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I've been creating new content for our site, lots of help related content, so I created a help hub section. Now the more I go through it, and look at url structure and breadcrumbs, I can't help but think I should be using a keyword in there, but also don't want to over do it, since the keyword we are shooting for is also a subsection of our site, complete with url keyword and breadcrumb. So I just don't want to have too many over redundant titles like keyword this and keyword that, so I came here to get some advice from the awesome community of folks.

Keep help hub so it's:

Url: site.com/help-hub/helppage1

Breadcrumb: Home > Help-Hub > Help Page 1

or

Url: site.com/keyword/help/helppage1

Breadcrumb: Home > Keyword > Help > Help Page 1

So I have 6 big selling item types for our company, it's our bread and butter, now we have subsections for these different types, from cleaning to instructions. We rank number one for various longtail keywords, however, for the two word keyphrase we want to rank for, we don't seem to get passed rank 30 / page 3 for.

Am curious since the long tail keywords for the subpages seem to not garner that much traffic if we should be combining all the subpages to just one item type page and optimize from there for the item type keyword ( a 5 word phrase )

This is for a niche industry, and the major keywords we want are two word phrases that have around an average of 48% keyword difficulty with. They're really no other synonyms to use for these, none that customers are using, and figuring out a plan to rank on page 1 for this phrase is proving difficult to say the least.

Progress is achieved, however it's just dropping back once we see the change, without much interaction from myself. I understand this is due to the bottom of the bucket characteristics but there must be more I can be doing.

Besides being as general as possible when posting questions here. Thanks for any feedback and even crystal ball guesses.

Touche, good sir, these are certainly some great ways to go about this. Especially number 3.

Thanks!

Wonder how long we got until http2 implementation...

So if my manufacturers don't have https sites, I should remove the links to them since it's going to hinder indexing?

Thanks for the http redirecting to https response.

Hello and good morning / happy Friday!

Last night an article from of all places " Venture Beat " titled " Google Search starts indexing and letting users stream Android apps without matching web content " was sent to me, as I read this I got a bit giddy. Since we had just implemented a full sitewide https cert rather than a cart only ssl.

I then quickly searched for other sources to see if this was indeed true, and the writing on the walls seems to indicate so.

Google - Google Webmaster Blog! - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2015/12/indexing-https-pages-by-default.html

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-to-prioritize-the-indexing-of-https-pages/147179/ 

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/google-indexing-https-by-default,30781.html

https://hacked.com/google-will-begin-indexing-httpsencrypted-pages-default/

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-app-indexing-documentation-updated-21345.html

I found it a bit ironic to read about this on mostly unsecured sites.

I wanted to hear about the 8 keypoint rules that google will factor in when ranking / indexing https pages from now on, and see what you all felt about this.

Google will now begin to index HTTPS equivalents of HTTP web pages, even when the former don’t have any links to them. However, Google will only index an HTTPS URL if it follows these conditions:

• It doesn’t contain insecure dependencies.
• It isn’t blocked from crawling by robots.txt.
• It doesn’t redirect users to or through an insecure HTTP page.
• It doesn’t have a rel="canonical" link to the HTTP page.
• It doesn’t contain a noindex robots meta tag.
• It doesn’t have on-host outlinks to HTTP URLs.
• The sitemaps lists the HTTPS URL, or doesn’t list the HTTP version of the URL.
• The server has a valid TLS certificate.

One rule that confuses me a bit is :

• **It doesn’t redirect users to or through an insecure HTTP page. **

Does this mean if you just moved over to https from http your site won't pick up the https boost? Since most sites in general have http redirects to https?

Thank you!

Thank you, especially for the FTC link, I didn't even think they dealt with things of this matter, but there it is.

As for the footer links, I'm staying far, far away from that, I'd only create another page for the customer links to go on, and scheme it as a customer's we've served / dealt with section, listing the link / logo as well as the good or bad words they had, maybe even the products they bought, and how those products held up.

It's been a goal of mine for this company to create as much helpful content as I can think of, then to push brain through a playdoh extruder and get even more.

Thanks again! Love the minds here on this site.

What would be the negative aspects to sending customer's requests for a backlink in conjunction with asking how their experience with us was?

Backlinks are one of the toughest for our niche industry to acquire and this seems like one of the best angles to cover, since we have .edu , .mil , .gov , and many bigname companies making purchases from us.

Would if be wrong to offer a small 5% discount during their next purchase if they create a backlink with us? Or if we added a " Customer's we've served " section including their logo or text link?

Thank you!

I hope you're all having an awesome day / week / month!

With Bigcommerce, I had this issue as well, and the way Bigcommerce dumps blog tags doesn't allow for any editing to be done for just those pages. So I had to dump my use of blog tags in general, was thinking of creating the tags myself for each blog entry, but haven't gotten around to it, just wanted to remove the tags to avoid the dup content.

I'm sure others may have this issue but also believe most CMSs allow for more customization of this type of section.

I love Addthis, not only does it have various products you can use, it has even better analytics.

The staff answers questions in a timely manner and the overall usefulness of the site is really excellent.

I've used them for about 3 years now, they've been great. The free products are customization and work just as good as the pro products which have even more functionality and styles.

Like the 1st post mentions, Content is all about being helpful, humor and facts can only go so far and really in niche industries, you're most likely not going to create some viral sensations.

With that being said, there is no reason that you can't be the goto in your niche for answers.

I'd focus on any content that can help assist your customers to make better more informed decisions of their purchase. This provides trust as well as useful information, allowing the customer to believe in your site more and most times to purchase from you.

But the content that is designed to help needs to span from the beginner to the expert consumer. Nothing can be too redundant or advanced, but just throwing up a few frequently asked questions isn't going to cut it. You want to shower the helpful content and make it easy to find, even located on its own page or on the page it most relates too.

Best way to do this, either look at your content and products from a newbie point of view or if you can't grab someone who doesn't work with those products ( like a family member or friend ) have them take a look and ask them what they get and what they don't. Ask them if they had to come up with x amount of questions, what would they be. Go from them, you can really get a great feel of how users are viewing your site this way.

Hope this helps!

I'd investigate the amount of quality content as opposed to the DA since I have a few sites with DAs lower than 20, especially with the drop that happened before thanksgiving. However, my domains lack backlinks but have more quality content than every single competitor out there in our niche, this in my opinion is google's flaw, using backlinks as the major deciding factor of DA is a big mistake and subjected to much manipulation, such sadness, ( little doge humor ).

You never know how active the domain in question is, and if they have the quality content, you could safely land a nice backlink on a site that will become the authority in their niche causing you to also get a boost.

Like the above post mentions, SEO hat should come off unless you see some sloppy work that will continue to hold a site back. Or you could use the highlighting of said sloppy work, add some corrections and secure that backlink for years to come at the same time helping that site raise their DA in general.

It's time we stop just being focused on ourselves and start lending hands across the net, building backlinks yes, but lasting networks as well.

We're all in this together, let's act like it! This community is a great example of what is lacking in the overall web in general. We are the change.

Thanks for this, it's been rather helpful, although the example I gave for shoes was just an example. The site currently I'm working on is all about products, and as a benefit to our users we've created further info pages for each product about cleaning and repair. As much as I do see your reasoning for structure to be Services > items   It's strongly a focus to have the products be at the forefront of this and the info about the products such as cleaning / repair inside as a subpage, since they wouldn't mind ranking for each product as well ranking for the cleaning  and the repair of each of those products as well.

So with this extra bit of info, would you recommend the structure from your comment still?

The way we're doing things on the redesign is, still sticking to the shoe example, if we sold shoes, boots and sandals, and someone went to dress shoe cleaning, we'd structure like: site.com/shoes/dress-shoes/cleaning

A more generic way for this same issue ( without the shoe example ) for cleaning information section for a particular product:

site.com/parent-category(Big keyword)/(secondary big keyword)subcategory-item/(longtail for info related pages)subcategory items cleaning

So let's say I have a parent page for shoes, and I have subpages for dress shoes, work shoes, play shoes, then inside each of those pages I have dress shoe cleaning, dress shoe repair, same for work and play shoes.

Would it be ok to use h1 tags like this:

Shoes > Dress Shoes  > Dress Shoe Cleaning

Dress Shoe Repair

Work Shoes  >  Work Shoe Cleaning

Work Shoe Repair

Play Shoes   >   Play Shoe Cleaning

Play Shoe Repair

Would these be considered duplicate h1 tags since cleaning and repair are used for each subpage? In certain niche companies, it's rather difficult to use synonyms for keywords.

Or is it ok to just keep things simple and use Shoes > Dress Shoes > Cleaning and so on? Especially since we have urls and breadcrumbs that are structured nicely using keywords, for this example both breadcrumbs and urls read like sitename.com/shoes/dress-shoes/cleaning.

Any advice?

This is a good answer, but the pages that the bigcommerce tags appear on with the blog posts, isn't editable , it's just aggregating the blog posts based on tags like you said, not sure how to place that nofollow tag on just those tag pages.

Almost seems like they shouldn't be an issue but are because of how bigcommerce is handling this tag process.

I don't want to put the nofollow tag on the blog posts themselves, since I want that content index so it can rank, so still kinda stuck between a tag and a hard place.

Curious why moz would pick up our blog tags as causing duplicate content, when each blog has a rel canonical tag pointing to either the blog post itself and on the tag pages points to the blog as a whole.

Kinda want to get rid of the tags in general now, but also feel they can add some extra value to UX later on when we have many more blog posts.

Curious if anyone knows a way around this or even a best solution practice when faced with such odd issues?

I can see why the duplicate content would happen, but when grouping content into categories?

So far I've gathered that backlinks are really king, however you can't get good backlinks without well written content that serves a purpose. As well you can't do a great job with that content and not keep a good user experience, since why would anyone want to backlink to content that can be helpful if you squint an eye and suffer a few scrolling cramps.

So how would you rank user experience in the everlasting war of SEO for Google?

With this in mind, why would using bootstrap resources pose a problem? I've seen it could add issue to pageload times, however seems minifying could easily solve that. I personally enjoy the use of Bootstrap since it's very easy on the eyes and can have real positive effects when a user looks at content on such a framework.

So I have a site that operates in a very niche industry, reading all I can about building backlink, I've come out of the walls of text with a few tidbits, however they're not very helpful still, since the playing field is so small.

Looking at manufacturer's sites, finding broken links or typos even, pointing them out in hopes for backlinks only goes so far.

Guest blogging seems to have reached it's climax and is slowly rounding the toilet.

They're active in social media, but due to the niche market, a few likes is the best that can happen.

So most efforts these days are around creating helpful resources for users related to the products they sell.

What other ways would you suggest looking into for building meaningful backlinks with other sites?

In these niche markets, it seems very daunting to say the least, while competitors use their own sister sites for some backlinks, this site doesn't have any sister sites.

What has been some beneficial backlink tactics you've employed for niche market sites?

Thank you for responding, again wasn't upset, but was scratching my head as to the various factors that represent the overall DA score. Thanks for schooling me further and have a great weekend.

Now I know & knowing is half the battle...

This still doesn't explain why I read that the indexing was less than desirable this time around and then saw a drop in DA ( BY 10 Points! ) While I've improved the SEO of our site, now I'm reading the indexing went great and the Drop in DA is basically our fault. Not sure what's going on, but still, doesn't make much sense, as I've seen half of my backlinks drop from being shown but have verified them still being there, manually.

So even in regards to the above mentioned, seems we're missing data that used to be there, and that this is the result of the drop. Bigger sites didn't see a drop least in regards to sites like EPA and BBB, however the smaller sites did see a drop in DA.

Just trying to understand all of this correctly and not speculate, can you bring me up to speed on what I may be misunderstanding?

Thank you

Good idea, I did forget to mention I was linking each section's h3 title to the page I got the info from. Thanks for the reply.