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2-3 sentences is going to be better than nothing, yes. Don't go overboard on the anchor text links to other internal pages, but it can certainly be beneficial.

Hey Bob,

The short answer is that most people don't do this because they don't know that they should, or they haven't gotten around to it.

Static homepages with well-written introductory content are almost always better than a dump of 5-10 blog post teasers, even for blogs that don't have any other function than publishing blog posts. For examples of good custom homepages on websites that only feature blog content, I'd point you towards these examples:

• http://mywifequitherjob.com/
• http://www.seattlehomestead.com (this is my site, but I think it's a good example of custom homepage/introduction content)

Here's the rankings I'd give on relevance:

• "Cleaning Marble Floors" - highly relevant, but probably too restrictive to continually create decent content.
• "Anything Related to Marble Floors" - just about right. Relevance is high in terms of search engines and your readers, and you're not getting too far away from the topic of the business.
• "General Flooring" - OK, but probably too broad if cleaning wood floors is irrelevant to your business.
• "Home Improvement" - Way too broad for the type of site you're running.

As far as finding writers, I'd avoid most of the content that you'll get for under $25 for a blog post. It's going to be poorly researched, and probably poorly written, too. Start with networks like Zerys or Skyword and look for writers with experience with construction/flooring/marble.

In the past, page titles, structured as questions have done reasonably well since they were often close to the query typed by many users.

In the future, however, I'd expect to see the following 2 broad changes:

• Knowledge graph answers to more popular and basic questions (meaning it's not worth much time to create these types of pages).
• Hummingbird changes to how queries are answered. From what I've read it appears that part of Hummingbird was about better analyzing the structure and meaning of queries, rather than simply matching keywords. To me that would suggest that the page types you're talking about will be less and less valuable.

Because of that, I wouldn't dedicate as much time to these types of content as I would have a couple years ago. Harder questions or Q&A type content will always have it's place, however.

Getting back to your question of "Would [having pages ranked that get lots of views] help my website as whole start ranking better?", I'd say yes, but not simply because the pages are ranking. It's more likely that they'd attract some links and social shares for the site (assuming they're decent quality pages), which would provide more benefit. That said, I'd only spend time on content that's closely matched with the topic of the rest of your site - creating these random pages won't add much benefit if they're not related to the rest of the site.

Seems like a nice enough graphic to me. Perhaps the target audience is inclined to share socially and not necessary link. That's very normal.

9 linking root domains is decent and there are probably lower quality ones not being displayed by Open Site Explorer.

Pinterest would generate links but you usually won't see this flooding the results in Open Site Explorer, probably due to crawl depth of OSE and similar factors - most of the shares just aren't important enough to index.

Agreed - the hyphen will make little difference.

I've never seen these and I"m guessing that it's purpose is to try to get people to log back in to GA.

You can set up custom dashboards with these metrics and schedule them to send out automatically on the first of each month to you or the client. You have to restart the emails every 6 or 12 months I think, but otherwise it's pretty hassle free.

Instructions on setting up custom dashboards: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1068218?hl=en

Instructions on scheduling emailed reports: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1038573?hl=en

Seems fine to me. I generally try to avoid doing things like changing a <title>tag and nothing else on the post, but if you do this shortly after posting then I don't think it'll affect much. Of course, it's better if you can find a happy midpoint between the two options.</p> <p>Make sure the URL is done well from the start - you definitely don't want to have to change that.</p> <p>Jason Acidre has a good post on a similar concept: <a href="http://kaiserthesage.com/increase-search-traffic/">http://kaiserthesage.com/increase-search-traffic/</a> and seems to have worked fine for him when just changing the title tag.</p></title>

Zerys and Skyword are both decent options. Craigslist and Problogger can be good options as well.

No matter where you go, you'll want to hire a few writers and select the best ones to write additional content. Don't give a writer an order of 10 articles without being sure that they're producing good content for you.

Agreed with Chris. I'd prefer to have a ton of branded links (whether it's URL or brand name) and then target whatever keyword I want on the actual page.

Are we talking "acupuncture" vs "acupuncturist", or are we talking "truck for sale" vs "pickup for sale"?

More context along those lines would help in answering the question. In both situations you'll need to approach it based upon the keyword difficulty combined with a manual assessment of what's going on in the actual search results. If you search for "pickup for sale" and there are results showing for "trucks for sale", then you can be more liberal with your use of synonyms on the same page.

For external pages, copyscape should be sufficient.

For internal content, I would launch it noindexed on a test server (use meta robots and robots.txt) and run a Moz campaign crawl on it. That should be able to tell you whether any content is duplicated within the site without the content getting indexed.

4 paragraphs is a bit much, but as long as there's significant content after that (more than 4 paragraphs) then you should be fine. The partial title shouldn't be an issue either.

So - hard to give a good answer for this aside from subjective opinion of what we've noticed recently. And, whatever answer I write will probably be dated 3 to 6 months from now.

With that said, the above answers are about right. Google should be able to understand these, and probably does (especially when there are no exact match results), but that doesn't mean that the page will rank if there are a bunch of people specifically targeting the "best haircuts calgary" variation.

If there were two pages, one with a split keyword and multiple links and social shares, and the other one with an exact match keyword and zero links or social shares - I'd put my money on the page with the split keyword.

"Foremost, shouldn't we get rid of that embed option on our page? I mean, isn't is stealing from our backlink potential? I can't imagine juice would somehow pass back to us through a Scribd-located doc or embed but I haven't found info affirming or contradicting that."

Yes, I absolutely agree that you should remove these. I'd also look for embeds of their Scribd documents and do a little bit of link reclamation and see if you can get a link added to the original content. Can't hurt, right?

"And secondly, isn't a Scribd collection a bit analogous to posting videos on YouTube and hoping your page will ultimately benefit from it via clickthroughs, etc? At this year's MozCon I heard a strong argument against that."

You could go a few ways on this - I don't think it's causing a huge issue. I might name the Scribd document something different from their own blog post, to try and rank for different variations on the titles.

Hey Harry,

For the top 5-10% of these pages (specifically the ones with the highest referral volume to your site or high domain authority), try and write some custom content to supplement your boilerplate stuff.

For the rest of them I wouldn't worry about the boilerplate content. Duplicate content on the pages would mean that it's unlikely that all of them would rank together, but I can't think of any reason that it would decrease the link value sent to you.

The attractions page that you linked to has plenty of unique content, but if you're targeting the keyword "st augustine attractions", you'll want to do everything in your power to make that page more attractive and useful than anything else ranking for the target keyword.

Listing blog posts down below as title + short description is great from a user standpoint and a search engine standpoint. Keep it up, and try to find ways to add more internal links to the text throughout the page rather than relying on dumping all the links at the bottom.

Both suggestions from Ron and ReferralCandy are good ones. Have a dedicated landing page, promote on all of your owned channels like newsletters and social media profiles, and do your best to promote through your writing onsite and offsite.

Beyond that I recommend that you look into paid social channels like LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. You can get reasonable CPCs and highly targeted audience demo/psychographics like job title, region, etc. Very handy if you only want to target CMOs or CIOs, for example.

Sri,

What I am saying is that this won't be a problem for you. But, I wouldn't do it unless Pinterest is really important to you.

Hi there,

302 redirects are only an issue for links pointing to your own site. So, if you have an internal link going through a 302 redirect, that's bad. If you have a link from a blogger who mentioned you're website that is 302ing, that's bad.

If you have links on your website that are sent through a 302 redirect to another website (especially a large one like Facebook), that's not a big deal and can be disregarded.

Hi there,

Digging up an old question I was asked to respond to.

In short - if you're writing unique descriptions on the indexed pages, then those are fine. The non-indexed pages don't matter in regards to duplicate content, though I'm unclear why you would need page 2 or 3 for a single hotel.

Regardless of whether the traffic converts, there's no harm to having non-converting traffic. If it generates links or social shares then it's adding value in that way. As long as the content itself doesn't suck, and reflects positively on the firm, then I would keep it.

There's probably a good argument to be made for reducing volume of blog content and devoting those resources to larger content pieces like whitepapers, downloadable guides, etc.

If the page no longer exists and you remove the robots command for that directory it shouldn't make much difference. Google could start reporting it as a 404 since it knows that the files used  to exist and there's no longer a robots command to ignore the directory. I don't see any harm in leaving it there, but I also don't see many issues arising from removing the robots command.

Try to stick with a /blog/ subfolder instead. Subdomains are treated separately from the rest of the domain in most instances, as mentioned in Mike's answer below.

The best way to do what I think you're trying to do would be to create some advaed segments.

Essentially you're just creating a group of pages and then only displaying data for those pages when the segment is applied.

Start with these two guides and come back and let me know if you're having trouble with either one:

• https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1041510?hl=en&ref_topic=1032940
• http://www.smartinsights.com/google-analytics/google-analytics-segmentation/segmenting-google-analytics/

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if you're trying to rank for "citibank home loans", you're not going to be able to make that happen in the next couple years unless you have an outstanding promotional strategy for your domain.

If you look at the SERP for "citibank home loans", here are the ranking domains I see (it's a 7 pack result page for me):

1. citimortgage.com
2. online.citibank.com
3. online.citibank.com
4. online.citibank.com
5. marketwatch.com (QDF News result from Spring 2013)
6. linked.com/company/citibank/.... (product page)
7. linkedin.com/title/home+lending+specialist/at-citibank/

You're not going to beat any of those results. You should start looking for non-branding or longer tail queries where you have a better shot at getting into the results.

The design of your page is decent overall, and the copy length looks sufficient to rank for other search terms. I'd worry about identifying an easier term to rank for, and getting your Domain Authority much higher and pushing internal links to these landing pages. Longer term that's probably your best shot as far as branded queries for bank loans are concerned.

Hard to say whether it's adding any value or not at the moment, so whether or not removing it would make a difference for mobile results is difficult to guess. I generally try and keep mobile content as complete as possible, and if this snippet of text is kept at the bottom in a minor font, I don't think it's adding too much 'weight' to the page.

I do plenty of link building, but honestly, I'm not familiar with this term.

Based upon the fact that they're asking you to link to each other, I'm guessing that they want you to create a link to their site from an internal page on your site, and that they will do the same in return. If that's the case, it's a slightly better version of reciprocal linking, where you each have a page A linking to each others page A.

If the link posted by SEO 5 Team is what you're referring to, that's much more commonly called second tier link building, which is essentially building links to a page that in turn links to you or your client.

Whether or not this person's offer is worth it depends on the site you'd be linking to, and the site you'd be getting a link from. Most likely, it's not worth your time.

Yes and no - you need to approach it conservatively.

Adding useful links throughout the website is fine. To be on the safe side, I would avoid using exact match anchor text frequently unless it's actually the page title. For example:

• A link on their site that says "best kitchen knives" pointing to your homepage at mikescookware.com is going to be bad.
• A link on their site that says "best kitchen knives" pointing to mikescookware.com/best-kitchen-knives/ is going to be better, but still pushing the line too far in my opinion.
• A link on their site that says "check out Mike's list of best kitchen knives available" pointing to mikescookware.com/best-kitchen-knives/ would be fine in my opinion.

After a certain point, each new link from her site isn't going to be quite as valuable as the first links were, purely from a link equity standpoint. However - each additional link could be providing value in terms of click-through traffic and actual visits to your site, which is just as important as any link equity that may or may not be passed.

As long as you're not dropping a link to your site from a significant percentage of the pages on her site, and you're mostly linking to internal pages of your site with resources or products rather than directly linking to your homepage, I think you're OK. I would go heavier on the resource/blog links than I would on product/category page links.

My end-of-the-day rule of thumb is that if it feels spammy to a stranger or looks like advertisements all through the site, you probably need to scale it back.

Hi Andreas - this is an interesting question and one that I've never run into, and I can't find any public references to whether or not it's been tested in the past.

The easiest solution is avoid the issue in the first place by embedding the flash video into the PDF and then including a transcript and photos beneath the flash content, inside of the same PDF file. This solves the issue regardless of whether the flash is read by the crawler.

If that's not an option, the next best solution would be to test your hunch and hopefully report back here as to whether it was successful or not. I'd be interested to hear the results.

GWT will take awhile to update sometimes, as mentioned above. Are you still having trouble with this or have the errors started to decrease?

Aside from that, if Moz isn't reporting a duplicate title or duplicate meta description, issue, I would guess that GWT is simply reporting old data still or something along those lines.

I'm going to mark as answered for the moment but jump back on here and let me know if you're still having trouble - happy to take a look.

I just did a site: search for your domain and looks like 1140 pages are indexed, so I'm assuming this got itself settled?

Congrats! Marking as answered.

Let's assume that all on-page factors are held equal - essentially both pages get a grade of A when you run them through the Moz campaign tool - everything on the page is dialed in. And, internal linking to each page is identical.

There are only 3 factors remaining:

1. Number of external links pointing at your page.
2. Level of competition in each SERP.
3. The fact that your business is recognized as being in Miami.

Due to the fact that these 2 pages are new, let's pretend that you haven't manually built any external links to either page.

Next factor is the level of competition in that SERP. Considering it's Miami vs. New York, I'm not surprised that New York isn't performing as well right off the bat. Build up some more internal links and do some external link building, and more long term build up your Domain Authority. You'll get there.

Final factor is the fact that the business is in MIami. That absolutely makes a difference. You're just going to have to hustle harder to get into the New York SERP without the benefit of having local signals due to the business location.

Haven't had a chance to use it myself, however based upon the product page it looks like it could be an effective platform to test as a low budget CDN.

Be sure to review the limitations listed on that page. None of them strike me as that big of a deal unless you're using animated GIFs - but it does timeout on large image uploads so that could affect you if you're not resizing huge images prior to uploading them.

I would be worried about whether it fails gracefully. In other words, if you uninstall it, will your image links revert back to self-hosted, or does it permanently change them? Would be a hassle to revert a large number of links.

Hi Sarah,

In general the site has good design and you're pushing user generated content in the form of the brag board, which I think is a good resource for building your community element.

People are hesitant to be the first to review unless they hate something. If you can afford it, I'd start by leaving lengthy reviews on products that have actually been used by your internal team. Use great grammar, shoot for longer form content, etc. Really set the tone that this is an awesome site for lengthy reviews.

Contests can be a good way to incentivize reviews, especially if you can partner up with a manufacturer for free or discounted product to give away. Do a recurring contest, and have all reviews count as an entry.

For your actual review form, try building out way more specific questions than just giving users a box. A good example of this is the questions that are asked of business owners signing up for Thumbtack.com. Rather than asking for a business description, they specifically as the business owners a number of targeted questions that really separates them from every other site online. You'll need to take the same creative approach to set yourself apart from other review websites. I'm thinking things such as "How did the product fit?" for clothing categories, or "Would you recommend this product to a friend who needed on as well?" Those are the types of questions that should elicit better quality of responses.

Hope that's helpful!

Have you heard the PT Barnum quote, "I don't care what you say about me, just spell my name right."? That's going to be a factor here. While the obvious ideal is to get a link from the article, as you mentioned it may not be appropriate and the client may not be comfortable with those types of requests. If the name is fairly unique, eg "Meiers and Young, LLP", then it's likely that Google can make an association over time using concepts like co-occurence. While that's not likely to be as strong as a link, it does likely provide some value in sending those citation signals to Google.

To make better use of that press, I would typically add a page such as www.client.com/press/ or www.client.com/in-the-news/ that lists those press mentions in reverse chronological order, and feel free to link directly to them if you think it actually provides value to potential clients viewing your site.

Just to clarify, 70 characters is a good rule of thumb for title tags, however that limit is largely in place due to the number of characters that Google displays in search results.

I personally think 80-100 is a good rule of thumb for maximum length on a URL but it's not always feasible, and the best practice for URLs is not as clearly delineated as title tags.

Hi Joshua,

There's not a perfect cutoff mark as far as URL length. In general, I try to clearly identify the keyword targeted as the page URL, and stick to one subfolder, or occassionally 2 subfolders on a larger site. Beyond that, I try to avoid being redundant, which is the biggest issue with the example you presented - you should try not to duplicate long strings inside the URL - in this case using "german-shepherd-puppies" twice is what makes it too long and redundant.

Assuming you want to target the keyword "Long Haired German Shepherd Puppies", I would rather see a URL like one of these:

• http://www.farnorthkennel.com/puppies/long-haired-german-shepherd/
• http://www.farnorthkennel.com/long-haired-german-shepherd-puppies/

Then for the actual page for Lava or one of the other dogs you'd probably do one of these:

• http://www.farnorthkennel.com/puppies/long-haired-german-shepherd/lava/
• http://www.farnorthkennel.com/long-haired-german-shepherd-puppies/lava/

That is an effective URL that isn't too keyword stuffed and isn't redundant.

Taking a further look at the site, you could also consider options like these:

• http://www.farnorthkennel.com/girls/lava-long-haired-german-shepherd/
• http://www.farnorthkennel.com/puppies/female/lava-long-haired-german-shepherd/
• http://www.farnorthkennel.com/german-shepherd-puppies/long-haired/lava/

Yes, absolutely. Lots of benefits here - locking in a domain that otherwise may have been taken by someone else, aging the domain with some basic content, etc. The downside is $10 and the risk that you don't move forward with that product.

Only caveat I would add is that it may make more sense to simply claim the domain and redirect it to the product page on your existing website, but this really depends on branding and other business factors as much as SEO best practices.

Hi Diego,

The Facebook numbers listed in Open Site Explorer represent Likes and Shares on Facebook, but don't reflect comments on shares of that URL.

That content is duplicate content, yes. However, it's more important to have a decent amount of unique content on each page than it is to worry about how much duplicate content is on each page. Duplicate content isn't the end of the world if each page has substantial unique content, which is the first explanation I'd put forth in why you're still seeing those other domains ranking fine. This is how you'd strike a balance between having useful duplicate content and pleasing search engines.

Regarding having too many products to write unique descriptions, unfortunately you're going to have to bite the bullet on that one if you want to rank better. It might seem unfeasible for you to write all of those, but writing them one by one or hiring a writer to rewrite each one in batches is going to be essential to you ranking well.

So, I'm going to throw out some ideas for contest promotion that should apply broadly to what you're doing... First step is to figure out audience so you know where to target. There are a billion mommy blogs that will promote contests but if it's not the right audience for your contest than it's a waste of time.

Figuring out the audience will dictate where you go to promote the contest. I'd start out simple - Google "literary contests" and see what comes up - you might get a few places you can email and tell about the contest that would be willing to write about it, or share with their social media pages and newsletter. Then move on to similar queries like "list of literary contests", "writing contests", etc.

Your question mentions doing keyword research for kwd volume. I'm not sure how that would apply to contest promotion? Overall I think you have the right idea in manually doing research into different outlets.

A few other posts to help you out:

• http://www.linkspiel.com/2012/09/using-contest-to-build-link/
• http://moz.com/blog/running-giveaway-competitions-for-links-and-seo
• http://www.linkspiel.com/2011/10/linkbuilding-recommendations-when-using-contests/

So, here's a few ideas, focused on press opportunities specifically, but with some other link ideas tossed in as well.

1 - HARO

We've had a lot of success with HARO for clients. They won't have many opportunities specifically for window improvements, so you'll have to think broader - general construction, green/energy improvements, and general business ownership queries are all going to be relevant, especially if the business owner is fairly personable and willing to get involved. For our clients, we monitor the requests and forward the ones we feel are a good fit. If the client is willing to read 3 emails a day, they'll see a number of responses on their own that might be good as well.

2 - Case Studies

This is a longer term project. Have the contractor ask their clients for energy bills a year before and the year after a project. You might have to incentivize this somehow to get participation.  It's tricky to draw too many conclusions, but year-over-year energy savings on average across a wide range of clients would make a good study. There's a number of variables that might be hard to account for - weather and personal energy use being the primary ones - so there might be some kinks to work out in this concept, but I think those could be mitigated somehow.

Anyways, in regards to PR, a study like this could produce at least a handful of links, particularly from energy conservation and window-industry publications. Might not be a ton of results, but enough relevant industry publications could be a major boost for a contractor in a boring niche.

3 - Events

I've seen some other "boring" companies that put on local events with a charitable focus and managed to get a decent handful of links, including a few news organizations. At the risk of tooting my own horn, there's quite a few opportunities out there to build links with local events, and it's a very natural topic to get covered by local press if the event is interesting enough.

4 - Image Marketing with Conservatories, Window Boxes, etc.

While I'm sure many of their projects are pretty straightforward, I'm sure they also have some more elaborate designs and projects. Conservatories and bey windows are great examples of really attractive projects that people like to look at. Even if they're not the business's primary focus, you've got plenty of opportunities for visual marketing on social networks like Houzz, Pinterest, Facebook, and Flickr. It's a long shot that these will generate press, but they can certainly generate links and traffic, especially if you've got a really nice gallery/portfolio on the client's website.

Hope that gets you started!

Hi Scott,

What you're suggesting - somehow assigning each blog post to a specific location - doesn't make sense to me for taxonomy purposes or for SEO purposes.

Assuming you assigned the posts to a specific taxonomy for locations, whether that looked like Tags or Categories, it provides little value aside from adding a small amount of text to the page.

Internal linking is one way to take advantage of the fact that you have that much unique content, but that really boils down to 2 tasks:

1. Ensure that each of the 4 locations has a dedicated location page (eg domain.com/locations/seattle-wa/) that is linked from your nav menu or sidebar in order to make sure every page on the site links there. Be mindful of the anchor text you use - it's hard to do an anchor text heavy with keywords for a location page without it looking spammy).
2. Add links within the body content of the page - when it's relevant to do so.

You can also begin to produce blog content that is geographically relevant as a way to directly build links to these location pages. For example, if your 4 locations were paint supply stores, and one location was in Seattle, you might create an article on "18 Seattle Homes With Crazy Paint Jobs" - this would be an effective piece of content to link directly to your Seattle location page. You'd want to do it in a natural way. Here's a good vs bad example:

• Good: "We sent out 2 paint consultants from our Seattle location to scout out the most off-the-wall paint jobs in the Emerald City."
• Bad: "Read more about our Seattle paint store."

Hi MM,

Here are the resources I usually hand to beginning link builders to get them started:

• http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies
• http://www.linkbuildingbook.com/link-building-resources.html
• http://www.clockworkpirate.com/
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/link-building

It should take you a year of full time link building to truly go after all of the strategies listed in the first 3 resources, and all of them contain tactics that you can use indefinitely. The important I'd focus on is keeping a steady pace of content creation and outreach efforts, diversification of your strategies, and avoiding anything that feels spammy (because that's a good sign that it's a low value tactic).

Feel free to ask any questions here, but that should get you started!

Pagerank won't register for a long time - 3-9 months over the past couple years is how long it takes to update the toolbar Pagerank.

Don't bother disavowing a couple links, that is likely not related unless you had issues with unnatural links prior to the domain migration.

Open Site Explorer will register 301 redirects as links - is that what you're referring to?

Hey James,

Seems like this may be troubling you still. I see 6000+ urls still indexed under the old domain.

A couple other things to try:

1. Make sure the domain is properly marked as changed in the Google Webmaster Tools backend.
2. Link reclamation (changing links from the old domain to the new one) is valuable and should be done, but the fact that you haven't done it yet won't stop the transfer process from working properly.

Let me know if you have other questions I can take a look.

Hi Juan,

Here are the resources I usually hand to beginning link builders to get them started:

I'd point you towards these three resources to get started:

• http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies
• http://www.linkbuildingbook.com/link-building-resources.html
• http://www.clockworkpirate.com/
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/link-building

It should take you a year of full time link building to truly go after all of the strategies listed in the first 3 resources, and all of them contain tactics that you can use indefinitely. The important I'd focus on is keeping a steady pace of content creation and outreach efforts, diversification of your strategies, and avoiding anything that feels spammy (because that's a good sign that it's a low value tactic).

Feel free to ask any questions here, but that should get you started!

Correct, I don't see a duplication issue.