Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hello Moz community,

We have a blog where we post what we believe is very valuable, unique content for our niche. The content frequently stays very relevant for our visitor for many many years.

In terms of both user engagement and SEO, should we keep the dates in our blog posts?

Should we remove them?

Should we go through every blog post and edit it slightly every week even if there is no meaningful information we can add?

Should employ some kind of plugin that does update the blog post date automatically?

Thanks. That is a good idea and we are already doing it. Moz scan gave us plenty of warnings of duplicate content so I fixed it.

I realize that it might be a minor point but it still bugs me.

We have a blog with a number of posts. Content of the posts does not expire or age (in the rare case something changes, we do update the information in the posts). The wordpress blog is setup to display our latest posts and displays 15 posts at once. Since we have a lot of content, the older posts get pushed off the front page which is understandable and desirable behavior. However the pages that have older posts have names like "/page/2/", /page/3/, /page/4/ and so on. This does not look very SEO or user friendly to me.

What do you think?

Did you come up with something better then /page/ and then a number?

Thank you Dave,

Your response makes sense.

Great caveat about being aware that older posts are more popular by the nature of them being older.

I will look into logs to see what posts I want to "promote" through the popular post plugin that have the highest engagement percentage wise.

Hello Mozzers,

We have incorporated Wordpress blog in our website. The blog has a fair share of what we believe is a valuable content both for the users and SEO. We have reached the point where our content is getting pushed out to pages 2, 3 and etc. 99% of the older content is still relevant and useful.

However it does get less traffic from the users because it is not on the front page. I am dealing with it by showing "related posts" and get some traffic through that.

I feel that the content that got pushed from the front page of the blog gets less love from search engines as well.The my permalink structure is /%postname%/ only, however when Wordpress adds page/1/ the SEO ranking appears to drop.

Is it because Wordpress adds page/1/ to the address? What is a good way to optimize is? I have 15 posts showing on the front page should I increase it?

When you add a location to an Adword campaign, if you go for a specific location it would show you the reach statistics. Reach statistics suppose to give you an idea of how many potential customers(from this geographic area) may potentially see your ad. This reach data is suppose to just show an approximate number of regularly  logged-in google users. Again this is shown before you add any keywords to the campaign and for the rest of the Bay Area counties the Adwords reach numbers match very closely census data.

Hostname filtering does not work any more. Unfortunately most of the spammers have adapted and are using your website as hostname.

For the WordPress I use Wordfence plugin( using paid version - not affiliated with them in any shape or form beyond paying for their services). In the advance blocking you can set limits on how fast and how many pages crawlers can request. You can also block by country or ip range. It can also show you live traffic with a lot of details ( a lot more then google analytic - more like server log ). It might not be the complete remedy but it can help.

Hello,

I have noticed in Adwords, when I select San Francisco or San Francisco county as a location for the campaign, it shows the reach as 7,220,000

Now I know that reach may be different from census data and depends largely on number of google signed-in users. But this number is waaay of. According to census there are only about 850,000 people in SF county, lets add as much that commute to SF for work, then we still have only 1,700,000 - not even close to 7,220,000 google is reporting.

Also note that for the rest of the Bay Area counties the Adwords reach numbers match very closely census data.

Any ideas?

I agree with Jared that generally splitting up the site can lead to drop of SEO results. It will also increases your work load since you will have to work SEO on 3 sites instead of one. However, it seems that you are concerned with usability of your site and in my humble opinion that should take a presence and should be addressed. I would suggest splitting the site under a single domain. You can have essentially 3 sites with very few crosslinks (so users would not get confused). www.mydomain.com/patients

www.mydomain.com/doctors

www.mydomain.com/researchers

On each of the 3 home pages, you can have a cross link to other two home pages. E.g. on www.mydomain.com/patients page you can put link like Click here for the medical professional to route user to www.mydomain.com/doctors

Thanks

It is very good that you have a blog.

Blogs are good.

This site is about SEO.

SEO stands for search engine optimization.

here is the link to the schedule

http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/w/page/25141119/Linkscape Schedule

Tentatively it updates every 4 weeks.

It is apples and oranges. HTML 5 is a language that you use to create web pages. it is as you can guess from the name the 5th and latest version of HTML with a lot of additional features.

Web 2.0 is not a language, it is the concept of sharing and collaboration.

It encourages users not only consume the information, but actively participate in creating content. Blogs, twitters, wiki, one website exposing API and allowing other websites to call it, is all product of Web 2.0 concept.

I had a similar problem with tag, read more and categories reported as duplicates. I resolved it by installing Nofollow Home Internal Links plugin which made all the non essential links nofollow

yep, it is down. From what I understand they are trying to fix some bug - you can read about it at

https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/21655043-mozscape-index-update-temporarily-delayed-until-july-6th

No it does not happen too often - never seen it down before personally but I suppose as with any software - oops things can happen. This outage is more of an oops thing rather then chronic problem.

I agree with Jared that generally splitting up the site can lead to drop of SEO results. It will also increases your work load since you will have to work SEO on 3 sites instead of one. However, it seems that you are concerned with usability of your site and in my humble opinion that should take a presence and should be addressed. I would suggest splitting the site under a single domain. You can have essentially 3 sites with very few crosslinks (so users would not get confused). www.mydomain.com/patients

www.mydomain.com/doctors

www.mydomain.com/researchers

On each of the 3 home pages, you can have a cross link to other two home pages. E.g. on www.mydomain.com/patients page you can put link like Click here for the medical professional to route user to www.mydomain.com/doctors

Thank you Dave,

Your response makes sense.

Great caveat about being aware that older posts are more popular by the nature of them being older.

I will look into logs to see what posts I want to "promote" through the popular post plugin that have the highest engagement percentage wise.

Yes, I have had this happen to our listing when I accidentally switched to "this business serves customers at their locations", our listing disappeared from google maps. When I switched it back, it reappeared in a few days.

The website is for the attorney that serves several nearby cities. The main page is optimized for the biggest central city. I have several options how to go after the smaller surrounding cities:

1. Create optimized pages inside the main domain

2. Get more or less exact keyword domains for each city e.g. for the city ABC get yourABClawyer.com

and then

a) use 1 page websites that use the same template as main website and link all the menu items to the main website

b)use 1 page website with a link "for more information go to our main website"

c) point exact keyword domains to the optimized pages within the main domain.

Which option would be the best in terms of SEO and user experience?

Would people freak out if they click on the menu item and go to a different domain website even though it uses the same template (option 2a)

Would I get more bounces with option 2b in your opinion?

Would option 2c have any positive SEO effect?

Should I not even bother with exact keyword domain and go with option 1?

Pro members have a perk  with Yext. 50% of resale account

Resale account after the discount is $75 per year. Resale account includes a powerlisting, so for $75 you can update a 20-30 sites which is not that expensive. The problem with yext is that once you stop paying them, your listings would disappear. So the best strategy is to use Yext to get the updates in there fast and then still go and update the listings manually. Make sure to keep the spreadsheet with all the sites and passwords so you can track your progress.