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Yes. One of the things that is very illuminating is that they have 27 writers for the blog. I used this example to try to convince my own company to not make the blog the realm of just one person, but to open it up to a team of people. This gets a wider variety of content, more content and less writing for each person. With 27 writers, they can post once a week yet each writer is only having to write 2 blog posts a year. I'd say that's pretty manageable!
I'm not sure that they count because their really an airline, but they do a lot of online selling and that's Southwest Airlines. Their blog is one of the best http://www.blogsouthwest.com/ - I just think it's a great model for a business blog. I think they are getting upwards of 200K visitors a month too, pretty amazing.
Funny you should ask because I just found an awesome one today. I actually sent around to my team and recommended it to them earlier this morning: http://www.getelastic.com/
I like http://www.workingperson.com - especially like their usability. Another great one from a content perspective is http://www.bhphotovideo.com
We have used a site called http://www.usertesting.com to help us identify usability and navigation problems in need of improvement. Their testers are excellent and the fee is extremely reasonable. You will be amazed at the information you get from just 3-4 tests. This might be more meaningful than any usability comments you receive here. I am thinking that your site and content are more targeted for the general public than the SEO community. Just a thought!
Here is a link to an insteresting thread on this topic in the GWT forums: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/1yhb_xcdtZ0
Judging from what top level contributors have said there, linking images and text links pass the same amount of PR, with a very tiny amount of advantage to anchor text for a text link versus anchor text from the image alt text. Ultimately, do what's best for the user. In this case, for e-commerce, I think the image link taking precedence is just fine.
Dana
Hi Peter,
Given that the site is 10 years old and that the URLs were already updated once fairly recently. I would leave them as they are exceot for those that have more than 3-5 keywords, or those that contain "stop" words like "and" "the" "of" etc. This would be pretty easy to do if you dumped all your URLs into excel and sorted them accordingly.
If you feel very strongly that your search traffic would improve if you changed them, I would suggest picking one section or category of the site and doing those first. Monitor what happens. If you get good results, then go ahead and change the rest.
Hope that helps!
Dana
No worries.I think your post looks fine. Here's my recommendation (and much of this is based on advice given by Everett Sizemore in his webinar on technical SEO for E-commerce). Even if your site isn't an e-commerce site, I think what I am going to recommend still holds true.
My recommendation would be to keep the news, downloads file and forums subdirectories in place. The reason I recommend this is from a content management and organization standpoint. Even if your site isn't large now, you probably want it to grow significantly. Once it does, or if it is already a large site, managing your content from a hierarchical and organizational standpoint will be so much easier if you leave those subdirectories in place. Imagine trying to move to a new platform at some point int the future and having ALL of your content only one level down. When you go to list out all of your URLs, without that subdirectory in them, you'll have no idea from looking at the URL where that page is on the site.
Also, if the site is well-established (say, more than five years old) and has built up some decent authority, be aware that 301 redirects to pass authority, but they don't pass ALL authority, so you could be devaluing your existing pages by making the re-writes.
If you feel the site is young enough and would be strengethened in the long run for SEO and UX by having shorter URLS (which I do think is a good idea) then here would be my recommendation:
http://domain.com/news/article-title-shorter-1234
http://domain.com/downloads/file-title-shorter-d1234
http://forum.domain.com/forums/topic-title-shorter-1234
I hope this helps! and by all means check out Everett's webinar located here: http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/ecommerce-seo-fix-and-avoid-common-issues . I think his advice applies to this scenario even if it's not an e-commerce site.
Dana
Thanks George! Fantastic detail and I think between your suggestions and Ben's too we are going to get further to solving this than we've ever gotten before. Perhaps we'll even solve this. That would be so great. As I mentioned, the company identified this problem 4 years before they hired me, and it's never been solved. I feel like part of why I am there as there SEO strategist is to pound away at these problems until they're fixed.
Thanks so much to you both. I can't wait to go in on Monday morning and use these suggestions to solve a five year old problem! Awesome.
I'll let you know what happens. If we fix it, I owe you and Ben dinner! (at the very least)
Thanks Ben. No apology necessary, it's all good. Your suggestion in combination with George's could lead us to an answer. This is definitely going to get us closer to finding the problem than we've ever gotten before. The company has been aware of this problem for almost 5 years but hasn't ever identified how to fix it. I've only been there a year now and I'm on the warpath to fix these technical issues. There are so many of them causing duplicate content problems that any SEO I do is undermined by problems like these.
I really really appreciate your reply and suggestions!
Dana
In our GWT and Google Analytics traffic reports, I often see some very oddly formed URLs. Here's an example
http://www.ccisolutions.com/storefront/www.ccisolutions.com
and here's another
http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category//www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/CEW.cat
What strikes me about this particular URL is two things:
http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/CEW.cat
and www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/CEW.cat,
both redirect to: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/on-disc-printing
This makes me wonder, is there something (a rule?) in the
backend (maybe the .htaccess file?)that was set up that says
http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/CEW.cat
= www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/CEW.cat
(or maybe vice versa?), and as a result an odd URL for the page is being
written automatically?
This scenario worked on every category page I checked. All had the same results. For example, I tried:
http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category//www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/AAA.cat
and it rendered the Live Sound category page, but without redirecting to the
user friendly URL. This URL stayed unchanged in the address bar
When I broke it into pieces, like
http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/AAA.cat
and www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/AAA.cat, both of these redirected to http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/sound-video-lighting-equipment-experts
Have any of you ever encountered a problem like this? Any sugeestions as to what might be causing it and how to remedy the problem? It is definitely causing us a duplicate content headache. Thanks!
Dana
I do think that it has disappeared from browser tool bars. I always check it manually here http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php Given that there isn't much authority established on this new URL I would link to it from your existing domain as long as the new domain doesn't have any insidious (nefarious?) inbound links from its past. I am interested to know what others think.
Dana
Yes. If you compare both URLs in open site explorer, it's pretty clear why the one outranks the other. You have many more inbound links to http://www.vipgoldrj.com/paginas/ensaios.html I am attaching a screen shot to show you. Hope this helps!
Dana
Does this new URL have any domain authority, backlinks or PageRank?
I agree that 99% of the time multiple H1 tags are not best. However, imagine your Web site is a trilogy with three completely separate volumes. In a case like this I think the site title tag might "Trilogy of 3 books" - and then there could very well be a blurb about each separate book on the home page. The titles of each one of those books could be an H1 tag.
Now, one could argue that each of those "books" maybe should have its own Web site, that's probably another discussion 
Given the way Alex describes the separate magazines, I am thinking they wouldn't like having the 301-redirects from a branding perspective. I like the idea of adding an attribution link to the original article. I have doubts about the "noindex" because I think that in many cases Google completely ignores this attribute. I'm not sure that's worth going through all the trouble of doing.
Have you tried putting the "duplicates" back to back in Open Site Explorer? I am really curious to know what that looks like.
Yes, multiple H2 and H3s are perfectly okay as long as they make sense. Think about the outline of a book or research paper. You could have Chapter 1, followed by several or many subchapters, and each of those subchapters or subheadings could have subsections. As long as those headings make sense in terms of the structure of your content, it's perfectly ok. There are even times when multiple H1 tags are okay. For example a very big site, or business, that might have three different arms of the business that all want to be represented equally on the home page, might possibly have multiple H1s (although be really really careful with that). Hope this helps!
Chris,
Great job on the site. I love it! OnTwitter and FB do you follow every celebrity chef who loves cheese? I bet there are some bloggers out there that would blog for cheese {I am one of them]. My guess is an inbound link from a celebrity chef or food and wine authority site would be pretty valuable. Ask them if they'd consider linking to you if you sent them some free cheese!
Have you considered adding product reviews? I am pretty sure your E-cart integrates with PowerReviews. We have been using them on a little niche site we launched back in January and I have been very impressed with them. It's only 30 USD/month. If you upgrade to the next level you can actually submit your star ratings to Google so they appear alongside your product listing. Might be something to consider?
Great job on the site,
Dana
