I agree with Arjen and Keri for the most part. However, I have seen the same phenomenon you are describing. While I would definitely take a long hard look at the quality of the content and probably even the technical SEO aspects of your pages, if all other things are equal it's very likely your competitors will still outrank you based on the age of their domains. If they have been established and in business for significantly longer than you, with an online presence for significantly longer than you, it's going to be an uphill climb to outrank them. Hope that helps!

I agree with Takeshi. One thing that no one has mentioned here is GetListed.org  (which Moz purchased in 2012 or 2013). Although their evaluation tool can be a bit wonky, it is helpful in identifying which directories your business may or may not be in, and there is an interface that helps you submit your listings manually which is completely free. If you have more time than money, this can be a good alternative to services like Yext. Hope that helps. Cheers!

Dana

I agree completely with Simon. We too have attempted to syndicate content and had the sites we submitted to then outrank us with our own content. The fact is, if you submit your content to a site that has higher authority than you, chances are they will rank for the content, not you, even if you have canonical tags and authorship in place and even if you publish the content on your site first. We've seen this happen not just with content like articles, we've seen it happen with products (i.e. if we have the same products for sale on our site, Amazon and eBay, Amazon and eBay will outrank us for those same products), and we've certainly seen it with videos. Post the same video on your site and YouTube and YouTube will rank for the video, not your site.

This isn't to say nothing should ever leave your site or get posted externally. If your business or someone at your business wins an award or does something positively newsworthy, reaching out to a reporter or blog editor with a story is a great way to raise the brand awareness you seek and obtain valuable referral traffic from the exposure.

The scenario at my company is almost identical to yours. The other difficulty I face (and I'm sure you and Simon have seen this too as in-house SEOs) is one of vanity. Stakeholders can get very caught up in the number of views their videos are getting on YouTube, or the number of eyeballs an article will get if it's syndicated versus just placed on their own site. Convincing them that being the sole location of that original content is sometimes a hard sell. I think the best way to do that is to produce a couple of pieces of great content and convince them not to distribute those around, then track how well that content gets positioned in the SERPs. If you can show them some real examples of the strategy being successful on a small scale, they'll be more apt to allow you to continue down that path. Hope that's helpful!

Hi Mike,

Many thanks ro both you and Dr. Pete. I apologize for leaving both of your answers hanging here for so long. Both explanations made perfect sense and I totally get it now. Now it's just a matter of fixing some of those issues. I've know since coming on board here as an in-house SEO that we had some pretty significant site architecture problems. This is just another one to add to my "to-fix" list Many thanks to you both I really appreciate your responses!

Dana

Thanks so much Dr. Pete this is very helpful. My apologies to both you and Mike for taking so long to circle back and mark this as answered. You both have done an excellent job of explaining what I am seeing. It makes perfect sense, even though it does point to some site architecture/internal linking problems we need to fix. But that's exactly why I asked the question:-)

Hi Brad,

Great question and I'm glad you asked it because I am planning out which conferences I'll be attending this year and trying to decide where to spend the money, just like you

Here's my personal experience and also what I've heard from asking and talking to lots and lots of people:

Mozcon, to me, is an absolute must. It's also great for me because I live in Olympia, so, no need for a plane ticket.

Last year I attended Jessica Bowman's In-House SEO Exchange in Santa Monica. It was a very different event, specifically for in-house SEOs, very small, but VERY worthwhile. If she offers it, I will do it again.

I have heard that PubCon, while probably of value from a networking standpoint, is not the best conference to go and get great takeaways and learn a lot. Basically, I've heard it's a wild party. In all fairness, I've never been. Don't get me wrong, I love a wild party, but given what I've heard I don't feel right asking my company to pay to send me to that one. Maybe if I paid for it myself I'd consider going.

I've heard that SMX West is good, but that SMX advanced is better, particularly if your intending on learning a lot by attending. That's the kind of thing I'm really lookng for, so, for me, SMX Advanced is probably going to become a must for me this year and probably future years.

The one conference last year I didn't attend and that I really regretted missing was InBound 2013. I was following the blog posts and Tweets coming out live from the event and if the atmosphere they conveyed was anything close to what was actually happening, I want to be there next year, really bad.

For me now, the question is: If I absolutely HAVE to chose one (in addition to MozCon and the InHouse SEO Exchange)....would it be SMX Advanced or InBound 2014? Personally, I am leaning towards InBound, but I think SMX Advanced will be an easier sell to my company because it's in Seattle and they won't have to pay to fly me across the country.

What are the conferences you are gravitating towards?

Hi Bob,

I'd highly recommend building out your profile on LinkedIn (if you haven't already) and then maybe even opting for the upgraded membership for a month or two. Lots and lots of SEO jobs there. Speaking from experience, the jobs posted on LinkedIn are far more "real" than jobs you'll find other places (like TheLadders).

If there's a company you're particularly interested in, call them directly. I cold called the company that I currently work for, they hadn't even advertised for an SEO, and guess what? They created a position for me Nifty huh?

One final suggestion, you're getting into a realm where working for an hourly wage is not really the best approach, IMHO (feel free to disagree). But, I think that if you are looking for a steady SEO job working for the same company or agency, you need to come up with your expected salary and benefits. Keep those close to your vest and don't put them on your resume. The right company will make the right offer Best of luck to you!

Dana

Hi. A mystery indeed! Have you recently upgraded or changed Web platforms or changed or upgraded what you are using for your site navigation?

I totally agree with Marie. First and foremost, be calm. Don't freak out and start changing a whole bunch of things. Make sure your client knows what's going on. Far better for them to hear it from you than discover it on their own. Make a plan. First, document everything that has recently changed. Hopefully you've done that already. Start with that 301 redirect. You already know it's a problem, whether it's caused this or not.

Has anything else changed? Meta tags, specifically title tags? I have seen a site drop from a #1 branded search position and disappear for up to a day because the title tags were updated. Then it reappeared back in it's original spot. It's possible that your clients site is in a Google dance, but my gut says that's not it. Start with the 301...and while you're at it, check and make sure that the non.www version of the homepage is properly redirecting via 301 as well as any other potential URL versions that also produce the homepage and that may have inbound links.

Good luck and please let us know what happens. Hang in there!

Yep, agreed on both points  Sometimes I think it's easy for us old-timers to forget that there are a lot of folks just starting out who might not have know the difference.

Hey guys, interesting thread about an old tactic.  Fresh Fire Media, I feel your pain. I was an in-house SEO for a very similar business owner who laid me off so they could dump all their marketing money into domain spamming and fake blog networks. So frustrating, but sometimes all you can do is shake your head and move on. They'll learn the hard way.

Just a note for newbies reading this thread, and this might be screamingly obvious to you web devs out there, but when people say "bold" they don't really mean the tag. This tag is deprecated and has been for many years. They mean the tag. They both visually do the same thing, but to my knowledge the tag is completely ignored by search engines, while the tag can still be a signal to a bot that the content it contains is of some particular importance to the content of the page.

Hope that helps!

Hi Jonathon, Excellent question! I expect you'll get two or three opinions on this. Here's mine, but keep in mind, depending on your goals, it may or may not be the right thing for you.

Don't be a link hog.

What do I mean by that?

I mean, don't be so tight with your concern about leaking link juice (God I hate that term!) out of your pages by linking to another site. Instead, think about it this way:

Is linking to this other resource or site helpful to my readers/site visitors? Does the fact that you are linking to a valuable resource enhance the value of your content/page and end up making you even more authoritative than you would have seemed without it?

If the answer to that is "yes!" Than, by all means, link to that other page or resource and be polite and respectful and for heaven's sake make it a "followed" link.

On the other hand, are you linking to the other page simply as a conversational, maybe even a one-off mention, like a link to a manufacturer from an eCommerce site? or worse, is someone paying you for a link back to them? Or perhaps it's a link contained in a comment on one of your posts.....Sure, go ahead and link if you want to, but use the rel="nofollow" attribute for those types of links.

It's certainly a judgement call, but I try to look at things this way, if I thought highly enough of a resource to mention it or include it for my visitors/readers, then I probably should link with a followed link. Just my two cents! Hope that helps

Dana

It can take Google a long long long time to remove old pages from its index. I'd highly recommend manually submitting the relevant URLs via Google Webmaster Tools' URL removal tool and do them a bit at a time. We have done this quite successfully. Otherwise, I think you're doing the right things. Hope that helps!

I agree with Jeff's suggestion. Although, just for fun I plugged both URLs into Open Site Explorer and they are really kind of a statistical dead heat, One has one more link than the other, and the one Jeff prefers has marginally better MozRank and Moz trust, but not by much. The overall Page Authority is identical at 13. They probably both could use some love, but yes, it appears you might at the very least have a keyword cannibalization issue. I understand how this happens because it usually results from an attempt to address navigation and try to assure that visitors are finding items they want via several different paths. Frankly, duplicate content happens a lot on eCommerce sites. People often talk about "duplicate content penalties." There is no such thing. It might just cause Google to rank one page and ignore the other, or rank both pages lower because it can't tell which one is really the important one....but it isn't a penalty, per se. Still, lots of duplicate content can cause other problems (like interfere with how much of your site gets crawled on a regular basis), so it's good to address where possible. Canonical tags should do the trick in this case. Cheers,

Dana

Hi Bob,

I use Screaming Frog for this. If you don't already have it, it's $99 very well spent. Once your site is crawled it's very easy to pull the 404s into an Excel spreadsheet and deal with them from there.

Hope that helps!

Dana

Hi Kevin,

I responded to your more recent question about 301 redirects, but I thought I would share some thoughts here too as well. I hope you find this helpful.

If you will be managing this transition (or to whomever will be held accountable for whether it was successful or not), part of what you need to start doing right now is managing expectations. To embark on this project and having someone (the owner, the CEO, your boss, whomever) hold you to the expectation that you will not lose any rankings or traffic as a result of this transition may be a recipe to get you fired. Part of what you need to do right now is beginning managing those expectations. I am not saying this because I don't think you will do a good job, I am saying this because, speaking from a lot of experience and studying what happens to sites when they migrate, replatform, rebrand, or all of the above, you must be prepared for a period of time when your rankings and traffic drop. They might even drop significantly. You need to have a plan in place for how you are going to deal with the business ramifications of that (decrease in revenue, etc). Are you going to rely on paid search to boost things up for a while? Print advertising? You need to plan for this.

Now, on the rosier side, if you do a really good job, hopefully after you power through the post-replatform dip, things swing up on the other side and become better than they were before. I have also seen this happen. Although I'm not at liberty to say which one, one of the major search engines replatformed and rebranded their News site and experience a significant dip for several months, but then powered through that and increased traffic by 80% after enduring the drop. So, in the end, they were better off.

While there are probably some folks here who may have witnessed a replatform with no impact on traffic and rankings, I myself have never seen this. I think it's important for you to make it clear to stakeholders that there will be a period of decline that could be as short as a few weeks, as long as a year and, yes, perhaps permanent. There are many things to consider other than just the URLs...i.e. does the replatform cause your bounce rate to skyrocket, which possibly could impact your rankings? And about 1,000 other things. How well all of that is managed will significantly impact how successfully you bounce back from the project.

Good luck to you. I feel your pain! But replatforms are inevitable and hopefully for you they will lead your business to much success!

Dana

I agree with both of the excellent comments above, with one exception, I don't think adding more text to your page will help your SEO in this case. More content? Sure. But that doesn't necessarily mean more text. How about an original video? How about a video that's share-worthy? I particularly agree that you need to pursue more social shares on the page you want to rank. In our own testing we have seen significant upward moves on pages/keywords that received 100 or more social shares. Hope that helps! Good luck!

This is a great question, and although the post is from last year, I still think that this interview with Janet Driscoll Miller is the clearest, best explanation of how to implement this that I've heard:

http://www.widerfunnel.com/events/google-and-search-engine-optimization-an-interview-with-janet-driscoll-miller

Here are additional comments from my own Q&A answer on the subject:http://moz.com/community/q/rel-author-tag-attributing-content-to-a-company#reply_121257

Hope those are helpful!

Dana

Your question really has perfect timing. Rand's most recent White Board Friday video/blog post addresses this topic specifically and shows you how to go through the process of creating Topics pages that rank for a set of keywords, rather than just one keyword or keyword phrase in particular.

Building SEO-Focused Pages to Serve Topics & People Rather than Keywords & Rankings

Here's the link: http://moz.com/blog/topics-people-over-keywords-rankings-whiteboard-friday

Hope that helps! I could have paraphrased the whole thing, but you're better off learning straight from the master!

You are very welcome Rick. Thanks for providing more details. Has your site experienced any other changes since the beginning of the year? I can see by looking at it in the free tools at http://ahrefs.com that you started the year with a lot of inbound links and many of those have been cleared out (most likely from Google algo) over the course of this year. Did you replatform the site, change URLs and/or change the architecture of the site since the beginning of the year?

Are you monitoring your Google Webmaster Tools account? There may be some clues there regarding potential site errors (503, 403 and 404 status codes) and duplicate content that could be getting in your own way.

Let me know. A thorough site audit would most likely get you some answers and give you some directions on where to focus your efforts to regain traffic.

Dana