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Hi fellow Mozzers...

I've been asked to increase organic search (SEO) traffic to a news/magazine style website. All the website consists of is regular news articles within a specific niche. It is also already listed on Google News.

I know we can improve any on-page tactics, such as optimising the article webpages, internal linking, improving the navigation and adding breadcrumbs etc. But what about off-page?

They want us to work on backlinks to the site, which we can do for the homepage to improve the domain authority. But there's no point on increasing backlinks to the individual news articles, as they have a very short life span, and are not evergreen. Perhaps it's a good idea to increase backlinks to the category pages? But there are no real keyword opportunites on these pages.

Can anyone recommend a clever SEO strategy to increase SEO traffic to a news style website? The site can be found at https://tinyurl.com/2p9arrwz

Best wishes. Many thanks for any replies in advance

Lee.

Many thanks, Donna.

I'm seeing things completely different to you. Screwfix does use both variations on-page (METAs and content). They also rank #1 for both variations.

Strange! I am searching from the UK, but the ranking Screwfix pages should be the same regardless.

Lee

Fair commments, Egol.. I can certainly see the logic.

The problem is that people use both variants.. so we want to rank for both!

It’s a conundrum

Many thanks, Egol.

Do you think that using both variants on page would cause any issues?

All the best.

Lee

Hi all.

Just wondering what peoples stance is on using multiple variations of keywords on a webpage - those keywords that have the same meaning and search intent, but are just spelt differently.

i.e. 'woodscrews' and 'wood screws' (the latter has a significantly higher search volume)

You could approach the webpage in 4 different ways;

1. Use ONLY 'wood screws' on-page, and in the page <title><br />2. Use ONLY 'woodscrews' on-page, and in the page <title><br />3. Use BOTH 'wood screws' and 'woodscrews' on-page, and BOTH in the page <title><br />4. Use BOTH 'wood screws' and 'woodscrews' on-page, but ONLY one variation in the page <title></p> <p>We've run some tests in the past but there were never any clear takeaways, a mixed bag of results really.</p> <p>Also, If they are considered the same keyword by Google why are the ranking positions always different for each variation?</p> <p>I'm not sure there' a specific answer to this, just interested to hear peoples thoughts really.</p> <p>Many thanks in advance!</p> <p>Lee.</p></title>

Hi,

Our clients are adamant that they have set up 301 permanent redirects on their websites, but when we check using Screaming Frog and various online HTTP status code checkers they are showing as 307 temporary redirects.

Examples;
http://www.lifestylelifts.co.uk/home-lifts/ 
http://www.terrylifts.co.uk/

Again, the client says they are seeing 301 redirects. Why are we seeing 307's? Who is right?

Very puzzling, any theories would be very much appreciated

Thanks in advance.

Lee.

Hi, we have an ecommerce website with facetted navigation for the various options available.

Google has 3.4 million webpages indexed. Many of which are over 90% duplicates.

Due to the low domain authority (15/100) Google is only crawling around 4,500 webpages per day, which we would like to improve/increase.

We know, in order not to waste crawl budget we should use the robots.txt to disallow parameter URL’s (i.e. ?option=, ?search= etc..). This makes sense as it would resolve many of the duplicate content issues and force Google to only crawl the main category, product pages etc.

However, having looked at the Google Search Console these pages are getting a significant amount of organic traffic on a monthly basis.

Is it worth disallowing these parameter URL’s in robots.txt, and hoping that this solves our crawl budget issues, thus helping to index and rank the most important webpages in less time.

Or is there a better solution?

Many thanks in advance.

Lee.

This is more of a ‘gripe’ than a question, but I would love to hear people’s views.

Typically, when you search for a product using the singular and plural versions of the keyword Google delivers different SERPs.

As an example, ‘leather handbag’ and ‘leather handbags’ return different results, but surely the search intent is exactly the same?

You’d have thought Google was now clever enough to work this out.

We tend to optimise our webpages for both the plural and singular variations of the KW’s, but see a mixed bag of results when analysing rankings.

Is Google trying to force us to create a unique webpage for the singular version, and another unique webpage for the plural version? This would confuse the visitor, and make no sense.. the search intent is the same!

How do you combat this problem?

Many thanks in advance.

Lee.

Many thanks Gianluca, think I was looking at it too technically yesterday.. got blind to it!

Think I've sorted it now!

Really appreciate the help, Lee.

Hi,

We've received the following Href Lang errors in Google Search Console. After much research and playing around with the tags we're still no closer to fixing the issues.

ERRORS; http://prntscr.com/du8ei8 AND http://prntscr.com/du8evi

As you'll see, Google is telling us that some URLs do not have return tags, but they do seem to!

Does anyone know of a pro that can provide a service to fix this for us?

Many thanks in advance, Lee.

Hi Scott, you should ask yourself why you want to use the services? Is it to publicise a newsworthy story and increase brand awareness or to simply build backlinks to your site for SEO gain? If it's the latter I wouldn't recommend them!

It is fine using these services, and in my opinion, worth the cost but PR marketing should be done with PR in mind, not SEO. Only submit a release when you truly have something interesting to report, it's about encouraging coverage of your news/brand, and that goal wouldn't be achieved with cr@p content!

Hope that's helped!

Lee

Hi, our client has switched from a non-secure server to a secure (SSL) server.. but the non secure pages still exist, i.e.

http://www.stainlesshandrailsystems.co.uk/balustrade-systems.html (non-secure)
https://www.stainlesshandrailsystems.co.uk/balustrade-systems.html (secure)

We assumed that we should 301 redirect the http pages to the new https pages using the following htaccess rule;

RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R,L]

HOWEVER! both of the above pages show the same Page Authority (PA) and Pagerank (PR).. does this mean that they are being seen as the same page, do we really need to employ 301 redirects?

Many thanks in advance, much appreciated.

Lee

Hi, I'm using the Moz Bar add-on in Firefox.. but it's suddenly truncated meaning that I can only see half of the toolbar, and I'm unable to use it's features.

Screenshot here; http://prntscr.com/bgm1z2

Does anyone know how to fix this? I've tried removing and re-adding Moz Bar, and installed a new version fo Firefox.

Thanks in advance, Lee.

Hi,

We have been approached by a potential client. They are a UK company whose website is hosted on a .com domain (the .co.uk forwards to the .com).

They also have a German website hosted on a .de domain. Both the .com and the .de are hosted in the UK. We believe that the .de website should be hosted in Germany. You agree?

Anyway, they now need to target the US market.

They are planning on duplicating the UK (.com) website and creating a US version of the site on a .us domain. They would rewrite the content for the US site to avoid duplications, and add Href Lang attributes etc. They are also debating whether the new US site should be hosted in the US or the UK.

We don't think this is the best strategy. Would it not be better to host both the UK and US website on the .com domain. using reginal folders? i.e. example.com/uk, and example.com/us. Obviously we would setup Href Lang accordingly and change the Google Search Console geo targeting options for each of the sub-sites (/uk and /us).

Or we could suggest hosting the UK site on the .co.uk domain, and the US on the .com domain.

So, what is the best strategy to target the US audience, whilst maintaining UK rankings?

Many thanks for your time, hope to hear from you soon

Lee.

Yes Christian, I would definitely request removal of the links.

The Google Penguin update on April 24th targeted sites that were using spammy backlink tactics, and site wide footer links came under that bracket, particularly those that didn't seem natural (i.e. non-relevant). Other backlinks that came under attack were site-wide blog roll links, and links from spammy networks.

No one knows for sure if the backlinks you mention will harm your site, but my guess is that they will.

Would love to hear other people’s opinions!

Lee

Nope, still not working! Quite a pain to be honest.

A response from Google Thomas, like your optimism!!

Hi Mark, although I don't have any conclusive evidence I would say that Google does index hashtag URLS.

Think of it this way; when you link within a page using an anchor (#), Google see's the '#' and 'non-# URLS' as unique URLS so logically this does suggest that they do index the full URL.

Hooe that's helped, Lee.