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In my experience the links still count. The original article should contain a canonical URL which declares it as the original.

We have had several articles shared and the links show up in opensiteexplorer.

We're building a blog on a subdomain of the main site. The main site is on Shopify and the blog will be on wordpress.

I'd like to keep the user experience as simple as possible so I'd like to make the blog look exactly like the main Shopify site.

This means having a menu in the blog that duplicates the Shopify menu.

So is it bad for SEO to have someone click on the 'about us' button in the blog subdomain (blog.mainsite.com) which takes you to the 'about us page' on the main shopify website (mainsite.com)?

The ideal scenario would be to set the site up as a subfolder however they have a site which is based on shopify so we will be building a separate site/hosting on blog.domain.com.

Unless there's a way of using sub-folder that has different hosting to the main site?

I have a client who uses a .com for there website in Australia. Were now building an external blog which will be on a subdomain.

We recently discovered they also own the Australian version of there domain name.

Should we build there blog on:

1. blog.currentdomain.com

2) blog.newdomain.com.au

Thanks

Yes. the blog would be set up on am Aussie host.

It is a custom domain

Make sure you have a 'dofollow' link on your front page back to your Google Plus page.

Something like this : [Google+](https://plus.google.com/your id)

If you use Google adwords try adding it as an extension to your ad as this seemed to speed up the process for us.

We recently lost our G+ page so were essentially have the same problem as you.

I have a client who currently uses shopify for there blog. I want to set them up with a separate blog away from the shopify system and host it in Australia.

I know the best option is using a subfolder but as the shopify system is an unmoveable CMS can I somehow point my subdomain to a subfolder and get the benefits of the domain name?

I could do this by using the rewrite rule in the htaccess file.

If I was to do this would it end up cloaking the URL's of the articles?

The first thing is to start getting some regular traffic from your articles.

Start with evergreen content with titles such as ' the benefits of ...' or 'top tips for saving energy' or ' what to look out for in choosing solar panels'. All these kind of searches will start generating traffic and links naturally.

Once you have a good basis of evergreen content you can start to have more of a mix of news articles.

This would be articles based around seasonal events such as 'saving money on your energy over christmas'. Also look for anything coming up over legislation that you can write articles about to become an authority on solar panels.

Try and produce the articles using Google plus authorship to help with the ranking and again to help build up trust and authority. Post all articles to your google plus profile. Facebook also may help with some unique articles, polls and sponsored stories.

Does the company have any success stories where you could perhaps produce a video? Dont just think of content marketing as just content. It could include infographics, video and whitepapers.

Were just doing the same kind of thing with our own website.

Make sure you run the existing site through screaming frog and open site explorer. You want to make sure any incoming links are pointing to relevant pages within the new site. there are a number of plugins in wordpress to handle 301's but I usually start by adding them to the htaccess just because it keeps things a bit tidier.

Have you checked webmaster tools to make sure any broken links are addressed?

Also you'll need to add your Google analytics code to the new site. Maybe try Google tag manager if its a new site.

Were just about to redesign our site and put all the blogs over to the new site.

Previously most blogs have been added to the uncategorised section of the blog and I'm now weighing up the benefit of sifting through all the blogs and changing them to relevant categories.

From an SEO perspective would it be better to

1. Leave them in their current category but start afresh with all new blogs by adding them to relevant categories?

2. Work out which blogs should go in which new category and 301 all previous URL's to the new one.

Obviously number one will take a lot more time than number two.

I work for a content marketing company and the majority of our clients are large banks looking to get their message out there.

We're thinking of favouring writers with Google plus profiles and adding the rel=author tag so all the articles incorporate rich snippets and a profile image.

So this is more of a discussion into whether you think this would be beneficial to a large corporation.

I know it aids in search and authority but it would mean a company would have many faces and they usually have one.
Think of when a company makes a speech on TV its always 1 person designated as the company spokesperson.

Another way would be to write on behalf of somebody in the company and have there profile image but I can imaging this is frowned upon by Google.

What are your thoughts

I see what you mean they haven't even bothered with a meta-description. The keyword 'Everyday Money Credit Card' isn't that competitive though. The top 4 sites for that keyword have a page authority of 1 so its a low competitive keyword.
I can't imagine you'd have to do much link building to get a site ranking for that keyword.

Keywords that clients usually focus on are 'compare credit cards' and 'credit card calculator' and there nowhere for those keywords. moneyhound.com.au also have a redirect so it doesn't seem to make too much difference.

I can confirm that 70 of our sites were hit over the weekend. It started happening about Thursday of last week.

Some of the sites were number 1 for keywords and now they're off the chart.

But honestly, the sites were of low quality and we have been advising the client for some time about over optimisation so this comes as no surprise.

Other sites we deal with who also have EMD have been unaffected. There's a lot of pissed people out there after this one.

They could've at least named it after another back & white animal!

I think your best off starting with an SEOmoz crawl on your site. Then if you need any help with specific errors we can help you with that.

Your asking for a site audit which can take a lot more time than if you were to do a crawl and link with your Google analytics account.

I recently helped my niece with her school project which involved a series of videos that give different outcomes depending on the decisions you make.

This is the video: http://youtu.be/2GpRPFhbZA0

I think it was easier to spread the message as it does involve a serious issue about underage drinking.
We managed to get 950 views just on the first video and almost 3500 channel views.

I signed up for a Google alert for anything involving the term ' underage drinking ' . Once I had a list of sites I'd see if they suited the demographic of the video then left forum comments that were helpful about the article and left a link to the video. It may have been easier as the video isn't selling a product so people tend to be more likely to approve these kinds of comments.

I also made sure i added it to as many free bookmarking sites as possible

Google places can be a real pain. try deleting your old listing. This will require you verify the listing with a postcard or pin.

Once this is a done, start a new listing. Not ideal as you'll have to start from scratch.

Otherwise contact Google they are quite helpful with these kinds of problems

http://support.google.com/places/?hl=en

Maybe ditch your meta keywords. Bing will read them but Google may view this as keyword stuffing.
How old is your domain? this may be weighted more in Bing than in Google.

In the initial stages its more about site architecture. This would encompass things like a correct URL structure, easy navigable site content, the distance each page is from the home page.

Your best off initially doing as much as you can yourself as this will bring the final price down. Do you have a sitemap yet? This can be a list of the pages that you need on your site in the structure that you want them on your website. So home>services> or home>products.

You could also source images that you want on your site, again the designer wont have to purchase them.

You could also decide on your meta description for the home page and ideally every other page.

Set yourself up a gmail account and make sure you add your website to webmaster tools and analytics.

Setup your Google plus page and Facebook page.

If you do all of theses things your well on the way to bringing the final costs down and also learning a lot more about how you can maintain your own website.

You'll need to start thinking about a content marketing strategy so you can keep fresh content on your website.