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I'm going to try to turn you around, because you're going down the wrong road. It's a bit of a read, but stick with me.

Stop thinking about sculpting your internal links, and start thinking about how to create a user friendly navigation. Your SEO and conversions will flow from there. Let's pretend you're in the home services category and you install and replace floors. The services you provide are repair, installation, and replacement of tile, wood, and vinyl floors. You'll want to have a homepage that allows users to navigate to pages that describes the services you provide and the products you offer. So your top navigation could have a menu that looks something like this:

Tile Floors
-Tile Floor Repair
-Tile Floor Installation
-Tile Floor Replacement

Wood Floors
-Wood Floor Repair
-Wood Floor Installation
-Wood Floor Replacement

Vinyl Floors
-Vinyl Floor Repair
-Vinyl Floor Installation
-Vinyl Floor Replacement

Now you've got at least ten pages that you can start to write content for, and each of them is easily accessible. If you have pages that you consider important to your users and your business objectives, best practice is to make them easily accessible from the homepage in your main navigation, and to make them accessible from related pages as well. In keeping with the home services theme, something you may consider a "non important page" could be your legal disclaimers. It's important alright, but not necessarily for the majority of your users. It's acceptable to link to content like that in the footer.

The reason I'm trying to direct you to think about the way users interact with your site is because that's the way Google has designed their algorithm to work. Since users interact with the footer much less than body content, Google has tagged links in the footer, and those links pass less PageRank. If you spend your time trying to game the system, you'll ultimately lose, whereas if you focus on your users, you'll ultimately win. To go back to our main navigation example for our flooring company, if I followed your strategy I might place content in confusing places, moving my "tile floor repair" page to the footer or a sidebar where users can't find it and Google devalues.

So focus on the users and the PageRank will follow. Good Luck!

Hi Steven,

DMOZ and other sites like it are either gone or are nearly ghosts. This is relatable to the conversation on machine learning, where one group believes you can program AI to learn and another (smaller) group believes you have to program all human knowledge into an AI manually to create a true artificial intelligence. Machine learning works, it's efficient, and widely adopted by the rest of humanity. The other approach - one that requires a lot of endless heavy labor - has died off for obvious efficiency reasons (and it doesn't work).

DMOZ was owned by AOL, which was recently purchased by Verizon. I've no doubt Verizon pulled the plug because it was resources spent on a dinosaur that has no value. It was a precursor to modern search engines, but I don't think anyone was using it for its intended original design.

Truth of the matter is, companies that don't invest in machine learning when a competitor in their industry is are going to the grave. You just can't compete with that level of efficiency with human hands.

This isn't the answer you want to hear, but I don't believe there is a way to do this. There is a way to see search traffic coming from different Google properties by removing Google as a search engine in Google Analytics. All traffic from different Google properties then shows up as referral traffic (so for example, I'd get to see traffic coming from images.google.com and traffic from google.fr, instead of everything showing up as Google/Organic).

But SERP features exist on google.com, meaning this is something that won't show up under sources because whether traffic clicks through on the SERP feature or your link, it's still coming from Google/Organic, and altering your settings so it shows up as referral it would still show up as traffic from google.com. Thinking about the way analytics collects data I don't think there's a way for us to determine a click through from a SERP feature unless Google provides that specificity.

If you find any information to the contrary, please share it here, because I'd love to dive into this myself if it's available!

I think Robert covers it pretty well. I would just add that it will probably be easier for you to rank for the long tail terms like "frosted jelly donut" as well if you're already ranking for "donut" if you've developed a logical hierarchy in your site architecture. When ranking for donuts, creating your sub categories or internal pages linked from your page that's ranking will pass along more authority to those pages targeting long tail terms.

That said I agree with Robert's assessment that assigning your time half and half is a good strategy if you have the resources to do so without becoming stretched too thin.

There are some very good articles, courses, and recommended strategies/tactics out there that answer this question more elegantly and thoroughly than I think most people can provide in a forum response.

A course with helpful backlink building tactics: https://ahrefs.com/blogging-course

An awesome article from the wizard: https://moz.com/blog/link-building-tactics-to-acquire-50-links

And my personal recommendation: focus on the content first. Ask yourself honestly, is this content even worth linking to? Would I link to this content if I owned another website? Who would even be willing to link to my website? Answering these questions might help point you in the right direction. For example, if you're a foodie blogger, there are a ton of groups out there on Facebook and other social media sites where you can network with other foodie bloggers and they often will link to each other's recipes and culinary crusades. On the other hand, a lawn care business is better off focusing on his local chamber of commerce and guest blogging for B2B golf course sites or garden blogs. Some niches are easier than others, but make sure you're fishing at the right hole.

Best of luck!

Have you considered using tag manager to quickly tag events such as button clicks? The other option I see in common use is to just set a goal to activate on a page view of the thank-you or confirmation page (destination URL). If you don't know what that is, you can't find it in your CMS, and no one can tell you, I would take the time to find out by following the funnel to completion. That's going to be the easiest path for you.

Once you've got the basic stuff down, you'll probably be asked to do all sorts of other tracking. My favorite one for ecommerce is whale hunting. You segment your data so that you only look at the people that spend above a certain amount on your site and compare their activity to the people who aren't spending a lot and to the people who aren't spending at all. Your client will love you for that one.

Hey Nikki, I think your specific question is more centered on "Will having a website that is only fully enabled with Javascript be harmful to SEO?"

First, there's a lot of mythology about this in SEO land. There are outdated resources and it looks like you've read some of them. Google has advanced their ability to crawl and understand js and the content behind it to a very advanced degree and the tools you may use as proxies to understand Google's capabilities aren't so effective.

But before I move on, I want to verify something with you. When you're talking about javascript, are you specifically looking for answers regarding a website like WIX, built with AJAX? Because that can change my answer significantly.

Hi barryhq, Google has in the past called the top three components of their algorithm Content, Links, and RankBrain, without naming a particular order. It sounds like you've worked hard on links, so good job! Your problem is therefore potentially related to content (ignore RankBrain, you can't really optimize for it).

So let's talk about content. When you do your keyword research, try to focus in on the searcher's intent. What tasks are they possibly trying to solve that Google is surfacing that aren't addressed on your webpage? You can learn this by studying other top results, related searches, people also ask, etc. For example, if one of the keywords you have is "best running shoes" then you know people are doing comparison shopping and including content that compares the top running shoes on your page will help you rank for that. And it's entirely possible that you'll discover in this process that your website is not a suitable match for the keywords you've targeted. I've seen this happen with clients who pick a phrase without doing the research required to make an informed decision and end up targeting something they can never rank for.

It's also possible that you have technical SEO issues, like canonicalization or poor internal link structure or cannibalization that's making it harder to rank, but assuming that your technical SEO game is on point I would recommend focusing on content.

This is more an SEM than an SEO question. I think I can help but I have a couple of questions first.

1. Do you have multiple campaigns running for multiple domains/accounts? 
2. Where ad platform are you remarketing on? 
3. Are you familiar with Google Tag Manager and would you be interested in setting up cross domain tracking? 
4. What's your level of familiarity with remarketing and ppc in general?

No problem! One more thing that caught my eye. You need a native speaker to reword your English page. Some of the sentences don't translate very well, and apart from killing your conversion rates it's also a bad look for your SEO.

Best of luck, looks like you're offering a cool service!

Thanks for the response Nikki, I'll try to be as thoughtful about this as I can, but I am somewhat skeptical that your problem is javascript. It may be a contributing factor, but in general the concern that most SEOs would have with java is that Google can't crawl it and effectively the content rendered by java is invisible, making it completely impossible to rank as your page is deindexed, and yeah, this is a real risk. The fact that you're on page 1 right now for a competitive term though means that isn't likely your issue. And you're on a Wordpress site, so most of the js issues aren't going to be a problem for you, unless you're using an Angular integrated theme or something.

That doesn't mean there aren't any technical issues holding you back. I ran your page through a couple tools and I'm finding that the page is very heavy, slow to load, and has a very low performance score in terms of page load times and part of that is how js heavy your webpage is. I would recommend running your page through any of the free tools out there. The lighthouse extension for Chrome isn't great, but it was developed by Google so it gives you an idea how they might be measuring your page. Your page scored a performance rating of 4 out of 100, which again, big indication you have speed problems related to your js that could be tied to your rankings.

I think you're on the right track to investigate technical performance issues, but the easiest way to track this down is to start by making sure you don't have content that isn't being indexed. From there you should be able to see if there's any js that's blocking content from rendering for Googlebot. If Google is crawling and indexing the content, your js is okay from a visibility perspective and you can focus on the performance aspect.

If Google is displaying the page completely with fetch and render, you're probably okay, but try going into Chrome Dev Tools and disabling the cache, then reloading the page. Watch for any errors and try running lighthouse with that open. You'll probably be able to catch errors that way.

Good luck!

Hi there, I think your specific question is, will embedding power points into the website hurt their site or help it? I'm going to try to break this down for you.

If the slides are indexable one of two things will happen:1. Rankings go up for new, related terms that you either weren't ranking for before or were ranking poorly for
2. The powerpoint cannibalizes rankings for the other pages that were previously built out

I'm going to assume you know how to track for this since it's pretty straightforward.

If the slides are not indexable then there should be no reason it would negatively impact rankings. It's essentially invisible to Google.

SlideShare slides can be crawled and indexed. I would expect that to be the default behavior unless you find documentation that shows otherwise. If you don't want it indexed, embed on a page and mark that page noindex.

Let me know if that helps!

Canonicals are not absolute directives, so Google will eventually sort out which of the two signals is more important. My guess is that the redirect takes precedence, because if they displayed the canonical to a user in search, it would be displaying a URL that sends users through a redirect which is a poor experience and they take pains not to do that.

When there are confusing signals like this out there, Google will do its best to sort out these issues and John Mueller has repeatedly stated "we do a pretty good job" at figuring it out, but he almost always adds a disclaimer that it's "better" to have a less confusing structure.

In plain english, it's not a catastrophic error, but it's something you need to clean up as part of your optimization efforts.