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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?

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?

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?

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?

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

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?

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.

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

Does it make a difference with Google if anchor link text is bold? The niche directory is offering regular lifetime listing for $199 (actual page pr 6) or bold for $349 (same page, same position). Also bold link has option of including email address. Does email address have any effect on SEO? Seems like a bad deal for bold, isn't it?