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Thanks, Logan.

I always wonder why tools like SEMrush tout themselves as DIY 'all in one' solutions and then mislead by providing these sorts of 'false opportunities.'

Thanks for confirming my instincts!

Hi there, this is a general question about link building strategies in 2018. It actually relates to reports derived from the link building audit tool on SEMrush, so forgive that. We use Moz as well, it's just that we happen to be working in SEMrush for link analysis.

Basically, the audit tool looks at our links and our competitors' links. It has come back with a number of 'opportunities' for link building and I'm questioning the value of many of them, in 2018. Many of the 'opportunities' the tool is suggesting we explore include answering forum questions on places like Reddit, Quora, etc. The tool has been good at identifying topical threads which might hold promise (a very specific branch of legal services) but most of the threads are 3 - 8 years old. To answer them, I would need to muster someone with expertise to post a relevant answer.

So, obviously, my question is does anyone think there is any value in this sort of link building in this day and age? I really think our greatest value will be in guiding their content strategy and looking for content creation opportunities on high authority sites.

Thoughts?

Thanks, Merriam. As is usually the case my instincts, and not the tool's advice, were correct. The homepage is not even written to rank for the competing word; it's just that Google is making the jump from 'tax attorneys' (which the page also ranks very well for) to 'tax lawyer.' So the tool is telling us that we're cannibalizing 'tax lawyer' when, in fact, I'm not even sure we use it on the homepage. It's just demonstrating semantic understanding.

Thanks again!

Hi all:

We do ongoing SEO for a tax law firm. Their home page, which contains very little text is marked up in the title tag with the phrase 'tax attorneys and preparers.' We are getting warnings from our SEO software that individual bio pages for practitioners are cannibalizing the homepage for the keyword 'tax attorney.'

Should I be concerned? The head of this firm is a very well known 'tax attorney.' Its kind of hard to describe him differently but we keep getting told his page competes with the firm's homepage for this search string.

Thanks in advance.

Hi Mozzers:

We have a client who regularly pays to have high-quality content produced for their company blog. When I say 'high quality' I mean 1000 - 2000 word posts written to a technical audience by a lawyer.

We recently found out that, prior to the content going on their blog, they're shipping it off to two syndication sites, both of which slap rel=canonical on them. By the time the content makes it to the blog, it has probably appeared in two other places.

What are some thoughts about how 'awful' a practice this is? Of course, I'm arguing to them that the ranking of the content on their blog is bound to be suffering and that, at least, they should post to their own site first and, if at all, only post to other sites several weeks out.

Does anyone have deeper thinking about this?

Hi Mozzers:

We recently launched a site for a client which involved bringing in and redirecting content which formerly had been hosted on different domains. One of these domains still existed and we have yet to bring over the content from it. It has also been flagged as a suspicious/toxic backlink source to our new domain. Would I be wise to redirect this old domain or should I just shut it down? None of the pages seem to have particular equity as link sources. Part of me is asking myself 'Why would we redirect a domain deemed toxic, why not just shut it down.'

Thanks in advance,

dave

Thank you, Jack for your response! This we did not know...

Hi there:

We have a client whose website we built in WP, using Yoast Pro as our SEO plugin. I was reading some reports (actually coming out of SEMrush but we use Moz as well) and I am getting really varying results in the description are of the SERPS. Even though I'm seeing the copy we wrote in Yoast in the description tag code, the SERP is showing an excerpt from the copywriting on the site. What's even weirder is that SEMrush is pulling an entirely DIFFERENT description.

I'm obviously missing out on the finer points of description tags, as Google clearly does not always choose to feature what is actually written in the description tag itself. Can someone explain to me what might be going on here?

Thanks in advance,

Thanks Martijn, we'll look into the blog post and implement.

dave

Hi there:

We are developers with some digital marketing expertise, but a current issue has us perplexed. An outside SEO firm has asked us to clean up a large number of 301 redirects. Most of these are 'default' Wordpress behavior that relate to calling the latest version of a JS or CSS file. For instance, a JS file is called with this: https://websitexyz.com/wp-includes/js/wp-embed.min.js?ver=4.9.1 but ultimately redirects to this: https://websitexyz.com/wp-includes/js/wp-embed.min.js. We are being asked to prevent the redirect from happening by, presumably, calling the ultimate file to begin with.

The issue is that, as far as we know, there's no easy way to alter WP behavior to call the ultimate file to begin with. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

Thanks.

Hi there, this is a general question about link building strategies in 2018. It actually relates to reports derived from the link building audit tool on SEMrush, so forgive that. We use Moz as well, it's just that we happen to be working in SEMrush for link analysis.

Basically, the audit tool looks at our links and our competitors' links. It has come back with a number of 'opportunities' for link building and I'm questioning the value of many of them, in 2018. Many of the 'opportunities' the tool is suggesting we explore include answering forum questions on places like Reddit, Quora, etc. The tool has been good at identifying topical threads which might hold promise (a very specific branch of legal services) but most of the threads are 3 - 8 years old. To answer them, I would need to muster someone with expertise to post a relevant answer.

So, obviously, my question is does anyone think there is any value in this sort of link building in this day and age? I really think our greatest value will be in guiding their content strategy and looking for content creation opportunities on high authority sites.

Thoughts?

Thanks for the answer, Billy. Since we've already built it, I'll launch it on another domain. The intentions are all above board.

Thank you for your response, Taylor. Your answer is helpful and seems to correspond to Roman's below. The client has the resources to do either of the two approaches and is mulling both options. Thanks so much!

Hi there:

We were able to accomplish what we were looking to using regex syntax in the backend of our host. We couldn't alter htaccess directly for some pretty arcane reasons, but they do have a redirect tool which is regex based and that syntax allowed us to do what we were looking to do.

Thanks.

Hi there:

We have a client whose website we built in WP, using Yoast Pro as our SEO plugin. I was reading some reports (actually coming out of SEMrush but we use Moz as well) and I am getting really varying results in the description are of the SERPS. Even though I'm seeing the copy we wrote in Yoast in the description tag code, the SERP is showing an excerpt from the copywriting on the site. What's even weirder is that SEMrush is pulling an entirely DIFFERENT description.

I'm obviously missing out on the finer points of description tags, as Google clearly does not always choose to feature what is actually written in the description tag itself. Can someone explain to me what might be going on here?

Thanks in advance,

Hi all:

We do ongoing SEO for a tax law firm. Their home page, which contains very little text is marked up in the title tag with the phrase 'tax attorneys and preparers.' We are getting warnings from our SEO software that individual bio pages for practitioners are cannibalizing the homepage for the keyword 'tax attorney.'

Should I be concerned? The head of this firm is a very well known 'tax attorney.' Its kind of hard to describe him differently but we keep getting told his page competes with the firm's homepage for this search string.

Thanks in advance.

Thanks, Merriam. As is usually the case my instincts, and not the tool's advice, were correct. The homepage is not even written to rank for the competing word; it's just that Google is making the jump from 'tax attorneys' (which the page also ranks very well for) to 'tax lawyer.' So the tool is telling us that we're cannibalizing 'tax lawyer' when, in fact, I'm not even sure we use it on the homepage. It's just demonstrating semantic understanding.

Thanks again!