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Not a problem, happy to help

You might also want to consider repeat custom. Having a database of repeat customers can be huge for ecommerce. Increasing lifetime value is one of the keys to success here.

A few ideas (I am assuming the CD key selling is legal, of course):

• Loyalty programmes (buy 'x' products and get 1 free, such as buy 'x' CD keys and get a random free one, obviously work your pricing to be sure you're in good profit, the freebie doesn't have to be an expensive one).
• Consider cross-selling at checkout. By offering an additional, related game at a decent discount, you may increase the average basket value considerably.
• Run seasonal promos, check Google Trends and other sources for when hotspots are (Christmas etc) and ramp-up your promotions - mailing out customers in a 'countdown' style fashion to build the PR (but monitor open rates and unsubscribes to make sure you're not annoying them!).
• Just before big game launches, piggy-back on the publicity & PR that the game generates and run discounts or contests - tie these in with you doing a video review of the game and upload to YouTube (you have a branded YouTube channel right?). Mail out to your list with the review of the new/just released game.

Other than Lifetime Value increasing:

Have you considered Twitch? Why not run a Twitch giveaway - Try to team-up with a popular streamer (if you're not well known yet, don't go for top-tier streamers at first. Find well known but approachable ones) and get them to do a sponsored CD Key giveaway. You'd need to make sure you get good coverage from the streamer (links from their chat, link from their bio for 'x' weeks, stream uploaded to their YouTube channel too if possible, with a link to your store etc).

What about asking any YouTube game streamers if you can sponsor their channel? Obviously, the likes of PewDiePie would be a bit too expensive, but aim for niche gamers with a decent following, you may be surprised how cheap you can sponsor them (CD keys?!) for links/mentions etc.

Just a few more ideas for you there, hope it helps

Hey Adam,

As per my message above, if you can provide more info, I can take a look at this for you. Without seeing the Schema though, hard to help fix it.

Feel free to send me a private message here if you prefer not to give the info publically (click on my profile > 'Send Private Message').

Cheers

Yup, all looks good now - the page has index, follow

I'm going to send you a private message here on Moz with a Screaming Frog crawl export, which I carried out just to check there were no instances of 'noindex' left on any pages... All looks fine from the noindex standpoint.

Sorry for the late reply, checking now for you

Agree with Chris on this for sure. I'd also add that you should use relevant hreflang tags to differentiate between the sites (or subfolders if consolidating into a single domain).

ccTLDs are fine if done right, but be sure that there's a valid reason (targeting a country) and use hreflang. Remember that you can't specific a country on it's own, you can either specify:

• A language on it's own
• A language AND a country
• NOT a country on it's own.

So, if you do stick with the ccTLD tactic, add the relevant rel alternate hreflang tags to all sites (including each having it's own self-pointing tag).

Or, as Chris mentions, merge into one gTLD and then I'd use subfolders for the country targeting (either ccTLD or gTLD option is valid, so long as it's done well and for the right reasons)

Hope this helps?

Hi Gavo.

I think I've spotted your issue!

Looking at https://www.brightonpanelworks.com.au/robots.txt I can see that you're all good now, HOWEVER...

view-source:https://www.brightonpanelworks.com.au/ Check your source code and you'll notice an inline noindex tag!:

Also, checking another page: view-source:https://www.brightonpanelworks.com.au/services/ I get the same meta tag.

This makes me think it's sitewide... So, as you;re running WordPress:

• In wp-admin, go to Settings > Reading, then untick the box that discourages search engines.

Once you've done that, the following optional steps won't hurt and may speed things up

• Submit a new sitemap
• Use the fetch & render, as Kevin recommends
• Personally, and this is entirely conjecture on my part, I'd use Google's page speed & mobile friendly testing tools, as I find that 'seems' to help (I've not bothered verifying by running tests & checking the access log files to bot activity etc - as it only takes a few seconds to do so not worth the time. Maybe I'll check out of curiosity at some point though!)

** As there's been a couple of errors with indexing, once you've done this change, I'd recommend running a full site crawl (Moz's tools or Screaming Frog is cool too) and check for any other noindex pages!**

EDIT: In case you don't have Screaming Frog, let me know when you've updated the WordPress setting and I'll run a crawl for you and ping you a list of any pages that are still showing noindex tags, if any exist

Can you provide a link to the page this error is on? If we can see the code, will be easier to help

Edit: The 'Warning' ones are you not showing recommended fields, the image & name ones though, they are more urgent as they are required fields. My guess is that either the fields are missing, or are malformed somehow - would need a look at the code to confirm & recommend a fix.

Edited the above re: clarifying rel=canonical advice

Hmmm good question!

Caveat: I don't know your exact situation, but let's discuss the options a little (I'll provide some links to reference material and a useful tool too).

I've not had to do this personally, most of the international SEO I've done involved the site having the same service offering across different economic regions, so the subfolders were only needed in their specific language (e.g. /es for Spain, /mx for Mexico etc).

This might get confusing, so I'll use some examples

One option would be to use subfolders for country, then language. This is a more complex scenario, so would need good planning of course, but by way of an example...  A section of your website targeting Spain (as a country) could be:

https://domain.com/es

Now, if you wanted a translated copy in English, of this page, you could do:

1) Query string (urgh!)

https://domain.com/es?lang=en

2) subfolder-subfolder

https://domain.com/es/en

An example when 'deeper' into an international subfolder, say the visitor is on the 'widgets' page, on the Spanish (Spanish country folder, showing Spanish by default, translated into English)...

https://domain.com/es/widgets/en

To add a little more complexity (sorry!) it'd probably be wise to set a rel canonical tag from the translated copy, to the country-specific version. So in the above 'widget' example, the page https://domain.com/es/widgets/en would have:

Then, on https://domain.com/es/widgets/, I'd set the hreflang to be self referencing, and I'd add a hreflang to the other country versions too (country versions in their own languages, rather than translated version of this one):

So on the above, as the english translation of the Spanish page is unlikely to want to be indexed (google.es should only have the Spanish version, google.co.uk, you'd want to index the English site, not the English translation of the Spanish site!), I'd rel=canonical it to the original Spanish page. But on every page that isn't rel=canonical'd to another pre-translated page (so, the ones we want indexing in their own country & language), I'd add hreflang tags to self and all other international sites, with their own language code.

Some reference material for hreflang (set to open in a new tab so you won't lose your place :D):

• https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/09/unifying-content-under-multilingual.html
• https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077
• http://www.rebelytics.com/hreflang-canonical/ (VERY strongly recommended read on not creating confusion between hrefland and rel=canonical)
• http://www.aleydasolis.com/en/international-seo-tools/hreflang-tags-generator/ (a generator for hreflang, but DO check it's output!).

Note: I'd still target the first subfolder from root (/es in the above example) to the specific country (Spain) in Search Console).

Of course as an alternative, you could do ccTLDs (.es/.co.uk etc) and then have a single subfolder for the country (domain.co.uk/es, for example).

UX Conisderations:

(You may have considered this already, forgive me if that's the case! Only adding here as I've had conversations on this in the past and have seen it cause confusion).

One realllllyyyyy important consideration here is how the visitor makes the switch from languages and also to a different country site. THIS is key.

Seriously. If the visitor gets confused and exits because something they didn't expect happened (switched to another country version of your site when they wanted a translation - this becomes worse when you have a considerable amount of country-specific content, such as guides etc), all the technical SEO work behind the scenes for the international SEO set-up is kinda wasted.

What I mean by this is (and this is true regardless of if you go down the ccTLD or gTLD with subfolders routes)...

When a visitor lands on your site, let's say domain.com root/homepage, how will they:

1. See this page in another language

2. Switch to a different country page?

A better example. Say I'm in Spain, you sell widgets and I search Google.es for 'best widgets for under €250' - you've done some awesome International SEO, so your site shows up high and I click on it. I land on:

https://domain.com/es/widgets/

Now, I'm on the **Spain **(country) version of your site, in Spanish (language), how would my journey be (in terms of clicks), if I wanted to:

a) View the English version of this page (domain.com/es/widgets/en)

b) Switch to the English site (domain.com/en/widgets/)

c) Switch to the English version of the site, but view it in Spanish (domain.com/en/widgets/) < Likely 2 clicks needed for this of course.

If you're adding to your site, the ability to both switch to another site country AND translate the current page into English (for non-English pages), it needs to be really clear to the visitor how to do either, so they don't click on a country flag and get a result they were not expecting.

Again, the above is true regardless of the gTLD or ccTLD issue. Good planning & labeling can help with this, just make it damn obvious to the visitor what clicking a flag will do and make sure they know how to 1) Translate the current page vs 2) Switch to another country-version of your site.

Whatever you decide, once you've worked out how you want it to work, I'd:

1. Role-play it yourself, visiting the site (mentally or on pen & paper if it doesn't exist online yet!) and try to 'be' the visitor in different scenarios - Is it obvious to get to where you want both country-wise and language-wise?

2. Once the site prototype is built, repeat the above, but on the actual site.

3. Write 2 or 3 scenarios (seriously, it will only take 5mins each!) and pass them to work colleagues - Ask them to run through the scenario and see if they get stuck).

4. If you want to really push the boat out (I recommend this!) use an online UX testing service:

• https://usabilityhub.com/ < Cheapest option of the two, with a few different tests you can do. Personally in your situation I'd probable have them open a country-specific page and ask them to switch language to English, then run a separate test asking another bunch to switch the country to England (or whatever countries you serve, but you get the idea... Ask one group to switch language, another group to switch country - check they do it right).

• https://www.usertesting.com/ < More expensive, but worth getting a small number done. Here you set a series of tests and a screencast of the user trying to carry out your tasks, whilst they talk into a mic.

Spending a few $ on user tests can be VERY useful for identifying where users may be getting confused, resulting in a much better user experience which, let's face it, is key not only for SEO these days, but also for conversions and £, $, and €

Phew!  long-ass post that may raise more questions than it answers I guess?! I don't know your exact situation so it's a tough one to advise on, but hopefully the above is some food for thought

I can't help with the Moz tools as not a mozzer But do you have rel tags on the pagination links (rel next/previous/view all)?

Some awesome answers from folks here - Giving them all a thumbs-up now!

Just to add a bit to the above (so meant as suggestions in addition to the above)... I'd also monitor the up-comers backlinks, press mentions etc. (Patrick mentioned checking what they are doing... I'd go a step further and monitor it on-going as some stuff may not be showing if it was done recently).

Of course, it's important not to be too 'copy-cat', I wouldn't focus JUST on this, but if you listen to the advice above, I'd mix in some competitive analysis of PR (public relations/press, not the old green bar!) of the competitor, mentions and links etc.

• You can use Moz's, like OSE (https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/) and look for 'just discovered' and also 'link opportunities' (to find mentions etc of your competitors)
• Set up a Google Alert (https://www.google.co.uk/alerts I like to do an alert for their brand name, minus their domain, set to 'as it happens', and be sure to set to 'all results' rather than just what Google thinks is the best of the results) - See screenie added to this post for an example. You can also opt to publish this to an RSS feed, rather than get emails - then use a feed reader (Chrome dashboard plugin with a few feeds is what I use! - Handy for the start to the day with a coffee, just review the updated RSS feeds).

Keep an eye on them, see what they're up to and figure out if any of it can feed into your work. Maybe they register on a decent industry site and start contributing content, can you do the same, only publish better content & promote it? Perhaps they get links from a supplier - do you use the same supplier? Don't copy them for the sake of it of course, just where it makes sense. It can also help to inform your strategy.

It sounds like you have your SEO pretty well sorted (ranking high for head terms), so how about reviewing:

• CTR from SERPs... can you optimise your click through by tweaking title tag (carefully! don't lose rankings) and/or meta description
• Page speeds - can you get the pages that rank to load faster?
• Internal links - when did you last run an internal link audit? Remember, when it comes to the top-slots in the SERPs, little things matter! If you've published any content in the last few months, see if it makes sense for internal links from there to the ranking pages (don't force it though!).
• Can you rank in position 0? < Are there any SERP features for the keywords (or related ones - Keyword Explorer to the rescue!) If there are SERP features, can you optimise for them?

Hope that gives a few things to think about?

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Personally I wouldn't do it. No way. At the end of the day this would be very clearly against Google's terms (not to mention low-quality work), so effectively you'd be placing a bet with your site's reputation on if Google's engineers successfully catch you.

If it's a business that wants to do well in the long term online, I wouldn't take the risk of a bet like that against someone like Google, who have 'one or two' decent engineers actively trying to catch this sort of thing.

Pattern spotting is likely to catch you out and end up with you in hot water, it's just not worth the risk (in my opinion).

As John points out, for a churn & burn website this may work I guess (not something I'd be involved in tbh!), but at the end of the day if you get caught, you're a bit screwed... Plus it'd just be contributing to more crappy content out there on the web - not something any of us need!

This is good advice, but as far as I'm away if you have a ccTLD (.com.br) that you cannot change the international targeting away from the country of your ccTLD, you can only do this with a gTLD.

Tricky one to answer without knowing more details really to be honest, but here's some things to consider:

• Do you have many backlinks from decent, Spanish websites? If not, I'd have a think about how to get some (don't go for low quality of course!).
• You say you're not a bricks & mortar business, but do you have a Spanish address & phone at all? If so, do you have any citations? Are there (again, decent/quality) sites you can get the site listed on?
• How's your international SEO set-up? For example, geographical targeting in Search Console for the domain or subfolder/subdomain (/es set to Spain, unless Spain is the default, in which case Spain set as the target for the entire domain), hreflang settings...
• How well is your Spanish SERP snippet (title & description) optimised for CTR? Can you make any changes (without negatively affecting SEO) to increase your click through rate from the search results? (Think good, enticing wording in your < title > tag, a decent meta description that pulls-in folk's interest).

Just a few thoughts

One difference is targeting options.

With a ccTLD (country code top level domain), you're not able to set the target country, it defaults to the country of the ccTLD. With a gTLD (generic top level domain), you can set your target in Google's Webmaster Tools (okay, Search Console).

I guess there are branding considerations and possible effects on CTR of having a .us domain - perhaps (100% conjecture here!) some folks would be more likely to click, due to confidence the site is targeting their country (though lots of variables here, for example with a SaaS business that is global, such as an SEO tool, prob less important than, say, a clothing company that only ships to one country!).

Personally, I prefer gTLDs in MOST situations, primarily because:

• You can target the country of choice
• It's easy to target a wider, international market in the future (domain.com/es. or domain.com/mx, /it etc)
• In Search Console, with a gTLD, you can even target different countries for different subfolders (or subdomains, but I'd usually recommend subfolders).

As for Google's preference/SERP advantages? Personally, I think that using a gTLD that has it's target set in Search Console to USA, VS a ccTLD (such as a .us domain) have no advantages either way in terms of USA ranking from an algorithm standpoint - OR at least any algorithmic advantage will be negligible.

Plenty of other factors to focus on, so I'd go with your preference, but if there's a chance you'll want to target internationally in the future, think now if you'd prefer separate ccTLD domains for each country (domain.us,  domain.es, domain.it etc) or a gTLD with subfolders (domain.com/ domain.com/es, domain.com/it etc).

Others may have a differing opinion though

Hi Tomasz,

Loading with a delay may alter the effect of what a tool reports I guess (though the tools may wait until the page is fully loaded/DOM ready or something?), but I don't think it'll solve the issue as such to be honest, as the dupe content would still be on the page.

If you don't like the idea of a link opening in a new tab, there's always the option of an iframe I guess, on the relevant tabs? Though it'd be a bit of work to make it responsive.

I checked part of that message in Google translate (had to type out what was in the image so didn't do it all!).

Point 2 in the list "use the details in the Manual Action Viewer to resolve outstanding issues"

Any such wording, I'd click the link, see what it says. copy/paste the text into Google Translate and paste here, explaining it's via translate and may not be quite right.

That should help folks to help you

PM sent with the code (in case you're okay making your own .htaccess file) or a link to a zip file that has a ready-made .htaccess file if you prefer.

Note: This will only work if you use Apache and have htaccess & mod_rewrite enabled... If you're on a linux host, chances this is okay but if in doubt, my contact details are in the PM.

Once done, feel free to email me the list of all error pages if you still have it, I'll paste into Screaming Frog in list mode and check that all the error pages now return 301s for you.

Sending you a PM with the file now

Thanks I didn't intend it to be that long, but at the same time, didn't want to leave anything out!

There's no hard & fast answer really, as it depends on your situation.

Personally, I'm a big fan of blogs in a subfolder on ecommerce sites. It gives you a great platform for publishing content that's useful to your target audience at various stages of their sales cycle.

For example, educating people about different solutions to a problem, guides on how to do stuff...

Not sure of the exact niche within gamers you sit, but, for example, a post with a detailed guide to streaming on Twitch, including photographs:

• That shows how to set-up OBS (Open Broadcaster Software),
• Explains the best settings in OBS are for Twitch (I know from experience people DO struggle with this part),
• Details how to set-up chat boxes and donation boxes etc in-stream,
• What your options are in terms of Headset/mic,
• What to look for in a webcam and how to do picture-in-picture style streaming (with an explanation of why this is good... It increases followers & encourages engagement etc)
• Detail external streaming hardware (Elgato boxes etc)

All of this will be VERY useful for any gamer wondering how to get into streaming and what hardware and software they need. Of course all the info is already available, but a lot of it is scattered across the web. Make it easy for folks and create an 'ultimate guide' style post.

Provide really uber-useful guides like this (varying depending on your exact sector), mix it in with genuine hardware reviews and comparisons... get a few mid-tier gamers to do hardware reviews on your blog too... and your blog may become someone's 'go-to' place for advice on gaming hardware, software and configuration. The benefits of this happening are that you may get subscribers to mailing lists, plus the brand trust - compared with JUST having an ecommerce store, will be huge.

You can also lock content with an email gate (e.g. in the Streaming example, offer a cheatsheet checklist that goes along with the post, in exchange for their email)... But personally? I'd be sure, if you do this, to have PLENTY of decent, helpful posts first. People will be more willing to give you their email once they know they can trust you. It's a value exchange and the onus is on YOU to provide the value first

The brand trust you should earn from this sort of work will likely increase your conversion rate considerably, as people prefer to buy from who they trust. On the subject of conversion rate, if you've not seen it yet, watch this: https://moz.com/blog/how-to-craft-the-best-damn-ecommerce-page-on-the-web-whiteboard-friday 

The only thing is, if you don't think you can support this level of quality on a blog, don't do it.

However, bear in mind that you DO NOT need to product 'x' posts a week... What dictates the amount you publish should be the capacity you have for producing stellar content. Better to publish less, but better. Also take the time to think about amplification of the content. Lots of good info here on Moz and other places.

Also, are there any folks you can partner with? Gamers who could get involved with the blog in exchange for gear or discounts?

Just to say I'll be sorting the htaccess for you later this afternoon

I'll ping you a private message on Moz when done and will include my contact details in case you need a hand or run into any problems.

Not really my place to say this... But why not book one of Moz's free onboarding sessions? They'll give you a walk through of all the toolset's features and help you understand the metrics a bit more.

Best of all... it's free!

What I'd recommend (both as a long term SEO and someone who's used Moz for years), is first book an onboarding session with Moz. I've been using the Moz suite for many years, but recently booked one, just out of curiosity really! (and to see if I had any knowledge gaps with regards what the Moz tools can do).

Don't expect strategy advice from Moz, of course, but sitting through a short onboarding session will really help you get to grips with the Moz tools and:

1. Mean you need to pay a consultant for less time training on Moz's tools (so your money can be directed more to strategy & advice, rather than learning the tools)
2. As you'll be a bit more comfortable with the Moz tools, you'll likely understand what the consultant you hire is talking about better
3. Without meaning to be rude to anyone, you'll also find it easier to spot those who can and cannot help you.

I'm not pitching for the work or anything here btw (am booked out solid with project work for the next few months, so couldn't even if I wanted to!), I just though the above might be a good way forward for you.

Another option is if the site uses a CMS. If so, then you can create a sitemap for content pages/posts etc,.

Personally, I'm with Krzysztof Furtak  on SF. Screaming Frog rocks. It'll find most pages, except perhaps Orphan pages as it wouldn't be able to find a link to crawl to discover the page.

If it's really important to get as many pages as possible, I'd do the following (I've put an Astrix (*) next to ones that some people may think are a tad extreme)

• Run a Screaming Frog crawl
• Grab a sitemap from your CMS
• Check any server-based analytics (AWSTATS etc)
• Check your access_log file & parse out URLs in there**(*)**
• site: queries, with & without www, and also using * as a subdomain (use something like Moz's toolbar to export)
• As Krzysztof suggests, Scrapebox would extract data too, but be careful scraping, you may get an IP slap.(*)
• Export crawl data from Moz & a tool such as Deep Crawl
• Throw the pages from all into Excel and de-dupe.
• Once you have a de-duped list, as an optional last step, go back to Screaming Frog and enter list mode (I have the paid version, not sure if it's possible with the free one) and run a crawl over all the de-duped URLs to get status codes etc

If you're going to do this sort of thing a fair bit - buy a Screaming Frog license, it's an awesome tool and can be useful in a multitude of situations.

The site: command is handy for asking Google what pages it knows about, however if Muzzmoz wants to know the number of pages on a site, you'd need more than this.

Also, re: your different ways or querying, I like to use:

site:*.domain.com - This can show other subdomains too, that may otherwise be missed

Good answer Dirk.

I like your idea of adding valuable, relevant content to the pages Dirk, good thinking.

Personally, I'd rather Iet Google know these pages are removed intentionally and not due to errors, so 410 rather than leaving as 40.

One thing to be mindful of, though, is how much crawl budget you're willing to give to these pages. If we're talking about a lot of pages in bulk, I'd be worried how much crawl budget they'd eat up over time. As you point out, they'd likely drop in rank anyway due to loss of internal links too, so might be the cost to the crawl budget isn't worth it?.

Another solution (using your idea Dirk), would be to somehow automate the process of, when a listing is marked as sold, the listing is removed, other properties in the same area are added (as you suggest),  then some time later (month or two?), a 410 header set.

The other option would be to 301 the old pages back to the area page for the properties (perhaps with something like a bootstrap message saying the property is sold but others in the area are available). This would pass juice etc back to that page. but, of course, you'd be telling G that the page had permanently moved, which isn't quite the case.

Hmmm looking at the first 2 pages, I think I can see what's happening here

Not 100% on how Moz's tool figures out dupe content, but I think this is why (3rd point is strongest, I think):

• Similar URLs (first part up to the last folder, then first word, then both ending in 2016) means the URL is a close match
• The title tags are also quite similar
• Perhaps most importantly, it does look like the VAST MAJORITY of the content on the page is in fact duplicate of other pages. It's not obvious at first BUT... To see what I mean, click on the 'Guidelines' tab (looks like jQuery tabs or similar) and we get a big amount of content - the most on the page - that's duplicated between both pages.

Perhaps consider making that a link to a dedicated page that has this content, opening in a new tab or similar?

For your 2nd two examples, check the 'About Your Instructor' and 'FAQs'. I'd advise that where content is repeated over & over, move it to it's own page and then link to it from there, rather than having the same several hundred words indexed on many pages.

Hope that helps?

Ps. There may be a better solution for displaying the content, iframing it into the tab etc, but if you go down that route be careful, it's an effort to make iframes responsive!

If it's a system that doesn't support .htaccess, it's likely IIS as Kevin said. That said, when you say:

So, I don't have a way to do 301 redirects.

... This makes me wonder if it's not IIS (as 301s are possible with IIS, just in a different way, as Kevin outlines). It'd be good to confirm what your hosting environment is either way though, as it'd be hard for anyone to give a decent answer without knowing this.

Ah! Okay cool. I'm based just outside Bristol - Been to Gatwick a few times... hope it wasn't too stressful!

I'll sort a htaccess file out for you tomorrow, no problems. Might be good to exchange Skype or Twitter details though, in case you run into any issues when adding it, though I'll put a bit of advice into the email I send the htaccess file with, so you should be fine Also, let me know when you've implemented the htaccess and I'll run a quick screaming frog crawl over both your site and the list of error pages, just to make sure all is as it should be

No worries re: returning the favour, just help the next person in line who needs a bit of help that you're able to provide, that's enough

Personally, if you're 100% that you don't want the Wordpress install, I'd:

• Delete all files in the myblog subfolder, except the .htaccess file
• Edit the .htaccess file (or create a new one if you deleted it)
• 301 Redirect any good posts (had rankings, traffic or links) to a specific, related page on your main site
• Add a redirect rule to 301 all remaining pages to / (main site's homepage)

This may sound odd, but I'd then submit a sitemap with the pages that caused the 500 and 404 errors, aiming to get Google to recrawl the error pages & find the new 301 rules.

If you need a hand with this, I'm busy today but I can make the .htaccess entry for you tomorrow morning *UK time) and ping over to you.

EDIT: I'll be out for the next few hrs, but will keep an eye for a response when I can. If you want to drop me an email, check my Moz profile page, look under 'Mike Gracia's Blog:' and email me at that domain (my email is mike@).

Not much to add to Sean's answer, except make SURE that what you want them to link to is worth it! Ideally, you'll have an angle, such as something the competitor doesn't. Even better, a new feature that the blogger could write about, to give them some 'juice' for their article.

Remember to think like them - What can you give to them, to help them make their piece of content better. To get what you want, you really need to figure out what they want

• Screaming frog! All day long

I love SF, it's amazing. I have the paid version (as I use it a lot) but their free too is good too. For smaller sites, the free tool is absolutely fine. It's not som crappy demo that has most features blocked or anything, it's very usable. Their paid version

Their paid version I'd put under 'low cost' for what you get too. Love the fact you can ingore robots.txt, great for testing dev sites.

One thing I REALLY like about SF (vs SaaS based online tools), is the ability to edit my hosts file & add a dev domain, then run SF on the site, even though it's on localhost - A benefit of desktop tools).

Then there's:

• **Google Analytics **- I like to create custom dashboards for various things, such as segmenting mobile vs desktop, PPC dashboards, social dashboards etc. I think as SEOs we forget how many clients either don't realise custom dashboard exist, or don't realise how useful they can be

• Search Console / WMT (can't get out of the habit of calling it WMT!)

• Deep Crawl - Very handy. I use this, Moz's crawl and Screaming Frog for all my crawl testing needs

• Various free page-speed checks (GTmetrix, Google page speed insights, Yslow, testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com, Pingdom page speed tool also)

• OSE & Moz (not free but for what you get, I think it's low cost)

• Moz's keyword explorer (AMAZING tool. Not just saying that as this is on Moz, I genuinely think it's awesome)

• Chrome & Firefox inspectors

• Firebug

• GA plugin for Chrome

• GA debugger for Chrome (handy for testing GA events in Chrome console!)

• Check my links Chrome extension (for when you don't need a full crawl and just want to check for broken links on a page quickly in the browser)

• Google Alerts - Great for finding unlinked mentions as they happen, keeping tabs on competitors mentions & press, or even being alerted to related topics etc.

• Excel or Google Sheets - Great for a multitude of data analsys!

• access_log file - I possibly saved one of the best till last! The access_log file is great for parsing out stuff like Googlebot visits. Pop the data into a (paid) tool like Screaming Frog log file analyser, or (as I like to do) insert the data into a MySQL database and run some queries... You can find a WEALTH of tasty info, like:

• What pages get the most Googlebot activity

• Group pages together (e.g. all posts within a category, or pages under a URL folder) and calculate what % of Googlebot crawls they got

• Identify any important pages that are not getting crawlled much

• Cross-check your sitemap (in MySQL I like to select all pages from the sitemap - which I store in a MySQL table, then do a JOIN with the access_log table in the same MySQL database, then pull off a count how many times the sitemap pages were crawled, according to the access_log table. Of course the access_log needs to be for a decent time period).

These are not strictly for SEO, but useful for SEOs I think:

• **Awesome Screenshot **for Chrome - good for taking quick screenshots & annotating screenies, for devs/staff/clients etc
• Pocket - Brilliant for 'bookmarking' articles to read later... Helps me stay on-track when I'm head-down working but spot an SEO related article I want to read later... Add to pocket & close tab
• Onetab - For the times when the number of open tabs makes my mac sound like a Boeing 747 Closes all open tabs, saves them in a list for later - Can export to a file too. Handy!

Argh! That's a long list, sorry!

Veronica (my keyboard doesn't do accents I don't think! Lo siento Veronica!) gave a good answer, I just wanted to add...

With internal links, if you're using WP or another CMS platform, there are plugins that do 'related posts', 'top posts', and even 'top comments', all of which could, in theory, send extra internal link juice to the pages. Though, many of these plugins would return the most popular/recent etc, not necessarily the pages you want

An approach I'd consider is manually finding posts that are related to the posts you're looking to give a little boost, and see if it'd make sense (from a content perspective) to link from any of the related posts you've found, back to your target posts. You may want to use an in-content link, or could even add a small 'recommended post' promo area - within or under the related post.

• Also, as you publish new content, remember to internally link to the target posts where it makes sense.
• You've mentioned content relaunches, did you update the last-modified meta (if it exists) or last-modified header?

Can the on-page SEO be improved at all? When you get to the first 2 pages, small improvements can yield results, so:

• Can the standard SEO be improved? (Go back to SEO 101, check things like filenames of images on the page, alt tags, what about subheadings? do you use < strong > when you could use < h2 > or < h3 >?).
• Page load times - can you optimise the images to increase load speed? What about page bloat (CSS/JS from old plugins - cleaning that will help the entire site!)
• Structured data - can you add any Schema markup? (article etc)
• Click through rates from SERPs... Can you improve the title tag (careful!) or meta description to try to get a higher CTR from the SERPs? As you get closer to the top, this gets more important (in my opinion/conjecture not fact)

That's all I can think of off-hand.

Very good answer by EGOL. Quality over quantity any day. As for being awesome content, remember that it should be awesome content that answers the needs, questions etc of your target audience.

Also, remember that to be truly effective, your content should speak to your demographic at different stages in their buying cycle. From 'Discovery' pieces, through to comparison articles etc, always be mindful when writing an article who you're targeting the content to, what stage of the funnel they are likely to be, and how you can HELP them understand the issues and move on to the next stage. Sounds like a lot of work, but once you get into the workflow, it's worth it.

For content ideas, think of questions too - If you've been in an industry for a while, you may already know what common questions come up - use this! It's gold. Also, if you have any sales folks (or any customer-facing folks) ask THEM what questions they get asked by customers most often - keep a list, look for trends and there you have an ideas list for your articles. This is just one idea - there's loads of great advice out there on the web for this sort of thing. Check some Whiteboard Fridays on content topics too, there's some good ones from what I remember.

I'd then mix really stellar content with some outreach. Be careful with outreach though, be smart and always think of adding value. Can you partner with any businesses in the articles? Can you write any guides that mention other (non-competing) businesses and produce or co-authored piece that'll be shared to both your social audiences & email lists? If you do base an article on customer questions, would the customers be happy to be mentioned in the piece (always ask!) as if so, perhaps they'll share it? (who better to help you reach more

If you do base an article on customer questions, - always as permission - but, would the customers be happy to be mentioned in the piece ( "Joe Blogs from [town] raised a great question which lead to this article...] as if so, perhaps they'll share it? (who better to help you reach more customers, than your existing happy customers).

Anyway, just a few ideas.

If you've uninstalled Wordpress, then all URLs in /myblog (assuming this was your WP install dir, looking at the screenshot) will return 404s.

It's odd that they are returning a 500 (server error) response, though, I'd expect 404 errors. Have you

Have you done-away with your blog entirely? The only thing I can think of is the uninstall of Wordpress didn't go quite right and some files remain. All of the files in the screenie were for the Jetpack plugin, are there other 500 URLs?

• How did you uninstall? Manually?
• Is the directory /myblog still there?
• Is the MySQL database for WP still there? (this wouldn't cause the 500 issue, that'll be file related, still a valid question in case you need to salvage your WP install for a later date!).

301 Redirects

If you have removed the Wordpress site, it's going to be important to 301 redirect (permanently moved) the /myblog (in .htaccess assuming you're using Linus). Otherwise:

• You'll lose any link juice to the blog posts
• Visitors will hit 500 errors (at present) or 404 not found errors (if you fix the 500 error, which I suspect is due to a problematic uninstall)

Recommended Actions (if you don't want a blog):

• Check to see if WP was uninstalled correctly, any remaining files in /myblog
• Check if the MySQL database is still there - if it is, WAIT! Do you have any old WP posts that you want to keep?
• 301 Redirect any decent posts to a relevant new page on your website
• Add a blanket 301 Redirect for all other pages under /myblog (redirect rules can do this, no need for lots of individual 301s!)

Don't You Want a Blog?

A final question Don't you want a blog? Were you using it to publish decent content etc? If so, no reason to ditch Wordpress. If WP is causing issues, must be a problem somewhere (likely a in a theme or plugin file, or a conflict). Wordpress can be a great CMS but the downside is the number of plugins. It's too easy to install lots of theme and run into problems. Same with some cheap or free WP themes too.

If you do want a blog still, perhaps post here with what the problems were? Maybe the community can help get you back on-track with a blog?

Bump for this too! Jon's answer seemed quite positive... any more news?

Okay - After some tweaking, it's actually not TOO bad. Not sure if it was just me, but they are looking okay now.

Shame that they are just scanned images as PDFs, rather than true (searchable) PDFs, but they are not too bad. Odd filename though - Vanguard something or other?

I think I'll stick with this and perhaps with some testing of dragging the elements around, I'll be able to get the page breaks at a decent spot!

In fact - using Chrome's 'Awesome Screenshot' plugin to take a screenie of the whole page gives a MUCH better quality result! allbeit a flat image not a pdf - But then again, the PDF output from Moz appears to be flat and uneditable/unsearchable (scanned image converted to PDF according to Adobe) too, so might as well be a flat jpg

Only different is the screenie doesn't put page breaks in, but I guess I can live with that for now

I just exported a report too - VERY low quality

Line-gaps in the middle of images, very low quality font (pixelated).

Something with the report generation seems to be off - not sure what or why, but I couldn't give the report to clients as-is, that's for sure

Bad bad idea!

As others have said, I suspect the theory here is to try to rank higher for when people use speech marks in their Google query.

In my opinion, the idea is bad for 3 reasons:

1. Hardly anyone searches like that these days - I do sometimes but only when the results without "" fail to return the results I need - or when I'm doing specific research (intitle:" " etc). Not many 'normal' users search like this

2. From a user perspective it doesn't make sense. In the body of content it would look very odd and unprofessional (unless you are citing a quote!) - Moreover using " " marks in the title tag is a bad idea - you only get a few characters for your title tag, so take FULL advantage of each character! I don't mean over-optimise keywords here either, but as well as having your primary keyword in there, use the title tag to help turn 'would-be' visitors into visitors - using " " marks in your title tag reduces the space you have to use, making it a bad idea.

3. It's a pretty blatant form of trying to manipulate results - Something that big G would likely not approve of... Ask your client if they want to gamble their online presence on something designed to 'trick' Google If they are promoting a crappy $7 affiliate product I'd maybe understand them being that silly, but if they want a long-term online business... Nah!

Kinda makes me wonder who suggested this to them! Did they enter a time-warp when they went into the meeting, going back to 2001?!

Important:

If you do this, please can you add the 'export to csv' feature to Chrome? Currently I don't see it there, so use Firefox for that

If I lost the ability to do the csv export of serps... I'd be upset! Still wouldn't moan too much as Moz has so much else that's great, but I would be upset none the less!

Hi Margaret,

Others may disagree perhaps but personally I'd say that 301'ing product to product, category to category is the way to go. From what I remember seeing a while back on the subject, Matt Cutts explained that it would be unwise to have too many 'hops' (e.g. 301 to 301 to 301 to 301...) but with redesigns etc doing a full product > product (page to page) redirect site-wide is fine.

At the end of the day it's best for the user!

re: the structure - with the new structure what is defining the 'keyword' part of the URL in '/productname-p/keyword.htm' ? You may be surprised what is possible in terms of automating (or at least semi-automating) things like bulk 301 redirects - especially if you can get the old URLs into an Excel file and manipulate them

I'd ask your digital agency (or whoever is doing the migration) if they can get their best Excel ninjas to have a chat with you about this.

At the absolute worst case, if there really is no way that this can be semi-automated, I'd say it's a job of a pot of coffee and some time with Excel open! A lot of the time though there is at least some automation that can be done in Excel.

I'd say 2 things:

1. Have a page on your website for each location and use schema local company mark-up on each page

2. I could talk for a while about G+ Local and multi-location businesses, but this post does a good job so I';d visit that  http://moz.com/ugc/get-your-multilocation-business-ranking-in-multiple-cities-with-one-domain-21815  (Tip of the hat to Brian Gomez 

Hope that helps! Sorry the answer is so short, but Brian covers a lot of the ground I was going to write about so not point ion me repeating it here!

I'd seriously look into 301 redirects.

How many products are we talking about and what is the current URL structure like?

The best way from an SEO, usability and revenue point of view would be to 301 URLS like-for-like - Sending domain.com/productabc.html to the same product on the new URL structure. This may be time consuming if you have 10's of thousands of URLS, but depending on the current structure you may be able to automate this at least a little.

So some questions:

What's the new structure

What's the old structure

How many products/categories/URLs?

Hmmm I would say borderline. If this was the mainstay of posts to a site, then I would be worried. However if you have lots of other content published on a regular basis that is content-rich and engaging, then I would be less worried.

If the main goal here really is for users, rather than SERPS, why not noindex, dofollow the page?

Couldn't you twist this a little though, have a unique intro at the start of the article, then a paragraph of your own thoughts on each topic - adding value and provoking thought, then a link to the topic after that? It's what I do on some of my sites, and it works well!

Hi Some 'bigger picture' questions to consider...

• Is the  blog a relevant, high traffic one that may send referrals?
• Does the site have a very good moderation policy, and only allow great content?
• Are you going to be providing great content that pulls the reader in and makes them want to read more?

If the answers to the above are positive ones, that I would say that it is worth writing for the site. I would recommend linking naturally, and try to negotiate Google Authorship of your posts

• Add the site to your Google Plus account in the 'contributor to' section
• Add a link back to your profile, with the correct rel=author tag

As I recently mentioned in another question a few moments ago, I would also recommend setting an advanced segment up in Google Analytics to check for referrals from the blog and, perhaps more importantly, goal conversions from visitors this blog has referred.

If you are thinking about this from a pure 'rankings' point of view, all I would really recommend is a shift in the though process Google is evolving, so it's important to do the same

Hope this helps!

The best advice is, as you say, to be 'natural'. Hard to 'emulate' a natural backlink profile? - Then I hate to say it, but try to earn some natural backlinks

Add UGC to product pages (reviews etc), try to make product pages (assuming this is an eCommerce site!) more interesting (soem great stuff on MOZ about this - including a whiteboard Friday from a while back, I think!).

If you ARE 'building' links, I would recommend avoiding exact match anchors. In terms of what anchor text % to use for each type, and what would look natural, I very strongly suspect that this is different in each industry/niche. Google is pretty good at spotting what other websites any given site is 'related' to, and so would also be able to calculate what, on average, looks dodgy and what looks natural. I would be very surprised if this data didn't at least influence it's algorithm's a little.

Who ranks at the top in your industry? What sort of anchor text do they have pointing to similar sub-pages? - Check this for 3 or 4 top-ranking sites in your sector.

Link like a Journo or blogger

Consider using a mix of brand, url, and natural anchors such as in-sentence links (read a few New York Times blogs to see how they handle citation links (or follow the example i just made! hahaha). Whilst on the NYT blog, why not follow the links from the NYT blogs to their destination URL, and then run an OSE check on those URLs? That will likely show you other examples of natural linking

The long term goal should be to earn links, not build them - I accept this can be a tough call though!