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Hi there, a disgruntled ex-employee requested that my company (a large publisher) unpublish a large number of at this point fairly dated articles. We're going to honor his request. The traffic numbers to these articles aren't significant, but I wanted to understand the SEO ramifications. Two questions: 1. These articles in sum account for 0.51% of site traffic. Will removing them outright cut off just that chunk of traffic? Or will it also affect search rankings for all of our remaining articles? 2. How should we handle unpublished URLs? Is it better to redirect the user to our homepage or a friendly, recirculation-oriented 404?

Hi there, my company is a national theater news publisher. Quick question about a particular use case. When an editor publishes a story they can assign several discrete locations, allowing it to appear on each of those locations within our website. This article (http://www.theatermania.com/denver-theater/news/full-casting-if-then-tour-idina-menzel_74354.html), for example, appears in the Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Denver section. We force the author to choose a primary location from that list, which controls the location displayed in the URL. Is this a bad practice? I'm wondering if the fact that having 'Denver' in the URL is misleading and hurts SEO value, particularly since that article features several other cities.

I work for an online theater news publisher. Our article page titles include various pieces of data: the title, publication date, article category, and our domain name (theatermania.com). Are all of these valuable from an SEO standpoint? My sense it'd be cleaner to just show the title (and nothing more) on a SERP. But we'll certainly keep whatever helps us with rankings.

Hi there, I work for a theater and live performances publishing site. We write 15-20 quality articles per day on the New York City and national theater community. We show a "Most Read" stories widget on all of our pages, but click rates for these are really low - 1% of readers click to read a story from this. As such we're considering replacing this with higher-value content. My question, however, is this: Is there any SEO value in keeping this widget? I want to make sure we're taking this aspect into consideration. Thank you!

What's the best practice for displaying author information at the beginning of an article? We're presently displaying it as: By <Author> • Jan 16, 2015 • <City>. We're considering making it even more concise by removing the term 'By'. Would be shooting ourselves in the foot if we did this? Any other ways we should optimize?

I work for a Theater show listings and ticketing website. In our show listings pages (e.g. http://www.theatermania.com/broadway/this-is-our-youth_302998/) we split our content into separate tabs (overview, pricing and show dates, cast, and video). Are we shooting ourselves in the foot by separating the content? Are we better served with keeping it all in a single page? Thanks so much!

Generally speaking, is it better to use robots.txt or rel=noindex to prevent duplicate pages from being indexed?

I work for a Theater news website. We have two sister sites, theatermania.com in the US and whatsonstage.com in London. Both sites have largely the same codebase and page layouts. We've implemented markup that allows google to show a search box for our site in its results page. For some reason, the search box is showing for one site but not the other: http://screencast.com/t/CSA62NT8 We're scratching our heads. Does anyone have any ideas?

Hi there, I work for a Theater news site. We have an issue where our system creates a chunk of duplicate content in Google's eyes and we're not sure how best to solve. When an editor produces a video, it simultaneously 1) creates a page with it's own static URL (e.g. http://www.theatermania.com/video/mary-louise-parker-tommy-tune-laura-osnes-and-more_668.html); and 2) displays said video on a public index page (http://www.theatermania.com/videos/). Since the content is very similar, Google sees them as duplicate. What should we do about this? We were thinking that one solution would to be dynamically canonicalize the index page to the static page whenever a new video is posted, but would Google frown on this? Alternatively, should we simply nofollow the index page? Lastly, are there any solutions we may have missed entirely?

Hello, I work for the Theater discovery website, theatermania.com. Users can browse current shows on a city-by-city basis, such as New York: http://www.theatermania.com/new-york-city-theater/shows/ My question is, is there any SEO benefit in us creating a single page that lists all shows (both current and non-current) across the US? My boss mentioned that this could help our long tail results, but I'm not so sure.

My company is a Theater news and reviews site. We're building a google news sitemap and Google suggests some recommended keywords we can use with their <keywords>tag: https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/116037</keywords> Our writers also tag their stories with relevant keywords. What should we populate the <keywords>tag with?</keywords> We were thinking we'd automatically populate it with author-added tags, in addition to one or more of the recommended ones suggested by Google, such as Theater, Arts, and Culture (all of our articles are related to these topics). Finally, many of our articles are about say, celebrities. An author may tag an article with 'Bryan Cranston,' and when this is the case we're considering also tagging it with the 'Celebrities' tag. Are all or any of these worthwhile?

I've read that Google frowns upon large numbers of internal links. We're building a site that helps users browse a list of shows via dozens of genres. If the genres are expose, say, as a pulldown menu as opposed to a list of static links, and selecting the pulldown option filters the list of shows, would those genres count against our internal links count?

We're an online theater news and reviews site. We're moderately popular in our industry. We're considering purchasing related domains (e.g. theatertickets.com, theaterticketing.com, etc) that redirect to our main site. Is there a marketing or SEO value in doing this?

Hello, my team is trying to understand how to best construct slugs. We understand they need to be concise and easily understandable, but there seem to be vast differences between the three examples below. Are there reasons why one might be better than the others? http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/06/20/bad-boys-yum-yum-violent-criminal-or-not-this-mans-mugshot-is-heating-up-the-web/ http://hollywoodlife.com/2014/06/20/jeremy-meeks-sexy-mug-shot-felon-viral/ http://www.tmz.com/2014/06/19/mugshot-eyes-felon-sexy/

We recently watched a video where a Google News developer advocated displaying large images near the top of articles. As a matter of practice, we tend to follow the below formats instead. Are we shooting ourselves in the foot? Use a gallery at the top: http://www.whatsonstage.com/west-end-theatre/news/07-2014/great-britain-billie-piper-west-end_34919.html Use a medium size square image on the right side: http://www.whatsonstage.com/london-theatre/news/07-2014/arts-council-funding-npo-orange-tree_34910.html Use a large image with a caption at the top: http://www.whatsonstage.com/london-theatre/news/07-2014/meera-syal-national-theatre_34913.html Also, do elements like a 'Buy ticket' console in the middle of article pages hurt us?: http://screencast.com/t/rqqMk2dATfmE

When creating a page, is it ever worthwhile to ensure that there's minimal duplication in the keywords in the page title vs. the slug? Or is it more like the title is more like a sentence description of the page and the slug is a scannable set of keywords that describes the page, and duplication doesn't really matter.

Hi there, my company is an online publisher of Theater news and reviews. We also sell theater tickets. We presently don't have a Wikipedia page. Would creating one generally help our search rankings?

Hi there, question about what constitutes an optimal slug. I work for a Theater news site. An article we recently wrote announced the opening of the musical "Holler if you hear me," which features the music of Tupac Shakur. We considered a few options, including holler-if-you-hear-me-opens-on-broadway and tupac-musical-opens-on broadway. Any suggestions? Also, if the full URL reads something like theatermania.com/broadway/news/06-2014/[slug], should we try to ensure that the term 'broadway' never appears in the slug to reduce redundancy? Keep in mind that the term 'broadway' is a pretty popular search term.

Hello, I work for an Theater news site. We've drafted an interview piece where three actors (Lin-Manuel Miranda, Leslie Odom, Jr, and Karen Olivo) discuss their participation in an upcoming show (tick, tick... BOOM), which is an autobiographical precursor to Jonathan Larson's hit Broadway musical, Rent. The show is playing for five days in the New York City Center's 'Encores' musical theater series event. In the interview, the actors widely discuss Mr. Larson's impact on the theater community, who passed away suddenly in 2001. As you might imagine, the most popular keywords on Google trends are of Mr. Larson, the show name, and Lin-Manuel Miranda, a tony-winning composer. We're considering slugs that represent several permutations of the above actor + show combinations (below), but we're struggling trying to balance a slug that appropriately explains the article, uses appropriate keywords, and limit them (to a count of 5, per google's recommendation). Any suggestions? miranda-olivo-odom-inside-tick-tick-boomlin-manuel-olivo-odom-inside-tick-tick-boomtick-tick-boom-encores-interviewjonathan-larson-tick-tick-boom-at-encores

We're a content publisher that writes news and reviews about the theater community, both in New York City (broadway mainly) and beyond. Presently, we display the term 'new-york-city' in news articles about Broadway / New York City theater (see http://screencast.com/t/XlifMdT9QP). Would it be better for us to replace that term with simply 'Broadway' to improve its searchability? I was doing some google trends keyword research and it looks like the search term "Broadway" in various permutations is substantially more popular than "New York City Theater."

Hi there, we're trying to determine how to best write headlines to make our articles more findable. We're a Theater content and ticketing site (theatermania.com) and we're about to publish an article describing outdoor Shakespeare in New York City. We've discussed a few headline options (we automatically use the headline as the page title, although we aren't married to this) below. Are any of these much more findable than the other? For example, are we shooting ourselves in the foot if we lead with "Fill your Summer...." in the first option? Fill Your Summer in the City With Free Outdoor Shakespeare Summer in the City With Free Outdoor Shakespeare Free Outdoor Shakespeare This Summer in the City

Hi there, my company is exploring creating an online magazine built with Adobe's InDesign toolset. If we proceeded with this, could we make these pages "as spiderable" as normal html/css webpages? Or are we limited to them being less spiderable, or not at all spiderable?