Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I would check with GoDaddy.  If you do a whois lookup they're managing all the DNS for that website so likely the ones managing the redirect if it's not with their webhost or htaccess.

JIm

Might be a manual penalty.  They've got a decent number of spammy inbound links from blog comments going to their website.  I'd have them take a look at Webmaster Tools, but that would be my guess.

Jim

From our experience, we've found the longer posts tend to perform better in search (500+).  That being said, you don't want to write for the sake of writing - the topic should drive the word count.

When writing longer pieces you should break them up with subheadings to make them a bit easier to get through.  They're also natural H2s.

You should also be linking externally (looks like you're only linking internally).  It will make your posts look more authoritative and will ultimately act as a better resource for the reader.  You're giving them access to more information through those links.

Happy blogging!

Hi Barry,

The purpose of that 3-digit min unique identifier is to make sure the filename is unique.  We recommend our clients add it to the tail end of the URL as part of the filename, so headline-of-article-12345.html

It's a requirement before you apply.  If you're already accepted as a publisher, make sure your News XML is working properly.  You should also start incorporating the new meta keywords tag for GN publishers.  We covered that update recently: http://www.brafton.com/news/google-rolls-out-news_keywords-metatag-to-identify-news-content

Jim

Infographics can be awesome vehicles for driving inbound links, thought leadership and social media activity.  You do have to promote it, though.  That means proactive outreach to industry sites, consistent push through your existing social media channels, etc.

The landing page you host it on should also have a substantial amount of written content.  You also want to make it easy as possible for someone to share it - so providing a copy of the code needed to republish/share right on the page is a good idea.

Good luck!

I've always like the idea of the following format:

Domain.com/blog-name/category-name/headline-of-article

Note that this is slightly different from what you've setup, with categories in sub directories hanging off the domain name vs the blog sub directory.

Another consideration is the name of the blog.  You might have a chance of ranking your blog page over time by adjusting the URL to /financial-planning-blog or similar (and incorporating keyword-rich text into this page).  The caveat would be that setting up your URL structure like this may make some URLs long depending on the length of your blog headline.

All things being equal, one website has 20 pages of content around a topic and another has thousands of pages of unique content, which is likely more of a resource for the searcher?  The larger website.

That being said, Google looks at 100+ ranking factors so if you have hundreds of authoritative c-blocks linking to a landing page on a small site it could rank well for the keyword you're focused on.

Split it up logically, with region pages (which might also make for great landing pages).

You don't want 1,000 links on a page.  Google won't crawl them all, it's bad from a UX perspective and looks spammy.

I've not seen it work at that scale, however if you were go to that route I would:

• Not roll out 1,000 pages at once - do it in stages.

• Make sure the content on each is completely unique so as not to appear like doorway pages.  So, content specifically about the city and region, etc.

Without knowing the site nav and existing size, it's hard to answer the linking question - but it needs to not look like a directory with a zillion links per page.  Maybe in map form with two levels of hierarchy.  Region, then county?

All things being equal, one website has 20 pages of content around a topic and another has thousands of pages of unique content, which is likely more of a resource for the searcher?  The larger website.

That being said, Google looks at 100+ ranking factors so if you have hundreds of authoritative c-blocks linking to a landing page on a small site it could rank well for the keyword you're focused on.

I've always like the idea of the following format:

Domain.com/blog-name/category-name/headline-of-article

Note that this is slightly different from what you've setup, with categories in sub directories hanging off the domain name vs the blog sub directory.

Another consideration is the name of the blog.  You might have a chance of ranking your blog page over time by adjusting the URL to /financial-planning-blog or similar (and incorporating keyword-rich text into this page).  The caveat would be that setting up your URL structure like this may make some URLs long depending on the length of your blog headline.

I would check with GoDaddy.  If you do a whois lookup they're managing all the DNS for that website so likely the ones managing the redirect if it's not with their webhost or htaccess.

JIm

Infographics can be awesome vehicles for driving inbound links, thought leadership and social media activity.  You do have to promote it, though.  That means proactive outreach to industry sites, consistent push through your existing social media channels, etc.

The landing page you host it on should also have a substantial amount of written content.  You also want to make it easy as possible for someone to share it - so providing a copy of the code needed to republish/share right on the page is a good idea.

Good luck!

Hi Barry,

The purpose of that 3-digit min unique identifier is to make sure the filename is unique.  We recommend our clients add it to the tail end of the URL as part of the filename, so headline-of-article-12345.html

It's a requirement before you apply.  If you're already accepted as a publisher, make sure your News XML is working properly.  You should also start incorporating the new meta keywords tag for GN publishers.  We covered that update recently: http://www.brafton.com/news/google-rolls-out-news_keywords-metatag-to-identify-news-content

Jim

I've not seen it work at that scale, however if you were go to that route I would:

• Not roll out 1,000 pages at once - do it in stages.

• Make sure the content on each is completely unique so as not to appear like doorway pages.  So, content specifically about the city and region, etc.

Without knowing the site nav and existing size, it's hard to answer the linking question - but it needs to not look like a directory with a zillion links per page.  Maybe in map form with two levels of hierarchy.  Region, then county?