Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Cedric, You're right to be concerned about duplicate content. I recommend that you take a few more steps to be completely sure that your site has a chance of performing well and being indexed and not penalized.

• You should write a unique title, the titles are much too similar
• You should write a unique introduction before quoting the article and additional unique content after the quote
• 300 words is too much for a quote from another article -- consider doing 150-200
• Consider using just 1 image instead of 4

Because you are only partially copying the article and linking to the original source there is very little chance that you will be penalized. However, your copied article will not be considered valuable because it doesn't have any original content. Just a few tweaks and a little original content should help and give you a chance to be indexed/ranked. Best of luck with your site and keep up the great articles.

You're welcome. Hope it worked out for you. You can mark this as answered if the problem is solved.

Hello, you mentioned you have previously done this with 301 redirects. It is possible to do without penalties or losing rankings on your primary domain.

However, the problem arises that you are essentially splitting page authority with the sub-domain which can potentially be treated as a separate website. I would not recommend using sub-domain for your forum to avoid the issue of competing with your primary domain. Forums can be a great source of content and traffic so I would give it the best opportunity to do so on your  domain. It would also be good to spend some time on maintenance to correct those errors and moderate poor quality / spammy / and thin content if necessary.

If you do decide to use a sub-domain, you would want to make sure to provide relevant links on every page back to your primary domain. Best of luck with your forum.

David nails it here. Most business owners understand they need SEO, but don't know how it actually works. They are often told, you need thousands of back links, and then the company promises them these links. You need to emphasize quality and remind them it takes time.

As far as convincing the client they need to update their information, I would emphasize how the search engines draw connections between different sites and if the information is wrong it may look at the business as inactive. I'm sure you've mentioned that you don't want customers calling the wrong number, but they probably responded with "no one gets the phone number from this site". However, if they are searching for the branded name of the business a business directories information may pop up and show the wrong info. Don't miss out on easy conversions. I would try and provide some information or articles showing why they need to follow your advice.

Hope this helps.

Chris

Adficient.com

We like to use Agency Analytics for keyword ranking tracking. It's updated daily, allows us to add any keywords we want to track, then we can track the keywords over a period of time. It shows the ranking changes since the first time the keyword is input into the program. So after 12 months we can see how a keyword has progressed.

Another great tool is Pitchbox, we do lots of outreach and this program automates much of it. It allows for us to find many new sites, email addresses, and track the sites we contact. Highly recommended.

Chris

Adficient.com

Hey Cole,

Good question. There are a couple of different routes you could take with the old or expired content. Leave as is, redirect to more relevant current content or remove it entirely from your site.

My recommendation would be to redirect these old pages to the most relevant updated content unless they are receiving any significant amount of traffic. If the traffic is at 0 and the page is indexed, you are probably better off increasing the page authority of a more recent article or page by using a 301 redirect. You'll also want to ask what is the best option for user experience, it may be beneficial to have these posts in a searchable archive for users.

There is a great article describing the options in a post on the Moz blog entitled "How Should You Handle Expired Content."

Hope my recommendation and the article help you make a decision. Best of luck with organizing your site.

Hello Allie,

Here is the basic regex redirect code to place in your htaccess file.

RedirectMatch 301 /sub-folder/product-category/(.) /sub-folder/shop/$1
RedirectMatch 301 /sub-folder/product/(.) /sub-folder/buy/$1

Hope this helps. You can also find more information on redirecting old pages using regex from WPEngine here.

Like EGOL mentioned it is considered spammy if a website hides and text or images for that matter. Cloaking text can result in a manual penalty from Google which can be terrible for a site. I would suggest putting in an h1 tag that mentions your brand and a keyword you hope to rank for. If you just have the brand name you want to rank for (and no keywords, which I can't imagine anyone would want to do) you can provide an h1 tag that mentions what the product or service is.

Overall, no, don't hide text.

Chris Hickman

Adficient.com

Gotta agree with Logan, just don't do it! Even if it's tempting. There's tons of great ways to build back links, you shouldn't need to resort to buying them. Sure there's tons of sites that still offer paid links and never get dinged by Google, but as we have seen over the years Google is always watching and penalties can be incredibly harmful. Currently, I've been working on a travel site and have ran into the issue of 75% of blogs expecting payment for links. We have changed our approach to the link building process and have managed to see some success. Be creative, you'll still be able to build links organically.

Chris

Adficient.com

Hey MissThumann, there is no good way to tell Google not to include a specific alt text. You could move the image down lower on the page to the second paragraph if you need to keep that specific image and alt text.

Otherwise, I would suggest that you change the alt text to something better that works in your search description or to remove it entirely and just leave the alt tag empty (alt=""). Hope this helps!

You will want to be selective with the categories and tags that you use. If you have multiple tag index pages with the exact same content you may be at some risk of serving nearly identical pages. It's still not a huge SEO issue as Google will likely just prefer one over the other.

If it does become an issue where multiple tags or categories are identical you can block indexing as you described.

Tags are primarily a feature for users to navigate subjects on your blog rather than a method to improve SEO.

The content quality and title of your posts is much more important in terms of optimization. We recently discussed ways to optimize content for search rankings just yesterday on our blog. I would recommend you focus on your content and keyword targeting as described there.

Hope this helps. Feel free to reach out if you have any other questions.

Devon,

Having multiple images linking to a site is not a problem at all, actually this is a very common way to build links to a site. As always it helps if all the tags are included in the image when it is posted (ie title, alt img). To make sure these are included it is often easier to send these sites the code to add to their blog, or have the code available for copy and paste. It's fine that the image is hosted in one place, the 'juice' will be passed from the site that has the image link.

Hope this helps.

Nick

Gotta agree with Logan, just don't do it! Even if it's tempting. There's tons of great ways to build back links, you shouldn't need to resort to buying them. Sure there's tons of sites that still offer paid links and never get dinged by Google, but as we have seen over the years Google is always watching and penalties can be incredibly harmful. Currently, I've been working on a travel site and have ran into the issue of 75% of blogs expecting payment for links. We have changed our approach to the link building process and have managed to see some success. Be creative, you'll still be able to build links organically.

Chris

Adficient.com

Hello,

I would recommend using a canonical tag on your duplicate page. Point the tag at the original blog. This will tell search engines where the original source of information is without penalizing the site. For more information,

https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization

Regards,

Nick

www.adficient.com

Hello,

You are not being penalized for these crawl errors, but it's important to monitor these. Continue to mark them as fixed and double check to make sure there are none that are broken. Many people have encountered the same issue you are mentioning, it seems to be inaccuracies within Google. Another option is to 301 these 'fake' URLs, however this may be time consuming for you. Also I would double check your sitemap, and make sure the links are not in the sitemap.

Hope this helps.

Chris

Adficient.com

From the perspective of search engines your examples would be virtually identical. The first one with the dash is the most common usage and easy to read.

Each year will be a unique term in each of your examples except that in your second example you wouldn't rank for "2017".

The characters you must avoid are the ampersand (&) and underscore (_) which will combine terms.

Hello Michael, valid question. Unfortunately, the title attribute has no direct impact on search rankings. The title tag is primarily for usability purposes.

I'm not positive, but I believe there may be apps for the visually impaired that read the content of title tags and alt image tags. If you're using the same content on desktop and mobile devices I would go ahead and add the title if it helps clarify what the link is pointing to.

However, it is not recommend to use the title tag if it is the same as your anchor text. It should be unique and clarify what the link is. Hope this helps.

This is cause for duplicate content concerns unless you specifically have tagged this type of page as no-index or included a rel-canonical tag pointing to your homepage. You would not want a 404 page being indexed.

I think your best option is to create a functioning 404 error page without your homepage content or to designate the pages no-index with the following tag.

Hope this helps.

Hello,

Any of these are acceptable. Picking between digital marketing and search engine optimization in the URL is up to you. You can always pick one, then utilize the other keywords within your page. For additional information on URL structure.

Hope this helps.

Chris

Adficient.com

Searching Google Maps directly is a little different than traditional SEO, mainly because the users location plays a role in the results that appear. If their location changes, listings adjust to the businesses closest to them.

However, there are some steps that can improve your specific listing for maximum exposure on Maps listings.

1. Verify all info is correct and the same business name is being used on major data providers such as Yellow Pages, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Yahoo Local, etc. And be sure they are linking to your website. Here is the full list:
   https://moz.com/learn/local/local-search-data-us
2. Make sure your full address is mentioned on your website contact page.
3. Get quality backlinks from related websites and include the city(s) name in the anchor text.
4. Use a local phone number area code and keep it consistent
5. Possibly have your smaller offices identify themselves with a specific location in their name
6. Get more positive Google reviews for your office
7. Include location and business keywords in your Google Maps description

I hope these suggestions help you top the rankings.