Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Duplicate page content or duplicate page titles?

The URL Structure is ok.

Hey Donnie,

Yes, from a pure link building standpoint commenting on blogs is worthless (in most cases).

However, the best way to get links is to have other bloggers notice you. There is no better way to be noticed than by commenting on blogs. The owner needs to approve the comment and more often than not they visit your site to see what you're all about before approving.

So, no those links with your name as the anchor text pass no juice to your site but, the potential of another blogger's link will. If the blogger shows up at your site and sees interesting content, he will link.

NOTE: Be sure that your comments are thoughtful and they add to the conversation.

Another Note: Yes, people do click on your link, if and only if, you are commenting in a thoughtful and interesting way.

AshJez,

Webfeat and EGOL make a centralized point in their responses and it has to do with content and effort.

Theo points out that no one tool is going to be your key to success.

Further, they all made the point that SEO is a business and requires a concerted effort on many fronts to get found at a high level and then convert search into dollars.

Probably the most important point is that SEO is a business of constant trial and error. Tools can help you to an extent but, success has more to do with the magician as opposed to the wand.

As you move ahead you'll find yourself using all sorts of tools on a regular basis. Most of the people in this forum have tools constantly running as browser add-ons and such that are giving them a never ending supply of metrics as they cruise the web.

What good are those metrics all compiled in a spreadsheet or in one's head if they aren't being put to work in a practical manor every day.

The only way to learn at this stage is to do. Preparing to do, wanting to do, wishing to do, is not doing.

**What you need, is to write stuff. **

The easiest way to get found AT ANY POINT IN YOUR SEM CAREER is to have more good content than your competitors.

Before I knew about any of the tools available, I would keep a running list of possible topics. Don't even think of them as keywords at this point. Just make sure that they are relevant and useful to readers.

It's easy to get lost in Google Keyword Tool for days at a time. Tap into your friends and family at first.

Send a simple email to a few people and ask them what they would type into google if they were searching for "whatever it is you do".

I do this now, you would be amazed at the simple and effective keywords actual humans will give you. Absolute Gold. I got a long tail keyword a few months ago from a guy I hadn't seen in years that is delivering my client over 120 visits per day.

I never ever would have though of it as a keyword. Now Google shows it as a suggested word when someone begins to type it's root into the search box.

**The best topics are simple, they pose the question and provide an informed answer. **

Keep loading up the site with simple content and then you can start using tools.

You would have to be in a really tough niche if you can't get at least a few visits per day with 20,000 words on your site. That may sound like a lot of words but many of the people in this forum have hundreds of thousands of words on their site, even millions.

Think about these words as built up equity. Every time you post an article, your building a little more equity in your site and in your brand.

Words are an investment. If you were a fisherman would you want a bigger net or a smaller one? Words are your net.

Write something as OFTEN as you can.

Now, once you start to build more and more equity, starting in a tight niche and expending slowly, now you can circle back and start paying more attention to tools.

Monitor google analytics each day to see what worked:

• what type of modifier worked better than others - does adding a year or a locale to your article title work?

• what type of writing worked better, highly technical or conversational

• what length of article worked better

• what keyword density worked better (don't concern yourself too much with this)

Different niches will require different things.

Once you've done enough to get a little search traffic, expand on the post that worked, write a similar post about a slightly different topic.

Basically, throw some stuff at the wall and see what sticks.

A tool like SEOMoz may not be your answer.... yet... but, it will be once you have something to monitor!

I doubt that will be an "Endorsed Answer" but, I also doubt that Rand himself would ask for your last dollar with hardly anything to monitor or the know how to monitor it. You can get the know how for free on this site.

Not familiar with the exact study but, if this type of thing interests you it would make sense to follow Derek Halpern at: socialtriggers.com.

Also Jay Baer's convinceandconvert.com.

Hi echo1,

The Bing mobile website will only show your local results on a mobile browser when someone searches Bing on a mobile device and clicks your result.

That's nothing more than a search result. It's clunky and very limited.

If you're using wordpress for instance you can simply use a plugin that displays your site in a mobile browser friendly version. Your customization will only be limited by the customization you have on your main site, to an extent.

Dependent on what type of platform you use, there are numerous ways to create a mobile version.

What is your site platform?

Well, as with many things, there is a time and a place.

Buddypress has very, very good uses.

As far as mini sites the time was long ago!

KW rich urls can be great but, internet users are getting savvy and they don't do as well as they used to for search or click through rates.

Wish you the best!

Hey mrupp44,

Good luck with the blog. Nice choice using wordpress.

* When I read an article that would be particuarly beneficial for my visitors can i post or share that on MY blog (giving the author the credit of course) without google thinking its duplicate content?

Yes, you can but, why not create your own unique article, adding your thoughts and personal insights and link back the article you like? Obviously you don't want to plagiarize any other content but,  there is no topic that hasn't been written about before.

_* is there anything specific I need to do with my blog for google to "see" the new, fresh content that is being added to the site? _

Yes, use a good SEO Plugin that creates and submits sitemaps, which it appears as though you are. Wordpress SEO is a great plugin but, you need to set all your titles correctly.

You also want to sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap. Using Yoast WP SEO your sitemap would be:  /sitemap_index.xml

* I have seen "tagged" items at the bottom of some blogs. Is this important?

I would LOVE for someone to come back and give me a good reason why Tags are important at all. I used them for a long time and recently I completely dumped them on most of the blogs I run. Far less concern about duplicate content and crawl issues. Life is just easier now and rankings improve dramatically on the sites where I lost them. I am going to completely eliminate all tags shortly.

The beauty of wordpress is you can go back later when your site is very deep in terms of content and add them, just for navigation purposes. The other beauty is you can Perm 301 Redirect any "tag pages" with the best redirect plugin available: Pretty Links Lite

As opposed to tags at the bottom of a page try YARPP Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. Very handy plugin.

_* Some blogs will have a word or string of 2-3 words that are a link to a specific website. Does this help me or just them or just people reading the blog? _

If you are referring to the anchor text with a link that leads off your site to another site? Then they help both but they help the recipient a little more (usually).

Writing a very optimized and well worded article (written for readers not Search Engines) with a few resource links to VERY WELL RESPECTED pages in your niche will help your own optimization efforts and your readers will appreciate it too.

However, you do not want to write an article targeting Local Search and link outwards to another resource using the targeted keyword Local Search in the anchor text. That is cannibalization and it will not help you.

The key phrase is:

**All I know is articles I write need to be relevant to my site and interesting and ORIGINAL and of benefit to my site visitors. **

YOU GOT IT!!!

Hey Daniel,

There's absolutely no doubt that you will benefit immensely from having more content on one URL as opposed to having a network of lesser URLs.

Any incoming links will distribute juice among the entire site as opposed to just one site.

The structure you mentioned is very standard and very effective.

Further, the keyword rich url is not what it used to be particularly for Google, it is still a major factor for Yahoo but, this will most likely subside as well.

The benefit of concentrating efforts in one domain has been discussed at length here and top to bottom, the single URL is the choice.

Start with a very tight niche and begin building outward from that niche.

Not sure what your focus is but careful Categorization will satisfy your needs as well. (I assume you're using a blogging platform)

www.companyname.com/denver/things to do

as opposed to

www.companyname.com/things-to-do-in-denver

Both will work very well but, a category page can rank incredibly well if your seo settings are inline, which is the key.

Using a category page will make user navigation much easier as well.

Good luck!

Hi raybiswa,

Matt Cutts gave some insight on this.

I can not for the life of me, dig it up, I believe it was a video. The topic was either affiliate links or ratio of advertising to content or maybe reviews? Sorry!

The basis of the advice was the same as always great content, more content, typical stuff.

But, then he gave a little tidbit that I have found vitally important when dealing with affiliate marketing.

He made a statement that said as long as you're "giving visitors choices, you'll be fine".

I tested this, I had a pretty established page that was ranking very well and by chance it had 3 affiliate links at the bottom to 3 different partner stores.

For fun, I deleted two of them.

The page dropped SIGNIFICANTLY, I wasn't using SEOMoz tools at the time but, traffic dipped from 60-80 visits per day to less than 10.

I left it for about a month and it never regained the ranking, until, I added the two options back to the page.

It came back to previous levels within 2 weeks.

So, give visitors options, use real reviews, watch your ratio of content to aff links and that works fine for me.

Also, I have a mini site that deals with the sale of tickets. There are only a couple ticket providers available so this method works for me.

At the bottom of each event description I use a link to a single page that has links to the 3 main providers. I no index and no follow that page with the aff links. That seems to work very well and only a small percentage of click throughs seem to be lost, not having the aff links on every page is well worth the slight loss in the click through transition.

I hope this tidbit helps you out.

I also hope that you weren't asking about YOU being the sales page and having affiliates pointing links at you! If so, I completely misunderstood! And that is a totally different topic!

The ones coming from Portland Oregon are a form of scraper many coming from:

Ian Duggan,

IP 204.11.219.89

21 Productions

IP 204.11.219.96

Eric Fleischman

IP 204.11.219.87

You will also see some from forex-ninjas, these are simply referral spam, they're trying to get you to visit the url and essentially create a visit.

If you're using Wordpress install a plugin called IP Filter and place these IP's in to be filtered. This will take care of the ninjas and the others.

204.11.219.*

176.65.158.36

204.11.219.88

204.11.219.95

204.11.219.92

If you block all those IPs the visits will stop, that is what I have found.

Hi dan1el,

I'm not surprised you're not getting more action with this question!

Far too broad and an impossible question to answer with the info given. I was in your shoes 1.25 years ago and it is a long windy road to this Holy Grail, I believe it is one of those journeys that never actually ends.

I would take the suggestion of the gentlemen above and read through SEOMoz Guide to SEO, I guess that will set you in the right direction.

But, as far as your search terms, there are a number of things you could do with the very terms you have listed. I wouldn't go after more than one on your home page, try at first going after one for each page/post.

best organic beauty products,  organic health and beauty products,  organic beauty product reviews,  certified organic beauty products,  all natural beauty products,  organic natural beauty products,  online organic beauty products

My point there is that those are all unique keywords that are simple and common variations of your two main KW's. Each one of them should be considered for targeting, assuming they get any traffic at all I haven't checked.

Don't be a snob about choosing KWs at this point in your young career that only have thousands of searches, master the easy ones and then you can go take on the big boys once your link profile exists.

Do you have a blogging platform integrated in your ecommerce site? If the answer is no, then go and rethink your strategy. A blog will be a must.

If you don't have words on your page, Google has no idea what you are talking about, it's smart but not that smart. By words I mean a lot of words.

My first order of business when I got started was testing my willingness to write content. If you can't / or won't write content then you are dead right here, unless you have a budget for PPC advertising or professional writers.

It sounds like you are passionate about the topic so my guess is, you'll be ok.

My suggestion as an initial exercise would be to pick a keyword from the list and see if you can bang out 600++ words on the topic without sounding repetitive or like you're wondering.

I'm not going to suggest how you write it, if your goal is SEO, then write a post or a page and run it through the On Page Scorecard in SEOMoz when you're done.

The scorecard will tell you where you blew it and will provide a baseline from which to begin learning what you can do on page to begin getting found.

Keep writing content and back checking against the score card until you are good.

The point is if you can't write content there is no point to study off page seo or link building or local or anything. Just write it!

That is phase 1 and if anyone has a different suggestion that our friend will understand please, do share!

AshJez,

Webfeat and EGOL make a centralized point in their responses and it has to do with content and effort.

Theo points out that no one tool is going to be your key to success.

Further, they all made the point that SEO is a business and requires a concerted effort on many fronts to get found at a high level and then convert search into dollars.

Probably the most important point is that SEO is a business of constant trial and error. Tools can help you to an extent but, success has more to do with the magician as opposed to the wand.

As you move ahead you'll find yourself using all sorts of tools on a regular basis. Most of the people in this forum have tools constantly running as browser add-ons and such that are giving them a never ending supply of metrics as they cruise the web.

What good are those metrics all compiled in a spreadsheet or in one's head if they aren't being put to work in a practical manor every day.

The only way to learn at this stage is to do. Preparing to do, wanting to do, wishing to do, is not doing.

**What you need, is to write stuff. **

The easiest way to get found AT ANY POINT IN YOUR SEM CAREER is to have more good content than your competitors.

Before I knew about any of the tools available, I would keep a running list of possible topics. Don't even think of them as keywords at this point. Just make sure that they are relevant and useful to readers.

It's easy to get lost in Google Keyword Tool for days at a time. Tap into your friends and family at first.

Send a simple email to a few people and ask them what they would type into google if they were searching for "whatever it is you do".

I do this now, you would be amazed at the simple and effective keywords actual humans will give you. Absolute Gold. I got a long tail keyword a few months ago from a guy I hadn't seen in years that is delivering my client over 120 visits per day.

I never ever would have though of it as a keyword. Now Google shows it as a suggested word when someone begins to type it's root into the search box.

**The best topics are simple, they pose the question and provide an informed answer. **

Keep loading up the site with simple content and then you can start using tools.

You would have to be in a really tough niche if you can't get at least a few visits per day with 20,000 words on your site. That may sound like a lot of words but many of the people in this forum have hundreds of thousands of words on their site, even millions.

Think about these words as built up equity. Every time you post an article, your building a little more equity in your site and in your brand.

Words are an investment. If you were a fisherman would you want a bigger net or a smaller one? Words are your net.

Write something as OFTEN as you can.

Now, once you start to build more and more equity, starting in a tight niche and expending slowly, now you can circle back and start paying more attention to tools.

Monitor google analytics each day to see what worked:

• what type of modifier worked better than others - does adding a year or a locale to your article title work?

• what type of writing worked better, highly technical or conversational

• what length of article worked better

• what keyword density worked better (don't concern yourself too much with this)

Different niches will require different things.

Once you've done enough to get a little search traffic, expand on the post that worked, write a similar post about a slightly different topic.

Basically, throw some stuff at the wall and see what sticks.

A tool like SEOMoz may not be your answer.... yet... but, it will be once you have something to monitor!

I doubt that will be an "Endorsed Answer" but, I also doubt that Rand himself would ask for your last dollar with hardly anything to monitor or the know how to monitor it. You can get the know how for free on this site.

Hey Daniel,

There's absolutely no doubt that you will benefit immensely from having more content on one URL as opposed to having a network of lesser URLs.

Any incoming links will distribute juice among the entire site as opposed to just one site.

The structure you mentioned is very standard and very effective.

Further, the keyword rich url is not what it used to be particularly for Google, it is still a major factor for Yahoo but, this will most likely subside as well.

The benefit of concentrating efforts in one domain has been discussed at length here and top to bottom, the single URL is the choice.

Start with a very tight niche and begin building outward from that niche.

Not sure what your focus is but careful Categorization will satisfy your needs as well. (I assume you're using a blogging platform)

www.companyname.com/denver/things to do

as opposed to

www.companyname.com/things-to-do-in-denver

Both will work very well but, a category page can rank incredibly well if your seo settings are inline, which is the key.

Using a category page will make user navigation much easier as well.

Good luck!

Hey funktiongolf,

I do a TON of golf marketing so I found this interesting!

As Tom Waite said adding an image in the BG won't do much of anything for you.

But, adding alt tags to images in general IS a good practice:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/image-seo-basics-whiteboard-friday

Right there in the beginning of that video you'll see the info on this. You can look around anywhere and you'll find the same info.

Your site is very image heavy, I assume all your images are Alt tagged correctly? If that is an issue on your On Page Score Card then you may not?

Properly alt tagging images, naming images properly, and adding text around images (where you can) will help in Image searches as well.

Also- With a content light site, you'll need a ton of back links. There a bunch of Golf Directories and I have found that people actually use them as a resource, unlike many other directories.

ShiveS,

Hope you don't mind me barging in here.

H1 tags, the value of conspicuously placing your keyword in H1 tags throughout the page is very questionable in terms of actual value.

However there is more to on page than just "Algorithm SEO Value" If your visible post or page title is tagged H1, which by default usually is tagged H1. Then you want your visitor to definitely see the targeted keyword or a synonym at the very least. **Bounce rate and time on page is of exceptional value to the major search engines. **

If you're page title "visible title" in the SERPs is the same or VERY similar to what the visitor sees when they land, a visitor is going to be a happier visitor when they arrive, happy visitors hang around longer and they interact more.

Alt tags, there is absolutely no doubt that a post or page that has images or info-graphics properly alt tagged will do better than a straight text block of text (all other things being equal) again, both for the visitor and for the SE to know what the essence of the article is.

Link Titles, that sounds like an off page element? If you mean anchor text, do you mean the anchor text of the "Interlinks" around your site, ie the links on your site that point back to the page in question, I can't imagine any reason in the world why those pointing links/anchor text would not be highly relevant to the destination page.

If you mean the anchor text on the page in question pointing to other pages on your site, again, I can;t imagine any SEO or Visitor value reason why anyone would place the Target Keyword on page A as the link anchor text to unrelated page B?

If you think there may be a problem with On Page being dead, try this:

Write the best article you can about your topic, really "the best" relevant, readable, resourceful, long and make the Title something completely different, do not add any images, or alt tag images incorrectly even, and do not point any links anywhere back to that page, and do not point any resource links off the page.

So, the article is about Laptops and the Page Title is Kitty Litter. The image is a graphic about the top 10 laptops, and it is alt tagged "Kitty Litter". No links anywhere.

You tell me how that page will rank, then wait patiently for 60 days and do all the On Page stuff you would normally do.

Which way do you think the page will rank better.

On Page SEO is NOT Dead.

Hey dan1el,

Publishing content in your news area may work. No clue what type of platform you're using?

You may have the ability to establish a Wordpress Blog in a sub-directory, check with host. Being new, I would say that WP is the way to go, many simple plugins for SEO and just about everything else.

But, the important thing to understand is this:

The KW = Natural Beauty Products - should have its own page dedicated to it.

The KW = Organic Beauty Products - should have its own page dedicated to it

The KW = Organic Beauty Product Reviews - should have its own

If you have optimized your home page for the term "Natural Beauty Products" then on the different page that targets "Organic Beauty Products" should have a link within the content in anchor text "Natural Beauty Products" that points to the home page that is optimized for the term in the anchor text.

With one caveat, customarily, the home page will not have a ton of resource value to visitors and links should be partly for link structure and MOSTLY for editorial value to the reader.

It is very rare that you will find any major sites, blogs, or whatever that have links within the body of text that aim at the home page.

As a matter of fact, I can't even think of an instance where I have ever done it or would? It just seems weird?

But, yes the anchor text of the link should be the keyword that is targeted on the destination page.

Hope that helps, even though I wandered off a bit!!!

Good Luck!

As a newbie, I would seriously consider making use of Wordpress, in my opinion you will be at a significant SEO disadvantage not using WP. That may get some argument from the community but...look at the profiles of the guys that know their stuff in this forum and you will find their own sites are built on WP.

Hey mrupp44,

Good luck with the blog. Nice choice using wordpress.

* When I read an article that would be particuarly beneficial for my visitors can i post or share that on MY blog (giving the author the credit of course) without google thinking its duplicate content?

Yes, you can but, why not create your own unique article, adding your thoughts and personal insights and link back the article you like? Obviously you don't want to plagiarize any other content but,  there is no topic that hasn't been written about before.

_* is there anything specific I need to do with my blog for google to "see" the new, fresh content that is being added to the site? _

Yes, use a good SEO Plugin that creates and submits sitemaps, which it appears as though you are. Wordpress SEO is a great plugin but, you need to set all your titles correctly.

You also want to sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap. Using Yoast WP SEO your sitemap would be:  /sitemap_index.xml

* I have seen "tagged" items at the bottom of some blogs. Is this important?

I would LOVE for someone to come back and give me a good reason why Tags are important at all. I used them for a long time and recently I completely dumped them on most of the blogs I run. Far less concern about duplicate content and crawl issues. Life is just easier now and rankings improve dramatically on the sites where I lost them. I am going to completely eliminate all tags shortly.

The beauty of wordpress is you can go back later when your site is very deep in terms of content and add them, just for navigation purposes. The other beauty is you can Perm 301 Redirect any "tag pages" with the best redirect plugin available: Pretty Links Lite

As opposed to tags at the bottom of a page try YARPP Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. Very handy plugin.

_* Some blogs will have a word or string of 2-3 words that are a link to a specific website. Does this help me or just them or just people reading the blog? _

If you are referring to the anchor text with a link that leads off your site to another site? Then they help both but they help the recipient a little more (usually).

Writing a very optimized and well worded article (written for readers not Search Engines) with a few resource links to VERY WELL RESPECTED pages in your niche will help your own optimization efforts and your readers will appreciate it too.

However, you do not want to write an article targeting Local Search and link outwards to another resource using the targeted keyword Local Search in the anchor text. That is cannibalization and it will not help you.

The key phrase is:

**All I know is articles I write need to be relevant to my site and interesting and ORIGINAL and of benefit to my site visitors. **

YOU GOT IT!!!

Good Morning Moz Community,

I have a local SEO/regional SEO question. I apologize if this question is duplicated from another area on this forum but, a query of the term Regional SEO showed no results, as did similar queries.

Please preference this entire question with "Knowing what we know about the most recent changes to local search" I know what has worked in the past, my concern is Now.

Working with a heavily regulated client that is regional, mostly East Coast US. They are in Financial Services and state licensing is a requirement.

They are licensed in 15 states. Obviously, it would look foolish, in this day in age, to Title Tag individual pages with local modifiers and have numerous pages covering a similar topic with not much difference than localized modifiers in front of the keyword.

I've never found that SE's can understand broad regional terms such as New England or Mid Atlantic or Southeast or Northeast, if someone knows different please share. Aside from an exact match search.

The client does have 7 offices in various states.

Perfectly matching and consistent listings in G Places, Bing Local and Yahoo Local was step one and all their locations are now in those services and there are many more smaller local citation listings are in the works. We have also successfully implemented a plan to generate great reviews from actual customers, for each location, they're receiving a few a day right now.

Their local places listings, where they have physical locations, are doing very well but:

1. What would the community's suggestion be on generating more targeted traffic in the 8 states where they have no physical location?

2. The client wants to begin creating smaller blogs that are highly localized to the states and major population centers that they do not have a physical location in. There is an open check book to dedicate to this effort however, I do a lot of work in this industry so I want to offer the best possible, most up to date advice, my concern is that these efforts will have two results:

a. be obscured by the ”7 pack" by  companies with local brick and mortar

b. would detract from the equity built in their existing blog by generating content in other domains, I would prefer to continue growing the main blog.

3. As a follow up, it has been documented that Google is now using the same algorithm for local, personal and personalized, that being the case, is there any value in building links to you Places page? Can you optimize your Places page by using the same off site techniques as you would traditionally?

Sorry to kill you with such a long question on a Sunday

Hello dan1el,

If you were to lay out your page correctly, you should easily be able to use a content rich, search grabbing page as a great way to minimize your bounce rate.

They land on an article and you have a very well placed: "VIEW ALL OF OUR AWESOME NATURAL BEAUTY PRODUCTS HERE" button, image, text add, whatever, they will click it, if that's what they're looking for.

I use this all the time, I build entire ecommerce sites in Wordpress.

To your last question: Absolutely.

The ones coming from Portland Oregon are a form of scraper many coming from:

Ian Duggan,

IP 204.11.219.89

21 Productions

IP 204.11.219.96

Eric Fleischman

IP 204.11.219.87

You will also see some from forex-ninjas, these are simply referral spam, they're trying to get you to visit the url and essentially create a visit.

If you're using Wordpress install a plugin called IP Filter and place these IP's in to be filtered. This will take care of the ninjas and the others.

204.11.219.*

176.65.158.36

204.11.219.88

204.11.219.95

204.11.219.92

If you block all those IPs the visits will stop, that is what I have found.