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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

Thanks

Hello guys,

Do you think it is worth disvowing scrappers' links on otherwise good linking profile.

Sites like

Webmaster tools shows that sites like:

• mrwhatis.net,
• askives.com
• prlog.ru
• bigbozz.com
• answerparty.com
• wordexplorer.com

scrape our content and generated from 10 to 90 links to our pages.

Is removing these links waste of my time?

Thanks

The domain that I want to forward is registered at 1and1. They have an option to forward the domain through DNS settings. Will that option allow me to keep the PR juice that have accumulated for this domain. It is/was PR4 site.

Hello Everyone,

I have the following situation.  There is main domain and a secondary domain that is related to the page on the main domain. I want to integrate the content of the secondary domain into the page on the main domain and redirect the secondary domain via 301 to that specific page.

As i understand I can do it via .htaccess using rewrite mechanism.

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

But the question is does it mean I have to keep paying for the hosting for the secondary domain? Because htaccess has to be located on the web server so I would need a hosting plan for it? Is that true? Is there any way around it?

P.S. to avoid any confusion - I am talking about hosting plan - not domain registration fees

Experts frequently mention that one of the best way to build the link is to guest blog with some authoritative blogs in your niche after Penguin, Panda and other animals invaded SEO landscape.

At the same time everyone agrees that "Content is the king" and if you have unique and useful content, people would link to you without any extra efforts on your part.

Do you see any contradiction in those statements?

I spent my time, my resource, my genius writing up very good posts. As a matter of fact all my post are good (IMHO), but I can churn out only 2 or 3 masterpieces per month.

Should I share my content willingly as a guest post to other websites who are not my local direct competitor of course, but nonetheless are in my niche, thus adding to their authority on the subject? I will get a link out of it. Would I get a significant traffic? I doubt that. At least from my limited experience.

Or should I strengthen my own site striving to be such authority in my niche? But without strong external link profile  Google shall frown upon me and my site.

Personally I inclined more to save most of the content for my own blog.

What do you gals and guys think?

here is the link to the schedule

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

Tentatively it updates every 4 weeks.

Hello Everyone,

The website I am working with offers service in two locations, lets say Service in City A and Service in City B. Those two cities, which are close by, are the main source of clients, so the owner asked me to concentrate on these terms.

I did a decent job for a newbie and now we are on the first page of google  closer to the top for these 2 terms.

The problem that I am facing right now is that

a) it hard to get that extra bit from onsite optimization when you optimizing for 2 different cities

b) Customers may get confused which cities we focus on A or B? We have locations in both.

c) Owner wants to expand services to additional cities.

So I looked at how our competitor handling these time of problem and most of them have a page with titles like "Cities we serve" with links to the individual locations that are optimized for the specific city. That page usually includes paragraph or two about local history and then re-span description of their services.

Is it a good practice to structure one's website like that if you are trying to target multiple locations?

Should I re-target my home page to something less geographically specific and create separate pages for Cities A , B and the new locations?

Would I lose ranking for terms service in city A & service in city B because of that

Or should I leave my home page optimized for Cities A & B  and just add new locations as separate pages?

Thanks in advance for you insights.

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.

Matt, no offense, but this is all very basic stuff that you must know very well before starting to do any type of SEO. People here usually discussing somewhat more advance topics.

As I understand you are expert in dog training. Imagine person coming to the professional dog training forum and asking umm how to tell the difference between the stud and the bitch.

File Manager in Cpanel.

99% of Internet providers use Cpanel. I would assume GoDaddy is using it too.

So all you have to do is login to your GoDaddy account and go to Cpanel. If you do not know how to do it, I would suggest calling GoDaddy tech support or reading up their help files.

Once you click on the File Manager, it would look like File explorer in windows, but only for your website. Click on Upload file button, pick the file to upload and you are done.

I have attached the screenshot of CPanel

I am not trying to discourage you but if you have no budget to hire someone else and do have time to learn. I would suggest digging into Goddady help files, calling their support or just using Google to figure out how to manage your site.

pUwXo.png

I can answer that specific question.

Sitemap is file with the list of pages and path to these pages that you what Google and other search engine to access.

Usually sitemap is generated by the program you used to write your website.

If it does not there are a few websites that allow you to create Google style XML sitemap on line. For example http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ Just use google and type something like sitemap builder. Once you get that file (sitemap.xml) use Godaddy file manager to put it in the root directory of your website (usually called public or www)

If you have CRM like WordPress there are plugins that you can download that do the same thing. Login to your wordpress admin panel. Go to Plugins->install plugin and search for sitemap. Pick the plugin that you like the best and just like that you got sitemap for you WP

It is very good that you have a blog.

Blogs are good.

This site is about SEO.

SEO stands for search engine optimization.

I think this should clarify it

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

On diagnosis page it has a small button next to every problem called Show Advice

Yes, linking with anchor text as your keyword from the blog post to the page that are you are trying to optimize for that keyword will help you rank higher for that keyword. But do not over do it - 1 link per post is probably enough.

If your blog ranks high enough then it would pass some link juice to the page you are trying to rank.

Make sure that that keyword naturally placed in your post not just tacked on for the sake of having a keyword. Blogs are written primarily for humans(your customers) and not the search engines.

one piece of advice,

before deciding to optimize for a keyword that you think your customers are using, do research and find out what they are actually using.

Google Insights is an excellent tool that can help you see what people are actually searching for.

here is the link http://www.google.com/insights/search/

For example in the last 12 month the top search terms in the USA that were ralated to dog training were

| 1. | training a dog |

I wish someone would do it for me as well.

However this type of work generally cost (from what I understand) $700 and up.

So at most you would get couple of quick comments that may or may not be accurate.

At any rate, if you expect some one to look at your site, I would start with posting its address.

P.S.

Also there is Firefox plugin called  SEOquake, once you install it, it would add a number of buttons to your firefox browser. Browse to your site and click diagnosis button. It would show you recommendation about that particular page (not the whole website). It is inadequate replacement for professional advice but it is free and it is something that you can fix right now.

Hope that helps.

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.

Is it better to specify www.site.com or *site.com for SEO Moz campaign?

assuming that

I do not have any subdomains except www,

in the Web Master tools I have selected preferred address as www.site.com

and I have redirect in my .htaccess from site.com to www.site.com

The reason I am asking is because I see different SeoMoz trust and other stats for root domain and www subdomain. I would think they should be the same, given the fact that I only use www?

Is it suppose to be in today?

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.

We can set our own keywords as branded in SeoMoz campaign, but Google would not necessarily see them like branded. After reading the Blog post at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-update

I had a question: Are there known rules (or at least guesses) what Google considers a branded keyword/anchor text?

I guess the first one would be your website domain. So bluewidget.com for example would be a branded keyword for bluewidget.com website. How about Blue Widget or Blue Widget Company?

As I understand in order to rank well for the page in google, the page/site has to have a lot of back links that have an anchor text with the keywords that you want to rank for.

At the same time if google finds that your anchor text contains kewords that are in your title or h1 tag, it may penalize your site. So what do i do to rank well for my chosen keywords.

Lets say I am only interested in keywords San Francisco widget and Oakland widget

The title of my webpage says San Francisco | Oakland widget

The anchor text that I usually pick is either San Francisco widget or Oakland widget.

I also have plenty of links that have anchor text like "website" or "click here"

What should I use for my anchor text in my backlinks?

I prefer site5.com. Their support is 24 hour-live, they are fast with option to pick your hosting location, and they are rock solid. I picked them after extensive research and we have been with them for about a year. I have nothing but good things to say about them.

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

In my opinion even purest white hat SEO is a form of "gaming the system". Setting the title of the web page to something SEO friendly is gaming a system. So yes, I am trying to "game the system" aka do SEO.

So you are saying that if I have two legitimate websites, I must not have a link  from one of them to the other because  it would be "a matter of time before you get slammed." ? And you think that having both sites on the same GA may contribute to it.

Is there a chance some else can add to that? I understand that no one knows for sure, except Google, how GA affects that sort of thing, so all I can hope for is guesses.

So my impression from reading articles about Page and Domain authority as well as impression from your answer is that

Domain authority is an absolute value of how SeoMoz thinks the page ranks in Google

and

Page Authority is a relative value of how much this page is helping this particular domain to rank in Google?

So by that rational you can have some domain with domain authority  rank of 10 and the webpage on that domain with authority rank of 60 because it is the only page that has backlinks.

So then it means that pages with high PA but low DA would have less value for backlinking then pages with somewhat low PA but high DA. Is that true for most of the cases ?

So DA 70 with PA 30 is better then DA35 with PA 40?

In the opensite explorer most of the links that I see have a higher domain authority and lower page authority which makes sense to me because I thought that domain authority is an aggregate of  its pages authority. But apperently I was wrong because sometimes I see that the page authority is greater then its domain? How could that be?

Let say I have my main site and my secondary site that is optimized for a slightly different set of keywords (nonetheless still relevant to my main site). I have several links from a secondary site to my main site. Secondary site is on a different C-block.

Do you ladies and gentlemen think that if I put both websites under the same google analytics account, Google is going to penalize me or remove some of the juice that is flowing from secondary site to the main site because it would detect through GA that both sites belong to the same entity?

I just confirmed that after the 3rd search, trying to add a new keyword in the Ranker, it does nothing. page shows 3 out of 200 searches were done.

Are there any SEO benefits drawn from creating backlinks with Google url shortener service(especially for the very deep links) or for the do-follow link juice I have to use a complete address?

Our attorney wrote a dozen articles that range from 300 to 700 words on various topics of the certain law area. These articles are all placed on our FAQ page with anchored table of contents.

This page does frequently come up on the first page of the google when people search for the questions discussed in these articles. 90% of these visits are not local therefore they are not potential clients. Attorney views it more like a community service then a marketing tool.

However, I think there might be a problem. People read though the page and close it because usually they can find what they were looking for right there, however GA counts it as bounce because they did not browse to another page.

Would large number of bounces hurt our standing with Google? Would it be better to separate the page into multiple pages for each article to make visitors browse?

It is the second time in less then a month when i get that error message. The first time I just removed the connection and re-added it. Is there any other way to fix it? is it the problem on my end or is it on SEOMOZ side?

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 tried to use competitive link finder tool. it says that it will identify 10 most important links that my competitor get that I do not. The results that I get are inconsistent with linkscape tool. For example my competitor has a link on  www lawyer-links dot info

Google rank of that site is 1. Is that really one of their most important links?

Robert,

Thank you very much. I appreciate the thorough audit. Many great points that make a lot of sense especially since I joined and started reading SEOmoz materials.

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?