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.

Hello, to see all the links to a page have a look at Google Webmaster Tools (now called Search Console).  If you go to 'Links to my site' there is a list on the right called 'Your most linked content'. If you click on this it will give you a breakdown of the links to each page which Google are using as ranking factors.

Personally, I would go for something much shorter. Long domain names can appear spammy, and I believe are one of the spam metrics used by Moz in their spam score. The other problem with a long domain name is that pages and posts on your site may have titles which will be much too long to fit in a search engines search window, although you may be able to tweak this.  You may well be better off having a very short domain name so that as new keywords come through which you want to target you can do this effectively without having too long a URL.

Hello!  Do you have a few strategically placed, non-spammy calls to action?

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.

Which platform are you using?  If it doesn't work you could make your own button using an image of your choosing with a live link to your Facebook page, or use one of the buttons Facebook supplies in their Developer section  Many sites now very easily give sitewide social links but I have heard that some users are being penalised for this.  I have taken mine down and manually apply social links in a few appropriate places instead of using the built in systems which often spam your whole site with unnecessary links.

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!

Hello,

I often list my address, even though we don't serve customers from the address.  There are a couple of reasons for this; firstly it strengthens your brand identity and gives people confidence that your business is real, and second because there is no other reliable way to get local search on your side.  If you use another address this may look odd and make people suspicious about the business. If you do list your address you can set up your site for people to contact you in the ways that you wish, rather than by coming to your address, if that's what you prefer.

Thanks!

I would use the following tools;

• Google.  I got a great list by typing 'key west blog' into Google and then clicking 'Search Tools' and then 'Past Week'.  The search results tell you how long ago the results were posted.

• Google Alerts.  Set this for the key word to be notified of new content being posted in (almost!) real time.

Toby

Do you think having a link to your sitemap from your homepage is any use for SEO? I am getting mixed messages.

Hello,I am trying to do an audit of the internal links of my site at zenplugs.com.  I am having great difficulty simply trying to establish how many internal links there are on the home page.  Off the top of my head I think there are probably 20-25 but Screaming Frog tells me there are 574, the MozBar is listing zero and Open Site Explorer is telling me my site hasn't been indexed yet.  I have tried several web based services but most of them don't work.  Can anyone recommend a tool which has given them a number they trust?

My second query is that one of the tools told me that there are 4 links on the home page with no anchor text, linking to http://zenplugs.com/#.  Is this a problem?

Many thanks, in advance.

Toby

Thanks everyone, very helpful.

Hello,

I have just used (the amazing) Screaming Frog to check my site and it is listing the two following pages as having duplicate titles, making me think it is seeing them as duplicate pages.

http://zenplugs.com/zenplugs-molded-earphones/

http://zenplugs.com/zenplugs-molded-earphones

Do I need to redirect one of these?

Thanks in advance!

Toby

I have been working my way through the Technical Site Audit Checklist by Geoff Kenyon which tells me to make sure 'Important pages have click‐through rate optimized titles and meta descriptions'.  How would you do this?

Thank you!  I'll get cracking.

Thank you, very helpful!

Hello,

Using Moz I can see that my ranks for my site ZenPlugs.com for keywords such as 'ear plugs' and 'molded ear plugs' and several other keywords aren't as high as other sites with similar DAs. I can't see why, am I missing something?

Many thanks,

Toby

I am going to go through and do this with all the main landing pages. Do you think it is worth also doing this with all of the blog  posts? I think there are about 50! I think the main problem will be complex sentences in these posts.

That's very helpful, thanks!  I'll do that.

Thanks, I owe you one big time!

I just Hemingway'd my front page and it is certainly much simpler and more readable, thanks for the tip!

This is excellent advice, thanks!  I will look into this.

Thanks Andy, it here http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-make-a-pair-of-Angel-Wings/

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

My highest domain authority link to my website ZenPlugs.com is from Instructables.com. I have been in two minds as to whether the links are of benefit for some time. The site is highly regarded and the page content is of high-quality and has had hundreds of thousands of visitors but the content is not directly relevant to my ZenPlugs site, although there is a short passage regarding the ear plugs on the page. I also get traffic from the links. I have tried adding and removing the links but have not seen any obvious influence in either direction, although it is rather hard to tell. Do you think this link is relevant and how much does it matter?  Almost all my other links are very relevant.

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.

Very good answer.

I don't consider the page to be thin, I consider it to be useful!  It is worth checking what other people are doing on their list pages and seeing how you rank compared to them. If you are not being penalised it presumably isn't causing a problem.

Now you come to mention it, I am having the same problem with my Squarespace site zenplugs.com.  The pages are indexing well but the images are mostly unindexed.  I would be very interested to hear any ideas!

You're number one hit!  Is your old website URL pointing to your new website?

Both pages are indexed now.  Well done!

SERP position is clearly relative to other sites.  If they are generating links of a type and at a rate that Google favours more than your activity you will appear to drop in ranking.  Anyone still see the 'Google Dance'?

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.

I find it odd that Google use two different methods for generating these figures, particularly when you consider how large their data set is and how many customers they serve.  It is always worth taking any metric data with a pinch of salt as it can clearly be skewed.  I think that many see Google's data as absolute but this discrepancy clearly demonstrates that it isn't.

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.

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.

Great pun in your question!

As SEO people we are programmed to follow these trends and look for causality, both so we can understand the effects of the changes we make and so we can spot emerging problems.  This is clearly a very important process.  Sometimes, however, I am sure that peaks and troughs occur as part of the random mix of behaviour which leads people to visit our sites.  Chaos theory clearly shows that in any truly random sytem patterns, peaks and troughs can appear.  I have also noticed that when the weather changes for the better I get less traffic on my ecommerce site; I suppose people go outside instead of spending time on the internet.

That is a very interesting question!

Although it is clearly a good idea to have a keyword or keywords in your primary URL, the problem is that your keywords may change over time and you can't have ALL of your keywords in your URL.  IMHO it is probably more important to have a short domain name so that if you have a blog or page title containing a keyword it will show up in full.