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Honestly, I would avoid using the same titles as a competitor. You want to stand out in the SERPs, not look like everyone else. It is possible to optimize your titles and still make them different enough to catch a searcher's eye.

Data is the cinnamon of content marketing. It enhances your dish with a nice cinnamon flavor, but you probably don't want a big heaping spoonful of uncut cinnamon or the next thing you know you've launched a viral video meme. Or something like that.

A story without data maybe is a nice story, but it's also toothless. The internet is littered with baseless opinions and we don't really need more of that. You can make an opinion insightful, however, when you back it up with facts, sources, numbers. Prove a product works laying out a success by the numbers. I want to see stories that know when to lean into the data, the kind of story that chews your face off and then drops the mic.

Make an assertion, express an opinion, back it up with facts, but never forget that the numbers are there to support the story, and not the other way around.

Cinnamon... face chewing... it must getting close to lunch time.

Oh, nice idea, running Screaming Frog on a server.. I passed your notes along to our Dev team, we'll see what happens.

It wouldn't be considered keyword stuffing, but the benefit of adding the keyword may be lost by the fact that you've made your URL longer and buried the pages another level down in the subdirectory structure. It's a nice bit of readability, but my guess is it's not going to have much impact on ranking.

For me, the relative neutrality of it and the low risk means that I'd consider user experience the deciding factor. Google will display the URL in any SERPs you rank in, and having the keyword visible there is probably a good thing for the searcher.

Check out Rand's post about structuring URLs (particularly #3).

Hey all,

I'm on the hunt for a service that will crawl our affiliate links and let us know when they return an error. I need to know that the last URL in the chain is returning a 200 over thousands of pages and links on a continual basis. The hitch is that most crawlers like Screaming Frog will return all of our links as working because it's only testing the first step, and this really requires a cloud solution anyway. Anyone happen to know of something?

Edit for clarity's sake: I need something to check entire redirect chains in bulk that isn't a Wordpress plugin, isn't a website where you plug in a URL and it cuts you off after the first 100 results, and has the ability to crawl the site and provide reporting on a continual basis.

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We yanked a whole bunch more content than that over the last few months.. blog posts that no longer got much traffic and had never really gotten any traction, articles covering topics we'd covered better multiple times, etc. If they were still drawing some traffic, we set up a 301. If there wasn't much of anything happening, we just let it 404. We haven't seen any negative impact from this so far.

I like EGOL's idea of having someone rewrite the content on those pages. If you can't get that done quickly enough to satisfy Mr. Disgruntled, set up some 302s until the new content is ready.

I'd also say that it's probably not worth rewriting unless you're planning to do it better than it was the first time around. If you can't blow it out and make it more valuable, then 301 or 404, whatever, either is probably just fine to wash your hands of it and walk away. Stressing out over one half of one percent when it's not delivering results in the first place isn't going to be worth my time, not when I could be spending that time and effort on something more profitable. Opportunity costs apply.

I wouldn't consider it keyword stuffing, reads pretty naturally, but it also looks like the same thing everyone else does... how would that stand out in these SERPs? What would make someone click yours over someone else's on this ultra dull list? Literally no one stands out.

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Good call on the reCaptcha stuff, I hadn't even thought about that. Google is teaching its algo image recognition by asking real humans "so, what exactly is this?" in a sort of backhanded way. And what would that do with that?

I do see a case to make for unique images being more highly valued. If duplicate content is devalued, and images are content, well... ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I agree with you about naming convention. I'm thinking more about alt text, title attributes, on-page context.

But I think it would be difficult to figure out if an image is being used in an unusual way. Say you have a photo of a Hawaiian sunset. What are you using that for? Maybe a travel site. Maybe a page of inspirational quotes. Maybe a church. Maybe a massage therapist. Maybe a Hawaii-themed restaurant in Oslo. Maybe a funeral home. The appropriate context could vary so much that it would be a tall order.

Not something I've ever heard discussed before, probably still a bit too esoteric for present day, but I've always been one to be guided by where I see Google headed rather than trying to game the system as it exists now. So think about it:

• Most stock and public domain photos are used repeatedly throughout the internet.
• Google's reverse image search proves that Google can recognize when the same photo is used across dozens of sites.
• Many of those photos will have alt and/or title text that Google also has crawled. If not it has the content of the page on which the photo exists to consider for context.

So if Google has a TON of clues about what a photo is likely to be about, and can in theory aggregate those clues about a single photo from the dozens of sites using it, how might Google treat a site that mislabels it, old school "one of these things is not like the others" style?

Would a single site hosting that photo be bolstered by the additional context that the known repeated photo brings in, essentially from other sites?

If 10 sites about widgets are using the same widget photo, but the 11th uses an entirely new, never before published photo, would the 11th site then be rated better for bringing something new to the table? (I think this would be almost certainly true, drives home the importance of creating your own graphics content.)

Anyway, like I said, all theoretical and philosophical and probably not currently in play, especially since an image can be used in so many different contexts, but it's New Years and things are slow and my brain is running, so I'm curious what other folks might think about that as the future of image optimization.

I have so many questions about this arrangement.

First of all, the third party ownership of the Search Console (and GA too, maybe?) is a massive red flag. Account ownership should always ALWAYS be handled in house. You need to insist on that, and insist loudly and furiously. It's extremely shady for a third-party SEO to own the accounts since it lets them hold the site and its data hostage if the relationship sours. How easy would it be for people who aren't even part of your company to use Search Console to start removing important URLs from the index? What happens to your data if you end the contract? Do they also own your analytics? Could they cut off your access to your own data on a whim? Replace your site with a page telling the world what awful clients you are? Depending on the size and type of company you are, letting an outsider own that access could be a very real threat to your business with the potential to do significant damage.

Also, what exactly is the local SEO company's role here? Why aren't THEY worrying about referral spam and questionable backlinks? If they're not, then what are they being paid to do?

If you don't have FTP access, who does? Does your company actually own the site? Is there a contract that spells it out?

For the staging site, all you should need is to make sure it's excluded from indexing via robots.txt. We have had multiple staging sites that, if indexed, would put some crazy dupe content into the world, but that's what the robots.txt is for. Set and forget. Well, check on it periodically, since you don't seem to have any actual control over what these guys are doing and the account ownership thing makes me very wary of trusting them to get it right and keep it that way.

As for the ghost spam, there's been a ton of discussion about it in the community over the last year. On Moz alone, there's this piece from March, and this one from August, plus a bunch of forum discussions. Bottom line is that there isn't much you can do to stop it, but that doesn't mean you're stuck with seeing it muck up your data.

Mike Blumenthal is reporting all sorts of weirdness is afoot at G+ today, it may be a temporary thing related to whatever issues they're having right now.

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2015/10/28/current-google-plus-page-url-cluster-fk-alert/

Are you sure the keyword stuffing is why they rank, or are they ranking in spite of it?

There may not be an easy way to know without taking a deep breath and jumping in, just make sure you have the ability to roll everything back in the event it goes sideways.

Is that site really so phenomenal if no one sees it because SEO best practices weren't baked into the design?

My first thoughts go to setting up and optimizing a Google+ profile for her, so that it starts nudging the Knowledge Graph in that direction.

My response is a big fat NOPE.

If the client isn't happy with the speed of back linking, then it's time for an education session in which you stand up as the expert they hired you to be and explain exactly why it's a bad, bad idea.

• Brokered links are often not contextual, which means they're not actually all that helpful.
• They tend to come from low quality sites, which means they're not actually all that helpful.

And that's just if you don't get caught. Getting away with black hat tactics is an intense, highly skilled, full-time endeavor. It's not a quick and easy way to anything. So even if you are willing to go there, given your inexperience with shady link building tactics, it's still a wretchedly bad idea since you've got no idea how to not get caught.

Best thing to do is to build a content and outreach campaign that builds links in an above-board manner that no one can take issue with. Believe it or not, that's actually probably easier than anything that link buying would steer you into.

Too many people are going to gloss over the "In general" part of what Gary is saying.

Things not addressed in that thread:

• If a URL isn't performing for you but has a few good backlinks, you're probably still better off to 301 the page to better content to it lend additional strength.
• The value of consistency across the site; wildly uneven content can undermine your brand.
• Consolidating information to provide a single authoritative page rather than multiple thin and weak pages.
• The pointlessness of keeping non-performing pages when you don't have the resources to maintain them.

Took a peek at your backlink profile, and a few things struck me:

1. You have some crazy link velocity. You went from zero to 4800+ links in less than a month, but from only 10 root domains.
2. The vast majority of your links are using exact keyword match anchor text.
3. Zero anchor text diversity.
4. Why are most of your links coming from a website about Swedish cosmetics? How is that relevant to metal doors?

I don't speak Latvian, but it doesn't look like a content issue to me.

It's nothing you should worry about, honestly. Create great content, and if it makes sense to link out to someone, then do it. With or without a rel="nofollow" is up to you.

Backing myself up here, in which John Mueller basically says there's no SEO advantage or disadvantage to outbound linking: 
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-external-links-20951.html

Do you mean reciprocal linking? If there's a strong contextual reason to do it, go for it. Just like any link building tactic, however, it can be a negative when done to excess.