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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: the original post on Moz 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

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...

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.

I wanted to also ask the wider moz community this question. Our blogs are currently run on blogger/wordpress using a subdomain strategy - blog.website.com and has now gained a home page PR3. It's been running for 2-3 years. This runs contrary to best practice of website.com/blog. I'm now considering making the blog internal but want to get your opinion as the longer I leave it, the bigger a decision it will be.... Do the pro's of making the blog internal outweigh the cons of doing so ? Pro's Blog benefits from root domain Fresh content on the site that people can interact with Root domain benefits from links the content gains Easier to analyse user activity Con's Loss of Page Rank Effort to 301 all URL's and content CMS altered to allow creation of blog content

Good afternoon Mozzers. I have a discussion based question and I'd be interested to know your thoughts. I currently implement a content strategy where we create a series of high value How-to written articles, relevant to our audience and then work at getting them placed on multiple high value websites. I have just been offered an opportunity with a PR6 domain to create a similar series of content but place it all on their site with links back to ours through a dedicated section. So my question is would I gain more value from small amounts of great content in lots of places vs. a lot of great content in on place? Effectively 1 link from 20 sites vs. 20 links from 1 site.

Google Plus have just released Custom URLs, see here So instead of the messy https://plus.google.com/b/012345679 you can have http://www.google.com/+{yourbrandname}. This would be much better for memorizing. But any opinions on added or future perceived SEO benefit?

Hi, Putting together a URL for a product we are selling. We sell IT Training courses and the structure is normally Top Folder=Main Courses section Sub Folder=Vendor Page Specific=Course Name + Term An example is courses/microsoft/mcse-training However I have a product where the vendor and course name are the same. How should I best organise the URL - double mention or single mention So a) courses/togaf/togaf-foundation-training or b) courses/togaf/foundation-training

Good Morning/Afternoon fellow Mozzers, I recently created an infographic and am now looking to get it distributed via as many publications as possible. I discovered some great sites with collections of infographics.However I have discovered a multitude of sites offering to review and feature the infographic, or "express" submissions so the graphic features faster for a price..... links below. http://www.amazinginfographics.com/submit-infographics/ http://infographicjournal.com/submit-infographics/ 2 questions 1. Is this considered as buying links? My instincts say Yes. 2. Some sites offer mix of free and "express" paid submissions. If the answer to Q.1 is yes, should I avoid them all together even if my graphic gets picked up free? Thanks in advance for the feedback.

I'd dread the answer being the latter rather than the former as we've spent two years building it blog.domain... However I noticed SEOmoz are domian.tld/blog and it got me thinking.... Cheers. R.

Howdy Mozzers, For anyone who has had experience of a manual penalty i'd appreciate your feedback. How long did it take to recover from a Manual Penalty? Of course every situation is different and its only been 8 days so perhaps it's to soon. Below is the email we received, I highlighted "believed" they didn't state we had. We highlighted a bunch of back links we didn't like however most of these remain in our profile in GWT so not sure what was really the problem. "Previously the webspam team had taken manual action on your site because we believed it violated our quality guidelines. After reviewing your reconsideration request, we have revoked this manual action. It may take some time before our indexing and ranking systems are updated to reflect the new status of your site." Your feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Good Morning/Evening Mozzers, I arrive at work this morning with 5 emails from GWT for my separate domains reading, **"Googlebot can't access your site - **Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 39 errors while attempting to connect to your site. Your site's overall connection failure rate is 15.1%." I have passed this on to the Web Dev team to resolve ASAP. My Question, will server connectivity issues harm my rankings? Is there a danger if this continues that URL's could be de-indexed? Input would be greatly appreciated.

Howdy fellow Mozzers.... Since Googles Penguin Update I am overly cautious when reviewing our link profile. I spotted 2 domains linking to us yesterday, 80+ links from each domain to our homepage. This looked superstitious, site wide links effectively. At first inspection I couldn't spot the links....they turned out to be two individual comments, but as the site had a plugin with "most recent comments", 1 link became 80. The link is an exact match of the individuals name who made the comment. And is a result of filling out the comment form. Name: Website: Comment: By filling out the name and website the name becomes the anchor text for the link to the website. Long story short...do you think this is penguin esq. link spam? Is it not? Or is it just not worth the risk and remove them anyway???

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.

We are trying to restructure our onpage SEO and want to make sure we have our URLs correct.  The problem is we did the URLs incorrectly in the first place and the ones we currently have are several years olds. We have some URLs such as: http://www.firebrandtraining.co.uk/courses/management/prince2.asp and 
http://www.firebrandtraining.co.uk/courses/cisco/ccna_2007.asp which are not ideal but user experience aside does it make sense for us to change the URLs and use 301 redirects to the new ones or is the damage done to our natural rankings simply not worth making the change? I have read different articles saying different things, some say that URL structure has little weight (if any weight at all) on rankings while other people seem to say it is quite important. In addition we have heard that changing the URLs with a 301 redirect will cause a large drop in ranking which will take months to recover from and contrarily that 301s are now considered "ok" by Google and we shouldn't see too much change at all in our rankings. Any advice would be much appreciated.