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Can we talk about Rand's book here? Just delete me mods if it's not appropriate or interesting to anyone. But I thought it was great - no they're not paying me - it put me in the mind of my absolute fave book of all time 'Trust Me I'm Lying' by Ryan Holiday.  I mean rand is nothing like Ryan Holiday but the style of complete and utter openness and fearless criticism of what is bad in the world really gave me a lot to think about. I can highly recommend it.  And to be honest (not transparent - those are different) to be honest don't be tempted to give up in the first few chapters thinking it's a rags to riches personal story.  Because it develops into a real goldmine of technical advice and the sort of advice that you can't get anywhere - emotional advice.  Being a founder is hard and I'd say it's well worth a read (or listen in my case) You'll be surprised if you've only ever seen him on Whiteboard Friday.  It's like a different rand altogether. What did you all think?  I remember some [person] trolling him once for some talk he gave at an SEO conference saying 'stick to whiteboard Friday - nobody wants to know about your life'  But you really do.  Because you need to know that your business is different from everyone else's.  I'm an optimist and think that in marketing the next decade is going to be the decade of authenticity.  And this is a great place to start. _Moderator's Note: This question has been edited to comply with Moz's TAGFEE Code and Community Etiquette Guidelines. _

I have looked at lots of different plugins and wanted a recommendation for an easy way for patients of ours to upload pictures of them out partying and having fun and looking beautiful so future users can see the final results instead of sometimes gory or difficult to understand before and after images. I'd like to give them the opportunity to write captions (like facebook or insta posts and would offer them incentives to do so. I don't want it to be too complicated for them or have too many steps or barriers but I do want it to look nice and slick and modern. Also do you think this would have a positive impact on SEO? I was also thinking of a Q&A app where dentists could get Q&A emails and respond - i've been doing AMA sessions and they've been really successful and I would like to bring it into out site and make it native. Thanks in advance 🙂

When we first started out our website didn't have a blog and we started one on Blogger.  It has loads of great content on it but it was before the days when I understood SEO so it's 4 years old and has maybe 1000 views per blog article. Now I want to repurpose some of that great content and SEO optimise it and put it onto my new site.  How do I go about this from an SEO perspective.  I am aware of internal competition and will only be using the old blogs that are new topics to start off with so it doesn't negatively impact my rankings. Should I just delete the old blog and re-write it all on the new one or redirect the old blog articles to the new pages and rewrite them?  The blogger articles have no links to them and it's just content that I'd like to use. The old blog has almost no SEO value at all but I want to use a best practice approach to not cause any damage to my new blog or have google thinking I'm stealing someone else's content.

So I understand that I'm never going to get google review stars appearing on my homepage.  The only term I really want my homepage to rank for is the term 'dentist liverpool'.  This figures. But what I'm seeing from my google analytics is that I can rank pretty much any keyword really well (with stars and a great serp entry) except my homepage.  Which is languishing at position 3-5. Now I made some observations from the data and the only people who are landing on my homepage are branded searches.  So people who are searching for us. Why cannot I just make a page and optimise it for 'dentist Liverpool' and go for the number one spot?  That way all the branded people can end up on the homepage and everyone else looking for a dentist in Liverpool can land on my highly optimised 'dentist Liverpool' page? I think I might be missing something really obvious here and know i'd need to de-optimise the home page.  But I find it so easy to rank for all sorts of keywords but our homepage (because it has everything on it) is just not getting to position one.  It's not specific enough to that keyword. Also how awesome would it be to have the only serp entry with 250 google reviews and stars and sitelinks and all that cool stuff?

I'm a dentist and I keep getting my images turning up on pages where there are hundreds of images of dental procedures, linking out to dentists all over the world. It's not -ve SEO I don't think. There's just not enough of it to be that. The images are linking back to me with follow links (but worthless) and the pages are indexed with low to moderate 10-30 DA (that's old DA)  and the new link explorer is showing them as worthless - so well done new link explorer! I'm not worried they are harming my site because I'm sure they're being ignored by google.  But is there some evil black-hat scam going on that i'm not aware of?  Should I disavow? I don't care that they're using our images. They are watermarked and they are linking back to us. I just don't understand the point of such a site either?  Is it a precursor to something more malevolent or spammy? **So my question is - is this harmful or should I just let the crazy internet be crazy and not interfere? 🙂 ** I'm always wary of disavowing.

Hi Everyone, What is the best practice for authorship in 2018 and going forward? I am moving my entire blog over to a new wordpress theme so it's easier to read and navigate in an attempt to make it look better on the mobile and give better UX / CRO and implicit user feedback signals to google. On the old blog I would say who the author is in the URL, H1 and in the content.  This includes an image of the author with an image alt with their name, qualifications and blurb. I've now set up each author as a 'user' for the new blog and their image and name comes up because I've marked those blogs as authored by that particular user in Wordpress. What should I do as far as the SEO elements are concerned? I have read Eric Enge's blog about authorship being dead here and also that authorship should be marked up in schema correctly - which I've done.  Also I've read around how it provides indirect signals even though it's no longer a direct ranking factor. Should I tell wordpress to ignore the authorship SEO element by unticking the boxes relating to publishing authorship or let wordpress just do it's thing?  Should I keep the images and alt tags and H1 in there or take them out and let the wordpress system take over the authorship SEO elements? It's going to look funny to have author (in wordpress theme) and then author details again just below? So what is the best practice for authorship in 2018 and going forward? Am I making too big a deal of it and can just let wordpress sort it out.  Something it seems to do very well? Thanks in advance, Ed.

My local dental practice has some pretty awesome number 1-3 rankings locally and nationally for all the keywords and topics we're interested in (thanks Moz) I was searching on my mobile locally for a keyword and notice that each time I search on my smartphone the first thing I see is a competitors ad for that keyword or phrase.  Then you scroll through four ads and the map pack (which we're in) and you find us at the number one position. I want to completely dominate the serp and was reading this: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/37161.pdf but if I' honest I don't really understand it. Should I run ads on the mobile to get that number one position on the ads so that everyone who searches locally for our keywords sees us on their smartphone before they even start to scroll and then see us again in the map and again in the 1-3 position? Is this a good idea or a waste of money?  PPC had never delivered decent ROI for us and will typically break even so we are just busy fools chasing leads for not much gain.  But I was thinking a more 'branding' related number one position ad might increase the conversion rate, CTR or help in some way.  Would it cost a fortune to keep it at the top of the mobile results for maybe 10-20 keywords just on the mobile? I know this is what google want me to be doing and i also want to choke my competition and completely dominate the SERPS because we provide the best service by miles and often the ads are shoddy and poorly executed.  What's the consensus amongst you wonderful PPC / SEO experts.  Obviously there's lots of SEO's saying it's a great idea because they just want to sell SEO services.  And google is in this camp.  So I don't know who to trust for the right answer.

So I've written this beautiful guest post for a site who've quite frankly done a bad job of promoting it and I'm a little disappointed. So I'm thinking: a) I could send it around to some other publishers and see if they want it.  What would be the duplicate content problems here if any? b) Why not just publish it on my own site and promote it to other blogs and the world in the normal way. c) Is this just wrong and if I say I'm going to write for someone then I write for them and if they make a mess of it that's my problem and I should be more selective about who I give my talents away to in the future. Thanks in advance. I am fairly new to outreach and all the internet searching on this topic is returning stuff about 'allowing other people to post guest blogs on your site' which is not helpful.  Rank Brain eh?  Supposed to be smart. But it's really not.  🙂

I'm a local dentist and have a very successful 'veneers price' blog page. People really want to know the cost of veneers and it gets hundreds of visits a day locally and nationally.  I also have a main Veneers services page talking about how you get veneers and what they are etc. This gets lots of local visitors but less nationally. I have recently tried to replicate it's success with 'dental implants price', 'tooth whitening price' and others but they've just bombed.  I replicated the style and the blogs are similar in structure, same links etc - but obviously totally unique content and topics. The price articles get no search and it's seemed to hurt the main services pages too.  They are all linked to one another in a systematic and helpful-to-the-user hierarchy and structure. Maccabees doesn't seem to have made any difference to the veneers traffic but should I consolidate the other price articles into their respective main pages or leave it and see what happens.  They have been at less than position 20 for months now. Whereas if you type in Veneers Cost UK, you'll probably see us in the featured snippet and position one or two. How do I know whether google regards the price of something to be a different topic from that thing and worthy of it's own page? Do they just want everything all on one massive page? That seems a bit clumsy to me. Thanks! 🙂

I'm a cosmetic dental practice so we're local and want people to visit our website, look around and make a booking. I've followed very closely the featured snippet debate on WBF and in the blogs here and everywhere else on the web.  I've got many 1-3 positions and have been optimising for featured snippets with great success. I have noticed though that once I get a featured snippet the CTR of the page that the snippet is taken from drops significantly.  This can often put me from position one into two or three.  The same thing happens sometimes on the local listings.  You get in the pack and people start visiting your homepage rather than the particular services page in the SERP. At a conference I was at, here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iXlVcbpvd0 (11:14) there is a suggestion that Vodafone de-optimise because a position one or two is better for their sales than a featured snippet. After all my interests are not the same as google.  They want to answer questions and I want to sell cosmetic dentistry.  So is answering a question without bringing a user to my site a good idea?  I've certainly seen the amount of enquiries drop once the category has a number of featured snippets. Are they as good as everyone says they are?  I think possibly not from my data and this Vodafone talk is the first time i've heard anyone agree. I've scoured the web for answers and it's all just "GET FEATURED SNIPPETS",  "HERES HOW TO GET THEM" etc.  But my business is not about getting more traffic it's about selling.  Could someone please point me to research on conversion rate and featured snippets. or ROI and featured snippets? Thanks.

Hi everyone, I have a main page for my blepharoplasty surgical product that I want to rank.  It's a pretty in-depth summary for patients to read all about the treatment and look at before and after pictures and there's calls to action in there.  It works great and is getting lots of conversions.  But I also have a 'complete guide' PDF which is for patients who are really interested in discovering all the technicalities of their eye-lift procedure including medical research, clinical stuff and risks. Now my main page is at position 4 and the complete guide is right below it in 5. So I tried to consolidate by adding the complete guide as a download on the main page. I've looked into rel canonical but don't think it's appropriate here as they are not technically 'duplicates' because they serve different purposes. Then I thought of adding a meta noindex but was not sure whether this was the right thing to do either. My report doesn't get any clicks from the serps, people visit it from the main page. I saw in Wordpress that there's options for the link, one says 'link to media file', 'custom URL' and 'attachment'.  I've got the custom URL selected at the moment.  There's also a box for 'link rel' which i figure is where I'd put the noindex.  If that's the right thing to do, what should go in that box? Thanks.