Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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:

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:

As part of a site redesign project, we've been doing a lot of 301 redirects, as we retire old URLs or rename them. My question is: is it necessary to redirect ALL old URLS? What about URLs with no links and low authority? Are these really necessary to redirect, since they're not referenced on the web and there's obviously a global redirect happening at the level of the root domain?

Just curious; I'm not sure I've ever really understood this...

Sorry for the late reaction to this response. Thank you so much, Nigel. We'll bear your comment in mind as we update this site's folder and file structure!

Hi there:

We are developing a pretty typical 301 redirection strategy. We basically are moving blog posts from a former sub-domain to the top level of our new designed site.

We've pulled a site crawl of the old sub-domain and want to make sure we redirect any posts with a significant backlink profile to their current counterparts. Most other posts are just going to be redirected to the main 'front door' of our new blog. Is there a way to selectively redirect a certain number of posts and then 'globally' redirect everything else to a single URL? I would assume this would be a pretty common task, but can't find an easy way to do what we want to do.

Hi Mozzers:

I am optimizing a bunch of PDF brochures within a client's website. Besides the typical optimization tactics I'm applying, (like these) I have a question regarding the file/url structure of the PDFs themselves. By default, the client is locating PDFs in an 'uploads' folder of their Wordpress site. So, a typical PDF might have a URL such as: https://www.Xyzinsurance.com/xyz-content/uploads/2015/06/Brochure-XYZ-Connect.pdf

My question: is there any advantage in eliminating all these sub-directories and moving the files into a main folder, simply titled '/brochures'  ??

Any insights or conjecture would be welcome!

Thanks, Roman for your thoughts! Everyone seems to agree that either approach can work, with the appropriate strategy and resources. The client has both resources and time; I had a meeting with them this morning and they are considering which one of the basic two approaches they plan on taking.

Thanks so much for your thoughtful response.

dave

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 fellow Mozers:

I have a question about strategy. I have a client who is a major real estate developer in our region. They build and sell condominiums and also built and manage several major rental apartments. All rental properties have their own websites and there is also a corporate website, which has been around for many years and has decent domain authority (+/- 40). The original intent of the corporate website was to communicate central brand positioning points, attract investors and offer individual profiles of all major properties.

My client is interested in developing an organic search strategy which will reach consumers looking to rent apartments. Typical search strings would include the family whose core string would be 'apartments in Baltimore.' (Currently, the client runs PPC for each one of their properties. This is expensive and highly competitive.) In doing research, we've found that there are two local competitors who are able to break on to Page 1 and appear beside the National 'apartment search guides' who dominate the Page 1 SERPS (like apartments.com). The two local competitors have websites of either the same or lower authority than our client's; one has a better link profile, the other is comparable.

Here's our problem: our local competitors only build and manage apartments. So, then, the home pages and all the content of their sites ONLY talk about apartment rental related information. Our client's apartment business is actually larger in scope than either local competitor but is only one of their major real estate verticals.

So my question is this: if we want to build out a bunch of content which will rank competitively with our local competition, are we better off creating a new area of the corporate site, creating targeted content and resources appropriate for apartment seekers OR would we be better off creating an entirely new site, just devoted to the same? I'm wondering if a new section will ever rank well against competitors whose root domains actually feature content which is only rental related? Likewise, I'm wondering whether we'd be giving up too much, in terms of authority, by creating an entirely new site? I've also only found examples in the industry where an entirely new site was created, so it makes me question the strategy of building out a rental-specific section of a site which also contains information about their condo business. For instance, the Related Companies are a huge builder in the East; they have a corporate site and a site called https//relatedrentals.com .

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

Hi there:

We maintain a calendar of digital events and conferences on our website here: https://splatworld.tv/events/ . We're trying to add as many events as we can and I'm wondering about the descriptions of each. We're pulling them from the conference websites, mostly, but I'm worried about the scraped content creating duplicate content issues. I've also noticed that most calendars of this type which rank well are not including actual event descriptions, but rather just names, locations and a link out to the conference website. See https://www.semrush.com/blog/the-ultimate-calendar-of-digital-marketing-events-2017/ and http://www.marketingterms.com/conferences/ .

Anyone have any thoughts on this? Thanks, in ..advance..

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

Hello Fellow Moz'ers:

I own a small digital shop in a major US city. We had a marketing idea which I'd like some input on the soundness of. We are creating a professional services directory of 'digital professional services providers' in our hometown. The directory's membership will only be open to firms located within our city limits. The directory will be curated and maintained, ongoing, by us.

Our motivation is 75% selfish and 25% benevolent. The idea is that, by building the directory on our subdomain, we hopefully will collect links, which ultimately will enhance search visibility. But I'm concerned about the devaluation directories have incurred in recent years and I've even seen advice given to the effect that listings in some directories might be harmful to a site's link profile. It is not our intention to harm those who might list in our directory.

Any thoughts on this matter would be greatly appreciated!