Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi there,

There are a few reasons why your Domain Authority may still be the same, despite more backlinks being built to your website:

• Moz may not have discovered all of the new backlinks to your website yet, so they may not have been factored into the DA score
• If they have discovered them, then there is a chance that some backlinks may not improve your DA score quickly and it may take more links in order for your DA to go up. This is particularly true the higher your DA is because the algorithm that DA uses is logarithmic which means that the higher you go, the harder it becomes to increase it
• The DA of other websites may have changed and could be skewing the DA of the websites that are now linking to you

You can read a bit more information and watch the videos here for more information on DA

I'd also just mention that you should remember that whilst DA/PA are designed to give some direction on how well you can rank in Google, they are not connected to the Google algorithm, so definitely keep an eye on DA, but don't forget about other metrics too.

I hope that helps!

Hi Troy,

I think a lot of the answer here depends on what your goals are.

If you're trying to get links into category pages by adding this type of content to them, then this is quite tough because when someone first arrives at the page, they will probably see products which can put them off linking to it. Even if you have some great content further down the page, they may not actually see it.

I do however think it is a great idea to cross link from category / product pages to genuinely good content related to those categories and products. This is good for user experience but you should probably keep an eye on conversion rates to make sure that it doesn't distract people to the point that they don't return to buy the product! Also make sure that there is a good call to action on the content pages to let people return to the category / product.

I probably wouldn't worry about duplicate content from snippets of text. If it is literally a snippet, then a link to the full page of content, I don't think that is going to cause you problems. Having said that, you should make sure that there is enough unique content on the rest of the page. With product pages, this shouldn't be a problem because you will have all the product descriptions / images / reviews etc. What I'm getting at is that if you have a page which is made up of largely snippets of content from other pages, then that isn't a signal of a quality page.

I hope that helps a bit!

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi Chris,

Link building can be very manual, particularly in the early days of a website and when you're trying to get going. Ultimately, you should be trying to come up with ways to make your website naturally link worthy so that you end up getting links which you didn't ask for.

This can come a few ways:

• Your product or service being genuinely useful to your target audience or within your industry so that people recommend it/reference it etc
• Creating content which genuinely answers questions and solves problems for your target audience
• Creating content which has some kind of an angle which encourages top tier sites or bloggers to links to it such as informative guides or statistics/data related to your industry

You may find it hard to get links to lots of your product or sales pages unless they are link worthy in themselves. So also try to focus on getting links to your content and then distributing the link equity from these pages to your key pages.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi David,

In terms of whether these links could hurt you, I'd be more concerned about the quality of the links than the topic. If the majority of links pointing at these user generated pages are low quality, then that would be of concern and you may want to disavow the ones that are very low quality such as the spammy sites / directories etc that you've found. You may even want to go as far as removing pages where the people who set them up are clearly spamming the pages hoping to get them to rank for some reason.

The fact they come from websites that are off-topic is a slight concern but they shouldn't "hurt" you as long as they are genuinely natural and it doesn't look like manipulation. If you're also generating links to other areas of the site that are on topic, then I wouldn't worry too much.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Chris,

I'm not sure I fully understand your question:

"The question now is, How with so many ranking keywords do you come up with a solid back link plan."

Do you mean how many keywords you can target with link building?

If so, that's not really the way to think about it because most high-quality link building won't use your keywords as anchor text and may not link directly to your commercial landing pages. The approach should be on getting links into the domain which are high quality which 1) help the domain as a whole and 2) can be filtered to your key pages via good site architecture.

Going back to your first question, if you are going to focus on link building, then you do need to prioritise and focus on key landing pages first. But you have two options for this:

1. Try to get links directly to those pages - this is hard unless those pages are link worthy in some way or you're prepared to pay for links to those pages which I wouldn't advise.

2. Try to get links to your domain/content and then use internal linking to filter link equity to your key pages.

Link building with a focus on improving 15,000+ keywords individually isn't going to happen and probably why you're struggling with this a bit. Focusing on a few at a time by doing the things above or trying to improve the domain as a whole is going to be more helpful I think.

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi there,

Thanks for the question.

It can be a challenge to build links to an ecommerce website, particularly if you're selling products which are widely available and not very link-worthy in their own right. The guide suggested by Rayflexgroup by Backlinko is certainly a good starting point, as well as a few others:

https://moz.com/blog/building-deep-links-into-ecommerce-pages - it's a few years old but worth seeing if any of the tactics are relevant for you at the moment.

https://moz.com/blog/creative-link-building-for-ecommerce-sites

https://geoffkenyon.com/ecommerce/link-building/

A few other things I'd suggest:

1. Look wider than just your products to look at your audience and what their issues, problems or concerns are. Then create content around those and look to build links into these. This takes time and you need to put a lot of effort in, but essentially you need to "surround" all of your products and categories with genuinely useful content which is as good as it can possibly be. You won't "go viral" with this kind of content but it will have the ability to pick up links over time.

2. Depending on your niche, spoof products can work well. A few examples are here and while these were not link building plays, they certainly generated links and attention.

3. Also look at the people at your company and their story - do you have a founder or CEO who is open to talking to business press or websites about business growth or retail trends? This can work well and get links from the kinds of sites that your competitors may not think of.

I hope that helps!

Hi Nicholas,

To lead on from what others have said, I'd agree that these links are unlikely to be passing value from a ranking perspective i.e. they're not likely to pass PageRank. Google do try and detect affiliate links and as Matt has said, they see these as placed to get affiliate revenue as opposed to being placed because someone genuinely endorses the website in question.

In terms of how this actually works, I'm not too familiar with Sharesale personally. But I know that similar affiliate programs provide plugins / scripts to affiliates which can make the link look natural, but when clicked, some JavaScript kicks in and adds the affiliate URL and the redirect. The website owner themselves can also do this themselves if they want to "mask" the affiliate link so that when someone hovers over the link, they see a nice clean URL rather than a potentially long and messy affiliate link.

In terms of what you can do - it really comes down to whether you value the traffic from the affiliate and if that drives revenue. If it does, then that's more valuable (I'd guess) than having a normal link. Plus, would they actually link to you at all if they couldn't get affiliate revenue? If not, then stepping out of the affiliate program may cause more harm than good. But it's really a balance between the affiliate revenue and potential link benefit.

I hope that helps a bit!

Paddy

Hi there,

Thanks for the question.

I wouldn't worry as much about DA/PA as I would the relevance and "human" quality of a link. DA can be a great indicator of the authority of a domain, but remember that it's just one metric. If you are working through large lists of links, then filtering from highest DA to lowest can help you prioritise, but I wouldn't necessarily rule out links below a certain number.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Jeeyaul,

As long as the links pointing at the 2nd and 3rd level pages (and the site in general) are good quality, then I wouldn't worry about this too much. I certainly don't think it's bad for rankings and is actually more likely to help those 2nd and 3rd level pages rank better.

If, on the other hand, these links aren't great quality or could be seen as manipulative by Google, then that could be bad for rankings.

You could take a look at this blog post that I wrote late last year which talks about what makes a good and bad link:

https://moz.com/blog/the-anatomy-of-a-link

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Ivan,

Thanks for your question. To answer each of your points:

1. Google Webmaster Tools and Open Site Explorer will often report different numbers of links from each other. They both use different crawlers and different methods of sorting the data, so they will never match up 100%. The same is true of other backlink tools such as Ahrefs or Majestic. I wouldn't worry too much about the numbers being different.

2. It can be hard to say why you're not ranking but it usually comes down to:

• The quality of your content
• The quality of your links
• The technical setup of the website

The quality of content generally seems to be fine and unique. However you don't seem to have many high quality links and as others have pointed out, there aren't that many. You may want to take a look at the following guide:

http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building

You may also want to carry out a technical review of your website to ensure that there are no major problems, here is a very good checklist:

http://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015

It can often take time for traffic and rankings to grow, particularly in the industry you're targeting which looks a little bit competitive. So I'd advise taking a look at your competitors and seeing if you can learn anything from what they do. It does look like you're making progress though, I found this example of where you rank pretty well:

http://screencast.com/t/jRiE4BRllcd

I hope the above helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

I'd say that your first solution is likely to be the best one. It's far better to have a smaller number of high quality pages than a high number of low/questionable quality pages. I'd also recommend thinking about whether it makes sense to combine the content or not when it comes to the user. If the trip reviews would all make sense on one page and add value, then it's another reason to consolidate. If they aren't really relevant to each other,  you may want to be very selective with which ones you combine and possible add some new, fresh content to the pages at the same time.

Also think about keyword targeting for these pages and review how much traffic they already get and use Google Search Console to understand which keywords drive traffic. Whilst the pages may be low quality, if they drive some decent traffic, you may not want to lose that. So if the keywords that are sending traffic are the right ones for you, try to carry them over to the new, consolidated pages where you can.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Brian,

To follow on from what Andreas has said, I think that Google certainly can figure out this kind of thing. The question then, as you point out is whether Google give credit for them. I think that if Google can figure it out, then they would give credit for that brand mention. It won't have the same effect as a solid link, but I can still see it helping in some form.

As to whether Google give credit or not, I don't have any evidence but I'd imagine it's dependant on a few things:

• If there are any other similar brand names / domains out there. So if there are a few different companies with similar names or domains, Google may not be able to figure out which one to attribute the mention to. Therefore they may not credit anyone or they may credit the wrong brand.
• The context in which the mention is given. If the mention is given in a piece of content which is the same topic as the domain, then it may be easier for Google to figure out and assign credit. If the content isn't the same topic, again it may be harder for them to attribute credit.

Ultimately, I guess the test is how the domain in question ranks for the brand name. If you rank number 1 and dominate, then it's pretty clear that Google have figured out that the two are connected. If the results are a little more mixed or you rank number 1 but not with a six pack of sub-page results, then again, Google may not know for sure.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Kaushal,

Thanks for the question.

There are a few ways to deal with this problem which are recommended by Google here. In summary, you can:

• Use parameter handling as you have done
• Add the nofollow attribute to problematic URLs
• Block problematic URLs in robots.txt

There is also a thread in the Google webmaster forums which may be useful to you:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!category-topic/webmasters/crawling-indexing--ranking/CCORJBI-mEg

Overall, it comes down to having a good site architecture and cutting down / removing / blocking URLs that you don't care about from a search perspective.

I hope that helps a bit!

Paddy

Hi Hampus,

Thanks for the question!

If I were to choose, I'd prefer this option:

https://www.granngarden.se/husdjur/hund/c/hundfoder

Mainly because, like you, I prefer shorter/cleaner URLs and am not a fan of repeating the same words. I don't think there will be a negative SEO impact of removing one of the category name words because the repetition is unlikely to be helping that much right now. If there was a valid reason to have it repeated, then my view may be different. But that doesn't sound like the case so I'd say to go with the shorter URL.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Gary,

To answer each of your questions:

1. Unfortunately, it isn't that simple. There are a few factors that Google will take into account when it sees 301 redirects to a new domain. In the past, this technique has been used to manipulate Google, for example people would buy expiring domains that have links pointing to them, then 301 that domain to their own - even if the domain was in no way related to what the expired domain was about. So Google will look at the relevancy of the links and try to figure out if the redirects would make a good user experience for anyone who clicks on the links and gets redirected.

2. Yes. Google needs to crawl the links in order to find the redirect and see where it points to. Depending on how strong your website is in terms of link equity, it may take a few hours to a few weeks for Google to crawl all of the pages on your site and find the redirects. Because of this, redirecting one site to another can often lead to at least a temporary loss in traffic for the domain whilst Google figures out what is going on.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Lauren,

This technique can be very effective but it is getting harder to do because as you say, people need a reason to link and often don't like linking out.

My question would be - does your colleague have a page on your website? Something such as a profile page? If they do, then this may be a good way of providing a reason for the link because it's crediting the right person with the quote. Another possibility - have they used a photo of your colleague? Again if they have, then that may be another route.

I know this may be a little too late, but I wanted to mention it for the future - the quicker you can contact someone after an article has been published, the better chance you have of getting the link. You mentioned that the article in Reuters was from a few months ago which makes it tougher for you. So I'd advise trying to react as quickly as possible to things like this using a tool such as Buzzsumo of Fresh Web Explorer to find fresh mentions of people's names.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Charles,

While it's hard to pin point a cause without looking at your particular site, here are a few steps I'd suggest taking.

1 - Monitor your links over time using tools such as Moz Open Site Explorer, Majestic or AHREFs and try to pin point which particular links are dropping off. This will help narrow down the problem and see if it's a real problem or not. For example, I wouldn't expect a drop in Pinterest to be a huge issues from a link perspective (links from there are nofollowed) but it may be an issue if you get a lot of traffic from there. You can also regularly download links from Google Search Console and compare the reports to see which links has gone.

If most of the tools don't show a drop, then it's not as likely to be a big problem but if all of them are reporting drops, then you should take a closer look.

2 - Look at your referral traffic too. Leading on from the previous point, if you're also losing real traffic from referrals, then it's more of a cause for concern because if a link is sending good traffic, then it's a link you don't want to lose.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

Thanks for the question.

I'm afraid that I'm not too familiar with "Hoth" link building so I can't answer that directly. Regarding subdomains though, from a technical perspective, they are different websites and therefore are capable of passing link equity in the same way that any other website could. It really comes down to the quality and relevance of the subdomain.

I'd recommend looking at them in the same way you would any other link and assess them for quality. The one thing to maybe flag is when you have lots of subdomains which are on the same root domain. There is a chance that these may not pass as much value but again, it comes down to why they are there and the quality of them.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Jason,

Thanks for the question.

I'm not sure if you've made changes already or if things are fluctuating right now, but I see your category page ranking for the keyword "twin dvd player" - not the advice page. I am however seeing your advice pay rank for "site radio" and understand that this is a problem.

In case you haven't seen it yet, this post from Rand is an old one but still very relevant to this topic.

There are a few things that you can look at here that can play a part in the wrong page ranking:

• External links to the page - I can't see many links at all but this is definitely a big factor
• Internal links to the page - you mentioned this and your site architecture looks logical
• Content of the page - I'd look for ways of being unique, useful content onto the category page so that it becomes more than just a list of products. I'd look to incorporate things like unique reviews for the products on that page, extra content on how to choose the best product, technical considerations etc. I know this is tricky as you don't want to push the products too far down the page, but with some good design, it can be done
• Page title - I'd possible look at making the page titles of your advice centre pages a bit more focused on the types of keywords someone would use when looking for this content. For example one keyword may be "Tips for Buying a DVD Player" "DVD player buying guide" etc which may help Google undertstand that this page is more to do with advice and info rather than products themselves

The other thing I'd recommend (this isn't a long term solution but makes the best of the short term) is to add some product images to your advice pages so that you stand a good chance of getting someone to click through to the product page and convert. You could choose your most popular three or four products and list them at the side. At least this means that people landing on this page stand more chance of converting.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Becky,

There have been some good replies so far but to address your question here, I think it's definitely worth doing the outreach and trying to build relationships. Unless you're a massive brand, it's hard to get noticed online without some form of outreach, at least to begin with.

In terms of time, it really does depend on your other priorities. If I had to put a time on it and given that you haven't really started yet, I'd block out maybe half a day to do some research and contact a few sites and then gauge feedback. Then build up from there.

Bear in mind that some companies will hire SEO and PR agencies to just focus on promotion of their website, so it can take up a lot of time. But if you start on it yourself with a few hours, then you get a good understanding quickly of what's involved.

A quick heads up - it's not easy! But it's important so it's worth pursuing.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

In terms of how many to aim for, I don't think I'd advise thinking about it from that perspective. Instead, I'd recommend thinking about it from a quality / relevance perspective. Make quality and relevance the first thing you worry about and if that means that you have a large list of directories to submit to, then that's fine and you should just work through them when you get time.

For the do's and don'ts, there are a few things that come to mind:

• Focus first on whether the directory is relevant to what your business does
• If a directory is likely to send you quality traffic, then that's a positive sign for it
• Look at the page where your website will be listed and make sure that you'll be surrounded by other quality sites, don't go for it if you see lots of low quality or irrelevant sites
• Check whether a directory shows in search results for it's own name, don't submit if it doesn't

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

This is quite a common issue and happens because technically, the addition of those parameters at the end of the URL mean that it's a new URL from Google's perspective. These kinds of parameters are very common and Google often figure it out and drop these URLs from their index and focus on the correct version. However, they don't always do this and may not do it as quickly as you'd like.

One way to deal with this is to add a rel=canonical tag to any duplicate versions of the URL and have that tag point back to the correct URL. Based on your question, this would mean that the canonical tag would look like this:

This would go into the section of this URL (and any other duplicates):

https://techplusgame.com/hideo-kojima-not-interested-in-new-silent-hills-revival-insider-claims/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=hideo-kojima-not-interested-in-new-silent-hills-revival-insider-claims

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Jason,

It sounds like when you moved to the Hubspot CMS, the URLs of your website changed? If so, 301 redirects are needed from the old URLs to the new ones. Unfortunately, redirecting all of your pages to the homepage is not optimal and is the likely cause of the traffic still remaining very low on your website.

It has been some time now since this work was done but I think it's worth a shot removing the 301 redirect from all your old pages to the home page. Then you should 301 redirect every individual old URL to the most appropriate new URL. This makes for a much better user experience, it stops 404 errors and it helps maintain traffic.

I'm honestly not sure if it's too late to fix the traffic, but it is worth a shot I think.

For future guidance, here are some good guides on moving your website:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6033049?hl=en&ref_topic=6033084

http://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Aaron,

The advice from the other guys here is spot on in that it's more about the quality of the domain linking to you than the number of links coming from it. If it's a relevant link and makes sense for users, it's pretty unlikely that it would cause you any problems.

Just to chime in on this question:

"My question is, is it worth have 2-4 articles from one highly relevant website, or will 1 article have the same weight?"

To give you a concrete example, I've guest blogged here on Moz multiple times and each post has links to my site. The first time a link was found to Google would have had more impact than the subsequent ones, but the subsequent ones would still help me because of the trust and relevance that the Moz.com domain has to my own. It's just that these links probably won't be as powerful as getting brand new links from new domains to my website.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

As others have mentioned, a bit more detail on what you're trying to do would be good, but assuming that you mean that Google isn't indexing your forum and social share links, there isn't a whole lot you can do about that. There are tools available that can speed up the process, but I don't think they're worth the effort because good quality links will be found and indexed by Google quickly anyway. Even if it takes them a bit longer, this won't cause rankings to drop.

With that said, if you're using any automated tools to build forum or social sharing links, these aren't likely to be great links anyway and aren't the kind that you should be focusing on. That may not be the case here, but I wanted to mention it just in case.

Cheers.

Paddy

YoastSEO should do the job for Wordpress - it allows you to define the canonical page URL on each of your pages/posts:

https://yoast.com/help/canonical-urls-in-wordpress-seo/

Another option which I usually find effective which I initially skipped over is the URL parameters section in Google Search Console. You'll find it in the legacy tools section and you can set these parameters to "No: Doesn't affect page content:" which is the option for tracking code parameters:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6080548?hl=en

Hi there,

There are plenty of really good resources online that cover this area, so I'd like to point you towards them rather than copy and paste their guidelines here!

Google has a good guide here with lots of visuals on how they crawl AJAX -

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/getting-started

They also have a short video here covering some of the basics of Google crawling AJAX and JavaScript:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6mtiwQ3nvw

You should also become familiar with pushState which is cover in lots of detail, with an example implementation in this blog post:

http://moz.com/blog/create-crawlable-link-friendly-ajax-websites-using-pushstate

The guys at Builtvisible have also put together a few good blog posts on this topic which are worth a read:

http://builtvisible.com/javascript-framework-seo/

http://builtvisible.com/on-infinite-scroll-pushstate/

Essentially, you need to make sure that Googlebot is able to render your content as you intended and that this looks the same to them as it does to users. You can often test how well they can render your content by checking the cache of your page or by using this feature in Google Webmaster Tools.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Christine,

As Alex said, this shouldn't be a problem. I'd just advise keeping things consistent where you can, if only from a maintenance/debugging perspective so that if something breaks, it's easier to diagnose.

You should also make sure that markup is consistent between mobile and desktop sites if you have separate sites or change content based on each one.

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi there,

Anchor text is one of many signals that Google uses to determine the topic of a page - mostly the page that is being linked to. For example,  if a link to a website uses the anchor text "coffee beans" then it's a reasonable assumption for Google to believe that the page being linked to is about coffee beans - without visiting the page. Essentially, it can help Google figure out what a page is about. The important thing to remember here though is that Google uses many, many signals to determine what a page is about - anchor text is just one and can be used in a number of ways or even ignored, so my advice would be not to worry about it too much for external links because you often don't control the anchor text that someone else uses.

If you do control the anchor text, then I'd advise being cautious with overusing keywords as the anchor text because it could look manipulative if you do too many.

Moz has a great intro to anchor text and best practices here which I'd recommend.

In terms of your question on which case will rank better, it's impossible to say because as mentioned above, there are many signals that Google uses beyond anchor text and many of them are ones we don't directly control.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Alberto,

I don't believe that losing internal links will affect your DA, so losing those internal links shouldn't have made your DA drop. Although I'd make sure that you intended to lose those 50k links and that you still have a good internal linking structure.

DA is calculated by Moz using a bunch of different metrics, so a score going up or down could be caused by a number of things. There is more information on Domain Authority here, but here are the reasons why DA may go up or down:

• Your link profile growth hasn't yet been captured in our web index.
• The highest-authority sites experienced substantial link growth, skewing the scaling process.
• You earned links from places that don't contribute to Google ranking.
• We crawled (and included in our index) more or fewer of your linking domains than we had previously.
• Your Domain Authority is on the lower end of the scoring spectrum and is thus more impacted by scaling fluctuation.

Overall, it is the volume and quality of external links to your website which will affect your DA, rather than internal links.

Having said that, I wouldn't worry too much about DA dropping by a point, this can happen sometimes and I'd focus more on the long-term.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Paddy

Hi Will,

The previous reply is a good one - these are answer boxes and are becoming more and more common. Here are a few more resources for you that may help:

http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-onebox-plus-box-direct-answers

https://moz.com/blog/more-google-answer-boxes-with-bonus-experiment

https://moz.com/blog/101-google-answer-boxes-a-journey-into-the-knowledge-graph

It's definitely worth following Dr. Pete on this topic, he tends to spot these new features pretty early and often talks about what they could mean for the future, as he has in the blog posts above.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi David,

Thanks for the question and I'm glad to see that you found my list of infographic sites

I think that infographics can still be a good way of marketing your website and getting links, the key really is to make sure that you're not just doing an infographic for the sake of doing an infographic. To be more specific, it shouldn't just be created in order to get links. There needs to be a solid, accurate story and data behind it as well as a nice design. Too many infographics these days are thrown together very quickly and shouldn't even be infographics! These are the ones that are probably not going to help very much in terms of links or traffic.

I believe that this is what partly led to Matt Cutts saying back in 2012 that Google may seek to discount links generated by infographics at some point.

It sounds like you don't need to worry about this but I wanted to point it out anyway.

Re your questions - I would avoid using commercial anchor text and stick to branded anchor text - this helps reduce the chance if the activity being seen as spammy and causing you problems with Google. I'd certainly recommend linking back to the original source of the infographic or the data behind it, I'd avoid linking back to commercial category pages because this can also make it look a bit spammy.

In terms of how many you should distribute to, it is less about the number and more about the quality of the site. The list I provided was put together over two years ago now (I need to update it!) so I'd recommend you review the sites and make sure they're of a good quality before submitting to them. Ultimately, you want your infographic to be covered on good quality sites that have the potential to send you quality, relevant traffic. If you use this as your benchmark, it will mean that you should end up going for good quality sites.

I hope that helps and best of luck with your infographic!

Paddy

Hi there,

Thanks for the question.

It is totally fine to update page titles and meta descriptions over time. I'd recommend to prioritise your most important pages first or where you see the biggest opportunities and start there. Then you can focus on the most important pages first and go through the rest when you have time. I would recommend trying not to change them too much unless you have a really good reason to though.

I'd also mention that you should try to write page titles and meta descriptions which are good for the user, focus on a keyword and read well - try to avoid just stuffing them with keywords if you can.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi,

Thanks for the question.

Here are some relevant sections of the Schema.org vocabulary which should be useful for you and confirm that the example you've given is correct:

https://schema.org/MedicalEntity

https://schema.org/MedicalSpecialty (Plastic surgery is linked from here)

This may also help:

http://moz.com/learn/seo/schema-structured-data

In terms of productontology - this looks sensible but I'm not sure if Google recognise / accept them as a vocabulary to better understand your content. However, Schema.org doesn't cover everything you're trying to markup, so it should work fine for now but I'd recommend running your code through the rich snippets testing tool to see how Google respond to it.

Hope that helps!

Hi Radi,

In terms of cleaning up your links, there is a good article here on Moz which may help with the process and it's still relevant:

https://moz.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-google-penalty-removal

Even though this is for penalty removal, step 3 talks about how to spot low quality links and before that, the article talks about how to gather your link data. I also wrote this guide a while ago which is still relevant except for the use of PageRank which is probably too out of date now. But the process is still relevant:

http://www.stateofdigital.com/step-by-step-guide-finding-low-quality-links/

To give you a very quick overview of the process, I tend to use something like this:

1. Gather all of your backlink data using Google Search Console, Open Site Explorer, Majestic and AHREFs
2. Combine it all into one dataset and remove duplicates
3. Look for patterns of links that may be low quality such as spammy anchor text, directories, article submissions etc
4. Review them in more detail to assess the quality

In terms of the citations for the old business name, these on their own shouldn't be harmful - it's perfectly normal for businesses to change names / rebrand etc. It's only an issue if the citations / links are low quality. It is probably worth changing the citations to the new business name where possible just to make sure that Google pass across any equity for them.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

I'd agree with the comments from Richard and Jim below, the types of techniques you mention are not really the ones that I'd endorse when you're trying to build a business online. Social media links using Fiverr and link directories aren't as effective as they used to be and can cause link problems if you use them now.

Instead, I'd recommend trying to make your website link worthy and using your business USPs to try and generate links. Here are some good guides to help you with this:

• http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building
• http://moz.com/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links
• http://moz.com/blog/link-building-101-the-almost-complete-link-guide-updated-for-post-penguin
• http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

These guides and tactics focus on more sustainable methods of link building which should help you in the long term,

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

Just to add to Ross's answer, it is best practice to have a canonical tag on every page - either self-referencing or referencing another page if that is correct.

However, if you don't have them, you won't necessarily see any big problems unless you also have duplicate content problems.

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi there,

There isn't a definitive answer regarding the number of links that you should add. The way I'd suggest thinking about this is what would make sense for users - do they need to have links on every single page? Does it make sense for them to be able to click to different subdomains from anywhere or could you list them all on your homepage or another page?

It's pretty common practice to cross link between subdomains that are related to each other, but you do want to be careful not to do it if it doesn't make sense i.e. if you're doing it just for SEO benefit, it's worth considering if it's the right thing to do. It's also worth avoiding a focus on keyword driven anchor text, because that could definitely be seen as manipulative if you overdo it.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Zach,

Just to quickly add to what Nicholas has said, I have seen instances where links to a site via hotlinked images can cause ranking problems. It sounds like you're on top of it with the disavow file, so just keep an eye on things and update that as you find new links.

If you've been hit by the Fred update, that does seem like something different, but again it sounds like you're doing the right things that would help with SEO anyway. It could be worth comparing your site and it's features to other sites that seem to have been affected and see if you can spot any similarities. Here is a list from Search Engine Roundtable.

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi there,

To add to what others have said, I don't think this is a good idea.

If you have lots of low quality backlinks already, then you need to clean these up by removing as many as possible and adding the rest to a disavow file in Google Webmaster Tools. Building more blog comment links is very, very unlikely to help with anything and may actually hurt you more.

Once you've removed or disavowed the low quality links, you should then concentrate on building good quality links instead.

Here are a few links that may be helpful:

https://moz.com/blog/link-audit-guide-for-effective-link-removals-risk-mitigation

https://moz.com/blog/category/link-building

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

In short, it's usually highly recommended that during a migration, you keep the old website live right up until the point that the new one launches. At that point, you put the necessary 301 redirects in place and launch the new website.

If you go the other route and take the site down and add a landing page as you've described, it's almost certain that you'll lose any traffic that the current website is getting. This is because any pages that are currently driving traffic will not exist any more. I'd highly advise against this!

The only caveat would be that if the current site is not getting any traffic at all at the moment, then there is an argument that you have nothing to lose by taking it down. However, I'd still advise to keep it up and redirect the pages at the time of the migration because this will help preserve any existing equity that those pages have.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

Thanks for the question. Can I just check something regarding this bit from your question:

"My company currently owns five different websites and every day we download a list of for Google crawl errors.I then crawl the downloaded list with screaming frog to double check the redirects to make sure the pages are not 404s."

I'm a bit confused because you say you download a list of crawl errors, which would be 404s, but you then crawl them to make sure they're not 404s?

Could you clarify this bit?

Thanks!

Paddy

Hi Syed,

Thanks for the question.

There could be a number of reasons why you can't rank any higher in search results. One place to start is to look at the websites that rank above you and see what they have that you don't. The things I'd look for are:

• Are they stronger, mainstream brands or established websites who are naturally stronger than you? For example from the UK, I see websites such as Buzzfeed and Amazon ranking for this keyword. These types of competitors are going to be very hard to move above.
• Do they have more and better quality links than you? Radi pointed this out in his answer and Open Site Explorer can help give you an answer here.
• Is their content better than yours on this topic? Be honest with yourself here and see if they're doing anything better than you and see what you can learn from this.
• Do they have larger audiences (you can get an idea of this from their social channels or engagement such as blog comments) which means they may be generating more user signals to Google?
• Is their content more keyword focused than yours? You can use the Moz on-page grader here to get an idea of this.

It can be hard to jump above stronger websites, but focusing on lower competition, niche keywords first is definitely the right approach.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Becky,

I'm not sure that product titles / descriptions would directly affect rankings as such i.e. writing good titles and descriptions is unlikely to make the category pages suddenly jump up in rankings. However I can see how it would help Google better understand the topic of the category as a whole, which may allow the category page to rank for a wider range of keywords.

The one thing to be careful of is that you don't accidentally confuse Google with your keyword targeting. So you should try and make sure that your target keywords map to different pages and don't cross over too much. If you cover the same keywords across a category page and a product page, it may confuse Google and they won't know which one to rank for that set of keywords - which means they may rank the wrong one and not rank as highly as they could.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Leana,

Thanks for the question.

If you're not updating or maintaining the small shop subdomain anymore, it would make sense to move all of those products/content over to the main domain and then 301 redirect all of the old pages to the appropriate new ones on the main domain. This feels like the best long-term approach given that you will be focusing your efforts on the main shop.

This can carry some risk though - migrating URLs and content can confuse search engines and you can sometimes see a temporary drop in traffic even if the migration is perfect.

I'd suggest testing the move first and move over a few products from the subdomain to the main domain, make sure you're comfortable with the process and then do more after that if it all goes well.

This should help consolidate everything (including link signals) into the main domain and help long term.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Rob,

There are some great answers in this thread, so I won't repeat too much. But just a few additional points:

• Ultimately, the quality of the site should be an important factor for you to consider. If the site is high quality, then it's likely to help you in terms of traffic and rankings no matter what the anchor text is.
• Anchor text still plays a big part in rankings. But as others have said, it can be risky to have too much anchor text which doesn't look natural i.e. is stuffed full of keywords. So you do need to be careful not to look manipulative and I'd advise not taking risks and focusing on the quality of the link as noted above.
• There are lots of other signals as well which Google can look at besides anchor text. A few may be - the position of the link on the page, the surrounding text, whether the link is in a list or not, whether the link is followed or not.. countless things which can help Google decide if a link is good or not.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

I'm not sure how many redirects you're doing, but generally, they're not a problem if you're trying to redirect broken pages to new ones so that users get a better experience. A few things to bear in mind though which can cause problems:

• Avoid multiple redirect "hops" e.g. going from page A to page B to page C. Wherever you can, write the redirects so that they go directly to the new page which is the final destination for the user.
• Keep the redirects "one to one" - basically avoid redirecting lots and lots of pages to a single destination if you can.
• Redirect to the most relevant page that you can in terms of the topic of the pages e.g. redirect a page about blue widgets to a blue widgets page, not a red widgets page - if that's possible.
• Do a crawl of the redirects using a tool such as Screaming Frog in list mode to check them all and make sure you turn on "follow redirects" and check the "redirect chains" report it provides.

I hope that helps!

Hi Eric,

Thanks for the question.

Are you able to register each of the duplicate sites with Google Search Console? If so, you could do that and then use the Fetch as Google feature which then lets you submit pages to the Google index. So you could enter the URL of a page that is now redirected and ask Google to recrawl it.

You could also setup sitemaps for the duplicate sites and submit those to try and prompt Google to recrawl them.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

Just to add to the other replies, there isn't really a perfect time to start link building nor is there a fixed number of links that could get you penalized. The focus should be on quality and if you're getting links that are genuine, then you shouldn't have anything to worry about.

As others have said, you should start as soon as you have something worth sharing. If you publish a page and aren't sure why it deserves to get links, then you're going to struggle to get them no matter when you start. You should also remember that not every single page you publish will generate links and this is fine. You may publish one blog post which is very high quality but not necessarily going to get lots of links, but may rank well for a certain keyword. So try to focus on quality over quantity with the content that you create and promote only your best and more link-worthy content.

I hope that helps!

Paddy