Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Mozzers,

We recently took over a website for a new client of ours and discovered that their previous webmaster had been using a WordPress plugin to generate 5,000+ mostly duplicated local landing pages. The pages are set up more or less as "Best (service) provided in (city)"

I checked Google Webmaster Tools and it looks like Google is ignoring most of these spammy pages already (about 30 pages out of nearly 6,000 are indexed), but it's not reporting any manual webspam actions.

Should we just delete the landing pages all at once or phase them out a few (hundred) at a time?

Even though the landing pages are mostly garbage, I worry that lopping off over 95% of a site's pages in one fell swoop could have other significant consequences.

Thanks!

This is mostly a semantics question, but I also want to check that I have a basic understanding of the two concepts. Are the two terms more or less interchangeable or are there any crucial differences?

I always thought of website optimization as the complementary partner to SEO. While the ultimate goal of SEO is getting people TO your website, website optimization is focused on refining your website so that those people STAY on your website.

When I think of conversion rate optimization, I'd imagine that's pretty much the same goal. Refining a website so that more people stay and ultimately convert (buy something, subscribe to a newsletter, etc).

Is my understanding of one (or both) of them flawed, or is it six of one, half a dozen of the other? Thanks!

I just submitted a CSV file with the information about 3 businesses to Moz Local, but I can't tell if it went through properly. The page gave me a message saying "0 are ready to publish. 0 need validation", and didn't list any errors in my listings. However, the number next to "Unmanaged" is still a 0.

I know from looking at some of the other questions on here that from the time that Moz sends the information out, it can take a few weeks for the listings to propagate. But I'm not sure whether or not it's supposed to take some amount of time for uploaded listings to show up on here as Unmanaged listings.

Should I try resubmitting, or does it just take a few minutes/hours for unmanaged listings to show up?

This may or may not be related to the problem, but I checked out your site in Chrome and got some error messages about Javascript files failing to load properly. One of them looks like it's connected to mobile/desktop stuff. Hope that helps!

"Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404 (Not Found) http://trimarkfunding.com/js/jquery-1.8.3.min.js

Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404 (Not Found) http://trimarkfunding.com/js/jquery.dropotron-1.2.js

Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404 (Not Found) http://trimarkfunding.com/css/5grid/init.js?use=mobile,desktop,1000px&mobileUI=1&mobileUI.theme=none

Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404 (Not Found) http://trimarkfunding.com/js/jquery.slidertron-1.2.js

Uncaught ReferenceError: skel is not defined init.js:1"

Obviously you'll want to take this with a grain of salt (because I don't have any real, definitive knowledge about this), but I would guess that address and phone number information would be useful (or at least not harmful). If nothing else, it might help standardize the contact information that various directory scrapers get from a website, so you won't have your fax number listed as your phone number.

The "offer" example was more what I was getting at. There are schemas for things like offers, local business, and certain kinds of services, but my understanding of rich snippets is that their main value is to display a "fancier" Google search result. But since Google has so far only implemented micro-data enhanced listings for certain types of information (like store hours, event dates, and recipe ingredients), is there any other reason to mark up company details on a page that are 100% accurate and verifiable, but not necessarily the kind of thing that would be displayed on a search listing (such as a local business's founding date)?

I've been wondering something about rich snippets for a while. I can plainly see how rich snippets and micro-data stuff can be super helpful for pages that feature things like event schedules, recipes, specific products with reviews, and articles written by influential authors. But is it worth trying to force micro-data into pages that don't readily lend themselves to the established rich snippet archetypes?

For example, say I was making a website for a carpet cleaning service. The company provides a service, rather than selling a tangible product, so there aren't individual items of which to tag pictures and reviews. The company doesn't hold any kind of events, so the scheduling stuff doesn't apply. The company doesn't necessarily present itself with any one person as the "face of the company", so there isn't anyone to tag as the "author" of the content. And obviously (I hope), people should not be eating/drinking carpet detergents, so recipes wouldn't work.

Given these restrictions, is it of any value to use any of the more generic micro-data structures like "thing" (http://schema.org/Thing) or "intangible" (http://schema.org/Intangible) to mark up stuff like "this is a picture of a carpet that we cleaned, but you can't actually buy from us"? Or are the rich snippets more of an "if your content fits with one of Google's promoted use cases, that's great, but otherwise don't bother" situations?

Thanks!

And as a follow-up, is that point far enough out to justify making a site's folder structure different from its navigation structure?

I'll give an example. Say I was to do SEO for a hypothetical (I hope) someconstructioncompany.com, and the the menus/submenus were laid out as

• About Us
• ---- Our company
• ---- Our staff
• ---- Locations
• -------- Albany (default path would be .com/about-us/locations/albany-ny.html)
• -------- Miami
• -------- Liverpool
• Services
• ---- Kitchen remodeling (default path would be .com/services/kitchen-remodeling.html)
• ---- Above ground pools
• ---- Green building
• Photo galleries
• ---- Kitchen photos (default path would be .com/photo-gallery/kitchen-photos.html)
• ---- Pool photos
• ---- Green building photos

Would there be any benefit (and if so, enough of a benefit to outweigh the additional overhead of keeping track of a separate structure) to having the menus set that way, but the actual files siloed as stuff like

• someconstructioncompany.com/kitchen-remodeling/kitchen-renovation-services.html
• someconstructioncompany.com/kitchen-remodeling/custom-kitchen-photo-gallery.html
• someconstructioncompany.com/above-ground-pools/above-ground-pool-photos.html
• someconstructioncompany.com/albany-ny/green-building-custom-home-remodeling-contractor-albany.html

Would that separation of navigation structure and file structure be beneficial or would that time/effort setting it up be better spent elsewhere?

Thanks!

I realize that since content marketing is (or can be) a part of SEO, then it would logically follow that it's up to whoever is doing the SEO to create the content*. And when it's 1 person or a small group of people that work for 1 company, doing its SEO, that makes perfect sense. But I'm having a little trouble wrapping my mind around how that's supposed to scale up for an outside agency responsible for the SEO of 5 or 10 or 50 other companies.

One of the biggest factors in my misunderstanding of the system is the reasoning for creating content in the first place. I absolutely understand how a professional in some field (let's say dentistry for example) could write up some insightful, accurate blog post about why flossing is great. After all, a dentist does (or should, hopefully) have a level of expertise on the subject that most people don't have. That blog post is a tangible addition of value to the website for anyone curious about the subject.

But why would anyone want to read a blog post about wisdom teeth written by just some random person at a marketing company? If that person has the time to do a lot of research and BECOME something of an authority on the subject of dental care, then that's fine. But what if they also need to create content for clients that do plumbing, car repairs, and cooking? I don't really see how someone can become enough of an expert on enough subjects and still have any time to do the other parts of their job. Maybe I'm just expecting too much, but I sort of feel that the internet is already full enough of advice and information from people that have no idea what they're talking about, so content from someone that's not an expert (but is a marketing person that the expert hired) seems... frivolous to me.

So to get back to the actual question, should/can an SEO ask their clients to create at least some of their own content, or is it the SEO's responsibility to generate all the content, even if it's not always stellar? Or is it just one of those "Could God make a rock so big that he couldn't lift it? Yes, he could, and then he would lift it" (or however that saying went) sorts of deals?

Thanks for the feedback, this can all be kind of overwhelming for me at times.

*"Creating content" in this specific case meaning writing blog posts, making videos, etc.

Can I create a web.config file, or is that something that needs to be set up by the hosting company (or at least whoever has access to IIS)? I suppose I could just call the hosting company (as Irving recommended).

Thanks, guys!

Hey everyone,

I've been trying to figure out a way to set up some 301 redirects to handle the broken links left behind after a site restructuring, but I can only ever find information on 2 methods that I can't use (as far as I can tell). The first method is to do some stuff with an htaccess file, but that looks like it only works on Linux-based servers. The method described for Windows servers is generally to install this IIS rewrite/redirect module and run that, but I don't think our web hosting company allows users to log directly into the server, so I wouldn't be able to use the IIS thing.

Is there any other way to get a 301 redirect set up? And is this uncommon for a web hosting company to do, or do you all just run your sites on Linux-based servers or your own Windows machines?

Thanks!