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Hi Moz community,

I appreciate the title is confusing, so let me explain.

We use blogspot to host our blog. It's set up as a subdomain of our website. Let's call it: lovelyblog.lovelytraining.com

Our website, in this example, is **lovelytraining.com **

We're migrating our website to a new domain: lovely.training

We'll be redirecting everything on the primary website, so our link profile won't be lost.

However, as the blog is hosted on blogspot, we'll lose links pointed to the blog. The blog would remain lovelyblog.lovelytraining.com - but our website would now be lovely.training

The question is, has anyone migrated/redirected a blogspot blog in this way, to retain links?

Secondly, is there another way we can tell Google that this is blog should be treated as a subdomain of our website?

I'm sure I'm missing out something stupid, so don't go easy on me!

Thanks all.

My question is sparked by how Moz uses its Whiteboard Friday videos.

We are currently capturing video stories from our customers. Its excellent and engaging content we'd love to share with a wider audience. I'm puttting together a strategy for video SEO to drive traffic to our site and Moz's approach intrigues me.

As we know, the world of video rich snippets changed in 2014 - their appearance in universal search reduced dramatically and what remained was almost entirely (90%+) YouTube snippets. Useless if you're looking to drive traffic to your own site. Of course, it's still possible to earn SERPs for video in Google video search, but I imagine the search volume is greatly reduced.

From what I can see, first Moz host their Whiteboard Friday video on Wistia, complete with transcript and whiteboard capture. Suprisingly, I see no Schema markup for video. Can anyone shed a light as to why this might be a good idea?

3-6 months later the same video is then uploaded to youtube, with the same title and a similar description.

The end result is multiple SERPs in universal search, almost always in the following order:

1. the original post on Moz
2. a YouTube result complete with a video rich sippet

This has me asking the following questions - I have some theories - but i'd love your input:

• Why use two platforms to upload and host the video? Why not just YouTube?
• Why avoid using Schema on the Wistia video hosted on the original post? Surely, this would allow an additional result in Google Video Search?
• Why wait 3-6 months after the first post to upload the YouTube video?

Greeting Mozzers.

I have a question for the community, which I would appreciate your input on.

If you have a single gTLD that services multiple countires, what do you think is the best homepage UX for the root homepage and why?

So the example would be you own website www.company.org and target content to Germany, Japan and Australia with content through the folder structure eg. www.company.org/de-de

If someone comes to the www.company.org from a region, would you:

• Redirect them based on location IP – so if from Germany they land on www.company.org/de-de
• Let them land on the homepage which offers location selection
• Let them land on a page with content and offer location selection eg. pop-up or obvious selection box
• Something I’ve not thought of…

I'd appreciate your input.

Thanks

Absolutely, loving the content, my one request....might be worth date stamping the content...i.e. "this information is correct as of 14/07/2013"

As we all know algorithms update and best practice changes....might help users determine the freshness of the content.

Greetings Mozzers.

I would really appreciate some input / advice / a sanity check on our existing SEO strategy.

A year into implementing the strategy (outlined below) there appears to be no uplift in our existing traffic volume. I guess i'm wondering.

• • Am I on the right track?
• • Is there something I'm perhaps additional should be doing / i'm doing something wrong?
• • Am I suffering from Penguin?

The strategy:

We produce a range of content, this is written 100% for our audience, How-to guides, infographics, industry news etc. - this has lead to getting a wide range of publications with high powered relevant domains, widely shared and read. As a result we now have a series of ongoing columns where we regularly produce articles that our widely read and shared.

We have a wide variety of homepage and deep links from quality sources.

We have our own blog producing a wide range of content relevant to our audience. Industry trends, news, changes that affect our readers, guides.

We optimise our pages using the Moz Page Grader for select keywords.

We've structured our site architecture appropriately for the most important pages.

Additional info:

We received a WMT penalty last year in march - unnatural links. We engaged an SEO agency who simply went rogue, automated link building with spun articles.

We fired the agency, asked them to remove the links they had "created" and set about a resubmission. Between March and May when we made our resubmission traffic dropped 40%. Now we did have he resubmission accepted after several reconsiderations but  whilst we've seen a slight recovery we have plateaued for almost a year.

This penalty obviously straddles the time penguin arrived, so I wonder if perhaps we haven't seen a recovery as we are still affected by penguin. Despite all the great work we have done.

If anyone has any advice or insight, please do get in touch.

I am considering running a competition and wanted to get some feedback on SEO Best Practice.

We will have a  unique competition URL - following the completion of the competition it will be 301'd to home page

Every entrant will be given a unique URL for the competition to share, if someone enters using there URL they get an extra ticket. This means we will create a large number of new unique URL's over a short period of time, the pages however will have the same content. Is this potentially bad for Duplicate content?Any advice? Perhaps a canonical tag on all unique competition entrant URLs?

Any other considerations?

Greetings Mozzers,

Doing my standard run through Webmaster tools and I discover up to 30% of my sitemaps no longer exist.

Has anyone else experienced the recent loss of sitemaps/can suggest reasons why this may have happened?

Re-submitting all sitemaps now but just concerned this might become an on-going issue...

Thanks for the responses guys, looks like an SQL Injection.

We have cleared the import and all is back to normal. We'll be looking in to beefing up protection. Thanks for the advice. Will be keeping my eye on the traffic via analytics and watching out for messages in Webmaster Tools

Just logged into our CMS system and it appears we have been hacked.

All page titles have been hijacked adding a secondary title tag linking out to website http://emapaydayloans.com with anchor text pay day loans.

Our Web Dev team are working on fixing the hack now. My concern is the potential knock on effect to SEO.

This looks like a bad neighbourhood site:

• 3 pages indexed
• PR 0

And for I don't know how long we've had almost every page on all our domains linking out with the following page title including the same link and anchor text:

payday loans

I assume its a wait and see at this stage.

My advice, they are all warnings for a reason....

Missing Meta Description - your missing the opportunity to include a description of what your pages is about (google doesn't always select your meta description). A good meta description can improve CTR of your SERPs which is an SEO Indicator, its also a missing signal (though not a powerful one) to Google about what your page is about.

Duplicate Page Title - this is the first indicator to Google about what your page is about and is an important indictor of what keywords your page should be found for. How will google know which page to prioritise? Again this is also included in the SERPs - relevance to the reader = improved CTR

Duplicate Page Content - never a good signal to Google, but depends if the pages are identical or not.

Too Many On Page Links - depends where these warnings are and how you think about site architecture/internal linking - loads of links on the homepage mean more link juice is divided between pages you may not want to prioritise

Title missing or empty, again your missing an opportunity to tell Google and users in the SERPs what your page is about .

I wouldn't worry to much about the Title Element being to long - its not a detractor but in the SERPs the headline is cut down to 70 characters - so just make sure you get your message in their. Overly Dynamic URL's, i'll be honest I don't know much about the impact.

Temporary Redirects again not to sure.

In answer to your question, Rand did a great article on this a while back as a follow on to a white board friday session.- http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites

There are also multiple other questions of a similar nature.

http://www.seomoz.org/pages/search_results?q=sub+domain+vs.+subfolder

The general consensus seems to be sub-folder over sub-domain. As Sub Folders tend to get all the benefits from the root domain.

To quote Rand from the top article his advice:

"1 subdomain under 1 root domain (but feel free to use subfolders as it makes sense). Starting a blog? I almost always recommend yoursite.com/blog over blog.yoursite.com. Want to launch a new section of content? Use yoursite.com/newstuff rather than newstuff.yoursite.com."

So both A and B - www.domain.com/keyword

Hope this helps.

I'm not using it, but my spammy spidey sense is tingling....

Banner Ads (which aren't ads because they are free?) on your blog linking to other peoples blogs and vice versa. Sounds risky.

Imagine one of those Ad spots is on the Blog Roll - 500 links from 1 domain to 1 page. Red flag.....

Sure

Go to your respective google, in the search box type:

site:domainname.com

This should give you a list of most indexed urls...not always right.

Also try checking out your Google Webmaster Tools Account (GWT), in the dashboard on the right hand side labelled sitemaps is a list of submitted and indexed urls.

Hope this helps.

Something tells me I know the answer to this question already but I'd always appreciate the advice of fellow professionals.

So.....fresh content is big now in Google, and i've seen some great examples of this. When launching a new product or unleashing (yes unleashing) a new blog post I see our content launches itself into the rankings for some fairly competitive terms. However after 1-2 weeks these newly claimed rankings begin to fade from the lime light.

So the question is, what do I need to do to retain these rankings?

We're active on social media tweeting, liking, sharing and +1ing our content as well as working to create exciting and relevant content via external sources. So far all this seems to have do is slow the fall from grace.

Perhaps this is natural. But i'd love to hear your thoughts, even if it is just keep up the hard work.

Agreed!

Thanks for the feedback.

I'm going to agree with the Noisey Little Monkey and Andy,

I answered a question similar to this a while back - check it out

The summary - Rand did a great article on this a while back- http://www.seomoz.org/blog/unders...

There are also multiple other questions of a similar nature.

http://www.seomoz.org/pages/searc...

General consensus is be sub-folder over sub-domain.

Main reason - Sub Folders get the benefits from the root domain, Sub Domains don't.

Here's the key take away from Rands article:

"1 subdomain under 1 root domain (but feel free to use subfolders as it makes sense). Starting a blog? I almost always recommend yoursite.com/blog over blog.yoursite.com. Want to launch a new section of content? Use yoursite.com/newstuff rather than newstuff.yoursite.com."

Hopefully this will have helped you make your mind up.

SEO Keith has pretty much hit it spot on.

I would try and use a combination of all 4 if at all possible.

From my observation GWT accuracy seems to vary dependent on how often your content is crawled..... showing a history of all your links i'm not sure it can be beaten. But accuracy of what is included I am unsure. We have a few external links that were pointing at our site which we know no longer exist. 3 months on they are still in our link profile according to GWT.