Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Latest Questions

Have an SEO question? Search our Q&A forum for an answer; if not found, use your Moz Pro subscription to ask our incredible community of SEOs for help!


  • Hi Anthony, Normally, my answer would be the same as the one given by Bryan. The simplest path in most multi-location business scenarios is to have 1 page per city and 1 page per service, rather than trying to cover every possible geo/keyword combo. However, most people ask about this before they have invested so much time and money in the development of the site and its content. Because you've already made the investment, this is what I would suggest you evaluate with the decision makers at the practice: Is the content simply mediocre or is it actually duplicate content? If the former, can you envision a way to take these pages to a new level of usefulness? For example, what if, on these pages you currently have, you showcased all of the free or inexpensive auxiliary local resources for mental health? I'm thinking of group therapy, mental health department, serene places to walk for meditation, free yoga or tai chi resources, elder advocacy groups, healthy and fun things for children, lectures, seminars, outdoor concerts, community gardens, pet shelters and anything else you could think of that could make a meaningful difference in patients' mind and body health. Because you would be doing this based on the symptoms of certain conditions and the resources of a given city, each page would, by its very nature, be unique and helpful. You would have, in fact, greatly enhanced the hyperlocal value of each page. But, if the content is duplicative, that's another matter as it could really be hurting the business and not doing much for the practice's clients. You might, in this case, decide to dismantle a structure that probably shouldn't have been built in the first place and go with the 1 page per city/ 1 page per service model, perhaps even implementing some of the hyperlocal suggestions I've brainstormed to improve the city pages, the health condition pages or both. You could cull the duplicate pages for their best work, build fewer, much better pages instead using some of the old work and greatly adding to it and end up with a very strong but slimmer site. I think either path is viable, depending on the resources available to you. Hope this helps!

    Local Website Optimization | | MiriamEllis
    0

  • I typically advise making promotion URLs "evergreen" so you can re-use them. For example, if you know you're going to have a Christmas sale every year don't make the URL /christmas-sale-2015/. Just /christmas-sale/ will do. Then when the promotion is over you can put up messaging saying when they should check back (if it's a regular promotion) and provide a link to your main promotions page. You can just re-use this same page every year and it will gain more and more links over time and become increasingly powerful. If the promotion is a one-time deal and not something that you do each month, quarter, year... then I would 301 redirect the out-of-date promotions pages to the main promotions landing page. You can update the content on that page regularly and optimize it for things like "sales, discounts, deals, promotions, promos...".

    Technical SEO Issues | | Everett
    0

  • I have a few thoughts. The Moz Pro Software suggestions are a good place to start, but will not constitute a thorough technical audit. Here's a good list, also from Moz to work on: https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015 "put strong emphasis on our blog, writing daily about the latest news and events in our industry" Be careful with this. If done poorly, it has the potential to do more harm than good. In the past, many SEO's would advise that we should blog every day..the more content the better. But, the mentality has shifted now. Quality is much more important than quantity. If you are blogging about news stories in your industry you have to be adding SIGNIFICANT value in order to convince Google that your content is worthy of rankings well. For example, let's say I am searching for a particular news story. I could read the original story on the site that broke the news, or I could read the story on a recognized news authority such as the BBC or the NYT, or I could read your version of the story. IMO it is very hard to rewrite news and convince Google that readers should land on your site. It's not enough to add a couple of extra photos, organize things differently, or have unique words. If you're doing this, you have to be a source that makes people say, "Wow. I got so much more helpful information on this site than anywhere else. I want to keep seeing this site when I search for news in this industry." If you can't do that, and you are simply rewriting the news then you are running the risk of Panda viewing your site as low quality. This is even more true if you are doing so on a daily basis. The ultimate goal when trying to decide what content to produce is to determine what you can produce that would be the absolute best of its kind on the internet. That's tough to do. One thing that you can do is ask your readers for help. Ask them what they wish you were writing about. Ask them what they feel you could do that would make them want to come to your site rather than any other. Links are still important too. I'm not saying to go out and build links, but brainstorming on ways to legitimately attract links can be helpful. You can also review the backlink profile of your competitors, but be careful not to mindlessly try to reproduce their links. Not every link is helpful, but if, for example, you see them listed on the resource page of an authoritative site, think, "OK, what can we produce so that we can approach this site and have them add us to their list?"

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes
    0

  • Have you considered using the Campaign parameters in Google Analytics instead? Campaign Source: 3876_537 Campaign medium: affiliate_link Campaign name: prequalify-2 Something like that?

    Online Marketing Tools | | Everett
    0

  • Yes, the pages are built just like stated in Google's article. And next/prev doesn't make sense, as the articles are not related. Canonicals are in place and direct to the category or tag page. The problem is that Google keeps on spidering those pages and signals 404- or 500-errors when there's changes or the server is busy. So we agree, I'll put on a noindex/nofollow on the "load more"-button. Thanks Dirk!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | corusent
    1

  • Hi there! We have a list of SEO companies we know and trust here, but they aren't really individual experts there. If you feel at all comfortable working on your site yourself, it's very possible someone here can give you some tips.

    Technical SEO Issues | | MattRoney
    0

  • Thank you for your answers! Much appreciated.

    Keyword Research | | Jana_Joubert
    1

  • Thanks a lot Cyto for the quick and helpful answer!

    On-Page / Site Optimization | | Adnan4SEO
    0

  • Did you get this sorted? looking at your page now, it appears that while you have a lot of occurrences of the same keywords (track 43, curtain 29, and curtain track 22), the density of them is quite low, 4% or less. This wouldn't be classed as keyword stuffing as far as i'm aware as you have plenty of other relevant content to dilute the frequency of them.

    On-Page / Site Optimization | | ben_dpp
    0

  • Great list! Can you explain the importance of HTTPS and using a CDN? Are these factors really that important? If I change my site to HTTPS how should I handle redirects? Thanks

    Search Engine Trends | | EngNet
    0

  • Hi Seomvi - yes, definitely a challenging problem, especially since you're thinking preventative rather than reactive (which is very wise!). My advice would be to consider creating some form of threshold for forum content before you expose it to Google. For example, you could have a litmus test that says, if a forum thread has <500 words or fewer than 2 unique replies, apply a META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW" to the page header. In that fashion, you keep algorithms like Panda from perceiving your forum as having lots of thin content/low value pages. For PR flow and crawl budget, I'd generally worry less. Google's gotten very adept at identifying forums, crawling them effectively, and understanding how to handle that type of content/link structure. That said, you might try using rel=prev/next to help with Google's crawling. Wish you all the best!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | randfish
    1

  • Hi Marie, I think if you feel I am not going to be penalised, I will leave them alone. Best wishes. David

    Technical SEO Issues | | WallerD
    0

  • Unless you're already not ranking well, changing URLs is a big risk, honestly. I don't think you're likely to see much gain, if any, by dropping one fairly sensible word/subfolder from your URL structure, the risk and work involved to set it up with 301s and the like far outweighs the benefit, which is questionable at best to start. I wouldn't do it unless I was burning it down and starting over.

    Technical SEO Issues | | BradsDeals
    0

  • Assuming the links you add to the top navigation are followable href links I think this sounds like a good idea for the reasons you state, as well as sounding more mobile and tablet friendly. It would be good to see the site though.

    Web Design | | Everett
    0

  • Google will frequently rank two pages from the same site in the same SERP if they feel that both pages serve the user intent of the query. Often this will happen, as is the case with these two pages, when they are two pages that are on the same topic, but answer slightly different questions - either of which could be what the user is really asking, if that makes sense. In your example, the two pages that Google is serving up are answering closely related, but slightly different questions: "What is VVS diamond clarity" and "what is the difference between VS and VVS diamond clarity." It might be advisable for this site to combine the two pages, if (for example) the wrong page was ranking for the query or one page was getting all the traffic and the other wasn't getting any. Another solution would to make them more different from each other, rather than tackling two long-tail variations on the same overall topic. I would not recommend creating two pages on long-tail variations of the same topic on purpose to try to lock down two spots in a SERP; your time would likely be better spent researching what specific long-tail topics people are searching on, and creating content to serve those users' needs. Umar does have a good point that a SERP with two results from the same domain often present an opportunity to take one of those spots.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RuthBurrReedy
    1

  • Awesome! I'm so glad it helped.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattRoney
    0