It's marketing hyperbole. 

I don't use social.  If you make content like what is described above, the visitors to your website will share it on social for you.

It is easy to describe what is above, but difficult to pull it off.  If you want to see examples of this type of content just visit the Moz.com blog.  It takes this type of content to be published there.

Again, these links are valuable....

https://moz.com/blog/why-good-unique-content-needs-to-die-whiteboard-friday

https://moz.com/blog/how-to-create-10x-content-whiteboard-friday

Would I then 301 it to the new page?

No.  This page will require a heap of hard work and you will probably spend some money making it.  It will be the best article on the internet for the SERPs that you are attacking.  It will be a big, carefully written, extensively researched, substantive article.  It might contain several great images, include quotes from expert people, photos that you travelled to get, maybe a video and more.  This isn't something that you throw away.  Articles like this might cost $500 to $2000 or more to produce.

This is the article that is going to go to #1 in the SERPs.  The link in it to your original page will pass some power. Then both of these pages will shoot to the top of the SERPs and put you into the domainant position at #1 and #2.  You will then be the authoritative author for this subject and produce more content around it that will dominate all of the secondary keywords.

Put links in the pdfs.  Edit their "properties" to optimize them for the SERPs.  You can place "buy buttons" in pdfs, include ads in them.  Track the number of views through log analytics.

Search here and here to get lots more information about using pdfs.

If this was my site, I would start by creating internal links to this page from relevant pages on the website that already exist.  That is an easy thing to do to help this content - if you have not done it already.

Then, instead of trying to create microsites or landing pages I would simply put serious work and resources into a new page on that website designed to absolutely defeat what you already have and the pages that are ranking above it.

Microsites and landing pages are weak efforts that Google has seen over and over for the past 20 years.  They know not to count them.

If you want to defeat something or take difficult SERPs, it usually takes the difficult effort of building a fantastic website or a piece of 10x content.

See these.....

https://moz.com/blog/why-good-unique-content-needs-to-die-whiteboard-friday

https://moz.com/blog/how-to-create-10x-content-whiteboard-friday

If they add the to the head of their page then here is what will happen.....

• the page with your article on their website will not be indexed by Google (they are not 100% good on this but they don't do badly)
• the page on their website will appear in your search console as a link with the note.... "Links to your site" as.... "via this intermediate link:  http://theirdomain.com/page-where-your-article-is-published.html")
• any page on their website that links to your article page on their website will appear in your search console as a link with the note.... "Links to your site" as.... "via this intermediate link:  http://theirdomain.com/page-where-your-article-is-published.html")
• any page on any other website that links to your article page on their website will appear in your search console as a link with the note.... "Links to your site" as.... "via this intermediate link:  http://theirdomain.com/page-where-your-article-is-published.html")

This is how Google currently handles this.  They will likely handle it the same in the future, but they could change their mind without tellin' anybody, which they have been known to do.

In my opinion, this is the proper way of giving your content to other people.  It prevents them from competing against you in the SERPs with your content on their website.  The problem is getting people to agree to it and a lot of other webmasters doing understand it.

This article can be viewed on their website by thousands of people and they can enjoy the ad revenue from it, their visitors can read it and share it, and link to it  -- and those shares and links will bring visitors into the article page on their website.

We have a large glossary on our site.  In my opinion, 1000 entries is too many for one page.  We break ours into alphabetical pages and still have a lot of entries on some of the pages.

These A, B, C pages each pull in some long-tail search traffic every day and they generate ad impressions from visitors who look at several glossary pages.

We also have links to reference pages, photos, graphics... 1000 entries is way too many.

A friend of ours has a large glossary with a generous amount of content for most of the entires.  He placed each definition on a separate page and between 1995 and 2011 made buckets of money from search traffic into those pages.  Then he got hit with a Panda problem, move to alphabetical pages and his site has recovered - still a huge income loss from those definition pages.

**No client wants to hear it, but it's the truth.    **

I agree 100%.   And they need to be honest with themselves about the quality of their content.  They can't sit down, type 30 minutes of yada yada yada, and think that they have something that will attract links, shares, etc.  They need to look at the Moz blog to see what type of content real marketers produce.

I would spend a lot of time learning before you hire anyone.  It is really easy to hire SEO people if you don't know what you want.  Then you will get what they want to sell instead of what you need.  So, learn and learn because it will make you a better buyer.

When I started, I couldn't afford to hire anyone.  Just didn't have the money.  So, I spent a lot of time and a lot of money on education and then came to the conclusion that I should just do things myself because every SEO would do things a different way.  Today, most work and all SEO decisions are made in house and we only hire when we specify how the work will be done.  That way we bet on ourself and take full credit or blame for how things turn out.

Don't link to them yet.

I would get in touch with the organization right away and let them know about this.

You need to do this before you link to them, because your customers/clients will encounter this problem.  It's also good business for you to help the organization.

I might call them instead of emailing them.  It is possible that their webmaster has an infected computer and an email reply might carry problems.

My concern with the subfolder is this would mean the blog would have to be run through BigCommerce's inbuilt blog platform which has a fraction of the SEO tools or layout options of a Wordpress blog. Do you think this loss is outweighed by the benefit of having the blog on a domain which has links already and is actively being developed to attract more?

This is like being told by Satin to pick Door A or Door B.  Neither of them is a good choice.

So, I would be looking for a way to have my content on the website where it can have good optimization and good structure.  We rejected ecommerce systems that did not allow us to build extensive websites on the same domain.  We don't use blogs because we don't like their structure.

But, the bottom line is... is your content top quality?  It needs to be very valuable to customers or have the ability to attract links - or better yet, both.  That is harder to solve than the website problem.

The quality of the blog is extremely important to the amount of benefit that it can produce for a website.  Also the location of that blog is important.  Regular updates, original content, many links to the store, regular promotion, and SEO optimization don't do anything unless that blog is able to attract genuine inbound links from other websites.  Without that the blog has no power to pass to the store.

So, I would examine the quality of the blog and determine if it has generated an genuine inbound links from important websites in your product niche.

Also, if the blog is on a subdomain, links into it will not help your root domain very much.  Google treats them as separate sites.  So, moving the blog to a folder on the root domain will do a better job of make the blog a contributor to your main website.

I agree about not using css to hide the date.  I would not hide anything on a webpage.

I don't know enough about WordPress to tell you how to do that.  It probably can be done, but I don't know for sure.

I think that a lot of articles can be written without a date if they are content that is close to being totally evergreen.   If you add a date to these articles and that date is a few years old, it can tarnish the opinion of the visitor when there is nothing wrong with the article, and the article might even be among the very best on the web.  So, I don't date a lot of my articles for that reason.

I am always upgrading articles, which is different from updating.  An update is when you add fresh news or information that is totally new about the subject.  An upgrade is when you add another section of evergreen content, add new photos, improve photos, add a video,  do a rewrite for clarity, or other type of improvement.  I notice that when I upgrade an article it often moves higher in the SERPs.  Usually just a few positions if it is on the first page, but if it is deep in the SERPs, it might move up substantially.  I've never had anything move from bottom of first page to #1, unless it moved into the featured snippet.

If you have a website with a few thousand articles and your author team is two or three people, if each of them update or upgrade one article every working day, there will be articles on your site that go a long time without an update.  Figure 200 working days in a year and a three person team.... if you have a 6000 article website that means it will take ten years to upgrade or update every article - if you do them in a straight rotation.

Well, I am very disappointed that with all the "experts" we have on these forums, nobody is bothering to answer my question above or even just to give a hint. I guess it is too hard to give an answer. If so, I can consider myself an expert too then!

Has SEO lost any hope of rationalizing problems?

From this very thread.   I can get ten more.

I am not confusing you with anyone else.

Why are you deleting posts?

Fabrizo,

I am a member of Moz, not a staff member.  So my comments are my own and are not approved by Moz.

I don't think that my comments in this thread were rude or offensive.  I am only telling you what you need to know.

If anyone reads a few dozen of your posts they will easily see that you are often rude to the people who try to help you.   People stop providing free assistance when the person asking for help isn't nice.

I've looked at your website for a few hours.  And, given you enough suggestions that I feel justified in making those statements.

Will Reducing Number of Low Page Authority Page Increase Domain Authority?

In my opinion, these metrics are not intended for this type of use.

I would stop looking at these metrics and get to looking at how you can improve the total quality of your website.  Google doesn't give a darn about your page authority or domain authority.

Would taking the following steps help?:
1. Remove or consolidate poorly ranking unnecessary URLs?
2. Update content on poorly ranking URLs that are important?
3. Create internal text links (as opposed to links from menus) to critical pages?

Everyone who owns a website should do these things.  So, Yes!  Do them!

On-site optimization only "qualifies" you to "appear" in a SERP.

Ranking in that SERP is an entirely different and separate process and a Heck of a lot harder to pull off.

Alt tags are generally easy work.  Good work for a trainee with minor oversight.   Hire help if you have more important work.

If we were to condense all three pages into one would we rank higher?

I would count these as two pages because one points to another with canonical.  My first effort would be to improve both of these pages.

I see these pages as #2 and #3 in the organic competition.  That is awesome, just absolutely awesome.  Nice work!

If you think that your merchandise is distinctly different from the site above you or if you have better prices or better shipping or anykind of a competitive advantage, then I would think twice about sacrificing a page.  Instead I would work to improve both pages, making them extremely unique, extremely sticky, extremely clickable in the SERPs, highly optimized for the visitor and  highly optimized for the query.   I would want to defeat the site above me, hold the competition down at #4 and work to double my money from current traffic.  In my opinion and experience, being at #2 and #3 with real potential to move up and improve is more valuable than risking #3 to try to get #1.

I would try to beat them straight out rather than sacrifice a good page and a SERP position for the hope of moving up.

The only time that I would not say that is if the #1 site is clearly superior in every way... visitor experience, prices, value propositions, ranking strength, clickability and more. Amazon above me is an example... but with your competitor, I would mount the attack.

** how can I get maximum Seo juice from others embedding my content**

Go straight to the most powerful site in your niche and give them your entire collection. Tell 'em all they need to do to use it is give you an attribution link on pages where the videos are used.  In one email message you will get links that your competitors will die for.   This should produce maximum SEO link juice.... and everyone on the web will see your content on the powerful site first, link to it there, share it from there, email their friends about it... and when these folks finally encounter the videos on your site they will think that you copied them.

There is nothing wrong about optimizing your homepage for a subcategory of your website.   The homepage is usually the strongest page of a website and should be used to your best advantage.  Some businesses change the optimization of their homepage from season to season, targeting the merchandise that is most profitable for that month.

I don't mind the domain below their signature.  I do that in all of my business email messages.  Sometimes I have two domains in my email signatures.   To me, a forum post is not unlike a public email and an unliked domain is not offensive to me in any way.

Is it marketing?  Yes, probably.

At the same time, it can be credibility.  I have gone to the websites of people who add an unlinked domain in their signature and have been impressed with what I find there.  These have all been SEO websites.  If they would have been fish oil supplement websites, or payday loan websites, I would likely have a very different opinion.  So, the industry of the domain produces an aroma or an odor.

Here is how these hit my mind....

Linked money keyword... not here to contribute, instead, here to mooch links, I don't like it, don't trust the post if I don't know the person.

Linked domain...  less annoying than the above and I don't like it.

Unlinked domain...  I don't mind this and don't find it annoying - if it is attached to a post that genuinely tries to help someone.  I might actually visit the websites of some strong contributors, just to see what they hold out as their expertise.

The deliberate act of making the link completely changes what I think of these additions to the bottom of a post.

Google has considered hidden text to be spammy almost since it served its first SERP.

I have been looking at questions posted in forums (such as Moz Q&A) every day since 2003.  Just scanning the titles of the threads will give you some idea of what people are doing to improve their site, what they are getting whacked for, what they are doing to recover, what google is up to, what common technical issues are being encountered, and much more.

You will learn a little by reading and learn the most important things by answering a few questions.  The "answering" isn't where the benefit is derived, instead it comes from when you ask a question the members will know you and give very generous help.

You will also learn who has expertise in specific areas and when you need help with something you will know who can help you.  Every item of outsourced work that I have ever paid for has gone to a person who I observed in a forum and learned to trust.  I am lucky to have such friends.

High ranking PR site (PR 85) has people advertising they can get you links from that site in exchange for money.

Google reads these ads.

I'm sure a goody 2 shoes will now tell me 'i should do everything natural not be tempted', but I actually dont know where the line is drawn between the same site giving a natural link to me and someone selling a link from the same site.

If you want to try this stuff, try it with your own website.  This isn't anything to try with a client's or an employer's site, especially one that has a warehouse with $10,000,000 in Christmas inventory, eight employees and a $15,000/month lease.

I have two metrics.....

1. Links that you didn't try to get and are delivering genuine traffic today.   These are from people who really like your site and are willing to give you their visitors.  Give thanks when you get these types of links.  Pay attention to where they are coming from, what type of content they are landing on and their context on the linking site.  Make more of that type of content and make it even better.  Find out what you can do to give help to the generous people who give you these links.  They are your fans and can become your strongest allies.

2. Links within your own site that people are clicking to discover your best and most relevant content to what they are reading.   If you are not promoting your own best stuff, nobody else is going to do it for you. This is a free and powerful way to cultivate fans and allies and get people to engage your website.  Google is watching.   Make more of these links and be sure that every page on your site has some.  Use high quality images and words that elicit the click.  Test different images and words.  Make these immediately upon publishing a new page.

Keeping all of your business on one domain will help with your branding, since there is a natural overlap in buyers and sellers of auto parts.  It will expose your buyparts business to everyone to comes to the sellparts domain.

My preferred method would be to keep all of the pages in folders on the sellparts domain.  That is best for SEO purposes since Google does not give subdomains the full benefit of their root domain.  I would work hard or pay for development to make that happen.

My very last resort would be to use a subdomain.  The pages on the subdomain would not perform as well as if they were on the root domain.

If these sites belonged to me, I would not place site-wide links on either of them that point to the other.  In this situation, links from BuyParts will probably be of little to no value in lifting the rankings of SellParts since it is so much stronger.

If I thought that many customers of these sites would be natural customers of the other, then I would combine the sites.  I would test this by making a large pdf of parts that I am willing to buy, placing it on the SellParts domain and linking to it from several obvious places saying "we also buy parts, click here for our buy list".

That is what I would do if these sites belonged to me.

"buyparts.com doesn't work"

I don't want to give a response without having a clear understanding of this.

There is a good post about this by Alexandra Tachalova on today's Moz Blog.

https://moz.com/blog/battle-for-traffic-organic-vs-social-media

I think that the answer that is right for me might be different than the answer that is right for you.

In the 1990s I used perl to code a basic shopping cart and used it for a couple of years.  I collected non-personal data about the customers' purchase intentions and passed it to Verisign, who collected personal and credit card data to complete the sale.  I used perl to code message boards, calculators, grade homework assignments, generate webpages from databases and much more.  All of this was done before such things were commercialized and made-to-order by big companies.

I stopped programming over ten years ago because it became so easy to get people to write short programs for me at freelance sites - and because age made it hard for me to concentrate hard on code.  I can write the specs and someone will code it and post a working copy before I have to pay for anything. They get it done faster than I could have done the work myself - and at a cost that is much lower than the cost of my time.  And, its kinda nice to now know a few people in Poland, India, or Peru who I can message through the freelance site to see if they will do a job for me.

Today, if I used WordPress, I would want to know php.  There are a lot of other widely-used content managers, shopping carts and other service platforms that use various languages.   I would learn the language that served my platform.   If I needed general data handing I would learn perl.  I require most freelancers to code in perl because I can understand it and can scan the code to be sure that they are not transmitting anything.  I can also tweak the code a year later if small tweaks are needed.   If I have a really big job or a job that handles really important functions, I will go to someone in the USA who I know and trust.

Lots of people are in the market for content.  Some are really picky about quality.  Some are not that picky.  Some do not recognize quality.  Some don't care.

I have a really hard time finding content that I will publish.  It has to meet a "content expert" criteria and an "quality of writing" criteria.   The best content that I have obtained from others has been from people who are already writing good content in my topic area. They have an active blog, have written books, or are professionals in the content area of the content.  So, I go out looking for proven authors in the niche instead of people who offer themselves as writers.  Me looking for them takes a lot less time than them coming to me or me giving people a chance to submit something.

We currently have hundreds of partners....  would be advisable to request our travel/tourism partners to show their support of our organization by direct-linking to our site by using a "partner-verified" badge?

Only if you have space on your site to display hundreds of their partner badges.

I would first do many things that gives genuine and visible help to each of them.  Ask nothing of any of them in return.  Expect nothing in return.  Then, show genuine gratitude to anyone who does something in return.  And publicize good deeds that  these people do for others - but not what they have done for you.    Sounds nuts, doesn't it?

As an SEO person, this seems like a bad idea, even if we set up 301s from all the old posts to all the new ones.

I agree.  Absolutely.

I would solve the problems with the blog.

In battle of all kinds across history "divide and conquer" has been a winning strategy.  This is also true on the web.  By splitting your site you divide its strength and help the competitors.   The site's linkjuice is split, its linking root domains are split, its keyword reach is reduced, the ability of visitors to the main site to see the genius on the blog is reduced, the ability of visitors to the blog to convert on the site is reduced.  It does not matter if the main site is in the persistent navigation of the blog, the visitors are not as aware of the main site and google is counting their assets separately.

The only exception to the above is if the content on the blog is low quality or infringing or duplicated from other sites.  Then that content should be cut from the site or improved.

Your #1 is true.

Your #2 depends upon content quality.

Sit down for three days and try doing the job.  Then compare your work with theirs.

It's really easy to think that a writer is not producing when you have no experience doing the same work.

So, get to work.  Write 50 of them.  It will be good for your soul.  More important is that your experience might streamline the process, discover quick and easy methods, learn how to improve quality.

And, is this worker just blathering features or including cues and triggers that stimulate sales?   I've spent entire days just tweaking three or four important pages.

We must avoid considering a page of content as a commodity.  There are enormous differences between bad, pedestrian, great, and kickass work.  One has very little value to your business. Another can MAKE your business.

If you add new article content that is optimized for a specific keyword then that content will get out in the SERPs and compete for relevant traffic.  If your article content is successful at pulling in traffic, you can have house ads or links on that page to route that traffic to lead forms or sales pages that might produce conversions.

Would adding a brand-new blog post once a week.....

How much time do you have to spend on this?... if your blog post is going to be a page or prattle then you are wasting your time in my opinion.  But if your page is very informative and worthy of being linked to by news stories, real estate sites, city bloggers, business blogs, etc. then you have something that is worth doing. This isn't easy to do.  Only a person with knowledge can do it and even if you have the knowledge you must be willing to put work into it and write with enthusiasm.

If I owned your site my target would be once a month or at most twice a month and that article would be nothing less than absolutely kickass and my blog would be come the authority of NYC commercial real estate.  If you have the knowledge, the writing ability, the media skills and the time to do that they you might own the freeking city in a few years - but you will need to dedicate a lot of time to "making rain".

Will Regularly Adding New Blog Posts Improve Ranking?

This has nothing to do with freshness.  Some people are deluded that tossing up a page of prattle is going to produce kickass rankings and a boatload of traffic.  It doesn't work like that.  This has everything to do with making an absolutely awesome website and establishing yourself and your business and The Go-To Place for information, facts, data, gossip, news about NYC real estate.

You can pay for links, pay for ads, or earn your rankings by making an awesome website.

Nice work!   Improve that page and really kick ass.

I think that "2017 Diaries" has a bit of competition and this site is still getting started.  It probably has slowly rising traffic but needs some high-quality linkable, shareable, noteworthy content that people want to read.  The blog is focused on product promotion rather than something to inspire the customer to write, plan, schedule, etc.

I believe that links used to have a much higher value than they have today.

Today, Google has a lot of information from Chrome browsers, SERP analytics, personalization, visitor engagement, content quality, content relevance to the query, and much more.  These can be used to craft a customized search for the visitor.  These ingredients in the ranking mix are growing in importance.... and they displace some of the value of links in producing rankings.

I posted about this on Moz eleven years ago and have not "built" any links for over a decade.

I think that your homepage ranks well for "2017 Diaries" because your site is all about diaries.  Your homepage is probably more powerful than your 2017 Diaries page and that is probably why the homepage ranks higher.

So, if this is the top query for bring you business, I would optimize the homepage for it, get relevant products on the homepage and go for it.  Right now your homepage could be greatly improved for "2017 Diaries" because "2017 only appears twice in plain text at the bottom of the page and is not in the title tag.  I wonder what your homepage could do if properly optimized for this term?

If I owned your site I would change the homepage optimization and content a few times per year to take advantage of a new year starting, back to school, summer fitness, etc.  This would move my most powerful page from battle to battle at various times of the year.  Perhaps you do this?

Also, if I owned the site I would have lots of articles about how various types of people use the products that you sell, historical information about famous people and their appointment, journaling, and diary habits.   I'd be doing a little more cross-selling of writing implements on the diaries page.  Just tossing these in based upon my experience in a similar niche.

Thank you for the example, Sandi.

I just did the site: query and the pages are indexed, just not ranking well.  Perhaps the need more time.

Thanks again.

I am suspecting that Google often hesitates to index pages that have registered trademarks on them that are marked with a .   For example EGOL used in the title tag or in the

tag at the top of the page.

Registered trademarks are everywhere and most retail product pages contain at least one of them.  However, most people use the registered trademark names as text in their writing without adding the registered trademark sign of .

Have you experienced a problem getting such pages indexed or have you read any articles about how Google treats registered trademarks?

Maybe they come here to Moz and run it through the page grader. 

and have to disagree with the notion that a company doesn't need to be on social

You are making that statement as a person who sells the service.  I make mine as a person who would have to pay for the service.

Are you willing to guarantee that your work can produce a positive return for EVERY website out there - even ones that you know nothing about?

I receive thousands of visits each month from facebook, reddit, pinterest, stumbleupon and other sites that could be considered to be social media.  Those visits are mostly not high quality, they enter the site and leave quickly.  These are generated with zero effort from me and combined they are a small percentage of total site traffic.

If I started participating in social media and traffic from social would shoot up by 10x or 50x, I don't think that they would increase my revenue very much because they are low quality visits.  To do that would require effort on our part that would pull us away from the work of producing content that pulls high quality traffic.   If we then stopped fanning a fire on social media the traffic from that channel would immediately stop.   However, if we stop making content the traffic from that continues to arrive because it is indexed in search and has demand there.

From that I believe that earning traffic from social is a cost that stops producing when you stop working, but traffic earned from producing content continues as long as that content is viable.  Also, efforts put into article content produce external links on other websites that deliver traffic and help search engine rankings.  Time spent on social does not have that return.

The above is what works for me.  I can produce content that does really well in search and has lasting and often growing value.  Some people can't do that.  At the same time, I know that I would not do well on social and that my time spent there would be a cost rather than an investment.

Most important, is I believe that a person does their best work when they are doing things that are highly motivating and enjoyable.  I like producing content but would not enjoy working to produce a following on social.  I would be like a racehorse pulling a plow on social media  Other people have different talents and social might work well for them.