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Years ago a site I'm working on was publishing news as one form of content on the site.

Since then, has stopped publishing news, but still has a q&a forum, blogs, articles... all kinds of stuff.

Now, it triggers "News Errors" in GWT under crawl errors. These errors are

"Article disproportionately short"

"Article fragmented" on some q&a forum pages

"Article too long" on some longer q&a forum pages

"No sentences found"

Since there are thousands of these forum pages and it's problem seems to be a news critique, I'm wondering what I should do about it. It seems to be holding these non-news pages to a news standard:

https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40787?hl=en

For instance, is there a way and would it be a good idea to get the hell out of Google News, since we don't publish news anymore? Would there be possible negatives worth considering?

What's baffling is, these are not designated news urls. The ones we used to have were /news/title-of-the-story per...

https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/2481373?hl=en&ref_topic=2481296

Or, does this really not matter and I should just blow it off as a problem.

The weird thing is that we recently went from http to https and The Google News interface still has us as http and gives the option to add https, which I am reluctant to do sine we aren't really in the news business anymore.

What do you think I should do?

Thanks!

Thank you, gentlemen. I appreciate the comprehensive answers.

Best... Mike

We have a group of category-like pages that have a lot of authority. We're interested in adding more internal links on these pages in kind of a "Popular Discussions" sidebar format (these are forum pages).

These pages already have about 90 internal and 5 external pointing links on them. About how many new links would you add to give those newly-linked-to pages a little boost?

Thanks!

Thinking about taking some pages that are one question discussion form pages and attempting to gain an answer box in Google SERPs.

Just like here on Moz, each page has one questions and often many, many, answers. This would mean making an unordered list with the question and the components of the answer in a box, maybe with a jpg. The info in the box would be kind of a summary of key points in answering the question.

I'm looking for suggestions on:

a) Is this a good idea?

b) What might help achieve the intended search result?

c) Does it matter that the box answers are summarized from a variety of folks forum posts, so not just one author?

d) Might it drive up bounce rate on the actual page?

e) Other considerations?

These are pages that have been around for awhile and aren't currently active discussions.

Thanks!

Okay, well, thanks guys. I kind of thought you'd feel a little stronger about the value of changing urls. Especially since Moz has tools that grade lower for janky urls. My own experience is a messed-up url is not a positive and well worth the slight/temporary decrease in page authority while that gets sorted out.

Anyhoo, thanks again!

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the message.

Would you go with new urls when the old urls are so bad...

LakeNameBoating.com/category/705687/rentals

Hi Logan,

Thanks for the response. I don't know, I've had a lot of success cleaning up non-search friendly urls like this.

In regards to the link above, Google saying "don't bother" may not be the whole story. But thank you for your take on it.

Finally, a cleaner/more purposeful url would have better CTR.

Anyone else?

Working on an old site that currently has category urls (that productively rank) like this example:

LakeNameBoating.com/category/705687/rentals

I want to enhance the existing mid page one rank for terms related to "Lake Name Boat Rentals," 301ing the old urls to the new, would you construct the new urls as:

LakeNameBoating.com/lake-name-boat-rentals

or...

LakeNameBoating.com/boat-rentals

And why? It's all for one particular lake with "name" being just an anonymous placeholder example.

Thanks!

Thanks!

HI John & Brodie,

Point taken. What if the subject matter gets even more further field than the original/existing subject matter. Would it ever be an answer to subdomain.OriginalSiteName.com ?

Thanks!

Hi,

I'm dealing with a several year old site that has had a lot of success in organic search around one particular subject and is now evolving into other subjects. Would like your experience on how best to handle this.

Here's what we have so far:

First, the site was about niche craft carpentry. Then, it added training. Then, it added training in other subjects in smatterings, like plumbing, electrical, etc.

Now it's considering adding training in subjects even further from niche craft carpentry. So, interior decorator training, landscaping training, etc.

Nearly all of it's organic search traffic (about 200,00 per month) comes from blogs, articles and discussions related to the original topic of niche craft carpentry... not training. As we've branched out from carpentry into carpentry training and then other subject training, have not had great success in organic with these new less related topics. We've had some for carpentry training type terms, but not much else.

If the site owners are hell bent on expanding into these other training subjects for business reasons other than search, how would you structure it?

For instance, would you go originalsitename.com/landscaping or landscaping.OriginalSiteName.com or what?

I understand that a landscaping.originalsitename.com is for all intents and purposes a new domain name and won't have the authority of the original. However, would it have more chance of breaking free of how Google has pigeon-holed the original site's subject matter as niche carpentry-relevant only?

Or, would you just keep adding subjects to the original domain name and figure that one of these days google is going to see it as the Lynda.com of an expanding galaxy of home improvement?

I should add that the future of the site is training, so landscape training or interior design training is pretty far from high end niche carpentry stuff.

What do you think?

Thanks!

Hi Egol,

Thanks for the clarification. I need links into these discussions, vs social, to get them to rank better in organic. The conversations we're targeting are aligned with organic search opportunities and generally perform, but not as well as they could if they had a few links.

Do you think a link builder could use non-toxic methods to make that happen?

What do you think it would cost and how how are the resulting links attached to cost?

For instance, is it like "here's some money and whatever happens happens?" Or, is it more like a clearer contract?

Thanks!

Hi Egol,

Thanks for the thoughts.

What if your content is a forum for a professional community discussing all manner of niche topics, but who generally are not super web savvy and out there linking to content much? The average age of these folks is about 50 and they're not real, "hey, check out this cool discussion about this totally niche area of government regulation!"

So, by "good content," it can be super in-depth, opinionated, fact-filled and authored by folks who know what they're talking about. Does that qualify as good enough material for a reputable link builder to work with?

If it is, what about the rest of my question?

It's almost like you're saying that no one should ever need to outsource link building, because with good content it always just takes care of itself.

Thanks!

What would be your take on how to hire a link building service. Specifically, but not limited to:

• Finding one whose methods/links achieved won't later destroy the domain?

• Define the cost for the service?

• What is a typical cost for such a service?

• Reasonable expectations?

• Any other tips for dealing with same.

Thanks!

Thanks, guys.

I've adjusted alt images tags on pages that really matter to me for organic. The tens of thousands of other images/pages are just going to have to chillax.

Hi Eric & Chris,

Thanks for the help. Given the size of the site, tens of thousands of pages and more than one image per average page, I guess my real question is how much trouble is this worth? I don't think the image file name is really going to reliably yield alt img text. So, about the most one could do is possibly a site-wide empty tag. Is this really worth it for organic search? Seems like kind of a phony manipulation to appeal to a search algorithm in maybe some microscopic way. But, I could be wrong, so that is why I'm asking here. If it really matters, we'll do it. But if it doesn't, would rather not. Especially when you consider the next thing will be that having empty alt img tags will some day be a small negative, right? That would be so Google of them.

Hi,

Would it be better for organic search to have a null alt image tag programatically added to thousands of images without alt image tags or just leave them as is.

The option of adding tailored alt image tags to thousands of images is not possible.

Is having sitewide alt image tags really important to organic search overall or what? Right now, probably 10% of the sites images have alt img tags. A huge number of those images are pages that aren

Thanks!

Hi Kate,

Yes, my whole concern is organic and running afoul of their ad guidelines for organic's sake.

Thanks! Best... Mike

Yes, can I mark a whole block of ads as "advertisement" or does each individual ad need to be marked?

As Google seems to have new interest in Rel Author for articles, is there anything comparable for q&a comments, where you have many commenters?

IMHO, Google is trying to get at the quality of the authors advice via authority of some kind, especially for YMYL content.

Best... Mike