Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Fuel Interactive --

To answer your specific question, I would use the meta (noindex, follow) tag instead of the canonical. It doesn't pass authority, but it is the correct usage. It will strike the page from ranking consideration, and allow the overall course page to have less competition.

Another question for you: is the article listing page already ranking higher than the overall course page, or is this a worry? If it's a worry, I recommend testing it out first so you don't prematurely optimize. Just a thought.

Hope that helps -- Andrew

Hey Mark,

• Your old URL might drop in ranking b/c it lose an internal link; it depends on how many links (both internal/external) it currently has. If it has a lot, the loss of an internal link may not matter that much.
• The new URL should rise in ranking for green shoes. There's no guarantee it will rise to replace your old URL. It depends on its link profile, competition, and on-page SEO.

Here are some additional thoughts on strategy:

• If you can, maybe ADD the new link instead of REPLACING the old link. Then you won't lose the internal link.
• I'd test it out for a week by making the proposed changes. If you don't like the changes, revert the menu.

Hope that helps.

-- Andrew

Not to mention time-of-implementation. I agree, SEO is very much is a balancing act.

You could embellish the content (add to make it 300 words) to warrant its own page. Then the question is: is it worth my time?

Best of luck!

Hey Tim,

I agree with your strategy.

There should be little reason why the same content would change in ranking. If the text, the internal linking, the # of pages are the same, the url's... the spiders shouldn't be bothered much.

I also think changing a few pages at a time is the strategic thing to do.

--Andrew

Hey cjkimber,

That's actually a common dilemma. Many sites prefer to "meta no-index" your tag pages, to remove those tags from consideration in ranking. That way your primary page (and all others) will rank higher than the tags.

The easy way to do that is to download the Yoast SEO plugin for Wordpress. In the plugin, you can noindex the content by clicking:

SEO (sidebar) > Title & Metas (sidebar) > Taxonomies (tab) > Tags > {Select "noindex, follow"}

There are a lot of other tools that will help you out w/ other parts of your SEO in the plugin.

Does that answer your question?

-- Andrew

Hey Mark_Ch,

One more question--what's your plan with the old URL's? e.g. /green-shoes adn /sports-shoes?

Andrew

No problem, Wayne. Hope that helps.

Nope, but thanks! That was a hypothetical I created. I'm part of an in-house SEO team for an San Diego online printing service. If you have a spare "online printing" link, that's a different story...

Hey Wayne,

I prefer relevance over proximity much more.

When I think about keywords I want to rank for (e.g. a local dry cleaner), I think "dry cleaning" first (keyword relevance), "Los Angeles" next (local). I would rather Google know that I am a "dry cleaner" than "Los Angeles"; it pins your website higher up for the business type.

-- Andrew

My recommendation is that you give each article its own page and unique link. It may take some doing, but here's why you should:

• Having its own page gives each article a chance to rank
• The aggregate's page keeps changing, so its rankings will constantly be changing as its keyword makeup changes

Article feeds ought to be structured like Wordpress homepages:

• With

Like I said; it's not the 'easy' answer, but it conforms to best SEO practices.

Hope that helps! -- Andrew

Morning, BobGW,

It depends on the purpose of your question:

• If your question is: will these links help? Yes, they'll help if the links aren't spammy. They may even help you tap into new audiences, keywords, and referrals.
• If your question is: are these links worth your time/money? That depends on your parameters. If it's cheap for you to experiment, experiment. If it's NOT cheap for you to experiment, then it depends on your risk tolerance level. I'd recommend you go for it; you should try to explore the possibility of what those keywords do for your site.

Hope that answers your question!

--Andrew

Hey Martyn —

A few questions:

• Do you know how have your rankings changed?
• How have your competitors' rankings changed?
• Which of your top keywords lost a lot of impressions?
• Both might help you isolate the issue.

I would check how your rankings have changed, and check that your backlink profile hasn't accumulated anything fishy.

— Andrew

@Ronyon - I second the @wesleysmits recommendation to prioritize products with key business value.

To address some of your points:

1. "Do I go with brand by brand? Do I go with products with good margin?".

• Go for the products that bring in the most profits for the company**.** Margins aren't exactly the key point. It's the real dollars coming in. If you have a product bringing in an incredible amount of money, your minor improvements will have magnified results. Example: Let's say the top product the site sells (out of 4k items) brings in $10k profit/mo. If you are able to improve sales on that single product (i.e. you ONLY do SEO + conversion improvements on that product), and you're able to boost sales by 50%, you're bringing $5k/mo more. That's $60k/yr. BY ONLY OPTIMIZING ONE PRODUCT.
• Go for products that are easiest to sell. If you have a products already bringing in a lot of organic search traffic, @egol is absolutely right. Improving the hook-i-ness of the title and creating the perfect description will have great impact. And it's EASY! If you have 100 visitors/day through organic search on just one product page, and you're able to improve the Click Through Rate by 10%, you've brought in 10 additional visits a day. Furthermore, if you can improve the product graphic or copy on the page, you might be able to boost conversion rates on that product. That's an additional sale every week or two. For an hour or two of work, not bad!
• It's OK to work on things one at a time. But you have to choose your battles. Make sure you're going to make an impact.

Here's another tip. Without knowing the big picture, it sounds like you need help w/ just the labor of the thing IF that's the case, then **make the case to the bean-counters that your work generates profits. If you had more help (hire another SEO), you'd be able to generate profits faster. Then you can also be a manager. **How?

• Create a before/after report of your work using Webmasters/Analytics.
• Take a snapshot of how the website is performing (Traffic per product page, CTR's, Conversion Rates, Bounce Rates, ranks for all the product pages)
• Do your SEO magic
• Go to your manager and say "Check out what I did. As a result of what I did in the past 3 months (for example), I'm bringing in $3.5k/mo extra for the next year. That justifies hiring a link-builder to help me out!"

This tip isn't just from me. There's a big tome of a book--The Art of SEO; co-authored by randfish--that spends Chapter 13 talking about "Building an in-house SEO team" (among other things). A great deal of that section talks about why it's so important to get buy-in from the organization.

SEO is a profit center. Management would love to make more money, faster. Give them a few good-looking charts, and get some help!

Hey Matt —

I have a couple of questions:

• How competitive are the keywords you're interested in winning? (Are these battles you can reasonably win?)
• What's your objective for ranking? Blog followers? Converting for leads? (SEO is largely text-based; are you better off solving your business objectives in other ways?)
• Do you alt-text your photos? (Have you attracting attention via Google image search?)

I doubt that noindexing the posts would help you out—I don't think you're penalized for having pages that are thin on content (they're just less SEO friendly). I would leave them indexed; then also figure out how to beef up your category page design to rank better.

— Andrew

Hey Ronyon --

I just wanted to check that you have the fundamental stuff (low-hanging fruit) taken care of:

• Fix on-page errors (e.g. unique titles, meta descriptions, everything is correct length)
• Subscribe to various useful tools (e.g. Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, Moz, etc.)
• Submit to a few directories (this is a useful tool: https://getlisted.org/)

From there, you have to figure out where you can build your links from.

Quick question -- what's your approximate budget range? And do you have an existing customer base or are you starting out?

-- Andrew

Hey Primocards,

There are a couple of factors here:

• The "on-page grade" you got was from Moz's crawler, and they're very specific about exact matches. On the other hand, Google's crawler tends to be more loose. Moz doesn't futz around w/ variations with punctuation, plurals, etc. And yet Google will know that "men's" and "mens" are fairly similar.
• I have noticed that Google does have different rankings for slightly different permutations, e.g. "printing company" vs "printing companies" can lead to a local (with local packs) versus a national search (no local packs)
• Then there's the grammar. I'd say that "men's" is the more accurate, and that may have a small (IMO, the effect is probably very small) impact

tl;dr; change it if you can, otherwise, don't worry about it. If you just want to improve the usability your Moz reports, just change the keyword you're grading from "men's" to "mens".

@rephael - It will only do a small amount for your home page. Nonetheless, you should do it!

Here is why the impact will be small

There are a couple layers that you should pay attention to:

• Page-level

• EXAMPLE: www.example.com/products/apples VERSUS www.example.com/products/bananas

• IMPACT: The keywords MOST STRONGLY affect the particular page that you are on

• WHY: The keywords specify what's on the page you're on. This is the "room" you're in.

• Subdomain-level

• EXAMPLE: kipjacksnauticalliving.blogspot.com VERSUS blogspot.com (notice how they're very different web sites?)

• IMPACT: The keywords LOOSELY affect the particular page you're on

• WHY: The subdomain is the site that you're currently in. This is like the "house" you're in. This gives Google clues about what your entire website is about.

• **This is what you're asking about in. **

• Domain-level

• Don't worry about this. It's not really relevant

Here is why you should still do it

• The more keywords you place on all your web pages, the more information Google's crawler will have
• The more Google's crawler knows about your website, the more confidence it will have to rank you for targeted keywords
• This is just one piece of the SEO work that you need to do -- part of the basic steps.
• However, it won't lift your rankings. The way I think about it is that it will simply make it a stronger candidate for the keywords when you start getting links from other subdomains with the same keywords.

Richard --

How about a hybrid solution?:

• Post exclusively on YouTube
• Embed YouTube video on your web page
• Add social media voting mechanisms on the web page

Benefits

• Key Benefit: Google SERP's promote YouTube videos most heavily, (e.g. "how to use microsoft pro charm bar")
• YouTube takes the bandwidth
• Searchable on YouTube
• Still gives you a linkable web page

Unless there's another reason that you want this video stored exclusively on your servers, or if you have advanced video playing features that you want to make available to your users, I think YouTube is the way to go.

--Andrew

Hey rosswhistler,

There is a filter right above the table, where you can select "Show <all>". You can change <all>to <only follow="">.</only></all></all>

I like to keep a tab on all links (just so I know the scope of my reach), but you're right--I'd focus much harder on the follow links.

— Andrew

Hey Dan --

I agree with Chiaryn's suggestion to export reports.

Another possibility is to create a different email account/password combination just for Moz—that way your employee gets access to Moz without access to other services.

It's a workaround, but it's how we do it at our shop. We have an email for the SEO group, for the Moz group, etc.

--Andrew

I agree w/ @kevinb. Google & Bing track results like high user engagement, low bounce rates, etc. Check out the infographic below.

If these articles aren't useful to users, Google will notice.

graph-future-of-search.png