Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thank you, trung.ngo! I appreciate your thoughts. Yes, we have transcriptions and are submitting site maps.

Thank you, cathibanks!

Hello!

We are producing multiple videos (each about 1-minute long) for a company website. We have decided to use Wistia to host them, in order get the full SEO benefits of links to the videos.

I have two questions:

1. Would it definitely be better for SEO to divide up the videos and place them on the various existing pages of the site that are related to the video content, rather than putting all the videos together on a separate video page?

2. If we do put different videos on different pages, would it be a bad idea also to have a video page with all the videos together? Would this be considered duplicate content?

Thank you very much!

Hello!

I am not very experienced with SEO, but I am trying to help out on a site that has been around since 2010 and has well over a thousand pages of high-quality, original content, with more being added all the time. Only around 65 of the site's daily visits come from organic search results; this seems very low. There has already been significant SEO work done on the site. Is there something about the site that strikes anyone as obviously getting in the way of organic traffic? The URL is ellenjovin.com.

I would appreciate any thoughts you may have.

Thank you very much!

Thanks, Federico.

Thank you, Keri!

Thank you very much, Dr. Meyers! This was extremely helpful.

Hello,

Let's say that there is a link to site A from site B. The domain authority of site B is 85, but the link is on a page that has a page authority of only 1. Does much authority get passed along from site B to site A? (Let's assume site A has a domain authority of 35, if that's relevant.)

Thank you!

Dear readers,

This post is a duplicate of one I just put up. Sorry about that. If you are interested in commenting or seeing other responses, please go to http://moz.com/community/q/would-a-free-pdf-download-diminish-seo-benefits-of-html-content.

Thanks.

Hello,

I am doing SEO for a company that, as a sideline business, sells four books written by the principals; the content is directly relevant to the company's primary business focus. Book sales are a tiny fraction of our overall revenue, and we don't expect that to change, although we will continue to sell the books.

In addition to selling them, we have decided to convert the books to HTML and post them for free on our website (laid out by chapter and section). The hope is that this will result in goodwill, links, traffic, and ultimately improved search rankings.

My question:  Would offering free PDF downloads of the books (in addition to posting the HTML content) diminish the SEO benefits of the HTML content?

• If we don't offer the PDF option, people would have to visit our site to read the content (unless they bought a hard copy).
• If visitors were able to download a free PDF, they wouldn't need to return to our site to read it.
• If our corporate clients (nearly all of our clients are corporations) could download a PDF, they could then post it on an intranet instead of posting a link to our site.
• In general, do you think a visitor would be less likely to link to our site if he or she were able to download the PDF? Or would the appeal of the PDF option make it more likely that people would visit and link to the site?
• Also, if we offer the PDF option, are there any SEO issues related to duplicate content?
• Finally, if we did offer the free PDF download, would you recommend that we ask for an email address before giving the PDF?

Thank you very much!

Okay, thanks.

Thank you, Alex!

Thank you, EGOL!

Do you think there is any reason to consider offering PDFs and not posting the HTML versions? Or do you prefer the approach of having the HTML and also offering PDFs?

Hello,

I am doing SEO for a company that, as a sideline business, sells four books written by the principals; the content is directly relevant to the company's primary business focus. Book sales are a tiny fraction of our overall revenue, and we don't expect that to change, although we will continue to sell the books.

In addition to selling them, we have decided to convert the books to HTML and post them for free on our website (laid out by chapter and section). The hope is that this will result in goodwill, links, traffic, and ultimately improved search rankings.

My question:  Would offering free PDF downloads of the books (in addition to posting the HTML content) diminish the SEO benefits of the HTML content?

• If we don't offer the PDF option, people would have to visit our site to read the content (unless they bought a hard copy).
• If visitors were able to download a free PDF, they wouldn't need to return to our site to read it.
• If our corporate clients (nearly all of our clients are corporations) could download a PDF, they could then post it on an intranet instead of posting a link to our site.
• In general, do you think a visitor would be less likely to link to our site if he or she were able to download the PDF? Or would the appeal of the PDF option make it more likely that people would visit and link to the site?
• Also, if we offer the PDF option, are there any SEO issues related to duplicate content?
• Finally, if we did offer the free PDF download, would you recommend that we ask for an email address before giving the PDF?

Thank you very much!

Matt,

Our web designer just made a change within Expression Engine, our CMS, and it worked!

Here's the code:

{if segment_2 == "" && segment_3 == ""}{redirect="sub1/sub2/sub3"}{/if}He put the code at the very top of the main /sub1/ template. It means "if segments 2 and 3 are empty, forward to /sub1/sub2/sub3."Thanks again for your help!

Matt,

Thank you so much for your generous offer! I apologize for my delayed reply. I have had to turn my focus toward other issues and let this one go for the moment.

i really appreciate your support!

Matt,

Thank you very much.

I tried that code, but it seems to conflict with other redirects already in place. I will see what I can figure out.

Hello!

I am working on a website with the following structure: example.com/sub1/sub2/sub3. The page "example.com/sub1" does not exist (I know this is not the optimal architecture to have this be a nonexistent page). But someone might type that address, so I would like it to redirect it to example.com/sub1/sub2/sub3.

I tried the following redirect: redirect 301 /sub1 http://example.com/sub1/sub2/sub3.

But with this redirect in place, if I go to example.com/sub1, I get redirected to example.com/sub1/sub2/sub3/sub2/sub3 (the redirect just inserts extra subdirectories).

If someone types "example.com/sub1" into a browser, I would "example.com/sub1/sub2/sub3" to come up. Is this possible?

Thank you!

Thank you!

Thank you, Ian!

Thank you, Matt!

Thank you, George!

Hello.

I just used Open Site Explorer to find inbound links to a site. But it does not seem to list all inbound links.

I will be changing a lot of urls on the site, and I would like to put in 301 redirects only for the pages that have links to them. Is there a way to find all inbound links and the specific pages they link to?

Thank you!

Thank you, Nitin.

Thank you very much, Peter!

Hello.

I am working on a site that was built with underscores in the urls, but only in the page names, not in the subdirectories. All the subdirectories have one-word names.

So a typical url is "example.com/sub1/sub2/page_name."

We would like to change the name of one of the subdirectories to a name that would be very useful for SEO, but this new name is a hyphenated word, let's call it "new-sub."

If we changed "sub2" to "new-sub" then our url would have a mix of underscores and hyphens: example.com/sub1/new-sub/page_name. But if I used "new_sub" instead, google would read the words as connected with an underscore, instead of reading the subdirectory as a hyphenated word, which would be less useful for SEO.

It seems like it might be a problem to have a hyphen in a subdirectory and underscores in the page names. But I want the SEO value of the hyphenated word.

Any recommendations?

Thank you!

Hello.

Should I use a dash or a vertical line in title tags?

Thank you!

Thanks, Nakul!

Thank you, Nakul!

Hello.

We are about to launch a redesigned and significantly expanded site that has traditionally used underscores as separators between words in its URLs.

Would you recommend replacing all the underscores with hyphens? That would then require many 301 redirects to maintain any links that might be out there.

Thank you!

Hello.

Our site was recently rebuilt, and we switched from using index.php in all the urls to not using it at all. We also changed the names of many of our pages. So the urls have been renamed from "example.com/index.php/old_page_name/" to "example.com/new-page-name/". While we were at it, we changed from "_" to "-" as our word separators in the urls.

In the .htaccess file, we have a small block of code that strips out "index.php/" from all requests. This code redirects a request for "example.com/index.php/old_page_name/" to "example.com/old_page_name/"

For your information, the code that strips out "index.php/" is:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET.index.php [NC]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} !/uSZWTLna/.
RewriteRule (.?)index.php/(.*) /$1$2 [R=301,L]

Then we have 301 redirects from "example.com/old_page_name/" to "example.com/new-page-name/"

QUESTION 1: Is this two-step redirect approach okay, or would it be better to skip the separate index.php stripping code and simply have 301 redirects that include "index.php" in the urls?

QUESTION 2: Will we lose some of the benefit of the links that have to pass through a 301 redirect?

QUESTION 3: We have 50 or so redirects. Will this affect performance of the site? How many redirects does it take to start affecting performance?

Thank you!

Thank you, Nakul!

Thank you, ColinSV!

Thank you, Robert!

Hello.

Is it useful to have a site listed in the Open Directory Project?

Thank you.

Thank you, Nakul. Great advice!

Yes, I can see the risk of more unwanted click-throughs in the top spot. Thank you, John!

That makes sense. Thank you!

Hello.

How much of a difference does it make in click-throughs to be the first listing in Google Adwords versus the second or third (still at the top of the page)?

Thank you!

Thanks, Jeroen.

Thank you!

Thank you for your the information. Great to know what Google said.

Since I posted this question, I found in Google Analytics that in the Tracking Info section of the Admin tab, you can turn on a feature to track subdomains of a property. So I can track example.com and www.example.com together, which makes sense because they are the same site. So my question is answered!

Hello.

I have had a Google Analytics account set up to track the property www.example.com for several years. In Google Webmaster Tools, I recently set the preferred domain to example.com (without the www), and we put in a rewrite from www to no-www in the .htaccess file. Should I now change the url of the property in Google Analytics to example.com (without the www), or does Google Analytics see the two urls as the same?

Thank you!

Hello.

If I have a keyword in Google Adwords that is using phrase match ("keyword"), could it be useful to add the keyword phrase "keyword nyc"?

Even if I did not add the second keyword phrase, my ad would be triggered if someone searched for "keyword nyc." So would it be redundant to add the second keyword phrase?

Thank you!

Thank you, Martijn!

Hello.

Is it worth running ads for both of the following keywords in Google Adwords (phrase match for both)?

1. "keyword one"

2. "keyword one nyc"

If I don't run the second keyword, my ad will still be triggered by a search for "keyword one nyc." So is there a benefit to running both?

By the way, the Google Adwords campaign is limited in geography to the NYC metropolitan area.

Thank you!

Thank you.

Thank you, Mat!

Thank you for your advice and the link to the great article!

Hello.

I am thinking of changing our home page title tag to include our two most valuable keywords from two of our sub-pages. Would this help the rankings of those two sub-pages?

Thank you!