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Hi Lindsay,

I'd recommend limiting the number of categories you select for each post - generally my rule is 3 categories maximum. That being said, I've found that the most successful strategy is to create & categorize content in a way that easily satisfies your user's intent. Categories = broad topics/areas of interest your ideal buyer wants to read about (broad keyword search phrases). Articles/posts = focus on one specific question related to the broad category (longtail phrases).

For example: let's say you have a shoe company and you've created a style blog that discusses the latest trends. One option is to do what a lot of companies do, and choose generic blog categories like trends, inspiration, comfort, etc...

Let's say you research and decide write an article called: Best Shoes To Wear To Coachella (because it's a longtail keyword). How do you categorize it? It's definitely goes in trends, but it's also kind of inspirational, and you also have a section about comfortable shoes to wear to Coachella. You can't choose just one category, so you end up adding the post to 4-5 categories.

The biggest problem with this type of organization structure is not duplicate content - it's that users (a) can't easily find your content because they don't know what your categories mean and (b) they're confused about what content they've already read, because they see the same articles in multiple categories.

In my opinion, the better way to choose categories and article topics, as I sort of mentioned above, is to start with broad topics that people want to learn about.

Instead, you might choose categories based on popular search queries. For example: Festival Shoes, New This Season, Celebrity Favs, How To Wear It, etc. In this case, your article: Best Shoes To Wear To Coachella would go under the festival shoes category. You could also have articles about Stagecoach, SXSW, etc. This isn't the best example, but I hope this make sense!

Long story short: done correctly, this type strategy is helpful in a number of ways: (1) your user is able to easily understand where to find the information they're looking for, (2) you avoid duplicate content, because your articles are written to correspond with 1 (maybe 2) categories, and (3) your category pages will be hyper-optimized for lots of longtail keywords that are related to your main category keyword. This will make your category pages like mini-landing pages that have a higher probability of ranking broad/more competitive keywords.

I hope this helps!

Domain Authority is used to track the the “strength” of your website compared to other websites. According to Moz, this is metric is calculated "by combining all of our other link metrics—linking root domains, number of total links, MozRank, MozTrust, etc.—into a single score."

Juggle Cats has 13 Root Domains and 41,022 Total Links. Most of which seem to be coming from sites owned by the same parent company called Proquantum, a _"Special-Interest Directory Website Publishers since 2002" _ In addition to Juggling Cats, they also own Engineers Guide USA, Health Guide USA, AssessorLinks, and Doomsday Guide. Each of these websites includes a footer that links to all of the other sites (and this footer can be seen on every page).

That being said, a domain authority of 30 for a site that's been around since 2002 is nothing to write home about. I've worked with companies who have newer sites that look terrible & aren't even optimized for search, and they'll often still have a domain authority between 30-40. This is because domain authority is more about #links than anything else, and more specifically it's about the # of linking root domains. In this case, it seems like the huge # of total links might be pulling up the overall domain authority slightly...but this isn't really significant in my opinion.

Hi Ruben,

Yes, that's 100% correct!

The pages through which visitors enter your site (from Google, Yahoo, Facebook, an email, or any other source) are called landing pages. If a visitor does not interact with this page in any way (meaning they don't click to any other pages on your site), this is called a "single-page visit" or a "bounce."

Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits. For example, if you had 1000 total visitors/sessions in a month, and 100 of them exited the same page they landed on (without clicking to any other pages first), you would have a 10% bounce rate for the month.

In my experience, the best way to lower your bounce rate is to (a) create content that speaks to your target persona, (b) provide links to other articles/pages on your site that will also be interesting to this persona, and (c) incorporate a content upgrade with a clear CTA.

For example, let's say your persona wants to paint their home, because their bedroom is too dark and it makes them anxious. You might write an article called: Top 50 Mood Boosting Colors To Paint Your Bedroom. Next to each paint color on the list you might include a link like [request a free paint sample] or [view paints in this color]. After reading this article, what is this persona probably wondering? I like #25 , #32, and #48. I wonder which one I'll like best...? Answer their question with your CTA. You might try something like: see which color feels best on your walls. Download a Free PDF that includes printable color swatches for all 50 mood-boosting paint colors. [Download here.]

I hope this helps!

Hi everyone,

I'm currently doing a full content audit for my company, in preparation for a website redesign. I've discovered thousands of pages (dating all the way back to 2009) with thin, outdated, and irrelevant content. ie: real estate news and predictions that are now super old news.

According to analytics, these older pages aren't receiving any traffic, so I think the best course of action is to delete these pages & add 404 redirects. In my opinion, this should be a big priority, because these pages are likely already hurting our domain authority to some extent & it's just a matter of time before we're really penalized by Google. Some members of my team have a different opinion -- they worry that deleting 1000 pages could hurt our rankings, and they want to wait and discuss the issue further in 3Q or 4Q (once the site redesign is completed and we have time to focus on it).

Am I wrong to think that waiting is a very bad idea? Google will notice that we've done a major site redesign--we've written all new copy, optimized the UX & content organization to make info easier to find, created new lead magnets, optimized images, etc.-- but we didn't bother to update 1000 pages of outdated content that no one is looking at...won't that look bad?

Do you agree that we should delete/merge all outdated content now, rather than waiting until after the site redesign? Or am I overreacting?

Thanks so much for your help!

One of my client's biggest keyword competitors is using, what I believe to be, sneaky redirects. The company is a large, international corporation that has a local office. They use a totally unrelated domain name for local press and advertising, but there is no website. The anchor text in the backlinks automatically redirects to the corporate website. Is this sneaky or not?