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"apart from main page, contact page, about us and some other generic pages, site name should be removed as it might produce duplicate content."

As a blanket statement, this is misleading at best.

Default title tags for most websites are "Page Title - Site Name", or something similar.

I generally like to keep the brand name in the title tag because I'm usually working on sites where the brand is valuable. For instance, "Seattle Lodging - Airbnb" is more compelling than "Seattle Lodging".

The main reason I usually get rid of the brand in the title tag is when I'm trying to create a high-clickthrough-rate title tag and the brand portion is getting in the way. For example "Seattle Lodging & Vacation Rentals - Nightly Rates Starting from $79!" might be a really compelling title tag and I can't fit the brand name on there, so I'll drop it. BUT I won't drop it elsewhere on the site where I want a solid default title tag format.

The only caveat is that if your brand sucks (eg DavidsCheapAffiliateReviews.info) then it might actually detract from your click-through rates, and you might want to leave it out.

Hey, something I've been thinking about lately is "where is the point of diminishing returns for keyword research detail?" I get that keyword research is important for finding out stuff like "people generally search for 'doctor' way more often than they search for 'licensed medical professional'", but what about after that? Is there much useful information to be found by sifting through spreadsheets of stats about "doctor" vs "dr" vs "doctors" vs "physician" vs "physicians" etc? Especially when Google seems to treat a lot of those as interchangable?

I wouldn't worry too much about "doctor" vs "dr" vs "doctors" - those are synonyms and the intent of the user doesn't change much.

Or another example: If a remodeling company did basements, do you think there's much to be gleaned from AdWords data comparing "basement remodeler", "basement remodelers", basement remodeling", "basement remodeling contractor", "basement remodeling contractors", "basement renovation", "basement renovations", "basement renovators", "finished basements", "basement finishers", "basement finishing", etc.?

Should those variations be analyzed and each targeted by their own sets of pages and pieces of content (e.g. a blog post that specifically targets "basement remodeler" and a blog post that targets "basement finisher" and a third blog post that specifically targets "renovated basement")

This example is different. The intent behind "basement remodeler" and "basement remodel" are rather different. The first is looking for local businesses, the second is looking for general information about remodels. To confirm this, all you need to do is look at the search results. Remodeler has a big local pack and list of local companies when I search it. When I search for the "remodel" version, I get a big photo pack, then local businesses, then People Also Ask questions, so there is clearly multiple search intent scenarios behind that example.

I wrote a bunch more about viewing the SERP closely to measure and classify intent here: https://www.contentharmony.com/blog/classifying-search-intent/ in case you're interested in diving deeper on those approaches.

To your point regarding targeting separate pages for it, yes and no. A local business should try and rank for one but may not be as focused on the second one. But it is worth creating a page that captures one overall intent and then figuring out which other keywords match it.

Or should the takeaway be "there aren't any combinations that people overwhelmingly prefer to use, so let's just make content about basements and topics relevant to basements. Keyword research complete."

Nah you need to be more specific or intentional about it than this.

Yes, example.com/blog/ will typically perform better than blog.example.com and exampleblog.com, and the more decent links that are pointed to the blog and the main site, the bigger the expected impact from combining them.

One word of warning - reverse proxies are complex and many teams encounter major developer headaches. Oftentimes it is easier to find a different way to set up content to be published on a subfolder like /blog/.

If you want to leave notes on what type of website you are working on (CMS or other software type for both regular site and blog) I am happy to leave notes if it's one I recognize.

The normal way to handle internationalization is to have separate Geo/Language subfolders, and potentially redirect users based upon IP address, or prompt them to switch to the appropriate language or country if they want.

For example, a US-based publisher with separate UK content might do this:

• domain.com/news
• domain.com/uk/news

Is there a reason you want to keep the URL the same while doing multilingual?

Google's overview of methods and why they're good or bad is a good starting point: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en

That's an interesting question - if you have examples of some of the secondary keywords you're looking at, that would be helpful for comparison.

There's a few things I would recommend.

The first is rather than guessing or trying to search for the right keyword, analyze competitor domains or specific competitor URLs to see what they rank for. For example, here are 400+ keywords that https://www.coursera.org/learn/songwriting-lyrics is ranking for. That number of overall keywords will typically make up for low volume on some of them.

The second thing is that lots of long tail searches, when combined, can produce meaningful traffic. So it is often worth testing out publishing a page on a keyword and seeing what type of traffic occurs naturally over 3-`12 months. 10 people who really really want a $10 or $100 solution to a problem and more valuable than 1,000 people not interested in buying anything.

The third thing is that sometimes people aren't searching for a product, but, if you rank for another term they're interested in, you can make some sales by giving them something worth buying. "how to write a song" has 11.5k-30.3k searches per month - I'm not certain you can make 500 sales off of those types of volume ranges, but, you might be able to make 10-50 when you rank for a big head term, or lots of longer tail terms. This "rank for other stuff and then sell our product" approach may be what is working well for the competitors you mentioned.

Finally - consider other types of queries that might make sense - 'music production classes" instead of "learn music productin online", for instance.

How to react to 3rd party content like this really depends on some other factors such as:

• Is this content showing up for your brand name, or just generic industry terms (if we were talking drones this might be "dji drone reviews" vs "4k drones")?
• Are they saying negative things about your company?
• Is the content obviously slanted or poorly produced? Usually savvy B2B buyers can ignore those on their own.

(I am not a lawyer but) It's not a trademark violation to mention your name without permission, so, you probably don't have much standing. If they're saying bad things about your company, then it really depends on whether they have a good reason for saying whatever they said. Either way - they're probably not going to take it down for you.

The broader question is really about content marketing strategy - how does your company go about producing better content that deserves to rank for whatever phrases these press releases are showing up for? Google doesn't love showing press releases in search results - if you give them something better to rank, and your site has some decent domain authority, you have a good shot of outranking that type of content.

Those are some general thoughts - this is one of those scenarios that depends on more info or specific examples.

Hey Mat,

Answering your second question here - "I do have another question though: the links and images that are embedded in CSS (so for example links that are not 'a href') are not recognised by the Moz toolbar. I know that the toolbar only can see normal 'a href' links, but can this hurt my SEO? Or will Google recognise these internal links?"

Generally images that are stored in CSS, for example a background image on a div, will not be indexed by Google. If you're storing links inside CSS I'll assume it's a scenario like a :before pseudo element. In that case, I would default to guessing that Google does not treat these the same or as highly as a standard link, and I'd suggest you change how that content is added to the page to get it out of CSS or JS files and into the core HTML file that is being crawled.

I'm getting a bunch of 500 errors in my browser console when attempting to view the link you shared, so I can't see any content being loaded by CSS, so I'm guessing those resources are blocked to non-logged-in users on your staging server. That is also a  potential reason why certain toolbars might not be able to load the content, however if you're logged in they should be able to fetch that content.

Answering the first question for anyone that stumbles on to this thread:

1. Go to the Appearance >>> Menus page
2. Select the correct menu you are looking to edit (some WordPress sites have multiple menus, or a separate mobile menu)
3. Click the down arrow on the menu item you want to enter, and edit the "Title" field:
   Screenshot example on imgur

If that doesn't work, then my next step would be seeing if A) you're using a custom menus plugin, eg MegaMenu, or B) you're using a theme with it's own interface. In either case I'd be looking at that theme/plugin to see if they are overriding these WordPress defaults.

Agreed with Kevin on the timing - give it 1+ weeks after publishing on your site to syndicate it elsewhere.

Unfortunately LinkedIn doesn't offer a canonical option that I'm aware of, unlike others such as Medium who I think are offering it. As a resutl, the LinkedIn post should have a citation back to the original post. Something like this:

This post was originally published on our blog at https://www.norhart.com/blog/2018/08/08/great-leadership-is-about-influence-not-authority/ - take a look here at the rest of our XYZ insights on how to be a better leader.

Putting this at the end of the post is fine. Italicizing or formatting it differently is fine. Adding or tweaking a call to action on why they should go to your site and subscribe or whatever is fine.

Good luck!

Lots going on here, so, a laundry list of follow up questions and thoughts for you...

Are you seeing AMP results showing up in the Search Console? Are you seeing them indexed as intended?

If you're doing Native AMP, you won't be able to diagnose pages by /amp URL types of formatting. It might be worth trying to fire off an event, or custom dimension in GA, for AMP = Yes / No or something like that.

For the sitewide view, have you tested loading pages on a private browser and incognito mobile browser and seeing if they show up in GA realtime in each of the 3 views when they're supposed to?

It looks like you might be using Cloudflare - I haven't dealt with an AMP site that uses it, but have you checked whether there are compatibility issues or anything you need to activate?

Are any Google Tag Manager pages set to fire on HTTPS only?

Are any GA filters in place that specify HTTP/HTTPS that need to be broadened?

Your Amp Analytics code seems to match the one on a site that is functioning as intended, so I don't think it's a formatting issue.

For the GA view filter - it seems like you should be able to simply include/exclude traffic to shop.winefolly.com - why the added complexity beyond that?

Those are all the same brand. Something like the following on the same site makes more sense to me from both a branding and SEO perspective.

• modernapts.com
• modernapts.com/locations/ - overview page
• modernapts.com/locations/seattle/ - city/location page
• modernapts.com/locations/los-angeles/ - city/location page
• modernapts.com/locations/seattle/capitol-hill-penthouses/ - building page

This is more or less the same as any retail/physical chain that has location pages.

Here is an example of an actual brand that has locations on the same domain, city level pages, and building level pages:

• http://www.equityapartments.com/san-francisco-bay-apartments - city/location page
• http://www.equityapartments.com/san-francisco-bay/mission-bay/azure-apartments - building page

I have not reviewed their overall SEO setup, but this is a great example from a URL point of view, and they have lots of useful information on their actual building level pages. The city level pages are great for SEO and targeting city-level keywords as well.

It wouldn't cause a literal penalty from Google, however, yes, it can hurt your site's rankings.

It sounds like those filters use URL parameters? If so it's possible for all parameterized URLs to be controlled or use canonical tags to indicate duplicate content.

What types of filters are these? EG what is changing on the page when you select the filters? Is this like an ecommerce category experience where you're filtering product listings?

It sounds like you're on the right track. If users and bots start off with the same content, that's a good start.

From there, the question is "how much content is being customized, and how frequently?" For example, if you're swapping out 5 different headlines for 40% of users, and 60% of users see the original, that's not a big deal, particularly if the rest of the page is the same.

But if you're swapping out 80% of page copy (eg removing a bunch of excess copy that is shown for SEO purposes), and 60-90% of users are seeing that "light" version of the page, you run the risk of two things:

1. First, the chance that it wouldn't pass a manual review if one was performed.
2. Second, the chance that Google may render a copy of the page as a user (not announcing themselves as a crawler), seeing a different version of the page multiple times, and then effectively devaluing the missing content, or worse, flagging the page in their system as cloaked content.

We could get lost in details of whether or not they're doing this, or how they're doing this, but from a technology standpoint it's pretty simply for them to render content from non-official IPs and user-agents and do an 'honesty check' for situations where content is showing up multiple ways. This is already how them compare the page on desktop vs mobile to see which sections of the page render, and which are changed.

I think you are also right to rely on site interaction before personalizing, but since there are multiple ways to do that, you should know that it's possible for Google to simulate some of those interactions. So there's a chance at some point they will render your content in a personalized manner, particularly if personalization is the result of visiting a URL or clicking a simple toggle switch or button.

Based upon your initial question which mentioned the following format:

SEO consultant

• SEO consultant Training

• SEO consultant Prices

I would agree with RedSweater that your example is over-optimized. You'll be fine with a list of text like this in a page that contains other content on it.

SEO consultant

• Training

• Prices

Local SEO services

• Training

• Prices

Hey there,

I wouldn't worry too much about the concept of LSI. Most of the people who know it well will tell you that it's a valid concept, but not used actively by Google (https://twitter.com/bill_slawski/status/963525512294379520).

LSI are synonyms of the keyword your target (the one in the H1 and title tag). For example my keyword would be  "Tuscany bike tour" and my LSI would be "Tuscany cycling vacation", "bicycle tour in Tuscany" etc...

Then secondary related keyword are for me the other topics I need to cover in my content. In this case for example it would be "Florence", "Siena". But from what I understand a good writer wouldn't use "Siena" or "Florence" multiple times in it's content it would replace it by keywords that support them such as "the town of Florence", "the city of Siena"," the Palio of Siena" etc...Is my understanding correct ?

I disagree with that. While you don't want to use a term excessively in a piece of content - there's no problem with using it multiple times, and writers should use variations naturally. Also - you don't need to think of "town of Florence" and "Florence" as separate keywords. They're close enough to be interchangeable. Usually when SEOs talk about related terms, they're talking about "world war II" and "germany", or "trees" and "leaves".

If so what is the use of using those secondary related keyword, is it to rank on other keywords such as Palio of siena tuscany bike tour ? or just not to repeat a secondary keyword too many times. If i write the Palio of Siena isn't it considered as another topic that the topic siena ?

An article about a bike tour in Siena should be a separate piece of content from an article about the town of Sienna. It appears that "palio of siena" is a horse race? In which case that would be two separate pages of content if you wanted to rank for both terms.

I recommend looking at some established and top-ranking websites in your niche and see what they're doing. That's often the best way to get a feel for what is working. If your niche isn't super competitive and you can't find examples you think are good, you can also look at more competitive topics in related industries - for example "kentucky derby"-related searches might be a good example in the US.

I'll just jump in and add that Miriam thinks about local SEO much more than I do, so I'll second all of her opinions.

Knowing that all of your properties are in the same area, this seems like the biggest argument in favor of separate sites. Google may be more likely to rank other sites instead of subpages of the same site to avoid what is called domain crowding. However, it still happens in local. Just search for "office supply stores" and you're likely to see multiple listings for Staples or OfficeDepot, for example.

Honestly you could do both. Have a corporate site with pages for every property on it, and set up microsites with single properties on them. If the site is setup well with something like Wordpress Multisite then at least the same software can be running and updated simultaneously. In that case I'd probably use the microsites as the landing pages for Google local listings.

If you do go the route of multiple sites, I'd recommend having a clear button or call to action to "View Our Other Properties in the XYZ Area".

Hey Mike,

Outside of Local SEO, one single site would be the clear winner because it’s easier to build the authority of that one domain.

Within Local SEO, having dedicated domains could make more sense. One could make the argument that it’s simpler for Google To understand a single location, but there are plenty of retail sites with single domains that refute that argument.

One could also make the argument that it might be easier to build homepage links to separate domains, but I don’t think it’s enough of a factor to change your web structure.

Option 2 is the standard in your industry, for certain. But it typically means higher web design costs to build and maintain them all, even if they’re somewhat cookie cutter. Frankly I think that’s as big of a factor in your decision.

I wouldn’t worry about the administrative relationship you described. It’s not going to be a major factor - you’re not deceiving Google by separating the sites, you’re changing how users experience the sites.

A couple of clarifying questions:

• Are any of the communities near each other, or are they in many cities across the country?
• Are you seeing subpages of corporate sites ranking in the local search results for any of your communities?
• Is there any administrative value to separating the websites? Outside of SEO considerations.

Lots of methods to how you reach out to them, but sounds like prospecting and finding them in the first place is the bigger issue.

For prospecting, go start by looking for lists of blogs, eg "top gardening bloggers". Also look for non-bloggers, eg "top gardening instagram accounts". Google obvious content, eg if you're looking for fitness blogs, search "best upper body workouts" or "post workout protein options" and you'll find sites that might not show up for "top fitness bloggers".

Gather them all up in a spreadsheet. Find contact info. Interact on social. Email and introduce yourself. See if you can offer a guest post with some actual highly relevant titles that they'd be interested in. It helps to already have some decent content you have produced to lend you more credibility with them, eg "here's a few past things I've published on similar topics."

Consider expanding the process with tools like LinkProspector, Buzzstream, Pitchbox, Just Reach Out (this one seems to have good training wheels for people new to outreach) - that can help you scale up the number of sites you can find and contact. But it helps to use them once you have done the process a couple times.

As you mentioned, will take awhile when you don't know the niche. But you can learn the space pretty quickly

To your first question:

If the text on the product page is only duplicated on that page, then it's fine. That's not much different than having a text pull quote in an article. Also not much different from Amazon having a short description, and a jump link down the page to a longer description.

To your second question:

We generally don't worry too much about duplication on category/tag/aggregation pages, so long as it's only excerpts, eg 5-50 words. If the pages are really thin, and 100% of the text content from the distillery page shows up on the category page, then you need to write more text for the distillery pages to fix the problem.

Hmm - aside from webrings of yore, I haven't seen too many tools trying to accomplish this. There were a few out there trying to connect guest bloggers, but, they mostly turned into directories of spam or low quality sites, not ones you'd really want to partner with.

As Roman mentioned, there's tons of influencer networks in every consumer niche that will enable pay-to-play opportunities but the safe advice is to treat these as advertising opportunities, not link opportunities.

Most people doing good collaboration will do direct email outreach and treat the collaborations like a real partnership (links are a side benefit and never mentioned). Figure out a good way to partner with people and the links will be naturally part of it.

I would think of these as keyword first, and use the general topic to inform what should go on that page. You'll also need to separate the purpose of the page versus the intent of the keyword.

For example, let's say you sell payroll software. A few of the keywords you'll encounter might include:

• payroll
• payroll services
• payroll software
• free payroll calculator
• how to do payroll

Each of these keywords has a different intent - so I would start out by identifying what the user should likely find if you were magically ranking #1 for that content:

• payroll - this is a "split intent" keyword and the user could be looking for a number of things. Let's set this aside for a moment, but most likely only your highest linked pages will rank for a head term like this, so your goal is to either get your homepage ranking, or get your "payroll guide" type of content ranking.
• payroll services - this is going to be a features/services type of page or even a homepage, since the user is looking for someone to take over their payroll. As a software company, you may want to build this page and tell users how your team handles payroll (if they do) or how the user doesn't need to hire a full service because your software makes it so easy.
• payroll software - this user likely wants to do their own payroll but automate the process with software, maybe even making it a one-step process. That deserves a feature/product type of page experience selling them on what your software offers.
• free payroll calculator - this user is most likely already handling their own payroll and just wants to use a quick tool to spot check their numbers. You should built a tool that does this for the user, and then have a call to action on the page that says you can save them a lot of time by just using your software instead.
• how to do payroll - this user is early on in the process of hiring employees or managing payroll and wants a complete guide to make sure they're doing it right. This type of query deserves a long-form guide, similar to the Beginner's Guide to SEO.

On each of these pages it might be natural to talk about taxes, W2s, benefits, deductions, etc. But you're going to talk about them different on each of these pages. Yes - you will want some body content on every page you publish that is intended to rank for something, but you can talk about the topics differently on every page.

Does this process help you in figuring out what type of content to put on each page? I can keep going but want to make sure that this is helping.

I'd chalk it up to being a quirk. "Golf holidays" is the keyword that actually has volume, therefore anything happening on "golfholidays" is mostly a curiosity unless you can track conversions from it. I would ignore it and keep plowing forward with your efforts to rank for the one you care about.

More likely than not you just need to keep building the authority of your site and make sure your page is well optimized for the phrase "golf holidays" and you'll get there. Most of the sites I see ranking on page 1 for that query have a decent number of links to them. 5 results are homepages which tend to have more links than internal landing pages, and the landing pages that are ranking are reasonably well targeted. As an example of what it takes to show up with a well optimized internal page with no links - British Airways (https://www.britishairways.com/en-us/destinations/holiday-types/golf-holidays) is only ranking 10th for the query with a highly authoritative site.

Hmmm - are you referring to a list of keywords that are relevant to each of their clients? EG if they're working with a pet food company, they're tracking "Dog food", "cat food", etc.?

Or are you referring to agencies that track an index of general competitive keywords to see how SERPs are changing over time? EG "credit card consolidation", "payday loans", "Women's heels", etc.?

Hi - I'm not familiar with the 2016 edition, however there's a few posts out there discussing older Windows servers issues. Historically speaking, IIS causes SEO headaches, but they can be fixed or mitigated with proactive efforts to do so.

Here is a post worth reading on the topic, but it won't cover newer concerns that might have been addressed since it was posted in 2011:

• https://moz.com/blog/what-every-seo-should-know-about-iis

Windows also publishes what they call the IIS SEO Toolkit which most SEOs have had good things to say about: https://www.iis.net/downloads/microsoft/search-engine-optimization-toolkit

Here are two blog posts talking about how to use the IIS SEO Toolkit:

• https://builtvisible.com/how-to-install-and-use-iis-seo-toolkit/
• https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/microsoft-iis-seo-toolkit-seo-tips-and-tricks/

In regards to your question on pinging - are you talking about pinging external servers when new content is published? I wouldn't call that a major SEO concern, but let me know if you mean something else.

I'll send a tweet seeing if anyone else can weigh in on your questions that has more recent experience than me.

Hi Jatin,

If you have any kind of unique content on a tag or category page, then it's reasonable to index it. For example, a category page with 1-2 paragraphs of intro text explaining what types of content are found in that category. In this case, any posts or post teasers showing up on that category/tag page would not be unique content.

If there is no unique content on that page, then I'd suggest noindex for category and tag pages.

Yes - you'll want to keep your blog on the same subdomain for SEO purposes.

• www.domain.com/blog/ is great.
• blog.domain.com is less great.
• www.differrentdomain.com is the worst option.

What is the reason for using this website platform again? Is there anything stopping you from using a different website software, such as Wordpress or Squarespace? Unless there's something keeping you stuck to that software (long term contract, or shopping cart/order functionality, or other things that their software does that you can't easily replace), then I'd generally suggest to look into alternatives that have better support for SEO & other digital marketing concerns.

Yes, that would require some website design effort as well as migrating content. It may even mean you'd have to change URLs, which can also create SEO headaches. So it may not be worth it all, just to fix the URL. But - it's really silly that they don't offer this, and their suggestions about tagging make it appear that they're not very savvy with SEO concerns that affect business owners.

That's kind of a lengthy non-answer, so I apologize. If you want to post specific URLs or website software here, that context would be helpful in helping you make a decision.

Let's resolve the boilerplate disclaimer text first: it is fine to have a section of content that is duplicated on lots of blog posts - the most important consideration is that each page has a decent amount of unique text from all other URLs on the website. Now there are limits to this - if every post has 200-400 words unique content (not really enough) and the boilerplate is 500 words, then your balance is off in that ratio. If you have 300-1000+ unique words on post and boilerplate text that is <100 words, then I would not worry about that at all. However, you can use the tag that Nick mentioned if you want to - it shouldn't hurt anything.

Now, regarding the canonicalization of posts and how it relates to category/archive pages:

Each post will have its own canonical tag, for example:

• http://www.domain.com/blog/best-post-ever/
• http://www.domain.com/blog/big-announcement-new-product
• http://www.domain.com/blog/annual-company-report

Then each category page or archive page would have it's own canonical tag:

• http://www.domain.com/blog/category/announcements/
• http://www.domain.com/blog/tag/widgets/

When you are viewing a category or tag or archive page that lists a bunch of posts - there is only one canonical tag visible in the code for that page, and it's for the page itself - not for the posts listed on the page.

I'm guessing you're asking this question because you read that duplicate content on category and tag pages was common, and that is true. However - canonicals are not involved in fixing this at all. The thing with Wordpress is that unless you built a theme yourself - you shouldn't have to touch any of this. Default Wordpress with Yoast SEO plugin installed will handle this for you. I have worked on hundreds of Wordpress sites for 10 years and can count the number of times I manually specified a canonical tag in Wordpress on one hand.

The duplicate content of two pages such as your knowledge center and press room should be mitigated by 1) reducing the number of posts that fall into both categories, 2) making sure there is some unique content (50-300 words) on the knowledge center and press room pages other than a list of blog posts, and 3) not stressing too hard about duplicate content on these pages.

Hope that helps, please feel free to respond with questions if I missed something.

I think you would generally approach this the same way you'd approach any subjective research, which is heavy on asking questions on a survey. You could research traditional qualitative research processes to learn more about how they're conducted.

You'd be surprised by the emotions that can be hiding in an otherwise 'boring' purchase like a boiler, however. If it's the middle of winter in Chicago and snowing outside on a Tuesday night and your boiler goes out and you have a baby crying in the house and a dog that needs to get walked - I can guarantee you're feeling a ton of emotions (frustration, anxiety, stress) when you open your phone, google "chicago 24/7 furnace repair" and finally get somebody on the phone to come out that night and fix it.

Even in a B2B purchase, there are emotions and motivations that are hidden under the surface, such as picking the more expensive furnace repair vendor that has a better reputation because you need to use up your end of year budget in order to keep it for next year, and you can always justify the choice based upon their reputation or even just a Yelp score.

SO - the hard part is capturing that emotion on a survey form or getting an authentic customer response shortly after purchase, or getting somebody to be truthful with you about these motivations that may be embarrassing or incriminating or whatever.

I think you're best off doing some research on general emotions, and then creating a list of all of the considerations that go into purchasing your product (free shipping? good warranty? website looks trustworthy? my wife will like the color? etc.). Once you have each of those lists, brainstorm how various emotions will factor into each of the purchase considerations, and how it will change depending on your type of customer (b2b vs b2c, enterprise vs SMB, senior exec vs intern, etc.). This may yield a lot of ideas, or not many at all, depending on the nature of what you're selling.

I think once you complete this inventory across each product, each customer type, each purchase consideration, and each emotion - you'll have a pretty darn good idea of how emotions can be factored into your marketing program, such as how to adjust the copy on your product/service pages, and how to create entertaining or educational content that reflects these emotions.

Hopefully that helps, but let me know if I can assist further!

Hi there,

This isn't bad enough to completely stop your efforts, however it makes me more concerned about your website platform. Which service are you using? Have you verified with their support team that you can't put the blog post title in the URL or change it manually?

The Yoast team has plenty of experience with large publishers, so my guess is that this is the most robust option you have for Wordpress.

But, I don't have any insights for you on the peculiarities of the plugin and things to watch out for. Will forward it along to other folks in case they have any notes.

Not a problem with link structure. Doesn't appear to be a problem with code, either, from a glance just now.

The good news? Your title tags work fine for me in Google search results and I see you at #1 ranking after the image pack for "press release examples".

http://i.imgur.com/z2LTwcc.png

IMO this is probably a personalized search result problem that you're seeing, and I would guess it's limited to you unless you've confirmed it with other people outside of your company computers.

Never hurts to resubmit the URL in Search Console, either.

Hi Taiger,

You can find instructions on how to do this at https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/answer/1235687

The menu itself is found at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/crawl-url-parameters

You'll just want to enter escaped_fragment when they ask parameter, and answer "No" to the questions regarding whether this changes content on the page.

In terms of whatever help Google might give to a site with https vs http, no, this doesn't really matter:

What type of SSL certificate works best?

Companies offer a myriad and confusing array of SSL certificates. The two primary ones to pay attention to are:

1. Standard Validation SSL – Standard level of validation. Typically cost between $0-$100.
2. Extended Validation SSL – Offers the highest level of validation and often costs between $100-500.

From a rankings point of view, it makes absolutely no difference what type of certificate you use. For now.

John Mueller of Google has stated that Google doesn't care what kind of SSL certificate your website uses, but that may change in the future.

For the reasons outlined in the blog post that Gaston linked to by Cyrus, you'll see that it could make a difference from a UX perspective since the EV certificates can look more trustworthy:

https://d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/uploads/blog/540d50cd94bd58.88267717.jpg

For an enterprise, the extra cost should be negligible. However, you should know that some of the EV certificates will only work on one subdomain, so you may need to purchase multiple certificates if you want to cover extra subdomains. "Wildcard" certificates that can work on multiple subdomains have only recently been available for EV certificates and are a bit more expensive I think.

If your audience is the same as the audience for your business, I'd highly advocate keeping this in a subfolder like /library/ rather than a subdomain.

If your audience is different, then I'm not certain why you're doing the magazine, so let's assume that's not the case.

You will see a drop in organic traffic by moving to a subdomain for the reasons covered in the Whiteboard Friday that Dmytro shared. Regardless of whether you leave it on the subdomain or the subfolder, you'll need to create proper 301 redirects as Eric mentioned.

Please let us know if you have questions on that process, but to clearly answer the question of "If we move the library to forensicoutreach.com/library, will that make any difference?", YES, we recommend doing that /library/ subfolder.

Hey Sam.

Is this for a visual feature, like making the content "appear" as the user scrolls? While Google is doing a great job of reading JS, my concern would be that this looks like cloaking or hidden text if the purpose is misinterpreted.

There may be safer ways to do this depending on what your goal is. Let me know and I can go from there.

Just to add a note to what Everett & Dr. Pete have said:

1 - Take a look at Quora's "Answer Wiki". It's a combination of other answers on the page and summarizes the best answers. You could use a similar format and even a similar title, eg "Best Answer", and could take the time to word it properly in a way that is likely to look like a clear answer.  EG if you're trying to generate a snippet on a page titled "What is the capital of New York?", then you'd have an answer clearly written as "The capital of New York is Albany." followed by the rest of the answers. That's an oversimplified example of course. Dr. Pete has other good ones in his Searchfest presentation.

2 - Use OL, UL, and Table formatting in the answer whenever you can. These elements are frequently cited within featured snippets and fairly easy to implement.

Do people tend to search for "CF-19" in the Toshiba example, or do they tend to search for "CF-1956Y6XLM"?

If it's CF-19 then I would add more value to the example pages, and not worry about the subpages as much. But, I'm guessing that it's the specific model numbers, in which case the ideal situation is to be able to index an exact page for that model number. If you take a look at the "CF-1956Y6XLM" example, PC World is ranking #1 pretty much on all spec content, meaning they're coasting on domain authority to rank those pages. Meanwhile I see you guys at #4. Typically I would suggest that it's a bad plan to go with really thin content, but if everyone else is doing it, you may not need 200-300 words to move up in the rankings. Try producing 50-75 custom words on 100 of these pages where you're ranking Top 5. Do it for models that are newer so you can monitor ranking improvement over time. If the ranking and traffic improvements happen, and they convert, then figure out if you can scale that process up for every new incoming product.

Other SERP benefits can beat rankings here, too. If you can get legitimate product ratings and generate some rich snippets for the products, that will help maximize your CTR. Try to write better meta descriptions, too - right now they're all pretty drab on that SERP example.

Martijn's suggestion of reviews is a good start but will probably only help on 10-20% of pages that you're able to get reviews on. Nevertheless, probably worth the effort.

Some e-commerce platforms will allow you to save a single product with variations, which helps with this problem. If 10 models can share a page, and be selected with a product sub menu (like the t-shirt size or color selector on a fashion ecommerce site) then that is a good way to cut down on total URLs by 50-90%. But, I'd try the unique content route first and see if the numbers add up.

Sadly I completely believe you.

If it's not cost or time prohibitive, I'd recommend moving to Godaddy's Wordpress hosting package and rebuild the site in Wordpress, which won't have these problems. Godaddy might even offer a conversion package of some kind.

Otherwise you might try a website builder option like Squarespace instead, which is also fairly decent for basic SEO considerations like this.

Good call on GTM - I always forget about the ability to add normal HTML snippets.

If you changed 2500 URLs on a 10 year old site and didn't create redirects then you have a much bigger problem on your hands than Moz alerts.

1. Did you create 301 redirects after changing these URLs?
2. Please send an example of a new URL and the old version of that URL.
3. Is your traffic holding steady in Google Analytics since you made these changes?

You'll need to create redirects from the old URLs to the new URLs. Once Moz gets a chance to recrawl this within a month the errors should go away.

If you changed the permalink structure on an established site (not a new site), then it's even more important to create these redirects, both for users and for web crawlers trying to give you credit for your incoming links.

I can't speak to the current Godaddy website editor - but most wysiwyg website editors won't offer you the option to specify a canonical tag.

Additionally, if you put ... code inside of the body copy, Google will generally ignore it since it could be manipulated by third parties with access to comment fields or other content editors. So, that's not going to help unfortunately.

You might be better off implementing the 301 redirect if they'll let you do that.

Also - if you can edit the navigation menu to make sure users are sent back to domain.com instead of domain.com/home.html, that should remove the URL from being crawled, which will help as well. Do they give you the option to get rid of that "Home" link and add a custom one that points directly to http://www.answer2cancer.org/ ? That would get rid of Moz crawl errors as well for the most part.

As long as rel prev/next is correct, and each page canonicals to itself (see second to last bullet on this page), then I think those title tag formats look good. Aside from getting rid of the Moz errors, it sends a stronger pagination signal to Google, and may be useful to the user.

From looking at your site, your niche is "quirky gifts", so that is a decent umbrella topic to drive the content you're producing.

I think the "10 Best ______" format is one you should keep doing regardless of the links. Over time they could get links from people referencing gift occasions and things like that.

The next content types I'd be focused on would be topic related. "Star Wars", "Wine Lovers", "Science", etc. These don't have to be posts about gifts for those audiences, just anything related to those topics that fans would want to read. These types of posts will be your broader strategy for building awareness with your target audiences. The better your production value and promotion efforts, the more likely you'll see links from this type of content.

Your overall blog may or may not attract subscribers. You're more likely to get them if you focus on an angle, eg "nerdy stuff" like www.thinkgeek.com. That's probably the best route to go in order to get a following over time. Otherwise you'll always be trying to build traffic without a developed fanbase. And, your blog can speak to 60% of the categories you sell and still be successful. You don't have to publish about all products in the same blog.

There's a couple of questions to answer here. The first is the difference between asking "Will our Domain Authority Decrease?" versus "Will our Traffic & Rankings Decrease?". The second question is more important so I'll cover that first.

The official answer from Google is that, no, your traffic and rankings will not decrease. In practice, however, a number of people have seen 5-15% traffic drops for weeks or months after the transfer - even when completed correctly. The general assumption is that this is due to creating redirects for http -> https, which traditionally reduces the value of your inbound link profile.

With that said, it's small enough that you can recover quickly with some link reclamation - basically you should update the links you have control over and also email friendly webmasters and say "we changed our site to be HTTPS secure and were wondering if you could update your link on domain.com/xyzpage/".

Deacyde's notes on updating internal links are also correct. You should also reference popular "ssl migration" guides like this one from Yoast: https://yoast.com/dev-blog/move-website-https-ssl/

In regards to your exact question - "Will our Domain Authority Decrease?" - this could reference the literal Domain Authority that is measured by Moz, or you could be referencing the broader concept of domain authority in terms of how Google views your website. I don't have an exact answer for how Moz handles normal 301 redirects and if they treat https redirects different. I would assume that Domain Authority might drop slightly, but that's a guess and not an official answer. As noted above Google says that your website will be treated the same, and I think that is the case within a few months, but there can be initial traffic drops, and worse if you handle the migration incorrectly.

I haven't paid for Google Custom Search engines in the past, but depending on your traffic, your search units may be far less than expected. We see plenty of large sites (thousands of pages+, millions of visits) that see less than 0.1% of their pageviews from searches. If you're starting the search feature from scratch, I wouldn't assume from the start that you're going to need to pay the $2000 rate.

Scoop.it is a bit more like Pinterest or Delicious. You can post stuff to your Scoop.it account, but it's probably not going to be a good solution for searching a website.

Google custom search will definitely be the easiest way to do this. If your content was stored in a database then there would be more options you could use to search it, but I'd still expect users to get better results from Google's option since it will be smarter at basic search functionality.

Can you redirect the old help pages to the new help pages? Or are the old pages still present because people are still referring to them for old versions of the software?

Do you have any flexibility to change the help page Content Management System or coding? The HTML frames being used are antiquated and a waste of your time to try and support.

Can you edit the HTML of the subpages that are within the frames? Those HTML pages have sections and you should be able to set the <title>within them like any other HTML page. They will possibly get indexed with URLs such as <a href="http://kilgray.com/memoq/2015/help-en/memoq_help_title_page.html">http://kilgray.com/memoq/2015/help-en/memoq_help_title_page.html</a> even though they will get redirected to <a href="http://kilgray.com/memoq/2015/help-en/index.html?memoq_help_title_page.html">http://kilgray.com/memoq/2015/help-en/index.html?memoq_help_title_page.html</a>.</p></title>

Posting new content to blog.corporate.com is still better than publishing nothing at all. For SEO it won't help www.corporate.com as much as www.corporate.com/blog/ would help, but SEO is not the #1 goal of every content program.

You can still get tons of value from driving qualified traffic to blog.corporate.com using tactics like Facebook Ads and other paid social media, and that blog can still rank in search results and eventually drive prospects back to www.corporate.com. As Patrick mentioned, creating links in blog posts that point back to key pages on www.corporate.com will help on the SEO consideration.

So to answer your questions:

1 - Will it help boost ranking of example.com if we share frequent content on our blog https://blog.example.com/? How much impact it has?

Yes, but good internal linking will be help. It has less impact than if you were to get that content onto www.example.com/blog/.

2- Everybody says content is the king, Ok fine, but when you are not allowed to share it on the main corporate site, then where to share it? Blog and social media sites? please help.

Subdomain is next best option if a subfolder on the main site is not an option. So, post content on blog.corporate.com - and then share that link on social media.

3- We are in a business where clients do not bother to go on sites and read, so in this scenario is it correct to say that you hav to create the content for search engine consumption even when your clients dont need it/or have not in the habit of reading it?

In most 'boring' industries there are still decent ways to get users on to the website reading your content, you just have to be more creative. Here's a few posts with ideas and examples:

• https://moz.com/blog/how-to-create-content-for-boring-industries
• https://moz.com/webinars/content-marketing-in-boring-industries
• https://moz.com/blog/the-guide-to-developing-a-content-strategy-for-boring-industries