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No problem Lauren,  happy to help.

I did just remember a working example of a strong company here in Aus that has split their services across multiple niche sites, no doubt for all the reasons I listed. They do rank very well for each of their niches; usually #1.

The site is http://www.carsales.com.au/. You can find their other sites under the "Our Sites" menu item in the top right corner of the nav and also under "Sites" in the footer.

This is about the best compromise I can think of, though I'd be hesitant about those followed links between each site. If you went this route, I'd suggest making them nofollow at least.

Best of luck with the campaign!

As genuinely interesting as this post is, the below paragraph basically sums up what I'm taking from it right now:

Earlier this year, Stone Temple Consulting released a study saying that links remain incredibly important in Google’s ranking algorithm. Searchmetrics agrees but says that importance has dropped.

Sure, if the data says there's less correlation there, maybe that's correct but to what extent? It's not like we can just start ignoring backlinks any time soon so as far as I'm concerned, it's business as usual.

We already know they're putting an emphasis on things like mobile usability, load speed, HTTPS, valuable content etc and should already be doing these things and that's not about to change.

Honestly I wouldn't be real worried about it. It seems Google is smart enough these days to understand what's going on there though canonicalization would be wise - just point the canonical tag on the login page to itself.

By doing this, assuming your URLs look something like domain.com/login?product=-product-name, all variations will theoretically be seen as the /login page.

If you really wanted to, you could use Robots to block these as well but I honestly wouldn't bother.

404s do hurt both user experience and ranking potential. As far as rankings go, it will hurt you site-wide too since it's an indication of your site's quality.

Releasing it without some products isn't the end of the world. The 404s will be a problem though - I would not recommend launching a website with any 404s, much less a collection of them.

If the links to these pages are just in the nav, it should be easy enough to comment those out temporarily so you don't see those 404s. What you end up with then is just a website that sells fewer products really.

This type of thing is generally better addressed by someone with more dev knowledge but one thing you may want to check is your versions of Wordpress and plugins.

Try to keep everything up to date since updates are often released to patch security flaws and if you're running any plugins that aren't really necessary, consider removing them as well. Doing so can often help your site speed and it also removes a potential vulnerability.

The only time we've experienced the same site getting hacked several times in a row it was through vulnerabilities in a particular form plugin.

Interesting. Literally none of the crawler tools I've just tried using give me anything more than a 404 for your  home page and that's where they stop.

I can see the 301 from the non-www version so the domain itself is crawlable - I'm wondering if maybe it's a htaccess issue?

The best I can work out from the outside is that something is wrong with your htaccess file, maybe it's pointing to an invalid path and this is generating the 404.

Since the site currently just gives a soft 404, taking users to a page that looks like the homepage, it may be that what actually happens when you go to www.schoppnutritionclinic.com is that you're being handed the soft-404 and just thinking it's your home page.

It's impossible to test further without access to these things but hopefully this points you in the right direction. I'd be interested to see the outcome here regardless; it's bugging me now!

I've only ever seen the demos for Hubspot but from what I've seen, they're very different tools - both excellent at what they do, but very different.

MozPro gives you access to a bunch of metrics and research tools predominantly for SEO decision making while Hubspot is essentially an advanced CRM; a way to track sales metrics and guide leads through the conversion funnel.

Granted, they do track some on-site metrics and provide some very helpful info there as well but it's still quite different to the Moz suite.

If we decide to go with HubSpot next year, it'll be as well as Moz Pro.

I agree with Eric here so I won't repeat what he has said, simply offer additional suggestions.

Firstly, you can click on each entry from that Crawl Errors window in your screenshot and from the window that pops up, check out the "Linked From" tab. It will show you all the pages this broken one has links from.

If you're having no joy finding them on the pages manually, you can try the Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Crawl the site and if the 404s show up here (if they don't they probably don't exist anymore and you can mark them as "fixed" in Search Console) then click them and check out the "Linked From" tab at the bottom. This tool shows you not only the pages it's linked from but also the anchor text so you can go to the linking pages and use ctrl+f to find the offening link(s).

Hope that helps!

In theory, putting this same post on each of the sites won't be a problem, it just won't be of any real benefit to more than 1 site. I say in theory because Google is smart enough to understand what's going on here.

In practice, I'd still steer clear of it all together. A better way to structure it is a single site with sub-pages for each location for this very reason (and some others). Changing this structure now probably isn't an option, so my suggestions would be to either:

1) Come up with different topics for each site so no 2 blogs are the same; or

**2) **Get multiple writers involved and have them each write their own version of this topic so they really are unique. If they can't see what the other is writing, they have no choice but to offer technically unique content.

For us, "technically unique" still isn't enough and I definitely don't recommend it but it is an option.

Thankfully these days search engines (or at least Google) do a pretty good job of understanding both what your content is about and the intent of people searching for your service.

In this context, what that means is you don't have to try jamming both keywords everywhere you can. I would suggest having both in the content a handful of times for that little extra targeting but if your other quality signals (link profile, load speed, content quality, anchor profile etc) are stronger than your competition, it's entirely possible you could rank for "attorney" without ever mentioning the word.

The most recent example of this I've seen in action is a car hire company who ranked for some "car rental" terms without ever using any variation of the word "rental".

As for how you go about having both words in there a couple of times without it seeming awkward, it can be as simple as either switching back and forth between the terms (perhaps not the best idea in this vertical) or maybe even having a small section of content with a heading something like "Attorney or Lawyer, Is There a Difference?"

Embarrassingly, until I started working at a major law firm in my previous role, I didn't realise lawyer and solicitor were the same thing here in Australia so it's entirely possible this content will actually help others too, though this may be a regional thing.

1) Analytics data is based on the UA code on the page. Assuming your pages are built on a template, by default the UA code for yyy.com is going to receive the visit, not yours. You could ask them to put your UA code on there but... that kind fo defeats the purpose of having analytics in the first place when you're blurring the data!

2) From a user perspective, it would be a little confusing to click a top nav link and end up on another website, so yeah I would suggest putting that link somewhere else on the site and making it clear that they're about to leave yours. Bonus points for using target="_blank" to open that other page in a new tab, also for user experience.

**3) **Right again. If yyy.com has nothing to do with xxx.com (as in the owners of X and Y don't even know each other) then it's a very strange request and one I'd be hesitant to even entertain.

The quality of their site can hurt you to a minor extent, I'd just be more worried about the confusing user experience and the fact that you'd be electively sending your users to their site, while they offer you... what?

The reason they want that link up there is simply the implied strength of that location. Link value is typically seen in order of priority from top left to bottom right; a link in your top nav gives them a sitewide link from almost the very top of every page. Good for them I suppose, though sitewide links aren't great, but not something you should do.

They can be incredibly effective and in some instances a necessity. The problem with them is the number of potential issues that can see them quickly change intent from high quality, helpful pages to keyword-stuffed trash.

There are three major issues we come across here on a semi-regular basis and they come down to communication, though none of them are easy to resolve:

**"Our service is the same everywhere" **- Every now and then we get a client who insists that their product or service is exactly the same everywhere, even when we know for a fact that it isn't. This makes it incredibly hard to build effective local pages because all we can do is offer info on the generic differences of their vertical rather than the unique characteristics of this particular business.

"All the top ranking competitors are using the keyword constantly in their content; the fact that you haven't leads me to believe you don't know what you're doing" - We take the educational approach right from our original proposal all the way through but sometimes, there is a not-so-silent business partner or the owner's family member who "knows SEO" and claims that our lack of spam means we're a waste of money after a few weeks of a campaign. Fun!

**"We need a landing page for every combination of location and service" **4 services across 10 locations? We need 40 landing pages!!! Obviously, this is always an absolute "no".

Irritating as these things really are, the solution is always the same. Run through the project plan again, educate them on why we're going down this route, provide some external sources like Miriam's great post and encourage questioning. The vast majority of the time this gets everyone back on the same team and a productive, well-optimised site. Every now and then it means we simply don't work for that client anymore if they continue to insist on spam.

Miriam's guide on this echoes our internal thoughts and process almost exactly and the key message is to never create local landing pages if they have no business existing in the first place. A question we so often ask here: if Google didn't exist, would you still perform that task?

Matt Cutts answered a very similar question some time back in this video response.

In short, it's not a problem having these date/category pages, provided you've got them formatted correctly. Basically, just make sure that on each of these pages, you're only showing the heading and a small snippet; usually a paragraph or two and maybe an accompanying image.

If you're doing this, search engines have no issue understanding that it's essentially an aggregation page rather than duplicate content. If you're unlucky enough to be working with a CMS that just dumps then entire posts onto each category/tag page then you're definitely playing with fire!

If you're using Wordpress, often the simplest way to go about doing this is using the "more" tag which you'll find at the top of the text area when writing a post. Clicking that button will add into the HTML which cuts the snippet off at that point and provides a "read more" link to the full article. Here is a link to more info about it, note that current versions of wordpress do look different to these screenshots; you're looking for a button that just says "more", rather than the icon they use here.

The best way to deal with it is to update your template to automatically cut it off at a certain length for you, it just depends on whether you have access to a dev to make this change.

We've handled plenty of site migrations but certainly not on an 18-month time scale! That said, the same concepts apply.

So if I understand correctly, they want to keep the current site running (old server and dev) and migrate one section of the site at a time to a subdomain so users would end up visiting a seemingly random mix of domain.com and sub.domain.com?

Without knowing more of the details, I suppose the best solution would be to relocate the whole site, database and all, to the new server then the new devs can work on whatever it is they were looking to change. Since you haven't already suggested that, there must be some limitation that makes this impossible - proprietary CMS or something?

It can depend on the type of site you're running I suppose but generally I see too many benefits to fresh user generated content to go closing them.

If you had topics that were particularly seasonal and no benefit could be had from yourself or users after a certain date (maybe an obsolete product that you don't want new buyers to confuse with the latest version) it may be worth closing comments and providing a link to a discussion on the new product.

You're on the right track in that user-generated content is a great thing for your brand/product, user engagement and SEO in general so the more legitimate interaction you have the better. Fresh content is what search engines look for and genuine discussion gives users a reason to frequently return to your site, allowing you to build that rapport.

As far as quantity of unique text, Oleg is right in that this becomes almost a pure UX question. Whatever works best for user intent is what you should be doing in this case. I personally prefer minimal pagination, especially on mobile but I'm just 1 user and may not even be your target audience.

Honestly I'd be surprised if you were penalised for this. At worst, you may be a little hindered algorithmically but even then, if you've got sufficient, quality content on your site, a solid structure, good page titles etc then this should just be a minor detail at the end of the day.

Talking purely about rankings, SEO is really just about sending overall signals and patterns these days; just make sure this isn't one of many risky signals. Of course, if you can fix it (maybe with the help of a dev) then it would be wise.

If it were my site, my biggest concern would be the impressive this gives to the user. Does it feel like they're having keywords blatantly shoved in their face? If so, the issue becomes a little more important. Search engines don't buy your products, users do!

Hi Alex,

You can run 2 different CMS on the same domain and from what I've seen, it doesn't really have any impact on your ranking ability if it's handled correctly. I've certainly seen plenty of websites that use one CMS to handle their products and landing pages and Wordpress for their /blog section but in all cases a deliberate effort has been made to keep them looking identical.

The biggest problem I see with that plan is that it sounds like you want the two different sections to look like two sites. While technically I suppose this would be ok, it would make for a confusing user experience!

Changing up the aesthetics slightly isn't a huge deal, you can use that to distinguish different parts of your website if that works for the UX. Moz actually does this, if you look at their Home Page, Blog and About Page you'll see that the primary nav stays exactly the same but the colour scheme and layout is slightly different on each.

Either way, I see there being two options and both involve a bit of work:

1. Update the aesthetics of your internalclient.com site before combining them so the UX is seamless
**2. **Migrate the content from one site to the other. Which direction you push it should depend on which is the most engaging in terms of aesthetics and usability.

I would expect that moving your blog/article content from clientinternal.com to client.com would be mostly copy/paste and some basic style tweaks, it just depends on the volume you're talking about. Doing that for 20 posts makes it an attractive solution but if you've accumulated 2,000... not so much. There are always options like Fiverr at your disposal for this sort of grunt work.

The final point to be cautious of is your internal linking. Just make sure you spend a good amount of time mapping out your new site structure and be meticulous about it's application, testing it with something like Screaming Frog when you're done. In the end, every item should give a 200 status; no links pointing to 301's and obviously no 404s.

EDIT: I forgot to drop some helpful resources into this one for the migration - these posts have been helpful for us in the past.

Website Migration Guide - Tips For SEOs Achieving an SEO-Friendly Domain Migration - The Infographic Domain Migrations: Surviving the "Perfect Storm" of Site Changes
301 Redirects - Migrating a New Site From Development To Live

It's a frustrating problem to have,  huh?

Rand did do a Whiteboard Friday on this general topic a while back which is fairly relevant here. As Dmitrii mentioned, option 1 is definitely the best option since the others mean content duplication of some form.

My best suggestion on this one would be to add a very short and enticing intro (I'm talking 1 or 2 lines) about that manufacture process and if they're interested, they can follow the link to the page all about it. Just make sure this link uses target="_blank" so it opens in a new tab for them. At least this way when they close that tab, they're right back to the product page they were on.

It is a risk but far safer than duplicating that same content across a bunch of products!

So, using Rand's advice from that WBF, you can pad out the content of your products very well and very uniquely and that line or 2 of text used as a "hook" to draw them to the other page is insignificant. Duplicate content is all about a ratio so if you have 2 lines of duplication amongst 500 words of unique and valuable text, it's not likely to be an issue.

Probably not the solution you were looking for but I hope it helps!

Don't get too caught up in jamming keywords into your titles. Chances are your competitors are already doing this, so use the opportunity to stand out and grab the users' attention; give them a reason to click your result over the other ~9 on the page.

Page titles should be compelling so getting your keyword(s) in there is great, but try to avoid the clunk old [keyword] [keyword] page title style. Sometimes it makes sense and is about all you can really do but if you can avoid it, do so.

I don't agree that you need to have the word Australia in the title either, Google looks at plenty of factors to determine what country you're in so no need to take up those precious pixels in your title with a long, redundant word!

There are a couple of Whiteboard Fridays that cover this general topic which you might find helpful:

• Headline Writing and Title Tag SEO in a Clickbait World
• Keyword Targeting, Density, and Cannibalization

I'd give you an example of a strong title but I just realised how little I know about wedding dresses! Basically, it should be something like Amelie Wedding Dress - [Something compelling; what do they care about?].

Remember, don't talk about yourself or your product, talk about the benefits these customers care about. If they're sold online, ship fast and this is your strongest selling point, maybe something like Amelie Wedding Dresses - Easy Online Store, Shipped in 48hrs!

There's no problem here if they're all completely separate sites and all have completely unique content.

Assuming both are correct, it's not really any different to having competitor websites in the same niche.