Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Yo Dude,

Are you serious?

Depending on the hosting situation, it might be possible that the issue could be fully resolved without involving the other party but I would not recommend jumping into this on your own. Not that the basics are terribly difficult but there are a number of basics you would need to wrap your arms around and there are numerous non-basic things to check and verify before you pull the trigger on a fix. Doing it incorrectly could easily leave you with a bigger pickle than you have now.  I recommend that you get very familiar with the topic via guides here on Moz and elsewhere before doing it yourself or have someone with experience take care of it for you.

But to partially answer your question, yes, you can install redirects after a year or even longer.  Whether they fix the issue you are describing would be quite another thing, however.

Yes, this can be confusing when you're first starting out.

A keyword is a word or a phrase that your target audience would use when they perform a query in a search engine for a product or service, etc. For example, if the target audience for a particular landing page is a professional plumber, the copy on your landing page might really focus in on "40" linear shower drain" because a plumber might know to search for that right off the bat.  However, if the target audience for a landing page is a DIY'er who is researching how to build a shower pan for the first time, their initial searches may revolve around simply "shower drain". While both "40" linear shower drain" and "shower drain" may be considered potential keywords for your overall web marketing plan, you might only focus on one of those for any particular piece of web content,  while the other would not be considered a keyword for that page.

The reason different web pages might be crafted to target these individual terms is that the more specific a page can be in tailoring content to a certain keyword, the better able it is to compete with strong competitors who are also targeting that key phrase. If your page uses terminology that broadly applies to both audiences, Google is less likely to rank your page higher than a competitor page that focuses granularly on only one of them when that's what the searcher queries.

Simple, huh!

I know, not really. : )

Vikasnwu,

Yes, those kinds of issues are typical for the super-simple website design tools.   Do you want multiple h1 tags? No, you don't.  Will it hurt you in this case, no, it  won't. In the future, when you move to a new platform, you can take care of issues like that, but for now, I wouldn't worry about it.

Hi Mgbeme,

Sounds like you're just starting out on the whole SEO thing.  It is a very big question you're asking and it's not really possible to provide you with a good answer to your question here in the forum.  However, there is a good keyword research guide here on Moz that is worth studying upon.  Once you've got a decent grip on some of the basics, you can ask more  specific questions for additional help.

Hi Listr,

But who uses  a feed reader today? I guess some people do but you have to pay monthly for a decent one and certainly, sailors have better things to spend $10 or $15 per month on and power boaters, probably even more so. The bulk of your traffic, at least for the first loooong while, is still probably going to come from search or social media, why start off on and antiquated foot?

If google has crawled and indexed your site thoroughly, you can also do  a site:domain search with a short phrase from the content Moz has identified as duplicate in quotation marks. The results will show you all the pages on your site with that exact phrase.   I like to use a few words at the end of a sentence and a few words at the beginning of the next sentence for this. If google has not indexed all your pages, however, this tactic will not provide you with all the dupe content.

So, for example,

site:mydomain.com "duplicate content happening. Can someone please"

OMG! NO!, Syndey. There are so many reasons why not to do that and like, zero, why you should.  It's a trap many marketers fall into--"Well my competitor did it and look at their rankings." And then you become the next casualty in the SEO wars. At least you asked first.  Many throw the spaghetti at the wall first and then ask questions about their penalties later.

I try to push people to read the Beginners Guide to SEO (and everything else you find) here because it is solid, whitehat information and that can be hard to find out there on the web. (And while I'm thinking about it, do pay close attention to the dates of anything SEO-realted that you read--if there is no date or it's more than a year old, don't waste your time)  Fundamentally, it goes like this be patient and learn everything you can for a couple of months before you even think about making changes to your site. The reason is, if you do something wrong, the recovery process could put you/your site into a tailspin that you might not recover from.

Now, back to your competitors' links. Firstly, do you really know that those links are helping them rank, or do you just see them there and assume so?  Remember, correlation is not the same as causation,  as they like to say here. Secondly, it's not always or necessarily the links themselves that are of value but the pattern of link acquisition that Google pays attention to. If there was a way to view things as Google does, even someone relatively new to online marketing could probably tell the difference between a whole bunch of low-quality links from obtained in a relatively short amount of time (yes you would burn out of your tactic within a few months) and a strong link profile of slow, steady link acquisition from reputable, complimentary sites.  If you were Google, which backlink profile do you think you would reward?  Thirdly, do you know how many good links it takes to outweigh a bunch of bad ones?

It only takes ONE.  Focus on getting that one and you and your site will be way ahead of the game--and your competitors.

You're going to end up with different organic and local search results for a "pool builder" search done by someone within the SF area than you will for a "pool builder san francisco" search done by someone in SF and/or outside it. How you show those results to the client will be  up to you.

The client will almost always be happier to see higher results.  You could start out tracking more and then trimming that list down as the project moves forward.  Of course, if the client doesn't actually have a physical presence in a location, that will be more difficult to show the higher results. You are talking about organic, yes?

Actually, there is no such thing as an agreed-upon 100% perfectly complete SEO project.  Some might call that just doing what's necessary to bring a site up to a basic threshold, some  might say there are always more keywords to go after, more backlinks to get or more social signals to go after. Still, others might say that if you're not ranking in Timbuktu, then obviously you're work's not perfect.

On the other hand, most might agree that the results of one tool, in particular, would be the best indicator of a perfectly executed SEO project. That would be #1 results ong google across the board for all of your target keywords--and what the heck, having #1 results for all of your competitors' target keywords, as well.

Anyway, look at google adwords keyword planner and see what the approximate traffic for the #1 position of your keywords and that will give you a hint of what you could be getting.

Isn't the key factor that "The decision has been made that e_ach product will have their own site moving forward_. "?

It seems like the Suits have spoken on this and that your job is to get the products onto their own sites in the best way possible.  But if you rel-canonical Page A-->Page B,  people will still be able to visit both URLs and that's not what they're directing.

To me, it sounds like 301's across the board and then move on, no?

Hi Carry,

To add to Eli's response, be aware that there is a lot of bad info on the web about SEO and it can be hard to know what info is good and what is bad.  Most people want to do as much as they can for their site as quickly as possible and that is understandable but there are companies out there who will take advantage of that.

A good place to start learning about SEO is with Moz's SEO Learning Center.  SEO for a  site can take a considerable amount of time and trying to go too fast can hurt a site in the long run. The learning center will give you proper information on  what to do and how long it might take you to see results.  --Be patient.

Hi jspinder,

There's really no "bad DA", only bad sites. For example, a new site with low DA may end up being a better site for a link relationship than an old site with low DA. A domain with great DA may not be suitable for you to get a link from because it's its content is not relevant to yours, while a site with much lower DA may be a great site to earn a link from because it is directly relevant to your niche.

If you're a new site, look for relevance to your market before you look for DA. A small, relevant site with low DA is often much more likely to work with another small site and give "good" link than will a site with high DA--just because, that's how things work out there.

Learn your market. Learn your competitors. Learn the companies in your market that are complementary to your site. DA is a reflection of how good/creative of a businessperson you are in the real world. Backlinks and DA and rankings are really just a reflection of that.

Properly implemented, curated, and maintained, there's not really a risk of problems with Google. It's just that for 99% of them there's so little-if any-ranking benefit to it, why bother.  It's not necessarily great for your brand, either.

There are LOTS of potholes on that path because it is an extremely well-worn path and many a hopeful implementer have ended up wishing they'd gone another route.  Take it from them--spend your time and/or money on building person to person relationships with your local business and figuring out with them how your businesses (and your customers) complement each other and work those relationships into links between your website brands. That's how real businesses do it and that's what the search engines reward.  : )

Cheers

Moz's index updates daily but that doesn't necessarily mean your DA or PA is going to change if and when the link is added to the index.  You should keep that it's not all about how often the index updates. The quality of a link plays a major part in whether or not it shows  in the index as well as whether or not it improves a site's rankings.

Link building is about keeping your nose to the grindstone, being creative, consistent, and recognizing where relationships with other websites will bring mutual benefit. Just focusing on  those things leaves little time to give much thought about one's domain authority score.

Hey Alan

It sounds like you are  saying that you have some old pages/urls from a website that you own and they have some external links pointing to them and you would like your site to be able to make use of any link juice coming from them.  (Makes me think of old websites/domains I bought back in the day.)

The way this is usually done is via a 301 redirect from the old page (that the external links are pointing to) to the current live page on your site that you would like to be the recipient of said link juice. Most hosts have an easy way to do this on their dashboard. Just wondering--why can't you see in your analytics if your site already is getting traffic from those pages/links?

Caveats: If the content of the pages that contain those external links is not relevant to the pages on your site that the links will be 301'd to, the link juice will be of little or no value to your page's organic ranking.  Also, Google, being a domain registrar itself, will be able to see if you are the owner of a site or network of  sites with a bunch of links going between them.  I'd definitely recommend spending some time with  Moz's beginners guide to SEO so to get a good lay of the land SEO-wise-speaking.

Hi Hasanovic,

What's your estimate of the strength of the domains that are copying your content?   In other words, are they coming up in search results for relevant queries ahead of you? Are they coming up ahead of you for phrases in quotes?  The point I'm getting at  is --how sure are you that you are seeing a negative impact from this?

I  ask because Google is quite good at knowing what content goes up before other content and there may not be any impact to your site at all.  Google is also quite good at knowing when content on a site is copied from another. If there are 15 sites all using the same copy stolen from you Google will have a hard time ranking those sites above sites with original content--unless those site have substantial domain authority.

If you are sure of the negative impact, then be sure you are requesting indexation of new content when it goes live and work on developing the strength of your pages and your domain.

Hi there,

If you're marketing products already found on Amazon, rephrasing the descriptions may help a little. However, you would then be competing with all the other Amazon resellers who have rephrased their product descriptions. You would also have to take into account how well optimized your new descriptions actually are. You would also have to come to terms with the fact that product descriptions by themselves most likely won't give your pages enough strength to outrank the products on Amazon.  Amazon's domain strength is enormous, making it difficult for a marketer to throw up a new product page and outrank Amazon for it.

Hi Seoan,

"keyword " is the exact string of letters identified as a search term for which someone may want to rank.

"Co-occurrence" relates to terms that are similar to the keyword or words that often show up near, or along with, a particular keyword.

The "Co-occurrence" thing kinda showed up originally as a foil against early article spinner-type spam tactics that just threw a bunch of words together into sentences and paragraphs peppered with keywords without accounting for actual readability. By building the co-occurrence thing into the algorithm, google required "marketers" to up their game as far as the copy they used on their site.