Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Bryan,

Wouldn't it have to re-crawl the old url to see that if forwards to the new url?

I'm changing the url of some old pages to see if I can't get a little more organic out of them.

After changing the url, and maybe title/desc tags as well, I plan to have Google fetch them.

How does Google know that the old url is 301'd to the new url and the new url is not just a page of duplicate content?

Thanks... Darcy

Didn't go to MozCon, but watching these videos is a huge value. When I've finally watched them all, it'll be like waiting for next year's episodes of my favorite series on Netflix.

Thanks! Best... Mike

Yes, the only iframe is the wistia and youtube embedded player.

Yes, it seems funny that this site audit tool calls out an embedded player as a problem. What if it was a Vimeo player... does that make any difference. I think probably not

Thanks!

I'm helping someone with a new site that will have pages for organic search that contain embedded video.

Some will be youtube embeds and some will be wistia embeds. These pages will have several hundred words of transcript text and the embeds (iframes) iframes themselves will be rather small, but expandable and possibly more than one per page.

The transcript text area is more like 80% of the page.

Do you think this is an organic search problem? I use one site audit tool that calls this out as a serious warning.

Currently, the embedded player(s) are a column down the left side, about 1/4th of the width of the page,  and the transcripts are everything else, wrapping around it.  The transcripts are fully readable and not hidden in some kind of expandable accordion or anything. Does layout matter in this issue?

Thanks... Darcy

HI Erica,

It's not on the page too many times, it's just relentlessly exact-matched between h1, url, title tag and img alt, but I guess that's okay.

Thanks

Hi Erica,

Thanks for the message. Whaddya mean... the page grader gives it an "A" for the keyword it hammered?

Thanks...

Hi,

I'm working on a site that was last optimized some years ago. It has a fair number of pages that the url, h1, title tag and image alt exact match. Although this comes back as A+ in Moz's on page grader,  it seems a bit much.

What do you think, is all this too heavy an SEO fingerprint for Google?

This is being considered for fairly templated pages as a means of adding unique text to the page, without giving up a ton of real estate. The text is all visible in view source, but only the first few lines in the scroll box. The box itself is just above the fold.

How, do you think this would affect search? Any other ideas for handling this. I'm limited by what the client will accept.

Thanks... Darcy

Recently SEMRush added a feature to its site audit tool called "SEO Ideas."

In the case of specific the site I'm looking at it with, it's ideas consist mostly of suggesting words to add to the page for the page/my phrase(s) to perform better.

It suggests this even when the term(s) or phrases(s) it's looking at are #1.

Has anybody used this tool for this or something similar and found it to be valuable and if so how valuable?

The reason I ask is that it would be a fair amount of work to go through these pages and find ways to add the select words and phrases and, frankly, it feels kind of 2005 to me.

Your thoughts?

Thanks... Darcy

Richard and John,

Thanks for the suggestions. I took a look at Doc Cop... pretty cool. Thing is, it almost seems impossible to find something that would be both a good TLD and have age, a good link profile, trust.

Alot of them look like license plates or too specific or just impossible to shoe horn into this particular concept.

What about using a domain name that reads okay as a domain name and then 301 the bought domain into it?  Totally crazy, or what?

Thanks... Darcy

Hi,

Old domain name is about books and book buyback. It had about 1000 pages at one time, been around since 2006, and still shows in Open Site Explorer as 86 links from from 46 domains, PA 43 DA 35, spam score of 4. The 4 evidently relates to low number of internal links and no contact info.

The domain name's ownership hasn't changed, but for the last year has either not been up at all or only the homepage in the last couple of months.

Now the idea is to maybe re-purpose it for place rating content... no more book content... totally different subject matter.

Is this an organic search advantage or would it be better to start fresh with a new domain name?

Is Google going to have a harder time seeing it as relevant for a new subject (with good new content) or seeing a new site as important?

Thanks... Darcy

Thanks for the answers Richard, Tobey & Lesley. Good points all.

Another option is to repurpose a domain name/one page site (used to be 1000 pages) that has been up for a long time, gained a bunch of authority/links for a totally unrelated subject, had a tragic developer experience where it's old content and could be used for this project. Currently it's a one page placeholder. That old TLD is equally meaningless to the new subject matter and could be anything.

So, if the choice were new 4 letter meaningless .com TLD or old meaningless 13 letter domain name with links for its old purpose and lots of old pages gone, which would you prefer? Is it hard to get Google to see an old domain name as a new subject... any harder than establishing relevance through content etc for a new domain name?

Thanks... Darcy

Sorry to misunderstand the problem. Do those new urls actually exist on your site or just in search?

Hi Pete,

It sounds like you've done what you can. I wouldn't submit multiple removals for the same url.

I assume it's out of your site map and you're not still being hacked and have figured out how it happened and taken steps to fix it.

Google will eventually figure it out. I'd try to move on to new stuff.

Best... Mike

Am starting to work with a new site that has a domain name contrived to help it with a certain kind of long tail search.

Just for fictional example sake, let's call it WhatAreTheBestRestaurantsIn.com.  The idea is that people might do searches for "what are the best restaurants in seattle" and over time they would make some organic search progress. Again, fictional top level domain example, but the real thing is just like that and designed to be cities in all states.

Here's the question, if you were targeting searches like the above and had that domain to work with, would you go with...

whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/seattle-washington

whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/washington/seattle

whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/wa/seattle

whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/what-are-the-best-restaurants-in-seattle-wa

... or what and why?

Separate question (still need the above answered), would you rather go with a super short (4 letter), but meaningless domain name, and stick the longtail part after that?

I doubt I can win the argument the new domain name, so still need the first question answered.

The good news is it's pretty good content.

Thanks... Darcy

Hi Kevin,

Thanks for the message. How much of a Summer drop do you see?

Anyone else? Thanks.... Darcy

I have a client who has a b2b site catering to a white collar information market.

Looking back in G/A, it appears that they've never had a good organic search Summer, but have made plenty of YOY gains.This Summer is a little better than past Summers.

Personally, I have read about people who take Summer vacations. Mostly in France. This is a U.S. site and U.S. traffic catering to business executives.

I can see it in the parking lot of the downtown office building I work in... fewer cars after Memorial Day and more cars after Labor Day. How seasonal would you expect that kind of organic search traffic to be, say from April vs July?

Would prefer answers from direct B2B experience, rather than guesses. But, if a guess is all you have, I will gladly accept that!

Thanks... Darcy

Hi Egol,

Thanks for the response. What do you see as the risks, if any, in our more automated approach?

Thanks... Darcy

Hi,

One of the sites I'm working on has a forum with thousands of pages, amongst thousands of other pages. These pages produce lots of organic search traffic... 200,000 per month.

We're using a bit of custom code to link relevant words and phrases from various discussion threads to hopefully related discussion pages. This generates thousands of links and up to 8 in-context links per page. A page could have anywhere from 200 to 3000 words in one to 50+ comments. Generally, a page with 200 words would have fewer of these automatically generated links, just because there are fewer terms naturally on the page.

Is there any possible problem with this, including but not limited to some kind of internal anchor text spam or anything else? We do it to knit together pages for link juice and hopefully user experience... giving them another page to go to. The pages we link to are all our pages that produce or we hope to produce organic search traffic from.

Thanks! ....Darcy