I like your idea of providing some historical context like some of the most influential events in the past or even some interesting facts could add value to the user. For example: The Roman empire spent the X% of their money on their military prior to their fall. Last year the US spent Y% or 1 zillion. Find out how that money is being used. You might also explain why the topic matters.
Posts made by SparkplugDigital
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RE: Content ideas for different sections of a news website?
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RE: Deep Page Link - url no longer exists
What about when the old URL no longer exists at all (page no longer saved on server) - how can you do a 301?
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RE: Are Guest Post Anchor Text Links Evil?
Thanks Joe. I thought he was talking about corporations asking if they can provide a guest post with specific anchor text links, but I'll have to go back and listen again. I agree that links should be relevant to the topic of the article. In a way I think guest post links are very similar to paid links in that you are exchanging a link for something of value (writing services) so it seems like a loophole to the rule of no paid links.
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Are Guest Post Anchor Text Links Evil?
Hi,
In the recent free SEOMoz webinar about What's Ailing the Linkgraph, Rand Fishkin says that corporations try to get anchor text guest posts on his wife's blog and he suggests this is manipulative.
Do you agree that anchor text links in guest posts are manipulative? Do you think that Google will take action against this tactic in the future?
Thanks!
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Is there a good tool for finding the outbound links on a domain?
Hi,
I am trying to find the number and preferably a list of outbound links on a site that has thousands of pages. Is there a good tool that you can recommend? Unless I missed it, I haven't seen this feature in SEOMoz.
Thanks!
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RE: Is there a crowd-sourced and up-to-date list of do-follow social bookmarking sites?
There is http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/22-dofollow-social-media-sites-offering-profile-links.html which has updates provided in the comments.
SEOMoz also provides a good resource at: http://www.seomoz.org/article/social-media-marketing-tactics#101-social-media-sites
Both of these are mentioned in the book The Art of SEO
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RE: Discrepency between # of pages and # of pages indexed
If you don't have many links to your site yet, I think that could reduce the number of pages that Google keeps in its main index. Google may allocate less resources to crawling your site if you have very little link juice, especially if deep pages on your site have no link juice coming in to them.
Another possibility is if some of the 10,000 pages are not unique content or duplicate content. Google could send a lot of your pages to its supplemental index if this is the case.
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RE: Hire single SEO & SEM person or hire separate people?
I would say that it is generally better to hire a separate person for SEO and SEM. There are so many different tasks that an SEO can be doing to move the organization forward on the SEO front that I think it is often a mistake for SEOs to be given additional tasks like PPC, or managing the company's social media, that will take their focus off doing SEO really well. Also, SEO is changing so fast that it can be a lot to ask to have your SEO stay current on the latest in SEO and also stay up to date on the PPC world as well.
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Should You Create A Transcript of Podcasts
SEOMoz creates transcripts of videos, but would you recommend creating a text transcript if you create a podcast that is 15 minutes or longer?
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RE: I need quality backlinks. Do they need to be similar to company website?
Links outside your niche are still very beneficial. For example if you are a home remodeler and the local news site writes an article about you and links to your site, this will be a valuable link even though it is not from a home remodeling site.
There are many factors that determine the value of a link. Relevance is just one of the factors.
In terms of receiving quality backlinks there are a lot of things you can do. You could create a resource for the best restaurants in your local area and have a great badge designed on Elance. People love to put badges on their site that show they were recognized. Another idea is to offer to write a guest article on local blogs where you offer your advice for free. Guest posts almost always include a link back to your site in the bio paragraph. Another idea could be to interview local businesses that might link to you. People who you interview are more likely to link to you because they have a strong incentive to promote their interview. Be creative and think about creating an incentive strong enough to compel people to link to you.
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The Risks of Unrelated Guest Posts
Hi Mozzers!
I'm really interested to get some opinions on whether a guest post on a blog that is far outside your niche could be a risky tactic.
For example if your blog is about a technology product and you get a guest post published on an Elvis blog, will this appear manipulative or similar to a purchased link?
Suppose your guest post is about Elvis, but at the end of the article is a link to a technology product with the anchor text "customized PC adapters". Won't that look manipulative to a search engine algorithm?
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Value of Inbound Links to Pages With a lot of Outbound Links
Suppose you have a resource page of the Top 50 Awesome Sites in your niche. Since there are about 50 outbound links, then I would think there will be less Page Rank being passed to internal pages from internal links on the resource page.
Since you are getting less PR passed to internal pages, are there other ways the inbound links can be beneficial, such as increasing the diversity of links of your domain?
Sites like SEO Optimise seem to create a lot of Top 30 Resources lists and I have read that they think it is a strong tactic.
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Creating New Pages Versus Improving Existing Pages
What are some things to consider or things to evaluate when deciding whether you should focus resources on creating new pages (to cover more related topics) versus improving existing pages (adding more useful information, etc.)?
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Should You Avoid Links from Sites with Big Difference Between PR and MozRank?
If a site has a Google toolbar PR of 2 and a Mozrank of 5, does that most likely mean that the site is penalized and a link would probably provide little value.
I know that Google rarely updates toolbar PR so I suppose the site could have also earned a lot of quality links since the last update.
Thanks Mozzers!
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Is Creating a Lot of Content A Bad SEO Strategy?
In Danny Dover's book, Search Engine Optimization Secrets, he talks about how every page on your site should be at least a little linkworthy, or it is just sucking link juice from the rest of the site and not contributing any.
Does this mean that creating a lot of content, (like a daily news article on your site that summarizes industry news or something similar) is not a good SEO strategy?
Should you limit the amount of content pages on your site unless it can attract links or hits on one of your target keywords?
Thanks!
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Can you have too many badge links?
If you badge program becomes really successful, can too many badge links hurt your rankings?
Since they are image links that are often placed in the sidebar of blogs, could Google mistake badges as do-follow ads and apply a penalty?
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RE: The ranking power of exact match domains
In my experience you see exact match domains ranking higher than they "should" all the time. I have talked to another SEO who prefers to go with an exact match over a brand name almost every time.
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RE: Link Building Tactics
Interviewing bloggers or industry leaders, guest posting on quality sites, infographics, creating great resource pages, building relationships with siteowners, writing great articles, to name a few.
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RE: Navigation Links in Footer
There are many good reasons to have navigation links in the footer. For example, there might be lower priority pages on your site that are important enough that you still want to flow some link juice to them. Additionally, a homepage link to your HTML sitemap can be a good way to flatten your site architecture, but you usually don't want to put the sitemap link in the header navigation.
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RE: Does it matter if your URL ends in .net or .com?
One way it could hurt your SEO is if people who link to your site mistakenly link to .com instead of .net which could reduce your inbound links.
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RE: Absolute vs Relative URLs
If your links are absolute and another site scrapes your content, those links are often embedded when they republish it. If you use relative links, those embedded links would not work and you wouldn't get credit for them.
Here is a relevant quote from Rob Ousbey from an SEOMoz post:
"I'd recommend absolute links in post/page/feed content in particular (so that any scraped content maintains the links back to you). For 'navigational' links, there's a variety of reasons why absolute links are still useful, such as making sure link juice flows to the canonical domain (eg: if you have a number of (sub/)domains that resolve to the same content)."
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Is this a directory or are they selling links?
I came across a website that at first looks like an informational site, but they also have a directory.
On their directory page, it says that if you would like a link placed in our directory email sales@site.com.
Do you think Google would consider this a purchased link or a directory link?
Can people get away with selling links on your site if you framed it as a "directory"?
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RE: What plugins & tactics are you using for Wordpress meta SEO?
I was listening to the Thesis webinar today on SEO and Chris Pearson gave at tip to limit use of plugins as much as possible. Apparently plugins often add additional code to your header which increases site loading time and loading time has become a more important SEO factor lately.
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RE: What would be a good way to drive traffic to a temporary post - job posting / classified ad?
If you can't spend money I would suggest Twitter. Ask your followers to retweet your job opening. You might also offer to write a guest post for a local blog that will get in front of a lot of your target audience.
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RE: Is it good/bad to place a press release on a third party website as well as your own?
I don't think it would harm you to post the press release on your site. There is a common misconception that you get penalized by Google if you have the same content as other sites, but this is not the case. Large news sites like the Seattle Times republish or syndicate articles all the time. Search engines simply try to omit duplicate content from search results so that you don't get 10 links that all go to the same article.
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RE: Linking Back to the Same Page
I don't see any reason why you would do this unless you are trying to manipulate the search engines. I would expect that Google and Bing would eventually find a way to ignore these links if they haven't done so already.
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Suspicious Link Directory
I found a link directory with good PageRank and MozRank. The page I would be featured on has good page authority of about 41. Their editorial guidelines appear sound.
However, I just discovered that they have a family of directories (about 7-8) that all look very similar in site appearance. I suspect that they are all hosted on the same servers and run by the same company. Would this family of directories be at risk of being flagged by Google as a link network and have all their links devalued?
Thanks Mozzers!
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Value of Linkworthy Resource Pages
Suppose you create a great resource that links to the top 50 blogs in your industry. The blogs in your industry love it and many of them link to that page.
How valuable are those inbound links? I would think some factors hurting the value of these links are that they are not pointing to an important page on your site like the home page or main category page, and the 50 links on the page dilutes the linkjuice that is passed back to the homepage. Or is the main value in making the domain's link equity stronger?
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RE: Who would you like to ask a SEO question the most?
I would like to ask Mark Zuckerberg what he thinks about Facebook's role in search.
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RE: Promoting linkbait
One idea you could consider is pay for StumbleUpon traffic. If enough people give it a thumbs up (hopefully it's something remarkable) then I believe you can stop paying and it will continue to be served to people. If a lot of people discover your linkbait on StumbleUpon and like it enough, they might share it on Twitter or Facebook.
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Video Hosting Service or YouTube?
We are considering using a video hosting service like Vzaar or Wistia for our videos.
What are some of the SEO advantages of using a video hosting service rather than YouTube?
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What are some good tips for getting approved by Google News?
Please share your tips for improving your chances of getting approved for Google News.
Thanks Mozzers!
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How effective is leaving comment links?
Has anyone seen evidence of rankings improvement from leaving do-follow comment links or is it a waste of time?
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RE: Is this a legitimate offer?
Usually the first offer is less than they are willing to pay. I would consider replying with something like:
I was actually thinking in the range of 40-42K because I am able to increase the company's bottom line by attracting customers through free targeted traffic to the site. Is this within your budget?
There are certainly places that will pay a higher salary as well for an SEO specialist, but there may also be a trade off with greater pressure, longer hours, and more responsibilities.
Another idea, if your company is okay with it, is to start your own SEO agency in the evenings to earn extra income and see how you like working with clients.
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The Value of Off-Topic Guest Posts
Hi Mozzers!
So the dilemma I am facing right now is getting links to deep pages on our site. One possible idea is guest posting on blogs with good domain and page authority. However, what if the blogs have good domain and page authority but they are off-topic or not really related to your site's main topic. How much will these links be devalued and could this hurt you by appearing manipulative?
Thanks!
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Is there a way to tell if a directory is passing Page Rank or is devalued?
Hi Mozzers!
I was wondering if there is a way to determine if a specific directory is passing Page Rank or if the links have been devalued by Google.
Thanks!
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RE: Open site explorer tool : domain authority
One of the fastest ways to build authoritative links is to find popular blogs that allow guest posts (ideally related to your site's topic) and submit guest articles to them.
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RE: Is this Directory Guide by SEOmoz still accurate?
I recently submitted to JoeAnt after looking at the SEOMoz directory list. The page I wanted to submit to had a SEOMoz page authority of 39/100 and about 5 links on the page, which looked promising enough to pay 39.99. The good thing about JoeAnt is you don't have to pay every year like other directories.
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What is the typical response rate and success rate for email link requests?
What is considered the normal response rate and success rate of acquiring a link through email link requests?
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RE: Do you spend much time on the phone when link building?
Most SEOs don't call people to acquire links although I know someone who has good success by calling the decision maker and asking for a link. I think it requires good phone sales skills which is generally not a strength of most SEOs. If you are comfortable calling people I would recommend trying it and measuring the results against your other efforts.