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We routinely link from our blog to product pages, landing pages, and content silo pages. As long as you do it naturally you'll be fine. We have a standard of our internal links being "helpful" to the user experience to help guide our team. For example, let's say its a product review blog article. It would make sense to link from that article to the actual product. What doesn't make sense is linking to that product from a blog article with content that is not related is rather "spammy" if you will.

You can invoke Google's eye if you're internal linking is clearly spamming, but this would result in lost rankings over time because your content does not serve users' search intent or answer their query, if that makes sense. In terms of a magic number of what is considered too much, there's no telling. I view it as more of a ratio instead of a hard figure. Long story short, keep the linking natural and make sure it helps the user solve their search query and you'll be fine.

I feel that it is a big benefit. Essentially with popular plugins like Yoast's WordPress plugin, work by listing your website and not the youtube link. If you're looking to convert traffic on your website, why send users to youtube?

Thanks for this information! All of the support agents I spoke with told me that it was not possible. They were all extremely professional, but perhaps they didn't understand what I was asking. I'm glad to hear there is a way to make it happen. WPE is a great platform for us.

Just thought I'd shoot an update - according to WPEngine the redirect will always be there. No way around it on their platform.

Hi guys,

Had a quick question that I wanted to verify here. After reviewing a Moz report we received some redirect chain error on all of our sites hosted with WPEngine. We noticed that the redirect chain appears to be coming from how the domains are configured in their control panel.

Essentially, there is a redirect:

• from staging/temp -> to live
• from non-www -> to www
• SSL redirect from http -> https

The issue here is that the non-www is redirecting to www and then redirected again to https://www

According to support the only way to get rid of this error is to drop the www version of the domain and to host everything under https://domain.com. To me it seems very odd that you cannot just go from http://non-www to https://www in just 1 301 redirect.

Has anyone else experienced this or am I just not looking at the situation correctly?

Well if I understand who did what in your example, your page is missing quite a bit of information that the other client did place on site. Yoast's local plugin is designed to fill in the schema gaps between what your client did and what you have started to do. I think that may be where the difference in opinion is coming in.

Here's some videos on the basics that should go on the location pages that you're trying to setup: http://moz.com/academy/local-content

I would also recommend that you visit Mike's blog: http://blumenthals.com/blog/

Essentially you need to apply schema to what your client set up there. Perhaps also a bit more original content on each page, but you get the idea. Don't forget to place hours of operation, address info, etc. on each location page. It might also be a good idea to put the location info in the footer with the proper schema markup in place. Yoasts plugin just helps you do this a little easier than with coding it yourself.

I would think working on the page that ranks currently would be better than starting over, but I suppose that all depends on budget, competition, etc.

We just underwent the same thing (Joomla 2.5 to latest Wordpress version.  Here was our process:

PRE-LAUNCH

1. BACKUP - BACKUP - BACKUP
2. Note all current urls, eventually launched new site on the same server (IP address) as the old Joomla site.
3. Duplicated site on a private server under Wordpress CMS. This way we can run the site with full url and not a subdomain or subdirectory url structure. For us this allowed us to hone in on issues and keep things clean. We did play with our hosts file to see the site when doing the build out.
4. Transferred all content over, retaining EXACT url usage. This did take some tweaking because Joomla's menu structure creates so many different ways to serve up the same content. We also kept all meta descriptions/ titles in place. An old developer used to fill out the meta keyword box, we stripped all of that junk. We moved all of the old joomla articles in categories and subcategories to Wordpress' blog structure. That was a lot of work (we had like 1000 pages or so).
5. Updated onsite content to be more professional (better spelling, grammar, and copy in general). For the most part we kept the same content though. We did update images with the same title, alt, description tags. The old images just sucked.
6. Updated to a much faster, better responsive framework. This cleaned up the code quite a bit. We added some plugins like Yoast SEO (with local, video, and authorship markup).
7. Ran multiple sweeps with ScreamingFrog and Xenu to find and fix broken links. There were a ton because joomla can sometimes append urls with php tags pointing to the database content instead of the SEF url. [Another lovely joomla feature. - I used to be a big fan of Joomla]
8. Killed off duplicate pages using 301 redirects to updated content.
9. Ensured physical locations had their own pages, proper schema markup, location data in the footer, and verified locations within Google local business center.

POST LAUNCH

1. For whatever reason we still had like 300 or so 404 errors in GWT. We watch it like a hawk. Additionally, our duplicate description and title tags shot up as well. We also received a message in GWT telling us that our site was still on Joomla 1.5.  We were like wth?!
2. Fixed all 404 errors with 301 redirects in our htacccess file. Never thought I would see so many redirects!
3. Resubmitted index to Google/ fetched as google. Then waited for index results.
4. Duplicate HTML / description warnings in GWT are now falling off every day. We expect the old Joomla 1.5 warning to go away as well. Essentially, we had a duplicate cache issue going on. As Google reindexes the site everything is falling back in place.
5. Watch GWT, Moz Analytics, other sources like a hawk every day to immediately handle issues. Made sure schema was pulling correctly in GWT.

Rankings initially slipped 1-2 spots overall. However, once the errors were fixed the bounced right back (took about 3 days, maybe less). Additionally, we increased the overall quality of the links pointing to the site as well as better quality content in the ongoing campaigns.

Overall we were initially penalized (not a real penalty) because of so many errors. However, once those errors were fixed and reindexed by Google, we were fine again. This was just organic. Our map rankings did not slip a single position.

Hope this helps!

Howdy Moz,

Just received a message in Google Webmaster Tools about a CMS update:

"Joomla Update Available

As of the last crawl of your website, you appear to be running Joomla 1.5. One or more of the URLs found were:

http://www.website/custom-url/article5034

Google recommends that you update to the latest release. Older or unpatched software may be vulnerable to hacking or malware that can hurt your users. To download the latest release, visit the Joomla download page. If you have already updated to the latest version of Joomla, please disregard this message.

If you have any additional questions about why you are receiving this message, Google has provided more background information in a blog post about this subject."

Read through the associated blog post. According to the post a generator meta tag is created in Joomla that notes the CMS version. Here's the oddity:

The site was on Joomla 1.5 over 2 years ago. 1 Year ago it was updated to Joomla 2.5. About a week ago it was converted completely to Wordpress. According to GWT the last date the Google bot accessed the site was the day before (5/1/14) the email.

I went through the code, css/html, and the database and found no reference of Joomla 1.5.

Has anyone seen this message? If so, how did you rectify it? Were there any adverse effects on rankings?

Sure does make sense! Quick question about the source of the review. You always want to get testimonials from clients as reference of your good work. However, these are self generated while reviews are done independently. Is it proper to use the testimonials or the review?

If testimonial, how do most handle ratings?

If it is the review, what about potential duplicate content issues?

Thanks for all of the education!

Howdy Moz,

Still kind lost of review markup and the best way to get it implemented into a Wordpress site. Any suggestions on a good tutorial that walks you through the process?

I think you're looking for this: http://pro.moz.com/tools/crawl-test

Just thought I'd shoot an update - according to WPEngine the redirect will always be there. No way around it on their platform.

Generally speaking no.  You can set up multiple report generations with custom reports, but your site is generally crawled once per week.  You can use other tools like screamingfrog to help track down errors.  GWT is also another good source, but only updates once per week as well.  Once you get the errors out of your system, you'll not want to be bothered that many times a week (I would suspect).

Perhaps, you may want a manual crawl: http://pro.moz.com/tools/crawl-test

A good question - From my end; I have several clients with keyword rich urls.  They do not seem negatively affected.  That being said, most of the clients have the keyword in their actual business name, like ACME Plumbing. However, even the ones that do not, have not been negatively affected.  Depending on your client's name I would try to drop the " - " in the domain and push it all together : brandbianalytics.com

I believe best practice is to always canonicalize to the original content.  However, the mix of the original content within those blog pages is tricky because I'm sure a lot has to do with how much content is duped.

Have you tried running any reports for duplicate content issues?  I know Moz has some great tools and one of my favorites is Screaming Frog Spider.  Have you also looked at your GWT to see what if any issues Google may have?

Duplicate content can be bad, but there are a few cases with transcriptions that we've recently discovered where penalties are non-existent.  One of the recent lessons we learned was from a similar thread about video transcriptions.  Phil in the post submitted some good links and research to back it all up.

Here's the link to that discussion: http://moz.com/community/q/video-seo-youtube-transcriptions-dupe-content
I hope this points you in the right direction!

We routinely link from our blog to product pages, landing pages, and content silo pages. As long as you do it naturally you'll be fine. We have a standard of our internal links being "helpful" to the user experience to help guide our team. For example, let's say its a product review blog article. It would make sense to link from that article to the actual product. What doesn't make sense is linking to that product from a blog article with content that is not related is rather "spammy" if you will.

You can invoke Google's eye if you're internal linking is clearly spamming, but this would result in lost rankings over time because your content does not serve users' search intent or answer their query, if that makes sense. In terms of a magic number of what is considered too much, there's no telling. I view it as more of a ratio instead of a hard figure. Long story short, keep the linking natural and make sure it helps the user solve their search query and you'll be fine.

Howdy Moz,

Over and over we hear of folks using microsites in addition to their main brand for targeting keyword specific niches.  The main point of concern most folks have is either in duplicate content or being penalized by Google, which is also our concern.  However, in one of our niches we notice a lot of competitors have set up secondary websites to rank in addition to the main website (basically take up more room on the SERPS).  They are currently utilizing different domains, on different IPs, on different servers, etc.  We verified because we called and they all rang to the same competitors.

So our thought was why not take the fight to them (so to speak) but with a branding and content strategy.  The company has many good content pieces that we can utilize, like company mottos, missions statements, special projects, community outreach that can be turned into microsites with unique content.

Our strategy idea is the take a company called "ACME Plumbing" and brand for specific keywords with locations like sacramentoplumberwarranty.com where the site's content revolves around plumber warranty info, measures of a good warranty, plumbing warranty news (newsworthy issues), blogs, RCS - you get the idea...and send both referral traffic and link to the main site.

The ideal is to then repeat the process with another company aspect like napaplumbingprojects.com where the content of the site is focused on cool projects, images, RCS, etc. Again, referring traffic and link juice to the main site.

We realize that this adds the amount of RCS that needs to be done, but that's exactly why we're here.  Also, any thoughts of intentionally tying in the brand to the location so you get urls like acmeplumbingsacarmento.com?

Sorry - guess I did not read your question correctly.  I believe the general rule of thumb is that it would be considered duplicate content.  I went through MOZ's youtube and it appears that they write original content for the video description and save the transcription for onsite only.  I currently do the same thing and have not noticed any penalties.  Hopefully this helps a little bit.

I feel that it is a big benefit. Essentially with popular plugins like Yoast's WordPress plugin, work by listing your website and not the youtube link. If you're looking to convert traffic on your website, why send users to youtube?

+1 to Chris.  I've had nothing but low value, spammy links.  In fact many of those spammy links were lost with the latest Google update and caused our rankings to drop. To find someone to manage that many different campaign keywords is going to be tough, especially over seas.  I find that they do not have access to the same resources like we have here at MOZ.

In fact most of the time I ended up providing the exact instructions for what I wanted to do.  Hopefully it doesn't come across poorly, but there seemed to be no independent thinking into the backlinking strategy either.  I mean there were no links built from industry leaders, trusted manufacturers, guest blogging opportunities, etc.  All just directory postings and profile builds on random websites.  And for a regional service provider (US based company), I feel that links built on websites outside of the US are not even relevant.

In my opinion the person you are looking for may need to be an in-house employee.  You can still use contractors to help on other parts of your project.  But  especially something like social media engagement, you may want to shy away from over seas developers.

All that being said and done - if it works, it works.  Best of luck in finding that special person - good help is hard to find!