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In my experience the links still count. The original article should contain a canonical URL which declares it as the original.

We have had several articles shared and the links show up in opensiteexplorer.

We're building a blog on a subdomain of the main site. The main site is on Shopify and the blog will be on wordpress.

I'd like to keep the user experience as simple as possible so I'd like to make the blog look exactly like the main Shopify site.

This means having a menu in the blog that duplicates the Shopify menu.

So is it bad for SEO to have someone click on the 'about us' button in the blog subdomain (blog.mainsite.com) which takes you to the 'about us page' on the main shopify website (mainsite.com)?

The ideal scenario would be to set the site up as a subfolder however they have a site which is based on shopify so we will be building a separate site/hosting on blog.domain.com.

Unless there's a way of using sub-folder that has different hosting to the main site?

I have a client who uses a .com for there website in Australia. Were now building an external blog which will be on a subdomain.

We recently discovered they also own the Australian version of there domain name.

Should we build there blog on:

1. blog.currentdomain.com

2) blog.newdomain.com.au

Thanks

Just want to get peoples idea on how the best way to measure the success of the best articles on a website/blog.

I'm looking at a few different options that can give each author a fair chance without being overlooked.

For instance if we just look at the most clicked on article then its not fair on articles published in months with slower traffic like January.

So should we measure the success by

a)most page visited after an article view

b)most clicked on article by month(this would be unfair for slower traffic months)

c)most shared via Social

d)article with most new visits

It would be great to get everyone's expert opinion on this.

Yes. the blog would be set up on am Aussie host.

It is a custom domain

Make sure you have a 'dofollow' link on your front page back to your Google Plus page.

Something like this : [Google+](https://plus.google.com/your id)

If you use Google adwords try adding it as an extension to your ad as this seemed to speed up the process for us.

We recently lost our G+ page so were essentially have the same problem as you.

I have a client who currently uses shopify for there blog. I want to set them up with a separate blog away from the shopify system and host it in Australia.

I know the best option is using a subfolder but as the shopify system is an unmoveable CMS can I somehow point my subdomain to a subfolder and get the benefits of the domain name?

I could do this by using the rewrite rule in the htaccess file.

If I was to do this would it end up cloaking the URL's of the articles?

The first thing is to start getting some regular traffic from your articles.

Start with evergreen content with titles such as ' the benefits of ...' or 'top tips for saving energy' or ' what to look out for in choosing solar panels'. All these kind of searches will start generating traffic and links naturally.

Once you have a good basis of evergreen content you can start to have more of a mix of news articles.

This would be articles based around seasonal events such as 'saving money on your energy over christmas'. Also look for anything coming up over legislation that you can write articles about to become an authority on solar panels.

Try and produce the articles using Google plus authorship to help with the ranking and again to help build up trust and authority. Post all articles to your google plus profile. Facebook also may help with some unique articles, polls and sponsored stories.

Does the company have any success stories where you could perhaps produce a video? Dont just think of content marketing as just content. It could include infographics, video and whitepapers.

Were just doing the same kind of thing with our own website.

Make sure you run the existing site through screaming frog and open site explorer. You want to make sure any incoming links are pointing to relevant pages within the new site. there are a number of plugins in wordpress to handle 301's but I usually start by adding them to the htaccess just because it keeps things a bit tidier.

Have you checked webmaster tools to make sure any broken links are addressed?

Also you'll need to add your Google analytics code to the new site. Maybe try Google tag manager if its a new site.

Were just about to redesign our site and put all the blogs over to the new site.

Previously most blogs have been added to the uncategorised section of the blog and I'm now weighing up the benefit of sifting through all the blogs and changing them to relevant categories.

From an SEO perspective would it be better to

1. Leave them in their current category but start afresh with all new blogs by adding them to relevant categories?

2. Work out which blogs should go in which new category and 301 all previous URL's to the new one.

Obviously number one will take a lot more time than number two.

I work for a content marketing company and the majority of our clients are large banks looking to get their message out there.

We're thinking of favouring writers with Google plus profiles and adding the rel=author tag so all the articles incorporate rich snippets and a profile image.

So this is more of a discussion into whether you think this would be beneficial to a large corporation.

I know it aids in search and authority but it would mean a company would have many faces and they usually have one.
Think of when a company makes a speech on TV its always 1 person designated as the company spokesperson.

Another way would be to write on behalf of somebody in the company and have there profile image but I can imaging this is frowned upon by Google.

What are your thoughts

I see what you mean they haven't even bothered with a meta-description. The keyword 'Everyday Money Credit Card' isn't that competitive though. The top 4 sites for that keyword have a page authority of 1 so its a low competitive keyword.
I can't imagine you'd have to do much link building to get a site ranking for that keyword.

Keywords that clients usually focus on are 'compare credit cards' and 'credit card calculator' and there nowhere for those keywords. moneyhound.com.au also have a redirect so it doesn't seem to make too much difference.

I can confirm that 70 of our sites were hit over the weekend. It started happening about Thursday of last week.

Some of the sites were number 1 for keywords and now they're off the chart.

But honestly, the sites were of low quality and we have been advising the client for some time about over optimisation so this comes as no surprise.

Other sites we deal with who also have EMD have been unaffected. There's a lot of pissed people out there after this one.

They could've at least named it after another back & white animal!

I think your best off starting with an SEOmoz crawl on your site. Then if you need any help with specific errors we can help you with that.

Your asking for a site audit which can take a lot more time than if you were to do a crawl and link with your Google analytics account.

I recently helped my niece with her school project which involved a series of videos that give different outcomes depending on the decisions you make.

This is the video: http://youtu.be/2GpRPFhbZA0

I think it was easier to spread the message as it does involve a serious issue about underage drinking.
We managed to get 950 views just on the first video and almost 3500 channel views.

I signed up for a Google alert for anything involving the term ' underage drinking ' . Once I had a list of sites I'd see if they suited the demographic of the video then left forum comments that were helpful about the article and left a link to the video. It may have been easier as the video isn't selling a product so people tend to be more likely to approve these kinds of comments.

I also made sure i added it to as many free bookmarking sites as possible

Maybe ditch your meta keywords. Bing will read them but Google may view this as keyword stuffing.
How old is your domain? this may be weighted more in Bing than in Google.

In the initial stages its more about site architecture. This would encompass things like a correct URL structure, easy navigable site content, the distance each page is from the home page.

Your best off initially doing as much as you can yourself as this will bring the final price down. Do you have a sitemap yet? This can be a list of the pages that you need on your site in the structure that you want them on your website. So home>services> or home>products.

You could also source images that you want on your site, again the designer wont have to purchase them.

You could also decide on your meta description for the home page and ideally every other page.

Set yourself up a gmail account and make sure you add your website to webmaster tools and analytics.

Setup your Google plus page and Facebook page.

If you do all of theses things your well on the way to bringing the final costs down and also learning a lot more about how you can maintain your own website.

You'll need to start thinking about a content marketing strategy so you can keep fresh content on your website.

The best thing is to look at previous examples of their work and also check the rankings of the site for a specific keyword.

Ask them what their preferred CMS is and why?

What is your post penguin strategy? They should reply with something about fresh content

What was your biggest SEO blunder and what did you learn from it?

What is your best SEO win?

How long have you been in the industry?

Were about to embark on an SEO project for a franchise business with about 150 franchises.

Would it be best to give all of the franchises individual domain names or house them under the one domain?

If they were on the same domain would it be worth setting them up with sub domains or with a URL so city.mydomain.com vs mydomain.com/city

Thanks

Does anybody else have any input it turns out the title tag visitors was the accurate one and the URL was very wrong.

There seems to be a lot of unanswered questions on these forums at the moment.

This will be seen as duplicate content and will halve the benefits of any pages.

Parked domains generally just point to one site so all you've done is create two identical sites in Googles eyes.

Why would you submit two identical sitemaps? You could declare within the htaccess file which is the original content but again your making things complicated when you link build as you dont want to double the work needed to get your site ranking benefits.

Hi folks,

Just wondering if anyone has any ideas as to why im getting different results in Google analytics.

I'm using the Content Efficiency Analysis Report from http://www.kaushik.net which is absolutely awesome.

When I search via my title tag I get 920 Unique Visitors over the month but when I search via the landing page URL with the same title tag I get 28.

Any ideas to why their should be such a difference.

I've also noticed that on that page i'm also getting a Rel Cononical TRUE using a site crawl.

Any ideas are much appreciated

Hi, It does sound like a similar problem to a client of mine.

We submitted all their dodgy backlink sites to Google webmaster tools but there's no way of contacting Google to see when these sites will be de-indexed.

Have you tried posting within the webmaster tools forum?

I also noticed your still using meta keywords, although this isn't harming your site, it could be perceived as Keyword stuffing.

Just wondering what the best practise is for unique meta desriptions on blogs.

When I post a blog on my wordpress, clicking the title takes you to an individual page with that blog on it.

I understand how important the title tag is on this page but when I create a meta description:

a) is it useful?

b) Should it be unique or is it ok to copy part of the post and insert that as the meta tag?

Thanks

I'm posting articles to my e-commerce site and just wondering about the anchor text links within the posts.

I don't have relevant static pages but the items do come up in a search query.

For example i don't have a specific page for red wine but if a user searched for red wine it would give a search query URL.

Should I use that search URL query as my anchor text?

Great news. Did you have to do any 301 redirects? I'm presuming as long as I keep the file structures the same this is not necessary.

I use SEO site tools extension for chrome. This allows you to easily see their meta description and keywords. Same as looking in their header tag just a bit quicker.

SEO book have a keyword analyser. http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/

They should be ranking high for their most mentioned keywords if their doing things correctly.

Were moving our site from a UK server to an Australian server to benefit from hosting our site in our home country.

The domain name is the same, the template and files are all the same so will we lose rankings at all when the website is moved?

I plan on leaving the old website up there until the new website is cached.

What considerations should we think of before we migrate?

Cheers

With posting to multiple article sites, just make sure you post under the same author name. That way you wont be viewed as duplicating content.

The effectiveness of this kind of linking isn't that great though, your better off putting great content on your own site and making sure its shareable on sites like Google plus and Facebook.

Is their any way on your site of adding articles to a page that then pulls in the items you have for sale based on the article? That way at least you would have a relevant landing pages for linking to.

We deal with about 200 clients for a series of websites. We create a number of articles articles per site per month.

A company we used to do link building for the websites it turns out were doing a lot of spinning which has been hard hit by the new penguin update.

I'm actually really happy about it as it means we can now do some legitimate SEO on their sites.

Any ideas of what the best strategy would be for this amount of sites which we are already creating shareable content for?

Just had at look at my notes from when I did my research.

Quantcast seemed good, as did Kissmetric. They all seem to allow free trials.

I had the same question myself a while back and after looking through a lot of alternatives I settled with Clicky.

You need to make sure if its a client they will allow you to add some code to the header of each page on the site.

However the only reason I settled with it was the price and the fact they allow you to white label the reports for your own company. There are a lot of alternatives so its down to price vs features

I also like to add my URL that I've added content to to web 2.0 sites like digg.

Our site has 500 rel canonical issues.

This is the way i understand the issues.

All our blog posts automatically include a rel=canonical to themselves.
eg a blog about content marketing has:

Should this tag point to one of the main pages instead so the link juice is sent back to our home page?

The report they sent through is actually broken down into the article name and then a list of the sites they posted it to.

The links aren't generated naturally through sharing.

Everything I've read says this is bad SEO as its duplicate content across multiple sites.

Its not spun, that's the only good thing going for it!

I've had a link build report of all the links an SEO company have got us but a simple search for some of the content in Google with phrase match brings up about 3 pages of the same content posted to different article sites.

I think it is doing something but will it just be penalised over time?

I'm just starting out doing SEO as a main role. Im going to be the only person there who knows anything about SEO.
Without a team of SEO dudes to ask questions too, SEOmoz is ideal.

If I were you I'd ask as many questions as possible as this will easily justify the payout for membership.

Hi Community,
Im planning on creating an article each month centred around 1 keyword.
Is it best to post this to the same site. eg http://ezinearticles.com/ every month or should I try to post it to a mixture of different sites?

I'm trying to rank a site higher for their chosen keyword by gaining links from anchor text within each article I create.