Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Patrick, the Linkarati article is especially helpful.

Thank you OptimizedPresence.

We have a Grants account and it's invaluable to our online income - so thanks for raising it.

Our competitive metrics are good but we need to increase our linking root domains to beat our competitors and climb a few critical positions in the SERPs.

We have drawn up a link-building strategy based on Moz's very helpful guide, and begun trying outreach.

We're a non-profit and the content we are pushing is blog content like this, in-depth articles like this (which, incidentally, do well in search), and we're also going to start creating more infographics and other types of content to try to generate some traction that way.

However, based on the success of the campaign so far, it seems unlikely we'll acquire links at the rate we need to in order to keep up with our competitors, particularly given that we only have three people who can spend time on this (at a total of around 1.5 days per week). Clearly this is something we need to persevere with and integrate into our normal content cycle, but I can't see us picking up more than a dozen or so links a year unless something unexpectedly goes viral! It seems like link outreach is so common that it's very hard even to get link targets to engage with you on social media. People just see it as spam.

It would be interesting to hear what other people have done successfully to help us figure our what a realistic approach to link building looks like.

We're not currently displaying the last modified date in our sitemap, e.g.:

<url><loc>http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/about-our-charity</loc></url>

Are their any advantages to including this data? One benefit that occurred to us is that it will enable Google to determine which pages have fresh content and which are therefore worth crawling, helping Google index beneficial changes quicker.

Thanks!

We have some instances of external links (i.e. pointing to another domain) in site menus.

Although there are legitimate reasons (e.g. linking to a news archive kept on a separate domain) I understand this can be considered bad from a usability perspective.

This begs the question - is this bad for SEO? With the recent panda changes we've seen certain issues which were previously "only" about usability attract SEO penalties, but I can't find any references to this example.

Anyone have thoughts / experience?

Thanks William - just to clarify, the rationale I don't have is why moz.com mentions that the "notable exception to preferring subfolders is language specific sites".

My inclination is to go with subfolders (as we would if we were e.g. launching a blog), but since the standard advice has a caveat for language specific sites, I'd like to understand why this is so before making a decision.

We're launching an .org.hk site with English and Traditional Chinese variants. As the local population speaks both languages we would prefer not to have separate domains and are deciding between subdomains and subfolders. We're aware of the reasons behind generally preferring folders, but many people, including moz.com, suggest preferring subfolders to subdomains with the notable exception of language-specific sites.

Does this mean subdomains should be preferred for language specific sites, or just that they are okay? I can't find any rationale to this other than administrative simplification (e.g. easier to set up different analytics / hosting), which in our case is not an issue.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

We're not currently displaying the last modified date in our sitemap, e.g.:

<url><loc>http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/about-our-charity</loc></url>

Are their any advantages to including this data? One benefit that occurred to us is that it will enable Google to determine which pages have fresh content and which are therefore worth crawling, helping Google index beneficial changes quicker.

Thanks!

Thanks William - just to clarify, the rationale I don't have is why moz.com mentions that the "notable exception to preferring subfolders is language specific sites".

My inclination is to go with subfolders (as we would if we were e.g. launching a blog), but since the standard advice has a caveat for language specific sites, I'd like to understand why this is so before making a decision.