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That's the thing...after a drill down, everything seems very natural...the IP sources are varied, the traffic sources have propotionately increased and the mapping also shows an increase in traffic from diverse locations. Analytics does not seem to indicate a particular planned trend...though the spike in traffic still feels a bit odd!

That's the thing...after a drill down, everything seems very natural...the IP sources are varied, the traffic sources have propotionately increased and the mapping also shows an increase in traffic from diverse locations. Analytics does not seem to indicate a particular planned trend...though the spike in traffic still feels a bit odd!

We've noticed a 100% increase in our traffic over the last three days. However, the page views have not increased proportionately. The traffic sources seemed to be dispersed naturally. Could this be a Ddos in the making or some other type of attack as it seems unlikely that we suddenly started receiving thousands of extra visitors. Its a leading news website with a consistent heavy traffic daily which just doubled over the last three days. What should we be looking at?

Your answer raises many more questions!

I don't know if the title makes sense, but here's my question...

Our newspaper website has multiple categories like World, Sport, Entertainment etc. Now, a story, belonging to the entertainment section maybe published on the entertainment page but is likely to have a slot somewhere on the Home page as well as other pages. The same goes for stories in sport etc. However, the url displays the date folllowed by the post title and thats it, no category name.

Now, a user may end up going to a detailed story that belongs to the entertainment section (from the home page or any other page) without actually having visited the entertainment page. However, for tracking purposes, we want to see how many hits we got on the entertainment page and any story belonging to that particular section. So, my question is how do I go about creating filters that can help me track category page and detail story hits as one? Or, should I ammend the url structure (keep in mind we are using wordpress for our news website) to include category after the date and would this solve my problem of tracking?

I asked a similar question recently but maybe I did not explain myself clearly.

Thanks!

What would you say about investing in Mobile Applications for most popular platforms like Iphone, Ipad etc?

Can you suggest how I would be able to do that by creating filters in GA without having to alter my url structure?

But you see, sometimes, a story is published in a particular (lets say sports) category and then displayed on various pages such as the home page, entertainment, latest news etc. Should that have any effect on the url or tracking?

Since there are no dumb questions, here's mine:

Our url structure currently displays the date followed by the post title. However, our news website has many categories like world, sports, entertainment etc. Now, when tracking in GA we get to see how many hits a specific page is getting (like entertainment) but since the category is not defined in the URL GA does not add the detail story views to the category page views. To illustrate further, a story from the entertainment section maybe displayed on the Home page and a reader may click on that story and read it without going to the entertainment page. This however, does not reflect in the analytics for that specific page(in this example, the entertainment page).

My question is, should we ammend the url structure to include the categories, if so, would the editor have to do that while composing the post or is there some other way. We are using WP. Or should I create some filters or something on GA.

Thanks!

I haven't done my homework on this, so I'd like to ask, if I am interested in launching a website in multiple languages. Let's say an Urdu version (that will have different content) of our English News website then how do I conduct some keyword research for popular keywords used by people searching the net in Urdu. Furthermore, how can I get an estimate of how many people are actually using the web in a particular language and from which geographical regions?

Cheers!

Thanks Barry,

The thing is we've already made the shift to WP but I was wondering thats an OK solution for a popular news website. As for Google news, we're amongst the favorites their when it comes to Pakistan news, as that's where we operate so that's not an issue. Thanks for giving the rest of the pointers!

Best,

Rishad.

Our newspaper website has an extensive readership in the US, UK, Australia and UAE. Should we go for a mobile web app? Is that worth the investment considering the fact that you have to design different apps for different devices. Or does a mobile version of the website work fine?

Also, are there any specific guidelines that you shoudl follow when designing web apps with regards to SEO? Also, if you could point out some good resources for getting web apps designed, that would be great!

Thanks,

Rishad.

Unfortunately, our techies are just as bad as our journalists. I guess we should stick with Wordpress then, I am aware of the scalibility issues but journos are most comfortable with the platform so can\t decide which way to go because our website is going to get larger and larger in the comng times!

Thanks for the resource brother...

Is Wordpress good enough to be used as a full fledge CMS for a large website. In particular, I'm talking about a news website. We have been online since 2002 but pretty soon we will have digitized our print newspaper archives of about 60 years. So, my question is, is it OK to use Wordpress for the entire website and if so what are some of the important things that need to be kept in mind.

Cheers!

Yup, that's exactly what I do here and I believe it is of utmost importance when it comes to delivering value to your readers. Just wanted to confirm that what I'm doing is in fact the correct approach. Cheers!

Now, there are a number of do's and dont's when it comes to internal linking, but do those rules apply to news websites that have to interlink relevant news stories, primarily based on their relevancy to the user and the value that they have to provide rather than keeping the idea of page rank sculpting in mind? What's your take on this?

hmmm...if only I am able to convince the editorial!

Man, the list was lost courtesy of Twitter. They said, they could only transfer the username and not the followers. Although the hijacker was operating an RSS, we wanted more control and wanted to integrate it with FB and do other things. Mailing list, yea we have one for online subscribtions and not for the Twitter followers we had previously!

Our Twitter account had been hijacked by an ex-employee who refused to give it back. However we filed for copyright infringement and got access of our Twitter account back. The sad part is that Twitter could not leep our followers intact and we lost our fan base of over 30k followers. Now that we have control of the account, how should we go about regaining our followers? Just to give the community a better idea i'd like to point out that we are a leading news organization (dawn.com) of Pakistan. (Yes, we have internet and no we don't ride on camels!).

We posted a message on our FB account that has an even greater following but didn't get a good response as most followers on FB are local whereas 70% of our readership comes from the US alone! So how would you suggest regaining followers and also, is it better to operate an RSS feed or manually select the links to share on Twitter.

Thanks!

Thanks for your response. As an SEO, I would have to agree with your approach but I don't think the decision to merge these different mediums on the online front will rest with the SEO, however, when asked for my two cents, i can give them the option that is most likely to bring maximum benefits.

Cheers!

Thanks for such a detailed answer. A very good explaination and you've pointed out important things to think about. As goodnewscowboy said, the answer cannot be solely based on SEO and you've pointed out the different things to take into consideration.

Cheers!

A large News Media Group has a Tv Channel, print newspaper, radio channel (for music primarly) and an online website that includes the newspaper content and other original content in different media. My question is, is it better to have independant websites for these different mediums or have all the content on one big website. Currently the newspaper and blog are online as one whereas the radio channel has its own website and the television has its own. So should we maintain sister sites and cross link to each other or have one big happy family under one house?

Best,

Rishad.

Hey, thanks for your answer...I actually managed to figure this out before reading your question and was cursing myself for being such a dumbo! Can't believe this didn't come to me before...thanks for you support anyways!

Cheers!

Thanks for your answer. Basically, what I'm looking for is to see how many people actually click on the internal links posted in the body of an article. To be more precise, I'm talking about a news organization that provides links to other relevant stories based not on page authority but on the "value" that the link provides to the user. In this case, I wouldn't be too concerned about the page authority. Rather I want to check how many people clicked through to the internal links. I hope thats clear!

Can anyone suggest the best way to track the effectiveness of internal linking on a website?

Thanks!

How can I check whether my website is accessible on mobile phones? Is there a tool that allows you to check if your website is opening on different mobiles? Also, is it better to have a dedicated website for mobiles or the original developed in a manner that it appears ok on mobiles as well?

Cheers!

Yes, I understand that we have to use 301s for the urls. That part is clear for us. However, how do you go about making the actual change? See, we add like 5 to 8 blogs daily and comments continue...so, how do we go about this? Do we publish the same content over onto the new category and then 301 the links? It is not possible for us to publish the entire content again. Also, if this is not the case, then what about current blogs? Like we have 5 new blogs today and we decide to activate the sub category, what should we do? I hope you get what I mean!

A very active news website has a very active blog as a sub-domain. For all good SEO reasons, they want to transfer the blog from a subdomain to a subcategory. Now, the issue is this blog is very active, updated daily and lots of people comment on it. So how should the website go about making this change while causing minimal seo loss and ensuring that the commenting process remains active and on going. A detailed answer would be much appreciated! Thanks!

I cam accross this blog post that guides on how to change a subcategory to a subdomain: http://devilsworkshop.org/moving-a-wordpress-blog-from-a-subdirectory-to-subdomain-preserving-permalinks/.

Any words on this would also be appreciated!