Thanks! Would we be losing any value by discarding a URL that has been live for multiple years? I've heard that the age of a URL (not a domain) can help a page rank, but I'm not sure I believe that.
Posts made by CMC-SD
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RE: How much juice do you lose in a 301 redirect?
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How much juice do you lose in a 301 redirect?
Our site has a number of, shall we say, unoptimized URLs. I would like to change the URLs to be more relevant; if a page is about red widgets, the URL should be www.domain.com/red-widgets.html, right? I'm getting resistance on this, however, based on the belief that you lose something significant when you 301 an old URL to a new one.
Now, I know that if you have a long chain of redirects, the spiders will stop following at some point, and that is a huge problem. That wouldn't apply if there's only one step in the chain, however. I've also heard that you lose some link juice in a 301, but I'm unsure how serious that problem actually is. Is it small enough that we'd win out in the long run with better-optimized URLs?
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RE: Rel=author: Which Google+ profile do I use (personal profiles or profiles set up under company email domain)?
I think it's possible that the company would "lose out," but that's not necessarily the case.
If I have successfully convinced the algorithm that I am an expert on widget maintenance, my articles about widget maintenance will get a rankings boost. Then I leave the widget-maintenance industry. The algorithm still believes that I'm an expert in that niche ... for a while, at least. It's quite likely that the algorithm's confidence in my expertise will decay over time if I no longer engage with that niche. My AuthorRank may drop, and the content I authored may no longer get the AR rankings boost. How far the content would fall in the SERPs depends on how much it was relying on that one ranking factor.
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RE: Rel=author: Which Google+ profile do I use (personal profiles or profiles set up under company email domain)?
I don't see why an account tied to a particular e-mail address would have an advantage in establishing AuthorRank. But keep in mind, we're all still guessing here.
G+ does have a one-account-per-person rule. I have no idea how much they enforce it. Considering how aggressively they enforce the no-pseudonym rule, I would guess that they take all of their rules pretty seriously.
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RE: Guidelines to Give to My Copywriter
Your copywriter's first priority should be writing content that converts. That means it needs to be informative, appealing, full of benefits, all that good stuff. That's the hard part. Including a few keyword variations is the easy part.
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RE: Is Google now ignoring title tags?
A change to the way Google displays the title doesn't necessarily mean Google has changed the way it reads title tags and uses them to establish relevancy.
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RE: Rel=author: Which Google+ profile do I use (personal profiles or profiles set up under company email domain)?
I think the terminology here may be a bit muddled.
AuthorRank is not something you "set up on your blog." It's a ranking factor that Google has patented and may be implementing some time soon. The thing you set up on your blog is the rel=author markup.
I'm not correcting you to be pedantic, but because it's important that you understand what AuthorRank actually is so you can make the best decision. AuthorRank is basically the answer to the question "How much should I trust what this author has to say about this subject?" Google will determine that based on your social profile on Google+. If you want Google to think you're a trustworthy expert on widgets, you need to engage with other widget enthusiasts and widget experts on Google+, and they need to engage with you.
You can use rel=author to connect your content to an inactive Google+ profile, and that will give you a pretty picture on the SERP and maybe help with CTR, but it will not help with AuthorRank. AuthorRank will only come from an active Google+ profile.
I'm not sure if it's a good idea or a bad idea to keep a personal G+ account and a professional G+ account. On the one hand, if all you use your professional G+ account for is engaging in your niche, that could be a strong sign that you're really into that subject. On the other hand, if your professional G+ account never has any off-topic, personal activity, that could ping Google as inauthentic.
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RE: Is Google now ignoring title tags?
I'm not sure the title-rewriting is a bad thing. The title is being rewritten to highlight the KW used in the search -- isn't that good?
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RE: India and Link Building
This is definitely not 'great linkbuilding." It's spammy linkbuilding. Now, as the other commenters noted, spammy linkbuilding still works to some extent. The question is, how much is it working? Will it work at all by the end of the year? Given its limited benefit and the high likelihood that it will soon have no benefit whatsoever, is this the best use of your client's resources?
I'm a new in-house SEO at a company that has been doing something similar for years. It's still working, so we haven't stopped it yet. But I'm working on transitioning to the content-marketing model, so we'll survive the inevitable Penguin update that tanks it all. So educate your client about how outdated and spammy that kind of linkbuilding is, and make sure they understand that it's just a matter of time before it stops working. If they want to keep doing it for now, that's their choice. But they cannot afford to only do it. They also need to start a solid content-marketing plan ... and if they don't think they can execute a solid content-marketing plan, they need to think about shifting resources to other inbound marketing tactics like PPC.
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RE: Comparing our traffic to competitors -- tools?
We use SEMrush to get a general idea. They project search engine traffic based on KW volume and position. The numbers are wrong, but the proportions are usually close; e.g., they think we had 20k visitors in March and 10k visitors in April, and we actually had 40k visitors in March and 20k visitors in April. It will get you in the right order of magnitude, at least.
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RE: Text within a Div Crawlable?
Every website created after, I dunno, let's say 2000 uses divs. View source on any page on the internet and ctrl+f for it. Divs are how you separate blocks of content so they can be arranged and styled. The spiders would be pretty bored if they skipped over all the pages with divs.
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RE: Sub Domain vs New Domain
Can you say more about this? Our web guy also wants the blogs on subdomains for security reasons.
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RE: Is it wise for employees to be tied to a company's content with rel=author?
I assume rel=publisher doesn't give you the pretty headshot on the SERP?
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RE: Is it wise for employees to be tied to a company's content with rel=author?
It's really not about "lazy," in my opinion. It's about time and skill. When the boss is managing the company for 80 hours a week, and isn't a talented writer, the boss has someone else write. (I say this as the writer, not the boss.)
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RE: Is it wise for employees to be tied to a company's content with rel=author?
Brian, that's a really good point. When they leave, they can disown the authorship if they want to. Which could conceivably happen if they leave to start their own company or go work for a competitor.
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Is it wise for employees to be tied to a company's content with rel=author?
We're an e-commerce company that sells consumer goods. We are launching a blog that will have advice, tips, etc. on topics related to our industry. I'd like for us to implement rel=author on the content. If we rel=author the content to an employee, what are the possible repercussions if that employee leaves the company? I know the markup is pretty new and hasn't been widely implemented, but has anyone dealt with this?
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RE: Similar Sites on Same Class C
As far as I know, the Class C issue is only relevant for linking. It's widely suspected that links from domains on the same Class C IP are less valued, since that's a good indicator of a "fake" link (i.e. a backlink that the site owner created, rather than a true editorial backlink).
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RE: How does badly formatted HTML affect SEO?
The main concern is whether or not the spider can read the HTML. If something's broken, the spider may get confused. It's a good idea to check the site's W3C compliance and correct what you can, but I'm certain the search engines don't ding you if you're not perfectly compliant.
The real problems with bad HTML are load times and cross-browser compatibility. (Although, frankly, great HTML can have cross-browser compatibility issues, since IE still refuses to get with the program.) Make sure the site looks good in all major browsers.
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Ghostwriting, blogging, and rel=author
Do you think it's unethical to use ghostwriting on a company's blog? Specifically, I mean hiring a writer to create content for the blog, and then publishing the content under, say, the CEO's name and using rel=author to tie it to the CEO's social identity. Does that undermine the whole idea of AuthorRank? Is it gaming the system?
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RE: Link to Articles for news sites in Google SERPs
I see news stories rather than sitelinks for CNN.
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RE: Should I remove links from my internal blog?
Are these blogs actually intended to provide useful, interesting, amusing content to web surfers? Or do they exist purely to pass pagerank?
If it's the former, I have a hard time believing that readers will trust the information if it looks spammy (and 3-5 exact match KW links per post looks spammy). So the strategy probably wouldn't work for that reason.
If it's the latter, it's trivially easy for Google to figure out that you're running an incestuous little blog network to move pagerank around. That's not the sort of thing they want to reward. Meaning they've already figured out how to devalue those links, or they will soon. So the strategy either isn't working now or will stop working soon.
In either case, your questions are about rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
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RE: Purpose of a Blog in a website
To expand on #2, people are more likely to share and link to content that is informative, amusing, and interesting. If your website is, say, an e-commerce website for plungers, it may be difficult to have informative, amusing, interesting content on the main part of your website. A blog is a great place for "linkbait," content that is created to attract attention and be shared. So a plunger shop's blog might have a post about the 8 most hilarious toilet explosions in history. As people link to this post, this builds the domain authority. Also, if you have links to your homepage, category pages, and even product pages in the post, pagerank will trickle there, too.
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RE: Internet Explorer and Chrome showing different SERP's
Yeah, I didn't figure that out for a while, either.
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RE: Internet Explorer and Chrome showing different SERP's
Search results are personalized even when you're logged out, based on your search history in that browser. You can turn that off, though.
http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=54048
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RE: I was googling the word "best web hosting" and i notice the 1st and 3rd result were results with google plus. Does Google plus now play a role in improving ranking for the website?
The two results you're referring to, the ones with people's names and photos next to them, are blog posts where people have used the rel=author markup to link their blog to their Google+ profile. That can influence rankings. I don't think anyone is sure how much influence we're talking about; part of the problem is that the people adopting this new markup are probably already doing good basic SEO stuff, so correlation and causation can get mixed up. In any case, it's likely that this author markup will become more influential in the future, so adopting it now is a no-brainer.
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RE: Whats the quickest way to measure inbound linkes to an inner page?
Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're asking, the answer is Open Site Explorer. It's down at the moment, unfortunately.
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RE: SEO for luxury brands!?
If they have videos, they could add transcripts in a collapsible div. That also address accessibility and general user experience. After all, if someone is sneaking a peek at the site at work, they probably don't want to have the sound on for videos.
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RE: Are blog pages hurting rankings?
First off, keep in mind that the "too many links" warning is a flexible guideline. If this is only showing up on your paginated blog pages, you probably have nothing to worry about.
Second, meta-description tags aren't important for paginated blog pages. Ideally, you're using rel=prev and rel=next, which lets Google figure out which page is the first in the series and probably the most relevant (and therefore the one that will appear on the SERP). Also, meta-description tags in general aren't super high priority. Google doesn't always use them as the SERP snippet. They appear most often on Facebook shares, but how often are people going to share Page 10 of your blog? Never.
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RE: SEO for luxury brands!?
Set realistic expectations for your client. It's fine if that's how they want the site to work, but explain to them that search engines primarily read text; without much text, the search engines will have a harder time figuring out what the page is about. Also explain their options: They can have more text on each page without compromising the design, by using tabs, collapsible divs, etc. Figure out whether or not visitors want more text on each page. If you can make that case, they might be persuaded.
Meanwhile, focus on the things you can control, like title tags and img alts. Then focus on linkbuilding. That should be relatively easy -- fashion is popular and has great potential for compelling content. At least you're not working for a plunger manufacturer.
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RE: SEO for luxury brands!?
Do you mean they have a flash website because they think it's prettier?
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RE: Do misspelled brand queries count as branded keywords?
I can't see why they wouldn't.
They should count for Analytics purposes because obviously that person was looking for the company in question, even if they couldn't spell or hit an incorrect key on the keyboard.
Also, Google is returning 7-result pages for queries like "ammazon," "jc peeny," etc. so obviously it knows what the misspellings mean.
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RE: Can we add sites to the crawl queue for OSE?
You "ask it what it knows" when you type in a URL and hit Search. Think of it like walking up to a really smart person and asking them to list off every book every written that includes the word "rhinoceros." They can only list the books they've read. A person only has so much time for reading, and OSE only has so many resources for crawling the web. It will never get everything.
If OSE doesn't show any backlinks for a URL, it means it didn't see any backlinks in the portion of the web that it crawled. That might mean there are no backlinks at all, or it might mean the backlinks are yet undiscovered (probably because they're in an obscure corner of the web). The best suggestion is to use multiple tools, as Derek says below.
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RE: Can we add sites to the crawl queue for OSE?
As far as I know, crawling your website wouldn't accomplish anything. OSE would need to crawl the pages that link to your website. And if you knew what those were, you wouldn't need OSE, right?
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RE: Quick Question About Exact Matched Keyword Domain
I mean that no more than 50% of your links should have KW anchor text.
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RE: Help with local Seo?
It looks like basically all of your inbound links are from low-quality directories and article marketing. If you want to move up, you're going to have to do some real linkbuilding.
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RE: Will Google maintain its search engine power?
I think it's a safe bet that the way we find information and making purchase decisions will undergo another dramatic change in the next few decades. I mean, thirty years ago, a bunch of ad copywriters were probably sitting around and wondering if the Yellow Pages' phone book market dominance would ever be challenged. They couldn't imagine web search, and we can't imagine what will replace web search.
In the meantime, Bing seems to be growing slowly but steadily. I wouldn't bet on them overtaking Google at any point, but it's conceivable that they could approach them in volume.
As for whether they have "too much power," obviously competition is good for consumers ... but we're not consumers, are we? I'm wondering, would we really prefer that search volume was equally distributed among, say, five or six different search engines? Meaning you now have to optimize for a half-dozen different algorithms in order to get lots of visitors from organic search? Oy.
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RE: Quick Question About Exact Matched Keyword Domain
Well, first of all, if you control all those links, they're probably not "quality." Second, collective wisdom suggests that post-Penguin, you need to keep KW anchor text below 50%. So if you're building 300 links, they can't all have "example tools" as the anchor text.
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Is it better to tweet as an individual or a company?
When using Twitter to generate interest in company blog posts, is it better to do it on a company account like @AcmeWidgets or a personal account like @JoeSmith, the owner of Acme Widgets?
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RE: Definition of Black Hat SEO
Common definitions of "black hat SEO" include
- techniques that are illegal (e.g. hacking a competitor's site)
- techniques that mislead bots (e.g. cloaking)
- techniques that are risky and not disclosed to stakeholders (e.g. paid links that your client/boss doesn't know about)
- techniques that are not consistent with search engines' guidelines (e.g. spammy linkbuilding)
I don't like the fourth definition, personally, because there's nothing morally wrong about trying to game the algo. I'm not ethically obligated to play by Google's rules. Their guidelines are intended to boost their business, nothing more, nothing less.
Now, whether or not a particular technique is effective is a completely different question. Some unethical and/or spammy techniques still produce results. The search engines seem to be getting better and better at punishing sites that don't follow their guidelines, so adhering to those guidelines is probably the best long-term strategy. But hey, if you're just going for fly-by-night profits, it could be very effective to exploit the stuff that still works.
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RE: Should we imitate our competitor's blog network?
Hmm, I didn't mean to mark this "Answered." Is there a way to undo that?
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RE: Should we imitate our competitor's blog network?
That's my suspicion, Igor. Now to convince the higher-ups, who saw our competitor's strategy and decided that must be what we need to do in order to vault over them in the rankings.
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RE: Should we imitate our competitor's blog network?
I should clarify that the EMD blogs are not attracting actual inbound links; their e-commerce site is doing fine.
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Should we imitate our competitor's blog network?
One of our competitors has built a little blog network, and I'm wondering if it's worth it for us to imitate it. Here's how they have it set up: They have domain.com, their e-commerce site, and blog.domain.com. They also have a half-dozen EMD blogs set up that all link to each other and to the e-commerce site, each one supplying content related to one niche of their busines (e.g. kitchenwidgets.com, widgetsforkids.com, etc.). It seems they've been doing this since December 2011.
In my opinion, the content on these EMD blogs is pretty low value. Sure enough, they have basically no inbound links from outside the blog network, and it's not getting shared socially. I'm having a hard time imagining a lot of long-tail searches that would bring in qualified shoppers, since they basically just write up 300-word long descriptions of photos.
Based on SEMrush data, it doesn't look like this approach is hurting them -- they didn't take a Penguin dive in April, for example. But how likely is it that this approach is helping them enough to justify the time they must spend writing (probably ~30-60m a day)? It would be trivial for the algo to determine that these are not natural links and completely devalue them. Would it not be better to consolidate that time into 2.5-5hrs a week spent researching and writing a valuable, link-worthy, long-tail-rich post for the main blog and then promoting it in hopes of attracting natural links?
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RE: Incorrect name on search result
I suspect this is a flaw in the title generating algo they've recently implemented. Honda doesn't appear anywhere in the code, so perhaps Google thinks Hyundai and Honda are synonyms?
My only other explanation would be that the title tag used to say "Honda" and Google hasn't crawled the corrected version yet.
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RE: Local/Geo-Targeted SEO Keywords
Well, you can check KWs that include a location term in the Google AdWords KW tool. That suggests that, for example, [engagement rings minneapolis] has an approx. search volume of 140/month. Insert usual caveats about relying on the AdWords tool. You can also use Google Insights to drill down by location, so you can see a search like "engagement rings" in Minneapolis.
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One writer, multiple brands - optimizing rel=author across several blogs
Our company has a few different brands, each with their own domain and site. These are not microsites intended to drive traffic to a main site; they all have independent e-commerce functions, full product lines, etc. Imagine we run Plumbing Widgets Inc, Kitchen Remodeling Company, and Springfield Countertops. It's not immediately obvious to surfers that one parent company operates all of these brands, and we're fine with that. Considering that it enables us to own a lot of SERP real estate for some money KWs, we're more than fine with it.
We'd like to create a blog for each of these sites/brands. Here's where it gets tricky. After doing some reading, I am persuaded that using rel=author will help us with SERP CTR and possibly rankings themselves. I am going to be writing all of the blog content, at least to start. I don't think I want to rel=author myself on all of these discrete blogs, do I? And surface the fact that one person is the head writer for the blogs of all these brands?
Creating blogging pseudonyms doesn't seem like a good idea, since part of the value of rel=author is genuine social engagement, and creating social personas that seem genuine is probably more trouble than it's worth. (Not to mention icky and dishonest.) Should I choose a customer service rep or manager for each brand and use their names and social identities (with their permission, obviously)? It seems like that would involve challenges of its own. I've ghostwritten for one business owner before, but this is on a larger, more complex scale. Any insights are appreciated!