Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks!

Toby

Hello,

I see Buzzsumo being widely touted as a great way of seeing what other people are writing on a niche topic to give an indication of what is performing well according to the number of social media shares.  Is this a good metric considering that any proportion of the shares could be paid for or secondary to advertising?  I have looked at some of the sharers and often there is no data logged, or only a few listed.  I see that often the longer posts have more shares; if I had written a 7000 word post I would be more likely to push it harder on social media and spend more promoting it, I wonder if this is skewing the data also.

Thanks for your opinions on this.

Toby

I run an ecommerce site and am keep to increase the time on site and reduce bounce rate.  I have had some good results from writing good articles and advertising them on Outbrain and Twitter; both of these metrics have improved.  However, I am wondering if Google will see this.  Clearly if people land on the pages from the SERPS and return there they will know what is happening but will they know if people get there from an advert?

Thanks Andy.  The articles were mostly on ezinearticles, some on Articlesbase.  It has never been spun and passed copyscape to begin with, I thought it might be worth doing to make sure no-one had scraped part of the article and reposted it somewhere.  When you say 'external links from the article itself' what exactly are you referring to?

I have some good articles I wrote for article directories a couple of years ago. I took them down 6 months ago.  I am hoping to repost them somewhere better if the content isn't listed on google and passes Copyscape.  Would this be safe?

Thanks for these answers, very helpful.

If a site has more pages and also has good internal linking, then logically it would rank better.  Is this the case?  Should I be building big (but high quality) sites?

Thanks for your help everyone, you have answered my question very thoroughly!

I find it hard to recognize unnatural link patterns when the links to my site are so familiar.  It can be hard to see the wood for the trees!  How many links from one site is too many?  Does it depend on the size of the site?  Thanks for your advice on this.

Thanks guys, very helpful advice.

Generally people seem to be avoiding directories as they can be spammy and thin on content. I have had problems with getting huge numbers of no follow links from them. I would say avoid.

I have been using my Moz bar for years now and have installed it on all my computers.  Shame I can't get it on my iPhone!  I find it great for grading websites on the fly and deciding whether they are good to do business with or not.  I also use it to monitor my own website and make tweaks here and there as I go along.  It is also really useful to check the effects of changes I make to content to page loading speed and other metrics.

If you have most of your backlinks pointing to your main page and have separate landing pages for each venue/region then your main page should rank well when people type in 'magician' and the locale.  You will need unique content on each internal page; you can rewrite the pages to maintain the meaning and use a tool like Copyscape to check they are significantly different.

It has been a lot more difficult getting this data since Google started masking the keywords people type into their searches from webmasters.  I remember having access to really useful data on this but now it is minimal.

Great pun in your question!

It is definitely a good idea to go after the long-tail keywords as well as the moon shots when you are looking to increase traffic.  I would include pages about 'web design' and 'website design' and use a good keyword tool to find a list of great keywords which are less competitive, as well as including the more competitive/higher traffic variations.  It is also very important to use a tool like Moz's On-Page Grader to check you have done a good job of your page optimisation.  I would also have a look at their competitor analysis tool to find out what the other sites which are outranking you are doing.

I agree with Andy.  The problem with having two or more main sites is that you will end up diluting your efforts when you might be better putting all your eggs in one basket!  These efforts include, blogging, social media, content creation and backlinking.  Dedicated landing pages are definitely a good idea with plenty of quality chat about offering your services in the different areas.  Your backlinks will be better applied to one site, rather than two, unless you have a huge amount of resources to plough in.

Hello!  Are the pages being built manually or automatically?  How many pages are you talking about? If they are being made manually and there are not too many you can include unique text about the products and the choices.  The way I would do it would be to minimise the duplication of text and instead try to list the products using images with minimal text to reduce the duplication issue.  It clearly isn't going to be in the interest of the user to have multiple pages which which consist predominantly of very similar lists and little else.  Each list and page needs to be significantly different in order to offer value to the user and so as not to be hit for duplicate content.  Good luck!

My goodness! Thank you, that slipped through the net!

Hello, I too am sad to see them go! I have found them really useful to find out what the current thinking is on issues which are often so contentious.  It can be very difficult finding a useful answer on the interweb as so many views are conflicting.