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this does a pretty good job of explaining lazy load

http://www.thesempost.com/lazy-loading-images-likely-will-indexed-google/

Thanks for the responses.

All content will live on the same domain.

So we're releasing this product in BETA and are waiting to let Google know about it until all the bugs are out. About 50% of the content will have the same date, while the other 50% was published sporadically over the last year, all with different date stamps. Unfortunately, we need to launch all this content at once because the project relies on us being comprehensive. It'll look thin if we don't include everything we created.

Of course, as we move forward and add content, we will definitely employ a calendar of 2-3 articles a week and date stamps will reflect that schedule. There will never be a big content dump like this again.

As for promotion, we have a schedule for all this new content so we are spreading our outreach out over time.

So in a nutshell, it sounds like it won't hurt me (or help me) to have a bulk of our content reflect the same date stamp.

Hello mozzers!

So my company is about to launch a large scale content project with over 100 pieces of newly published content. I'm being asked what the date-stamp for each article should be.

Two questions:
1- Does it hurt article's SEO juice to have a lot of content with the same "published on" date?
2- I have the ability to manually update each articles date stamp. Is there a recommended best practice?

p.s. Google has not crawled any of these pages yet.

appreciate the point of view! And the Whiteboard Friday today was very timely for this as well. Highly recommend watching if you're looking for ways to do keyword research and how to incorporate it into specific pieces of content. #randprovides

What are you thoughts about breaking up the large blog post into multiple articles and linking between them instead of housing them under one URL? We are working on theme park guides and there are so many highly competitive keywords that would seem impossible to rank with one awesome post.

Or do you recommend keeping it all under one URL and just crushing it on UX. Can I assume that the 10x content combined with the usability (not having to ping pong all over the place) will trump 5 articles that are focused on unique keywords.

Thanks Dan for the insight.

Yes, we'd like to capture both "for sale" and "for rent" keywords associated with the brand but the bigger word we want to capture is the brand name alone or the "for rent"=brand. The lowest priority is the "for sale" keywords. Obviously the brand will probably be no. 1 every time, but there's no reason we can't secure a first page spot for just the brand name and have the "for rent" brand page be the one that shows up.

how big is the market: 
for some brand names, pretty big, others, not so much, it fluctuates

how competitive:
lots of other companies are vying for the brand name, but there is at least one or two results on the first page that don't belong.

search volume:
not enormous but definitely the people we want to come to our site. but again, depending on the brand, the volume could be large

typical user:
probably looking to rent instead of buy

May I also add that the old "for sale" pages have an incredible high bounce rate when it's the first page people see.

And as I search further, I wonder if rel=canonical is the way to go. The pages are very similar but have a very different focus. Regardless, I want Google to show the "for rent" page without completely turning off the functionality of the "for sale" page.

Thanks for serving as my sounding board moz. i may just answer this question myself

So I have a tactical question and I need mozzers.

I'll use widgets as an example:

1- My company used to sell widgets exclusively and we built thousands of useful, branded unique pages that sell widgets. We have thousands of pages that are ranking for widgets.com/brand-widgets-for-sale. (These pages have been live for almost 2 years)

2- We've shifted our focus to now renting widgets. We have about 100 pages focused on renting the same branded widgets. These pages have unique content and photos and can be found at widgets.com/brand-widgets-for-rent. (These pages have been live for about 2-3 months)

The problem is that when someone searches just for the brand name, the "for sale" pages dramatically outrank the "for rent" pages. Instead, I want them to find the "for rent" page. I don't want to redirect traffic from the "for sale" pages because someone might still be interested in buying (although as a company, we are super focused on renting).

Solutions?

• "nofollow" the "for sale" pages with the idea that Google will stop indexing "for sale" and start valuing "for rent" over it?
• Remove "for sale" from sitemap.

Help!!

I don't want to track external links. I just want to know where they go when they leave. Is that possible? Can I do this with a cookie?

Thank you so much for this response. It is exactly what I was looking for. I would have searched the term PushState if I knew it existed. Thank you again. I friggin' love the Moz community!

I work for a travel site and we have pages for properties in destinations and am trying to decide how best to organize the URLs

basically we have our main domain, resort pages and we'll also have articles about each resort so the URL structure will actually get longer:
A. domain.com/main-keyword/state/city-region/resort-name
_    domain.com/family-condo-for-rent/orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village_

_   domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name-feature    _
_   domain.com/family-condo-for-rent/orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village/kid-friend-pool_

B. Another way to structure would be to remove the location and keyword folders and combine. Note that some of the resort names are long and spaces are being replaced dynamically with dashes. 
ex. domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name
_      domain.com/family-condo-for-rent-in-orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village_

_      domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name-feature_
_      domain.com/family-condo-for-rent-in-orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village-kid-friend-pool_

Question: is that too many folders or should i combine or break up? What would you do with this? Trying to avoid too many dashes.

bueller? bueller? bueller?

hqdefault.jpg

My company is working on creating destination guides for families exploring where to go on their next vacation. We've been creating and promoting content on our blog for quite some time in preparation for the map-based discovery. The UX people in my company are pushing for design/functionality similar to:
http://sf.eater.com/maps/the-38-essential-san-francisco-restaurants-january-2015

From a user perspective, we all love this, but I'm the SEO guy and I'm having a hard time figuring out the best way to guide my team regarding getting readers to the actual blog article from the left content area. The way they want to do it is to have the content displayed overtop the map when someone clicks on a pin. Great, but there's no way for me to optimize the map for every article. After all, if we have an article about best places to snorkel on Maui, I want Google to direct people to the blog article specific to that search term because that page is the authority on that subject. Additionally, the map page itself will have no original content because it will be pulling all the blog content from other URLS, which will get no visitors if people read on the map.

We also want people, when they find an article they like, to be able to copy a URL to share. If the article is housed on the map page, the URL will be ugly and long (not SEO friendly) based on parameters from the filters the visitor used to drill down to that article. So I don't think I can simply optimize the map filtered-URL. Can I?

The others on my team do not want visitors to ping pong back and forth between map and article and would prefer people stay on the discovery map. We did have a thought that we'd give people an option to click a link to read the article off the map but I doubt people will do it which means that page will never been visited, thus crushing it's page rank.

so questions: How can i pass link juice/SEO love from the map page to the actual blog article while keeping the user on the map? Does google pass that juice if you use Iframes? What about doing ajax calls? Anyone have experience doing this? Am I making a mountain out of a molehill? Should I trust that if I create good content, good UX and allow people to explore how they prefer, Google will give me the love?

Help me Rand Fishkin, you're my only hope!

Resurrecting this thread. Anyone have info on connecting an OTA feed to Google Hotel Finder. It seems that Booking.com has the run of GHF and my company would like to get in on that? All thoughts/ideas are appreciated.

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"I am not going to pay to boost my posts to my already existing fans."

Not sure why you wouldn't want to pay to market to an audience that has already said they "liked" your brand. Instead you are going to run ads on Google to people who you have no idea if they're interested in you? You've garnered 10000 likes and you can spend $30 per post to promote it to everyone. If it is engagement and reach you want, $30-$50 can go a long way.

My companies FB page has a little over 4000 followers. Without promoting, 100-200 of them see a post and we only get a handful of likes and maybe one comment. When we promote them for $30 we got almost 100% reach to our followers, upwards of 100 likes and anywhere from 5-15 comments.

Not all marketing is conversion focused. Like you said, we use Facebook for branding. Great. Branding isn't free though. If you posted 4 times a week and paid $25/post to promote those posts you are looking at $400/month to build your brand to people who have already given you the thumbs up.

You can use that marketing spend to identify brand ambassadors and then slowly create a community of people who will advocate for you and your product. If you come at it with the thinking: "If I spend $100 I need 3 customers then Facebook is definitely not the right place for you."

So I am encountering the same problem as Marcel. My meta descriptions are similar to other pages, but not exact matches. There are variables in each description that change depending on the page you are viewing. My main issue with Marcel's solution is that I don't want to put the exact meta description in the content as it doesn't really flow with the layout/design/messaging. The meta desc works on the SERPs but as an actual part of the copy, it does not fit.

Any other suggestions? Could I put the meta desc. at the bottom of the page?

Would including NOODP do the trick?

In fact, the example they use on that link has description above title.

Regarding testing, I read one article where the guy did an extensive test and saw results increased when the title was above the description, but I couldn't really validate who this person was or what kind of test he did. He just said, "I did a test and results were better." (Not very scientific)

And yes keywords don't help according to President Cutts. That has been known for quite some time now. But no one has come out and said they hurt either. And believe it or not, there are other search engines out there besides Google. Quite a few, actually. Our meta keyword tags draw on the title tag keywords only. We do not stuff.

Do you have proof that "title" before "description" equates to better rankings? I have not found a definitive answer one way or the other.

Also, I agree about keywords. Good news is that it is dynamically generated and programmatically included with no effort.

So I just asked this same question here because I couldn't find any answers from Mozzers on this topic. This was from 2 years ago. I've been finding conflicting advice on META order. It seems like best practice would be to have title before keywords. AM I wrong?

The way our site was built, engineers put the title tag blow the meta desc. and meta keywords. I asked to have it changed based on the best practice of putting the most important content first, but apparently doing this will cause a major ripple effect in the way the site was engineered. Will we lose out on full SEO benefit with this structure? Should I stand down?

<title></p></title>

Can you determine the percentage of leads that turn into paying customers? In addition, can you determine the overall worth of each customer? Ie. we have 200 current customers in the month of May and they have brought in a total of 20,000 pounds in revenue, that means that each client is worth 1000 pounds.

I know this is a rudimentary example, but if you can determine:
1- what a client is worth to you
2- How many leads become actual customers

Figure that out and you'll know if you are overspending for a lead.

Let's say you convert 20% of your leads to paying customers, then in the example given in your initial question, you will have paid 704 pounds for 4 paying customers. That is 176 pounds per customer acquired. Of course these numbers all hinge on you making sure credit is given to the appropriate marketing channel.

This is a common problem and one that is integral in figuring out how much a conversion is worth to your company. So I have some questions.

Is a conversion an actual sale or just a lead? If it is a sale, you must figure out how many conversions came from ALL channels. So you say that you believe Organic accounts for 90% of your conversions. Do you have Analytic goals set up to prove that or are you assuming? Also, you mention that the ads generated calls to the office. Do you have phone tracking set up? If not, I would do that too, because if ads are generating calls, the campaigns should get credit and the answer to your question will become more clear.

You will also want to tag URL:s properly so you can analyze the traffic in Analytics. Knowledge is power and if you can understand where conversions are coming from, you can maximize your PPC efforts so you're bringing in the traffic that is most likely to convert.

In a nutshell, get your tracking in place and don't make assumptions on where conversions come from. Also, you need to find out how much the company makes per sale and use that as a base to decide if your marketing spend is worth the investment.

What you are describing sounds like a mess to maintain. Three potential sites? If you're interested in usability, create one site and build it so it speaks to the personas you're targeting. Like bstone said, build one and put all your effort behind that site. By splitting up the sites, you will be doubling the effort and neither will reach their full potential. In some cases you will even be competing against yourself.

I'm with you Jane. It's not that much effort and it avoids any confusion or 404s.

what if someone bookmarked a page that you changed the URL for? That page might not have any links but it can still receive traffic.

It is my recommendation that if one is doing a massive redirect that all pages should have a rule written for it. Why risk a 404?

Alan, there is no value in redirecting pages without external links?

I am in the process of implementing a massive 301 redirect project as we are changing the URL structure of our site. Our site has been indexed fully by Google for quite some time but most pages do not have external links pointing to them. So if someone searches a KW that triggers a deep linked page, why would I not redirect that page to its new URL?

This is all great information! Mozzers rule!

So I am in the process of recommending 301 redirects from a stronger domain (old but still getting a lot of traffic) to a weaker one (new, refreshed design, same product). No one is maintaing the old site and we want to pass the link juice. I am concerned that what happened to Cindy will happen to us. I want that traffic and I want to make sure that the 301 redirect will work. And of course, don't block old domain with robot.txt

One question though: What happens over time with the 301 redirect? I am assuming that the newer domain will eventually show in search results for the KWs that triggered the old domain to show. Is that a safe assumption?

Thanks Josh for your response. We decided to implement Adwords conversion tracking and not rely on Analytics goal tracking. I was not confident in Analytics ability to track Adwords conversions so I kept it all separated. If anyone has experience with differing statistics between the two, I'd love to hear it.

My company is in the process of updating how we track conversions in Adwords and Analytics. One prgrammer suggested importing Analytic goals into the Adwords account. I am extremely hesitant to do that because I know that Analytics and Adwords don't always play nicely together.

Does anyone have any experience (positive or negative) around this. Pros and cons? Should I keep the tracking separate?

Also, FYI, our flow does not employ the traditional "thank you page" conversion model. We have java scripts and onload events that fire when goals are triggered. I am not a programmer so I am a little out of the loop on how it all works. All I know is that I want conversions/goals to be attributed to the correct channel.

Help me mozzers!

I know this thread has been answered but do you have a preference on this.

What are the pros and cons of importing Analytic goals into Adwords? I prefer to keep it all separate as adwords conversions will show up in Analytics. Any thoughts on this?

Thanks for the response. Yes, the bounce rate and time on site data will definitely be off with VPVs. To scrub the data we could create a GA profile. If we did that, though, would that remove the goals as well?

If we decide to use a real Welcome page as our goal tracking success page, what happens if a user clicks off the welcome page and then clicks the back button? Wouldn't that then trigger another conversion or would that simply be counted in the many-per-click-column? Our developers mentioned using a "trigger on first view" script. Would that solve the problem?

I am working on setting up goal tracking. Currently when we receive a new signup, the person gets sent to their dashboard homepage and this is not a valuable a goal tracking destination. My suggestion was to build a "Welcome" interstitial page to send a user to when they create an account.

Our tech team suggested using a Virtual pageview instead as it is their thinking that a "Welcome" page adds little value.

Is there any downside to using Virtual Pageviews with regards to goal tracking?
Are interstitial page more reliable? 
Can you still use funnel visualization with Virtual Pageviews?

Thanks for the great workaround.

One question: If you set up a profile that filters out virtual pageviews from the real traffic, won't you also be filtering out the goals that those virtual pageviews represent?