Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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

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!

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!

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!

Hello. I would like to change the url of a page. It currently has very few inbound links. I would set up a 301 redirect to the new url. Is there anything else I should take into account before changing the url? Is there a downside to changing a url? Do inbound links carry the same value when a 301 redirect is involved? Thank you!

Hello. How much more important does Google consider pages in the root directory relative to pages in a subdirectory? Is it best to keep the most important pages of a site in the root directory? Thanks!

Hello. I have a page on our site that is especially popular and has many inbound links. This page has the same site navigation buttons (at the top) as every other page on the site. Do these site navigation buttons pass along link juice to other pages in the same way that an internal link would elsewhere on the page? Thank you!

Hello. I have a competitor that is on the front page of Google (and often at or near the top) for many desirable keywords - almost unbelievably so. I notice that their site has a blog. When I click the blog button, I am taken to a different URL that has a very similar layout with a similar navigation bar, etc. When I click one of the navigation buttons on the blog site, I am taken back to the other URL. This seems strange. Is there some ranking benefit to having two URLs set up like this? Is this a sneaky site? Thank you!

Hello, There are some keywords that have no monthly search data in the Google Keyword Tool. In many cases, this is because there have been very few searches for the keyword. Would you recommend focusing on other keywords that do have search data in the Google Keyword Tool? Perhaps focusing too far out on the long tail of search results can be less productive than focusing on keywords that have proven that at least some people care about them. What do you think? Thanks!

Hello, How much better for rankings is an html text heading (H1 text of a word at the top of a page) than a graphic of the word with an alt tag? Thank you!

Hello, I have a title tag that includes three keywords and has a total of 59 characters. The third keyword is not very important. If I eliminated the third keyword, leaving the first two (for a total of 48 characters), would the ranking value of the first two keywords increase? Does including the third keyword dilute the value of the first two? Thank you!

Hello, Is the Google Keyword Tool the only reliable source for stats on keyword search volume on Google? The tool returns "no data" results for keywords I would expect to have some, if not much, search volume. I would like to cross-check these results, if possible. Thanks!

If a page is optimized for certain search terms that have "nyc" at the end of them, will that help the page appear when someone in NYC searches for the terms without the "nyc" part? Thank you!

We have a "Clients" page on our site with approximately 125 of our clients listed. We have a link to each client's website, so that's 125 links. I am rethinking this approach. Is there any value to having these outbound links? The SEOmoz PRO analysis tells me I have too many links on this page. I have read that more than 100 links on a page is too many, but that seemed to be referring to internal links. Any thoughts? Thanks!

Hello, I am the newly appointed in-house seo person for a small business. The founders of our company have written several books, which we sell. But book sales are a small part of our business. We are considering posting to our website some or all of the content of the books. This content is directly relevant to the existing content of our website and would be available for free to all visitors. 1. Is it likely that the traffic and links to the new book pages would improve the search engine rankings of our existing pages? 2. We already have pdf versions of each book we could post, which are formatted nicely. Should we convert these to html to make them more friendly to search engines? 3. Of course, we would have to split each book into multiple web pages, perhaps one chapter per page. How much content could each new page optimally accommodate? 4. Would it be more valuable from an SEO perspective to post pieces of the books over time in a blog format? Thank you very much for your thoughts!