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We're thinking of simplifying our website which has grown to a very large size by removing all the content which hardly ever gets visited.

The plan is to remove this content / make changes over time in small chunks so that we can monitor the impact on SEO. My gut feeling is that this is okay if we make sure to redirect old pages and make sure that the pages we remove aren't getting any traffic. From my research online it seems that more content is not necessarily a good thing if that content is ineffective and that simplifying a site can improve conversions and usability.

Could I get people's thoughts on this please? Are there are risks that we should look out for or any alternatives to this approach? At the moment I'm struggling to combine the needs of SEO with making the website more effective.

Thanks for your reply Everett, that definitely answers the main part of my question,

I'd be interested if anyone has any experience in using the Confluence add-ons for SEO?

Thank you both - it sounds like we could have made a mistake here. I thought that there might be something fishy going on when I couldn't find any more information on how to do this!

Phil - the link is http://www.reelseo.com/embedded-youtube-indexed-google/.

We've recently moved to using YouTube for embedded videos on our site. We have a number of videos that are embedded and then a larger number of videos which are part of our YouTube channel.

I've been reading recently that it's possible to get Google to list embedded video links pointing to your site rather than to YouTube itself. I am interesting in driving traffic directly from the search results to our pages rather than via YouTube. Could somebody provide a basic step by step guide on how to do this please? Or is this something that is not possible? I've been doing a lot of research online but, sadly, can't work out how to do this.

Hi Edmund,

I'll let the more experienced members of this forum answer your question in more detail. One thing I've learnt over the last 8 months though is that there seldom are any quick wins

One 'quick win' that we're implementing here though is Google authorship tags. You can use these to link your content (in this case a blog?) to a Google + account. When setup, this means that rich snippets such as your photo appear in the SERPs which can increase CTR and your visibility on the page. It is also possible that Google has / will implement this into their algorithm to assess the overall authority of your page via an 'author rank'.

I'm not sure you'd see any difference in your SEOMoz Domain Authority, but it is a quick easy win that is becoming fairly standard these days

Go to http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1408986 to learn more.

Thanks,

John

I think this is a difficult question so apologies in advance and any help would be appreciated!

We currently have a large amount of support center content sitting on our main pages which we don’t think is very effective (mainly basic how to guides). We think it is difficult for visitors to understand and the UI is very poor. In order to solve this we’re currently moving this content onto a subdomain using Confluence, a wiki based team collaboration tool (from a company called Atlassian).

What we’re planning on doing is very much like what Atlassian themselves have done on this page: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/ALLDOC/Atlassian+Documentation

What are the SEO issues / dangers that I need to consider before moving this content? I’m assuming that as this content will still be on the same domain then we can minimise link equity / authority loss by setting up re-directs to the new content. Also, has anyone had any experience of using Confluence and whether individual pages can be optimised for SEO? I notice that there are lots of add-ins that can be used, one of which is an SEO add-on which allows you to customise things like meta description tags.

Thank you all - basic stuff I know. All three of your answers put together answer my question so excellent stuff.

It's interesting that even when I've moved onto more complicated SEO concepts a simple issue coming out of the blue is the one that throws me. Maybe this shows that sometimes it's best to keep things simple?

What do people think is the best way to increase unbranded organic traffic specifically? We have worked on on-page optimisation / keywords / some social media, but there has been no noticeable increase over the last 6 months.

Do you think increasing unbranded traffic is an objective worth pursuing?

Thanks for your responses everyone. It sounds like this is something to look into but not something to spend too much time implementing!

Would listing my content / blogs on Technorati have an SEO benefit?

A few months ago, I did a piece of analysis on our competitiors' link profiles and then ranked the linking root domains to get the highest scores. Technorati was one of the domains with a high domain authority and is also relevant to our business. On the other hand, I've seen on whiteboard Friday's that directories are losing their importance.

My gut feeling is that this is something that is worth doing because it is easy to implement but that we shouldn't expect amazing returns in terms of traffic / page authority scores.

Your opinions would be much appreciated

Yes it does.Thanks Chris!

Hi Tom, that makes sense Thanks for your reply and for your excellent response!

Hi everyone. I'd really appreciate your help with this one

I've just watched Matt Cutt's video 'what percentage of PageRank is lost through a 301 redirect?' and I am confused. I had taken this to mean that a re-direct would always lose you page rank, but watching it again I am not so sure.

He says that the amount of page rank lost through a 301 redirect is the same as any other link. Does this mean that no page rank at all is lost during site migrations? Or is it the case that first page rank would be lost from the original link and then more page rank would be lost from any subsequent redirects?

watch?v=Filv4pP-1nw

Thanks again Seb, that makes a lot of sense. I definitely see the difficulty in finding someone who is both logical and creative, especially someone who can bring both those skills to the workplace.

Thanks for your reply Sebastian!

It sounds like it's difficult to merge the two roles from a consulting perspective. Do you think that this would also be a problem for an in-house SEO?

You mention that programming is important, what technologies would be the core set that an SEO should understand?

Apologies if this is a basic question as I'm still new to the world of SEO and have mostly been approaching it from a reporting perspective!

I’ve been wondering recently what makes a good SEO / Social Media employee. It seems to me that SEO and Social Media are in the process of merging into a single role.

What are your thoughts on the skills that this new world SEO / Social Media employee would need? Or do you think these roles should ideally remain separate and that a “traditional” SEO is more what is needed?

My own role has been moving much more towards social media recently and I was wondering if this was a common trend!