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I am going to assume this is a product website that sells widgets within a category.

I think if you just approach this randomly on page loads, this will give you random results.  Why not look at what keywords you are trying to rank on for that category an then pull in reviews that relate to that topic with links to products etc.   What products sell the most in a given category, what products make you the most money?  Focus on reviews from those product pages on your category page and then link to those products as your visitors are most likely to click and then buy from your category page.

I think your focus is too much on tossing around a bunch of content and ranking for the sake of ranking, vs looking at how to make it best work for your company from a revenue perspective.

Greetings everyone!

Background

I help run multiple continuing education sites for Allied Health professionals.  Our editors do a great job of getting some of the best authors in their respective fields to come onto the site and present webinars and we publish articles around those presentations.

I would love to be able to use the rel=author tag on these sites as the authors we use help to improve our credibility when a user is on the site and I would like to take advantage of this in the SERPs.

The issue is that while most of these authors are leaders in their respective fields and have published in many academic publications, they are not on Facebook or Twitter, let alone Google+.  Also, they are probably not interested in setting up a G+ profile. They are "famous" and well published within their fields, yet they are somewhat  "invisible" on the web.

We are looking to implement author bios on our site and then could use the rel=author tag internally so that seems like a good first step.

The question is then around linking out with rel=me to any profiles (FB, Twitter, G+) The issue is that, as I mentioned above, the online profiles are pretty scarce.

Question / Discussion

1. Is it worth it to setup all the authorship markup to internal bios on a site when many of the authors are "invisible" on G+, twitter, FB, etc. and so I will be limited in how I can link rel=me to those profiles.

2. If the Google+ profile is not available for an author, what do you prefer to link to.  Would you say FB over Twitter as FB has more users, or if a user has both profiles, but uses twitter more often, would you link to the Twitter profile instead?

Many of these authors work at the university and have a bio page on the university website, would it be working linking to that profile?  How do you judge the "best" place to link to if there is no Google+ profile.

Thanks!

Thanks everyone, especially Andrea.

Andrea, you are right, the issue here is about how best to talk to the rest of the company, from developers to marketers to editors to executives.  I like the points about how developers tend to be very literal and specific so the wrong choice of words can throw them off.  #semantics is key when you deal with the rest of the group.

I had been thinking about this for the past day and ran across Rand's excellent whiteboard friday on the SEO pyramid

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-seo-fundamentals-pyramid

He set this up as a hierarchy of needs (a la Maslow) and I liked it.  I think it helps me to organize and also talk about these items.  He gives the following levels from the bottom up.

1. Accessible, Quality Content (Unique Text, Bot Accessibility, URL Structure, etc)

2. Keyword Research and Targeting (Keyword research, on page targeting of tags, h1s, text)

3. Link Building (Link requests and content link strategies)

4. Social (on site user engagement, social media, viral)

It is setup so if you do not do 1 and 2 right, you will not be able to really benefit from 3 and 4.

This got me thinking.  I am going to talk about this to my team in terms of a pyramid slightly tweaked from Rand's order above, but still bottom up.

Is your website:

1. Crawlable? Can the search engines find and crawl your website optimally? When the search engine bots and users come to your site does your server respond like a Ferrari or a Yugo?

2. Rankable?  Have you selected the right keywords that your users are search for and that convert on your goals.  Did you optimize for these keywords within your HTML and page content?  To a search engine and to your users, does your site read like Shakespeare or more like a 3rd grade essay on "What I did on my summer vacation"?

3. Linkable / Likeable / Tweetable / Pinable? - Is the quality of your content good enough that people want to talk about it, share it, link to it, tell others to visit it. Is it so compelling to your audience that when you ask them to link to your site, they do it happily and then ask others to do the same?

4. Useable?  When you spend all this time making your site fast, highly ranked on the optimal key words and highly regarded by others, do people get to your site and then become confused?   All the traffic in the world is useless if they can't figure out how to convert into an action on your site.  Is your messaging clear to the user?

Generally, here is why I put this in these types of groups / names

Crawlable - IT folks get the concept of optimized coding.   They are already interested in that and understand not wanting to waste the bot's time.  When I mention bloated slow spaghetti code, they get it.  Nobody likes to look at that, why would a bot want the equivalent of that with crummy HTML code and slow server response? They also tend to think of steps 2 and 3 as too much art and so do not want to get into that part.

Rankable and Linkable - Editors and marketing gets this.  They can see how using the right key word makes a difference and also appreciate quality, interesting stuff.   When I show them how the title and description are used within a SERP result, they get that too, more so that how it impacts ranking per se.

Useable - I wanted to change the top of the pyramid a little bit as we are working to include the designers and marketing as a part of this process internally.   Want to leverage how they fit into this process and so it makes sense to them if you do not have a clear message (like with any marketing item) you do not get conversions.  Having the useable step built on top of the others, explains why I need to have certain phrases worked in to the copy etc.

Cheers!

Hey there!

I am writing up an SEO plan for our company and wanted to get the groups input on the use of some SEO terms.  I need to organize and explain these efforts to nonSEO people.

I usually talk about, SEO in terms of  "Internal" vs "External" efforts.

Internal SEO efforts being things like

Title Tags, Description Tags, Page Speed, Minimizing errors, proper 301 redirect, content development for the site, internal linking and anchor, etc.

External SEO efforts being things like

Link building, social media profile setups and posts (FB Twitter Pinterest, YouTube), PR work.

1. How do you split these out?  What terms do you use?

2. Do you subdivide these tasks?  What terms do you use?

For example, with Internal, I sometimes talk about  "Technical SEO" that has do to with making sure that site speed is working well, 301s are setup correctly, noindex tag etc are all used properly.  These are things that different versus "On Page" efforts to use keywords properly etc.

I will also use the term "Site Visibility" for non SEOs to explain the technical impact.  For example, if your site has the wrong robots.txt, if you have 500 errors everywhere and a slow site, if you are sending spiders down a daisy chain of 301s, it is difficult for the key parts of your site to be found and so your "Visibility" to the engines are poor.  You have to get your visibility up, before you begin to then worry about if you have the right keywords on a page etc.

Any input or references would be appreciated.

My two cents, even though Google "generally" sees them the same, I would not allow this to happen so that I can be as specific as possible for Google.

A separate reason to use slashes at the end of the URL is that this is what tools like Google Analytics use to group and sort traffic results.  There are default drill down reports that look at the ending slash to determine traffic to a given directory.   If you are inconsistent with the use of the slash, then you may have some traffic allocated to one directory versus another.

I prefer use of the slash for this reason as well.

Cheers

Agreed.  You said have more 404s than you have pages indexed, that is not good even if your ranks did not drop.  That would mean that while you are being found in the SERPs you are now showing 404s to users.  It is the equivalent of a bar running out of beer during Octoberfest.  Also those thirsty polka dancers with nothing to sell them to drink.

Cheers!

When you say it did not fix them, do you mean that the 301 was not working, or that the 404s did not go away in the GWT report?

You will not see an immediate change in GWT for those errors.  They may take 30-90 days to clear out.  If you have them fixed, you can mark them as such and then take the error out of your console.

As a part of the SEO Membership, check out the SEOMoz report for some option.  I have used Screaming Frog SEO spider with some success to look through my site and find random links.

P

Just to clarify.   404s dont always come from links on your site.  Often, these are links on other sites etc that Google has in its index that they found somewhere and are trying to see if the 404s dont work.

Not saying that it is not malware, but clarifying the angle on these.

Thanks - please mark as answered and like if you please!

Hey there.  The %C2 %94 %3A are simply ASCII values of encoded versions of special characters in the URL.

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp

%3A is the same as a colon

%C2 is Â

%94 is "

This simply puts those characters in a format that is easier for the browser to read and then convert into a format it can use.

Couple of things to check on where this comes from.

Get a spider program and see if somewhere, waaay out there in the back ends of your content library that you have some crazy goofed up link that got planted here.  Find it an delete it

Other than that, somewhere out on the internets, as my developer likes to say, "A bunch of monkeys banged heads on keyboards"  There are site scrapers that do not do a good job and take your content and then repost it and they screw up all kinds of formatting and you end up with links like the above pointing to your site.  The spiders look for it and you get a 404.

I just did a Google search on

www.nfl.com/gamecenter?game_id=29528&season=2008&displayPage=tab_gamecenter/

and you get all kinds of random pages linking to that.

Here is what I would do.  You mention most errors start with

http://gridironexperts.com/”/

You can 301 all those to another page.  Or, show a simple helpful page for the user to navigate off of with a noindex, nofollow meta tag.  The noindex tag would get those pages out of the index at least and not show a 404 error.

I find that taking all the punched holes from my hole puncher and tossing them in the air and then pretending I am in a parade while I wave to all my admirers feels pretty good.

http://www.entireweb.com/express_inclusion/

Anybody used this?  There is a express inclusion that you pay for, vs the free.  Wanted to see what the group thinks.  Worth it, not?   It is not included in the SEOMoz list of directories.

Another alternative to canonical would be to simply link to the source in the reprint of the article itself.

You would then be giving that signal to Google on where the content came from without claiming ownership/authorship.

I assume that you have an admin section in the CMS where you are editing and entering these articles before they go live.

You need to get a developer to simply write a search algo that when you create a new article and before it goes live, it takes sections of your content and looks for matches/duplicates.  You can set a requirement that it has to match on a minimum of a 4 to 5 word string and other such limitations to make sure you are not matching too many items.  It will take a few tests to find a sweet spot of too many matches vs not enough.

With 17K pages, this is the only way you can really do this in an efficient way, you need some IT support/development. They may have to create a reporting layer as well to help you sift through the results.

Good luck.

Ditto on what Donnie said.   Purple Cow, if you want that site to be an authority, it needs to be authoritative.  Why would anyone buy the Washington Post if it just copied all its articles from the New York times?   Get a few staff writers to combine and tweak articles as Donnie mentioned or to write original content.

Good luck!

Are you also blocking the sub-folders with robots.txt?   I think of nofollow as being used on a page by page basis vs a folder basis and only with the robots.txt you can block a folder.

As these pages are already in the index and you want them out, you really need to add a noindex meta tag on the offending pages.  I would not use the robots.txt approach as you want Google to be able to spider the page then read the noindex meta tag to remove the page.

Cheers.

Hi James,

It sounds like when you consolidated widgets, you gave Google more of a focused page for persons to search for vs a larger number of pages on the same product.  This is interesting as it is the inverse of the long tail effect.  You would think that more pages around a given product would be better.  I guess this would be a search case where too many pages was a bad thing.  Makes me think of how we setup pagination to make sure Google does not focus on p 2,3,4,5 etc but work the noindexes to have focus on page 1 of the pagination.

Thanks for the post!

The only other thing to consider is how you want to parse all this out in Analytics.  If you were to go to the folder structure, it may be easier to parse things out as you can look at a folder by folder basis.  GA automatically creates reports based on a folder (aka slash) hierarchy.   You would not have that with the dashes.

Also, you can setup regexp to parse on the slashes to setup some really cool filters and advanced segments.   You may get the same thing with your dashes as long as you are consistent with how you use the dashes.  So the first slot is always gender, the second slot is always style and the the last is product name.

I am with EGOL that it may be a moo point, but wanted to put in another variable for your to consider in what works best for you.

Cheers