Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Some blogs get ten or more posts per day and others get just one per month.

Both can be successful.

The success of your blog will depend more upon the quality of your content than how frequently you post.

I was thinking that a weekly post would suffice for my blog because the audience isn't one which would be checking frequently + there aren't very many new developments in the industry I'm in that would necessitate more than that.

That sounds like a good reason to post infrequently about newsy items.  You don't want to bore people.  But... what's wrong with writing some exciting tips and stories about evergreen topics.  If you really know your stuff about your industry you should be able to speak about it with enough enthusiasm and expertise that most people will learn and enjoy.  If you can't do this then maybe you aren't the right guy for this blog?

I think that if you have a blog with one post a week or one a month then a very small number of categories makes a lot of sense.

However, if the blog is getting hundreds of posts per month and many posts hitting two categories then it could support a lot of healthy categories.

Category pages can attract a lot of traffic if they are in the right niche and optimized well.

My blog gets more traffic through category pages than through all other sources combined.  There are also lots of links hitting those category pages and lots of people subscribe to their RSS feeds.

It's all about which keywords you can optimize them for.  If I had a widgets blog I would have lots of categories by color, what they are made of, and more.

For instance I can get my site on a .EDU, but it will just be a list of links. Is that bad?

I don't know what your definition of a link farm is but mine is a site that has at least a few SEO links stuffed into every page.

What you are describing to me could be a curated list of outstanding resources done by an .edu librarian or professor.  Those can be some of the best links on this planet... but without more info we can only guess.  It could be an untended forum page or a student site stuffed with naughty links.

If the PR4 site was high quality without a lot of duplicate content, no signs of manipulation, and perfectly in my keyword niche I would rather have a link there than on an unrelated PR7 site.

No scientific data to justify this, just sayin' what I would grab.

We have bread crumbs on our main site and as Dejan describes.... "Another neat thing is in the SERPs when you get little: Top Level > Main Category > Sub Category type links under your snippet. "  .... lots of these extra links appear in our SERPs.

Also, just yesterday we started adding breadcrumbs to our second most important site.  This is part of a redesign for a site that was built a long time ago. It is a medium-size handbuilt site and adding the breadcrumbs is going to be a little costly.

We believe that breadcrumbs are very important for visitors, they help communicate the structure of your site to google and are important for making the navigation structure links appear in the Google  SERPs.

Did you read Dejan's response on that page and notice how he referenced google videos and see how his response was marked as "good answer" and also as "staff endorsed"?

I think that you should get to work on your breadcrumbs.

I use MindJet for outlining long articles.  I never thought about it for planning link structure but would probably work well.  Good thinking.

Draw a diagram that looks like a branching tree.

Alternatively, is there a better way to handle this?  and if so would that ligate the benefit of the anchor text.

Put some unique and interesting information on those pages, describe your download in detail, show screenshots or samples, write unique and sexy titles, optimize them, enjoy the traffic.

Download pages on my sites get LOTS of traffic.  LOTS.  One received 2475 visitors from search yesterday.

Lots of people link to download pages, tweet about them, like them on FB. This could be a huge opportunity.

We have a blog that publishes about six to ten short posts per day, each linking to an external URL that has great content.  Most of the content that we link to is newsy rather than evergreen.

Over time that content gets stale, the number of search queries drops and some of the links go dead.  This content loses its value over time.

Once each year we do a major purge of old posts, deleting a couple thousand at a time.

Before this purge is done we look at analytics to determine if any of the posts are pulling traffic from search.  When we find posts pulling lots of traffic we will create a new page of substantive content about that subject or identify an existing page that is relevant.  The posts are then  301 redirected to those pages.  All remaining posts are redirected to the homepage of the blog.

We have been doing this for a few years and it makes even more sense now that google seems to dislike pages with short  content.

Over the past several years most professors have moved their course material websites into course management systems such as BlackBoard and WebCT.  These are almost always passworded.

It is getting harder and harder to get .edu links.

Also, SEOs have heavily spammed professors and .edu webmasters with link requests for crap content.  They are tired of being asked to consider crap for their recommended lists.   They now delete link requests immediately.   This is another reason why .edu links have become very hard to get.

Moving to subdomains is not a good idea in my opinion.  Each subdomain will be treated as a separate website and will need to develop its own link popularity.  If the stores remain in a subdomain their link popularity is combined rather than divided.

I recently redirected two subdomains of a site to folders in the root domain and the results have been kickass.

Most of them are on eight or nine month contracts and are regularly at their offices between late August and mid May.

Mid to late August is the best  time for .edu link requests because professors and university staff are revising their websites for the new academic year.

Use Juicy link finder in "Research Tools".

"Our original link-finding tool. Simply enter the keyword you are targeting and we'll give you up to 200 potential link opportunities. Try our Link Acquisition Assistant for next-gen link building suggestions."

For a general answer... I have zero concerns about two (or even three) links to the same URL on a single page of my website.  I place links when it makes editorial sense and when it  is helpful to my visitors.

Although I have not heard any specific information about how google handles duplicate links on a page I doubt that they find a problem with it.  Why should they?  In my opinion, linking to the same URL two or three times on a page can be a signal of its importance.

lol... right...

Just saying that if anybody comes into my office and talks about changing the URLs on my site I will be reaching for my gun.... there is a really good chance that they will be shot.

If you create a best-on-the-web article for concrete pumps let us know about it by posting the URL here.  I know someone who might link to it.

Your site sounds a lot like mine.

I am betting that your site is pretty successful.

If that is true then why is it important to improve the domain authority?  I think that is something that arrives on its own if you are building a great website.  It is the result of being a great webmaster.

Just saying what I would be doing... I would not be chasing domain authority, I would be focused on things that please visitors, improve my website, make people want to link to it.  Do that and domain authority will rise as a result.

Lots of people who redesign sites change the URLs.  That is usually a huge mistake.

Is there a genuine need to change URLs?  If not then don't do it.

If their is a genuine need then weigh that against the fact that some link value will be lost through the 301 redirect.

We rarely rarely rarely change URLs here.

Any designer who says he wants to change my URLs will be in for a fight that he will probably lose.

If I wanted to rank #1 for "concrete pumps" I would create a page of content that is better than anything else on the web.  Not just a little better, but a LOT better.

This might be an article with lots of photos, videos, data tables.  It should be the first document that a person who is interested in learning about concrete pumps would read. It must be awesome.

It would cover what is a concrete pump, why are they needed, when/who invented them, the history of concrete pumps, types of concrete pumps, examples of use, interesting facts, links to lots of subtopics (hopefully some of that will be on your own site).

A page like this should attract links - but it would be a good idea to do some linkbuilding to get the initial rankings - at least enough to get it on the first page.

Look at the wikipedia article.  Anybody who is a concrete pump expert should be able to make an article that is 100 times better than that.  Beat it by a mile and you have a chance to rank on the first page for concrete pumps and maybe eventually be #1.

If you can get a page like this ranking #1 for concrete pumps that will make you THE MAN for that industry.  All of the links that hit that page will pump power through the rest of your site and boost your rankings.  Other pages on your site will be hard to beat if you can accomplish this.

If you are up to doing the research, writing that article, getting the photos, getting some video, compiling some data then I would go for it.  The links that an article like this will attract will  be extremely valuable.

Looking to make gains in page rankings with out persuit of links and social networking

I really respect this attitude.

You are going to need some awesome content for that... and you might need to do a little bit of linkbuilding.

What are your goals?  Are you out to rank #1 for "concrete pumps" or do you have other ranking objectives?

It would not surprise me if google is doing an intentional "shuffle" in some SERPs - just to test what searchers do with different rankings.

If this belongs to google they shoved it out the door before it was fully dressed.... or we are looking at something that was "leaked" instead of "launched".

Its clear the term pagerank is ill defined.

I would instead say that it is"clearly defined" but  "poorly understood."  description of pagerank

PageRank is merely a measure of connectivity.  It is determined by the number of pages that link to your site, the PageRank of those pages and the number of outgoing links that the hold.

KW rank is determined by a very large number of factors.  The greenbar pagerank that you see in the toolbar may not even be used in the same form that you see for determining rankings.

Since you are ranking well already.  I would think that the linkbuilding is not "urgent" - especially if the people doing the searching are highly interested in the event and are likely to visit more than one website.

My first priority then would be to define what content should be on these sites?  What is "the minimum"? What would be "ideal"? And, what would be "kickass"?

Once I have that I would get "minimum" on every site then start to get "ideal" everywhere. Only then would I try to get links if the links that I am trying to get are given on merit.

I would try to get "kickass" content on the sites that are most important or the ones that face heavy competition.

This hits really high on my BS meter.

I rarely, rarely link to people who ask for a link.  Most of them are link weasels.  We are not in the business of promoting other people's websites.  We are in the business of making content for our visitors.

If I have any interest at all in linking to another site I visit their site and check it out.  Who are they linking to, can I see anything that looks like link manipulation.  Anything fishy and no link for them.

I do not believe that the link that you are being offered with will provide any benefit to you.  It sounds like they are blocking linkjuice.  They are either ignorant about this or this is intentional.  Probably intentional.

You are in the driver's seat if you want this link.  They asked first, so you can tell them what it will take to make the link happen.  If you want this link then tell them to give you a standard link.

Is your question about this simply value given for value received or do you have an editorial concern about adding their link to your site.

To get a big site indexed and keep it in the index you must link deeply into the site at multiple points with heavy PR.  This forces spiders into the bottom of the site and forces them to chew their way out through other pages.

These should be considered permanent links.  If you remove them the spider flow will stop and Google will eventually forget about your pages.

Is there genuine search volume for these events and if there is how do you rank in the SERPs for the important terms?

The URLs on my site in WMT slowly migrated to the new domain.  My change was done in February and there is still a little activity in WMT for the old domain.  But new domain is very healthy.

I recently changed the preferred domain.

Check the NEW preferred domain (and be sure to claim it in GWT) .  If nothing is there yet give it some time.   I don't know how much time because I didn't do daily checks on the two domains that we moved in the past year.... but one day the new URLs were there.

The important thing is what's happening in the SERPs and if you executed the redirect properly.

I would work on other things for a few days.

If your sales or other conversions are holding up then don't worry.

Fewer spiders can be a good thing.   You can go into webmaster tools to see if google is still visiting (look under crawl stats).

Yes... I am seeing toolbar green on lots of new content today - going back to content published on May 8th.

A lot of analytics programs include robot visits in the direct traffic.  Could simply be fewer scrapers or a change in spidering patterns.

If your conversions are holding up I would not worry about this.

Sudden Drop in Direct Traffic....

Do you really mean direct - like people typing in your URL or using bookmarks?  Or, are you asking about total traffic from search and other sources?

Anyone have any ideas on what to look at or what to do?

You have access to more information than we do.  Check your analytics to see where your site has lost traffic.

Have your rankings fallen?

When your site was modified were URLs changed without redirects?

You have not provided enough information for anything other than guesses from us.

I have an article uploaded on May 8th showing greenbar.

If I was going to allocate company resources in response to an answer to this question I would want that answer to be based upon good and complete information.  Needed for a good answer is an evaluation of your content, evaluation of your competitive position, evaluation of your inbound links, evaluation of your current SEO and more.

Any answer that is given without these evaluations is a guess and could direct you to spend time/money where it will not be effective.  Also, the answer will probably not be the same for each of your sites.

So, instead of giving you an answer that could be really wrong my advice would be to hire someone who can spend the time needed to provide a good and competent answer.

Looks like they did a global update... my content from as recently as last month now showing greenbar.

The page that is hit with the link gets the most benefit.  However, a small amount of benefit flows through your site, first to the pages that are linked to by the linkbait page and then smaller amounts passed on through each step of the site's linkage.

My personal belief is that if you have a few pages about widgets on your site and they acquire a number of authoritative links then something other than linkjuice begins to benefit your site... and that is sitewide boost for anything about widgets.

I also recommend Alan. No matter who you get, if they don't ask you to make sacrifices or do a lot of hard work then you have the wrong person.

The redirect value is one link from another website.

In my opinion that feature is a bad idea for both users and SEO.

I would not use a 302 redirect. I would create a navigation or a menu that allows the visitor to choose his destination. I never assume to know what a visitor to my site is looking for.

I rarely abandon pages. Instead I improve them. Before abandoning pages I would check to see if they have any external links and if they attract traffic from search. If they are useless pages then I would 301 redirect them. Will this help your SERPs? It might help slightly but it might not.

....comparing to other sites with less content ranking higher than them...

A lot more goes into rankings than the number of words on a page.

If I wanted to save money on content I could find a lot of examples of short copy sites that rank ahead of me.... but my attitude on this is..."The hungry person usually eats the other guy's lunch."