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Hi Chris,

Sorry for the confusion. The plan is to merge both databases (our vulnerability database on our corporate site and our exploit database on our other website) into one and place them on a subdomain off of our corporate site. Right now the exploit database that is on our second website gets a LOT of traffic, it contributes about three quarters of the traffic to the domain. I would like to minimize the loss of traffic when placing this on this subdomain and looking for ways to do this.

@ryan - I am not sure exactly why, but our web producer told me that we need to use a subdomain and cannot put this on our domain. I will follow up with her to find out why.

Update - I guess one of the databases is written on a different platform (ruby) so it cannot be hosted on the same server - changes are harder to make as a result. I guess this could still be done however it may be a little harder to update - anybody have experience with this?

Thanks for the help guys!

Pat

Hi All!

So the company that I work for owns two very strong domains in the information security industry. There are two separate sections on each site that draws a ton of long tail SEO traffic.

For our corporate site we have a vulnerability database where people search for vulnerabilities to research, and find out how to remediate. On our other website we have an exploit database where people can look up exploits in order to see how to patch an attackers attack path.

We are going to move these into a super database under our corporate domain and I want to ensure that we maintain or minimize the traffic loss. The exploit database which is currently on our other domain yields about three quarters of the traffic to the domain. It is obviously OK if that traffic goes directly to this new subdomain.

What are my options to keep our search traffic steady for this content? There are thousands and thousands of these vulnerabilities and exploits so it would not make sense to 301 redirect all of them. What are some other options and what would you do?

Right, that is my hunch as well. But Marketo tracks a conversion as a form fillout. So if somebody reaches the reg page and fills out the form, and reaches the thank you page it should record a conversion in marketo and google analytics.

Hi All,

Hoping somebody can help me out with this...I am getting a lot of slack from my boss over this.

So we use Marketo for landing page creation. I create unique landing pages for PPC so that people who come in via ppc are the only people that see these landing pages. I put the google adwords conversion code on the thank you pages of these pages. So User sees PPC add > clicks add and gets sent to a registration page > fills out reg page and gets sent to thank you page that contains conversion code.

When I look in adwords, I am seeing that for this specific campaign that I had 15 conversions yesterday...in marketo I am seeing 0 conversions. I do not know which one to believe.

Anyone have any ideas?

Pat

Hey Everyone,

So the company I work for owns 2 domains. We have our main site which offers our portfolio of products and then we have a second domain, which we acquired, which focuses on one of our products (we also have this product available on our main site).

So here is where things get tricky for me. This second site (the one that focuses on one of our products) has a HUGE following and a higher domain authority of 80 when our main site has an authority of 70.

The higher up of the company want to merge the second popular site with our main site. There are many problems with this in my opinion since the following on this second site is very hardcore in the security space (I do not think that they will like to be sent over to a more corporate site) BUT I want to figure out the SEO value that can be gained or lost from this merge.

Some questions...

By 301 redirecting the pages over to our main page - I am assuming that the SEO power carries along with it so that these pages should still perform well?

Will the domain authority of our main site go up with the merge since we are bringing over pages with a lot of equity?

In your opinion, does it make more sense to keep the site with the higher authority since it is easier to host content that performs better?

Anyone have any experience with this?

SEO-wise do you think that this is a good idea or a bad idea?

Thanks a lot!

Pat

Hi All,

So I have put together a weekly video series on security topics. I have read an SEOmoz post around how you can boost SEO by adding the transcription to the page, which makes perfectly good sense.

My question is, can I include the first couple of paragraphs and then have a "read the full transcription" so when the user clicks, the rest of the content appears? Do the search engine spiders only crawl the first two paragraphs in this instance or do they crawl the whole thing even though the entire content is not on the page?

I dont mind making the page longer and including the entire transcription if it is easier for SEO but if there is no difference, than I think the first option would be the best user experience.

Thanks for the help

Pat

OK so let me break down this little scenario we have going on. I work for a b2b company so we have a lot of gated content that is behind a form fill out - this is how we get a lot of our lead generation.

Some pages that we have behind the form are showing up in search which allows people to view the documents bypassing the form. At first I thought, well why dont we just no index that page so that it does not appear in search. But then I thought it would be smart to keep the pages indexed to keep the SEO value,

Is there a way to keep these pages indexed but make sure that when they click the link in the SERPS that they need to fill out the form in order to gain access to the document? Something on the backend that checks to make sure that the referral URL was completed or something like that?

Anybody deal with this before?

Hi Chandana,

I agree with Nakul to a certain degree (sounds like a full blow SEO is not in your timeframe though). If I were you I would get an inventory of all of the pages, look at what each page is trying to rank for or at least the most important pages (each page should be optimized for 1 or 2 keywords). Use the google keyword tool to see how many people are searching for these topics. If the number is very high and competitive, try to find a keyword that is more attainable or if nobody is searching for those keywords, find one that can take its place. For instance, if you are trying to rank for tours and entertainment, it will take a LOT of effort to show up in top 100 searches since that is an extremely general and tough keyword to rank for I am assuming. Maybe you should try to rank for something like haunted house tours in massachusetts, etc. Then when you have a good sense of landing page and keywords you can dive right into on page SEO. Optimize meta tags and on-page. While you are waiting to see how those changes affect your SERPs, start link building the right way! Very important to get your domain and page authority up by getting other tour websites and blogs to link to you.

20 days is a pretty slim time-frame but like I said, the quickest solution is to really get organized, optimize on page SEO and work towards getting those high quality links. You can increase traffic by pushing your social programs too!

When Nakul says SEO audit he is saying that you should look at the current website, look at what keywords they are trying to rank for and find out exactly where they are ranking today. Take a look at the domain authority and the links that are pointing to your customers' website and try to increase that number with high quality links (links from related companies with high domain authority.) SEOmoz has tools for you to accomplish all of these things in their resources section!

Good luck Chandana!

Pat

Hi Kristina,

Thanks for the help! I have a question around your second bullet point. So our TLD is rapid7.com. Right now we have pages that are rapid7.com/product/etc. I was thinking that these long tail seo pages would just be something like www.rapid7.com/long-tail-keyword/. Does this make sense or are you saying that this should be done differently?

Thanks again!

Pat

Hi All,

Hoping you can help me out with a couple of questions I have. I am looking to create SEO friendly landing pages optimized for long tail keywords to increase site traffic and conversions. These pages will not live on the main navigation.

I am wondering what the best way to get these pages indexed is? Internal text linking, adding to the sitemap? What have you done in this situation?

I know that these pages cannot be orphaned pages and they need to be linked to somewhere. Looking for some tips to do this properly and to ensure that they can become indexed.

Thanks!

Pat

If you have the time, you can do one yourself too. Check out http://infogr.am/. They setup a couple of cool templates and you fill everything in. It's actually pretty fun to do too!

Hi Irving,

No we had 0 PR outreach pointing to these other domains. Each site had VERY minimal external links that were very outdated.

Good to know about the rankings. I was really hoping that I would see a boost but just glad we fixed the problem.

Hi All,

So I have been at my current company for 5 months now. I quickly realized that they previously bought multiple domains. The domains do make sense (they are mostly our products, etc). However they did not just redirect to our main website, instead, they were a direct copy of our main website.

They had it setup so that when we made changes to our main website, www.mainwebsite.com, that the same exact change went to www.productwebsite.com. Basically we had about 7 of the SAME EXACT websites with a different root domain. So I explained to them the problem with having duplicate content on the web and how we are basically just self cannibalizing our online efforts. This problem is fixed now and I am just wondering if anybody has seen the results before?

To tell you the truth we already do pretty well SEO-wise. Just wondering if this will make it even better? I am assuming that this will also take a little while to take effect?

Thanks!

Pat

After digging around, this is normal. Google Webmasters has a 2 day delay for SEO information. I am assuming that everyone who goes into webmaster tools and goes to the traffic tab > search queries is only able to see information up to July 23rd. Google analytics gets their SEO data through webmaster tools, this is why I am seeing 0 impressions. So tomorrow the impressions should go from 0 to the correct amount for the 24th of July. PHEW

Hey guys,

So I have been on Google analytics and I looked at Traffic Sources > Search Engine Optimization > Queries & Landing Pages

From Tuesday until today I am showing 0 impressions for top queries when we usually average around 9000 impressions daily, I am seeing the same for landing pages. When I go into google webmaster tools I am seeing 0 data from tues-today. It doesnt say that I have 0 impressions, it is just not showing me those dates, almost like I am unable to see data that is so close to today.

The weird thing is that traffic to the sites in question is higher or normal to what it has been the whole month which makes me think that this is some sort of glitch. If we are being penalized and indeed have 0 impressions via search then our traffic would drop tremendously.

When I sign out of google and search for our search terms, I am seeing our site pop up right where they should be. When I use the Page Rank tool I am also seeing us in the SERPS where we should be. Wed morning when I came into work after SEOmoz had an updated keyword rank report, I saw some great gains for a lot of our keywords. I am super confused  and hoping that I was not part of the 1% affected. There is no reason for our sites to be penalized, they have great authority, healthy traffic, and go by SEO best practices. We have great content!

Has anybody ever ran into this problem? Could use some guidance!

The other day we released a press release, see it here http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120717006087/en/Rapid7-Metasploit-Pro-Increases-Vulnerability-Management-Efficiency.

I asked them to include two links (seen in the first paragraph) with targeted anchor text (vulnerability management and penetration testing). The press release was published and when I check the open site explorer to see if I got any link juice from the press release, I am not seeing the link...ugh

I noticed that they are using some sort of tracking code that seems to be redirecting the link, is this the problem? I talked to our sales rep at businesswire and he told me that they could take the code off if that is what needs to be done.

Do you have any insight into this or have you ever ran into this problem?

Hi Everyone,

So I am looking into a couple of sites that we can use for press release distribution. Naturally, I am looking for sites that will improve our SEO (sites that have a high domain authority). I guess I am just trying to wrap my head around the whole domain/page authority and how it effects our SEO.

So for example, I am looking at prlog.org. They have an overall domain authority of 91...sweet! Is this all I should be looking at when I am looking to place a press release, which will include targeted links using appropriate anchor text?

If I drill down even further to the actual section that the press release will live on, which will be the security section of the site, the page authority is a 49. Is this what I should be looking at?

Do I have to drill down even further and look at the page rank for the actual URL that my press release will actually live on? I am assuming since it will be a totally new page that the page authority will be very low. Is this correct?

Should I be looking at a combination of the two? The page authority of 49 is pretty low but the domain authority is very high. What does this mean for my SEO and my links?

In a nutshell I need to know what I should be looking at for SEO purposes, is it domain authority, is it page authority of the section the site will live on or is it the actual page that my press release lives on. Is it a combination? What would you do in this situation?

Also, could you give me a little more insight into when a low domain/page authority can actually hurt you. What the threshold where you get no link juice or are actually penalized? Do you have any insight in the domain/page domain number that is considered not worth it?

Thanks all!

Pat

Hi Craig,

You should also do some research on the keywords that you are trying to rank for. For example, you are going to try to rank for the keyword "web development" this is going to be pretty tough since it is a super competitive keyword where a lot of websites have a very high domain and page authority already. You might want to try to check out a keyword that is a little more targeted, you will have a much better chance at ranking well and your CTR will be much higher!

But yes you have the right idea. Target a certain keyword for each page, maybe a second if it makes sense and go from there.

Pat