Questions created by alecfwilson
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Is it ok to correct someone who spelled and styled our name incorrectly in a blog post?
A writer recently recommended my company, Swiftype, in a blog post. However, he called us Swift Type, which adds an additional t, splits our name into two words, and uses an additional capitalization. Would it be out of line to email him and gently correct him? I appreciate the recommendation, and will absolutely focus on thanking him for that, complimenting his content (which is fairly good), and just add the correction at the end of the email. While it isn't a huge deal, a search Swift Type brings up the Swift programming language and SwiftKey as first page results, while Swiftype only displays our content (he also didn't link to us, so a user would have to search to find us - reaching out could also be a chance to spur him to link to us).
Branding | | alecfwilson0 -
Glossary pages - keyword stuffing danger?
I've put together a glossary of terms related to my industry that have SEO value and am planning on building out a section on our site with unique pages for each term. However, most of these terms have synonyms or are highly similar to other valuable terms. If I were to make a glossary, and on each page (that will have high-quality, valuable, and accurate definitions and more), wrote something like "{term}, also commonly referred to as {synonym}, {synonym}," would I run the risk of keyword stuffing penalties? My only other idea beyond creating a glossary with separate pages defining each synonym is to use schema.org markup to add synonyms to the HTML of the page, but that could be seen as even more grey-hat type keyword stuffing. I guess one other option would be to work the synonyms into the definition so that the presence of the keyword reads more organically. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | alecfwilson0 -
Looking at acquiring a competitor with a high organic ranking (WordPress Plugin)
I'm looking at acquiring a competitor who operates a WordPress plugin with the same function as mine (although ours is much better - they used this plugin to acquire leads for other software). We're trying to determine the best way to execute it. They are the number 1 result on a very high value search, and the number 3 on another (which appears to the source of all their customer acquisition, they are simply a very well named, long existing WordPress plugin, and so haven't had to fight much to keep their ranking). Ideally, we'd be able to take over that ranking, but I'm not sure if that is possible. For one thing, they don't have a website beyond the WordPress plugin, so even if we wanted to, we couldn't 301 redirect it (as far as I know). Second, wouldn't a 301 redirect likely result in entirely losing the ranking? We are actually highly relevant to anyone who ends up at this plugin (the owner has actually been recommending us and contacted us because his customers who have left have had a good experience), and wouldn't be redirecting it to piggyback on the link juice, we'd be trying to acquire the customers that have been discovering this plugin organically. I understand why Google defaults to policies making purchasing high ranking domains not very valuable. However, it seems like if you've built a company that derives a high volume of its leads (and thus acquisition value) from organic search, that there would be a way for a company in the same space to acquire at least the rankings, if not the link juice. Hopefully that was clear, if not, let me know where I lost you, and I'll attempt to clarify. Thanks!
SERP Trends | | alecfwilson0 -
For URLs that require login, should our redirect be 301 or 302?
We have a login required section of our website that is being crawled and reporting as potential issues in Webmaster Tools. I'm not sure what the best solution to this is - is it to make URLs requiring a login noindex/nocrawl? Right now, we have them 302 redirecting to the login page, since it's a temporary redirect, it seems like it isn't the right solution. Is a 301 better?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alecfwilson0