your site and the Q&A section becomes widely used, you'll start to see questions show in Google searches. In general, as long as you develop that section for your USERS and not for Google specifically, you'll get the traffic you want and more sales (assuming that's the goal).
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
-
Can subdomains hurt your primary domain's SEO?
Our primary website https://domain.com has a subdomain https://subDomain.domain.com and on that subdomain we have a jive-hosted community, with a few links to and fro. In GA they are set up as different properties but there are many SEO issues in the jive-hosted site, in which many different people can create content, delete content, comment, etc. There are issues related to how jive structures content, broken links, etc. My question is this: Aside from the SEO issues with the subdomain, can the performance of that subdomain negatively impact the SEO performance and rank of the primary domain? I've heard and read conflicting reports about this and it would be nice to hear from the MOZ community about options to resolve such issues if they exist. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BHeffernan1 -
Why do people put xml sitemaps in subfolders? Why not just the root? What's the best solution?
Just read this: "The location of a Sitemap file determines the set of URLs that can be included in that Sitemap. A Sitemap file located at http://example.com/catalog/sitemap.xml can include any URLs starting with http://example.com/catalog/ but can not include URLs starting with http://example.com/images/." here: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html#location Yet surely it's better to put the sitemaps at the root so you have:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
(a) http://example.com/sitemap.xml
http://example.com/sitemap-chocolatecakes.xml
http://example.com/sitemap-spongecakes.xml
and so on... OR this kind of approach -
(b) http://example/com/sitemap.xml
http://example.com/sitemap/chocolatecakes.xml and
http://example.com/sitemap/spongecakes.xml I would tend towards (a) rather than (b) - which is the best option? Also, can I keep the structure the same for sitemaps that are subcategories of other sitemaps - for example - for a subcategory of http://example.com/sitemap-chocolatecakes.xml I might create http://example.com/sitemap-chocolatecakes-cherryicing.xml - or should I add a sub folder to turn it into http://example.com/sitemap-chocolatecakes/cherryicing.xml Look forward to reading your comments - Luke0 -
Need a layman's definition/analogy of the difference between schema and structured data
I'm currently writing a blog post about schema. However I want to set the record straight that schema is not exactly the same as structured data, although both are often used interchangeably. I understand this schema.org is a vocabulary of global identifiers for properties and things. Structured data is what Google officially stated as "a standard way to annotate your content so machines can understand it..." Does anybody know of a good analogy to compare the two? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Display:None CSS & SEO
Hi A while back I was told that using the display:none tag to hide content you want minimised is bad for onpage SEO - is this the case? It's not that we want to hide it from Google, we just don't want it taking up a huge amount of space on product pages. I have found some of these on our site, and want to know how bad they are. Is the content under the tag going to be ignored? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Partial Match or RegEx in Search Console's URL Parameters Tool?
So I currently have approximately 1000 of these URLs indexed, when I only want roughly 100 of them. Let's say the URL is www.example.com/page.php?par1=ABC123=&par2=DEF456=&par3=GHI789= All the indexed URLs follow that same kinda format, but I only want to index the URLs that have a par1 of ABC (but that could be ABC123 or ABC456 or whatever). Using URL Parameters tool in Search Console, I can ask Googlebot to only crawl URLs with a specific value. But is there any way to get a partial match, using regex maybe? Am I wasting my time with Search Console, and should I just disallow any page.php without par1=ABC in robots.txt?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ria_0 -
URL Injection Hack - What to do with spammy URLs that keep appearing in Google's index?
A website was hacked (URL injection) but the malicious code has been cleaned up and removed from all pages. However, whenever we run a site:domain.com in Google, we keep finding more spammy URLs from the hack. They all lead to a 404 error page since the hack was cleaned up in the code. We have been using the Google WMT Remove URLs tool to have these spammy URLs removed from Google's index but new URLs keep appearing every day. We looked at the cache dates on these URLs and they are vary in dates but none are recent and most are from a month ago when the initial hack occurred. My question is...should we continue to check the index every day and keep submitting these URLs to be removed manually? Or since they all lead to a 404 page will Google eventually remove these spammy URLs from the index automatically? Thanks in advance Moz community for your feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd0 -
A few questions on Google's Structured Data Markup Helper...
I'm trying to go through my site and add microdata with the help of Google's Structured Data Markup Helper. I have a few questions that I have not been able to find an answer for. Here is the URL I am referring to: http://www.howlatthemoon.com/locations/location-chicago My company is a bar/club, with only 4 out of 13 locations serving food. Would you mark this up as a local business or a restaurant? It asks for "URL" above the ratings. Is this supposed to be the URL that ratings are on like Yelp or something? Or is it the URL for the page? Either way, neither of those URLs are on the page so I can't select them. If it is for Yelp should I link to it? How do I add reviews? Do they have to be on the page? If I make a group of days for Day of the Week for Opening hours, such as Mon-Thu, will that work out? I have events on this page. However, when I tried to do the markup for just the event it told me to use itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Event" on the body tag of the page. That is just a small part of the page, I'm not sure why I would put the event tag on the whole body? Any other tips would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | howlusa0 -
Two Pages with the Same Name Different URL's
I was hoping someone could give me some insight into a perplexing issue that I am having with my website. I run an 20K product ecommerce website and I am finding it necessary to have two pages for my content: 1 for content category pages about wigets one for shop pages for wigets 1st page would be .com/shop/wiget/ 2nd page would be .com/content/wiget/ The 1st page would be a catalogue of all the products with filters for the customer to narrow down wigets. So ultimately the URL for the shop page could look like this when the customer filters down... .com/shop/wiget/color/shape/ The second page would be content all about the Wigets. This would be types of wigets colors of wigets, how wigets are used, links to articles about wigets etc. Here are my questions. 1. Is it bad to have two pages about wigets on the site, one for shopping and one for information. The issue here is when I combine my content wiget with my shop wiget page, no one buys anything. But I want to be able to provide Google the best experience for rankings. What is the best approach for Google and the customer? 2. Should I rel canonical all of my .com/shop/wiget/ + .com/wiget/color/ etc. pages to the .com/content/wiget/ page? Or, Should I be canonicalizing all of my .com/shop/wiget/color/etc pages to .com/shop/wiget/ page? 3. Ranking issues. As it is right now, I rank #1 for wiget color. This page on my site would be .com/shop/wiget/color/ . If I rel canonicalize all of my pages to .com/content/wiget/ I am going to loose my rankings because all of my shop/wiget/xxx/xxx/ pages will then point to .com/content/wiget/ page. I am just finding with these massive ecommerce sites that there is WAY to much potential for duplicate content, not enough room to allow Google the ability to rank long tail phrases all the while making it completely complicated to offer people pages that promote buying. As I said before, when I combine my content + shop pages together into one page, my sales hit the floor (like 0 - 15 dollars a day), when i just make a shop page my sales are like (1k+ a day). But I have noticed that ever since Penguin and Panda my rankings have fallen from #1 across the board to #15 and lower for a lot of my phrase with the exception of the one mentioned above. This is why I want to make an information page about wigets and a shop page for people to buy wigets. Please advise if you would. Thanks so much for any insight you can give me!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SKP0