Some SEO 2016 questions
-
Hello MOZ Community,
I have some questions where the following is still working for seo in 2016:
- Is an exact keyword in the domain still a good start?
- If a domain contains the most important keyword does one still need subfolders with that keyword in the url?
- Do you need multiple subpages so the main url becomes stronger?
- Is linkbuilding still the number one factor?
Thank you for your thoughts!
-
Thank you.
These are some good answers for me.
I will focus on brand building and kickass content!
-
All of these questions will draw different opinions from different people.
Sometimes contrary opinion is most valuable.
Is an exact keyword in the domain still a good start?
If you mean... EgolsWidgets.com... then, widgets in your domain name isn't worth much. But if you have a site about brass widgets with BrassWidgets.com as the domain... then the domain will be slightly helpful. Exact match is what you need. Partial match is worth little to nothing.
If a domain contains the most important keyword does one still need subfolders with that keyword in the url?
If this is worth anything at all, it is not worth much. If I own BrassWidgets.com, I am not going to have a folder named /brass-widgets/
Do you need multiple subpages so the main url becomes stronger?
Huh? If you want a good website you will probably need a lot of subpages. That is called "content".
Is linkbuilding still the number one factor?
No. KICKASS content is the number one factor. "Content" isn't worth much at all unless it is KICKASS. If you make a website with crappy content then who is going to link to it, who is going to read it, who is going to do anything with it.
If you don't have kickass content then you will be forced to pay a linkbuilder and he will have to perform some type of sin to get people to links to your crappy website.
-
Thank you for responding.
I was trying to get some "almost" exact keyword matches combined with lots of weak backlinks to rank for some affiliate marketing sites, but it does nothing.
And your answers clearly show why.
Thanks again.
-
Thank you for responding and your helpfull answers.
It really seems that shortcuts are not helping and brand building is the way to go.
-
Hi mhenze,
Will answer to the best of my ability:
- Exact match still a good start?
It depends on what the brand of the website/business you're working on is. This one was answered well in Q&A in December of 2015 with the following:
"If your "brand" is going to be "Region Family Holidays" then an EMD is fine. Just make sure you're branded that way, and try to cultivate a variety of natural backlinks. If your brand is "Acme Travel UK" and the site is regionfamilyholidays.co.uk then you'll be fighting a losing battle."
Here's the link: https://moz.com/community/q/exact-match-domain-should-i-use-one
Long story short, the value of EMD's lessens as your brand diverges from the keywords you're targeting. If you are branding based on keywords you're targeting, then you're still in good shape.
-
Kind of related to the first question - it depends on what your brand is. I would stay away from the EMD/keywords discussion and just focus on producing solid content targeting keywords. It's the safest way to go and it gets results in my experience. It's a small piece of the pie compared to your link profile and properly optimized content/site structure.
-
I'm not entirely sure what you're asking here. Subpages don't really add strength to the main URL (in fact, it works in reverse). Subpages are great for ranking additional keywords or if you have multiple products or services that are not related to one another and you want to keep your services separated for SEO purposes. Your main URL will be strong if you can generate sufficient links and provide excellent resources to your visitors.
-
According to Moz's 2015 Search Engine Ranking Factors Survey, links are still the #1 factor when it comes to rankings.
Link is here: https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors
Granted this survey was based on 2015 factors and your question revolves around 2016, but the factors have not changed significantly in this time and it is doubtful there will be anything game-changing in 2016 (at least not for a few months).
This doesn't mean links are the be-all and end-all of rankings, but many very smart people seem to think they are still a big factor. Make sure you are following best practices, make sure your link profile is natural and whatever you do, don't spam or buy links for your sites and you should do just fine.
-
Greetings. I'll start this one off!
First and foremost, I have to point you to the 2015 Ranking Factors. They haven't change that much and it is really the best reference out there for all of these questions.
1. I say yes with a giant BUT...you have balance branding with that nifty keyword domain name. My personal experience is not all is lost on keywords in the domain as some will tell you, but I'd only do it IF there is no significant loss to your brand.
2. Keep the URL as short as possible.
3. Not sure what you mean here. A well structured website with quality content will give you the best results, so I'm leaning towards yes on this one.
4. Short answer is Yes. That and great content. See the 2015 Ranking Factors.
Good luck.
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
-
Site Category structure detrimental to SEO?
Hi Guys, I am hoping that you may be able to help with an internal debate on whether our currently category structuring could be damaging from an SEO point of view. Our site sells t shirts primarily and as such we have a large product base of around 7000+ products. Our category structure currently works like so: Mens/T-Shirts/Movie&TV/TV/ Which I think is fairly typical, though this where it gets interesting, within this end category of "/TV/" there are around 120 categories that are used from a filtration point of view to contain items for each specific show etc, IE Mens/T-Shirts/Movie&TV/TV/Breaking_Bad, Mens/T-Shirts/Movie&TV/TV/Game_of_Thrones. The vast majority of these categories have between 1 and 3 products within them and the rest higher. Multiply this by the large amount of categories that we have on site and these end level "Band Title" categories amount to around 13,000+ categories in the directory. If at this point we put the filtration element aside, what is the communities opinion of the benefits or drawbacks of having the category structure like this? Thanks in advance for any feedback.
Technical SEO | | timsilver0 -
Mobile website question
Hi Mozzers, A website I manage has a mobile friendly version of their main website and a /m version as well. I was wondering if anyone had any experience in the best way of handling this? Should we just get rid of the /m version and tag the mobile friendly version? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | KarlBantleman0 -
Disavow questions
Pretty sure I know the answers to these but someone asked me to make absolutely sure so here goes, any opinions welcome: If i disavow a whole domain does it include all sub-domains on the domain also?- my answer is clearly yes. If i have network of links really bad linking to my website that are already nofollow but awful websites to be linked on, is it worth putting them in the disavow list anyway to basically tell Google literally no association? I know the whole point of disavow is to essentially nofollow the link. Opinions much appreciated, thank you guys.
Technical SEO | | tdigital0 -
SEO question: Need help on rel="alternate" hreflang="x"
Hi all, we have webcontent in 3 languages (official belgian yellow pages), we use a separate domain per language, these are also our brands.
Technical SEO | | TruvoDirectories
ex. for the restaurant Wagamamahttp://www.goudengids.be/wagamama-antwerpen-2018/ corresponds to nl-be
http://www.pagesdor.be/wagamama-antwerpen-2018/ corresponds to fr-be
http://www.pagesdor.be/wagamama-antwerpen-2018/ corresponds to en-be The trouble is that sometimes I see the incorrect urls appearing when doing a search in google, ex. when searching on google.be (dutch=nederlands=nl-be) I see the www.pagesdor.be version appearing (french) I was trying to find a fix for this within https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=nl , but this only seems to apply to websites which use SUBdomains for language purposes. I'm not sure if can work for DOMAINS. Can anyone help me out? Kind regards0 -
301 redirects and seo..
I bought a domain and it has nice traffic. It only has about 5 main pages in php When i got the site i switched to html because php was overkill. I did the 301 and google deleted the php files and replaced with html version when i check site:domain.com It has been about 7 days. I DID NOT use 301 for each of the 5 pages to go php to html instead is used this code RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | samerk
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain.com
RewriteRule (.) http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RedirectMatch 301 (.).php$ http://www.mydomain.com$1.html So basically if you load php it will load the html version. dog.php > dog.html Is this OKAY? or should it be done differently.... worried! Thanks !0 -
Redirect question
I would like to redirect http://example.com/index.html to http://www.example.com/ Is the code below correct ? RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}^example.comRewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.html\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://www.example.com/ [R=301,L]
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
URL Structure Question
Hey folks, I have a weird problem and currently no idea how to fix it. We have a lot of pages showing up as duplicates although they are the same page, the only difference is the url structure. They seem to show up like: http://www.example.com/page/ and http://www.example.com/page What would I need to do to force the URLs into one format or the other to avoid having that one page counting as two? The same issue pops up with upper and lower case: http://www.example.com/Page and http://www.example.com/page Is there any solution to this or would I need to forward them with 301s or similar? Thanks, Mike
Technical SEO | | Malarowski0 -
Advice on SEO for videos on a streaming server
I am looking for some advice on video SEO when the video file is housed on a streaming server. An example page is below. The onlyvideo element on the page is a script reading in the filepath to the streaming server so I am not sure what the best course of action is. Currently, none of our videos are indexed. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/webinars/Making-Agile-Work-for-You.cfm
Technical SEO | | SEI0