Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Max -

This is a question that we get asked quite often. Let me refer you to these two pages:

What is Domain Authority - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain-authority

What is Page Authority - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/page-authority

Basically, DA is the strength of the whole domain, based off of links. PA is the strength of the page and likeliness for it to rank according to links. If the page has a bunch of links to it, yet the overall site does not have many more links, the PA of that page will be higher than the DA of the entire site.

Hope this helps.

I totally agree with you that affiliate links should not help rankings and many mention that they should always be nofollowed, though a lot of people don't (I probably have some followed affiliate links out there somewhere on the Internet).

Philosophically I am opposed to affiliate links helping the target site rank. I've also seen some sites get into trouble for having affiliates link with followed links, so I'd be careful of it myself if i was running an affiliate program.

Hi Jay! Great question here.

First of all, kudos to you for looking to kill duplicate content with fire. As a marketer but foremost a writer, I am all about great writing and not doing this duplicated/spun stuff to try to rank. It won't convert anyways.

I put out a call to my followers on Twitter and one of them recommended https://www.killduplicate.com/en. I haven't personally used it, but give it a shot! It comes highly recommended.

Hope that's helpful!

John

No, DA is how well the pages on the website may rank. It is domain specific. PA is how well the individual page may rank, irregardless of DA. We all know that pages on a more trusted site have a better chance of ranking higher for more competitive terms.

Your first example is correct. You could have a PA of 60 and a DA of 10 on a site.

I don't think I agree with your second one though. Page metrics are still better correlated with rankings than domain metrics. It would be better to have a link on a high PA page than a high DA domain, though sites with a higher DA will often have more pages with higher DA.

But with your two, I would say that a DA70/PA30 is better than a DA35/PA40, because a PA30 is not too much less than a PA40, but that DA is powerful.

Hey Joseph -

Good question here. It's pretty impossible to say what percentage better a subfolder (/blog/) is than a subdomain (blog.mycompany.com), but there have been many case studies done over the years that it is better for SEO overall. At my old company, we moved from a subdomain to a subfolder and sorted out some technology (went to WordPress from TypePad), usability, and internal linking issues. Over the course of about 3 months we saw a great (200%+) increase in traffic. BUT, we also had a lot of content that should have been ranking, were cranking up the quality and quantity of content we put on there, and actively improving our site's overall SEO. These results not typical, your mileage may vary, etc.

I think in your case, I would say that you need to weigh the pros and cons of the effort required to make this work technically with the focus on creating amazing content that gets shared and linked to. I think often we focus too much on smaller technical things like subfolder v subdomain, while neglecting the real reason we are blogging/creating content (to build an audience).

I don't necessarily think this is a make it or break it thing for you, but if you have the chance to put it on a subfolder and it's not too challenging technically (I'm not familiar with the ins-and-outs of this with HubSpot), I'd recommend a subfolder like mycompany.com/blog/

Good luck!

Hey Ricky -

Great question that I think a lot of small businesses and companies deal with. While on the one hand Google's guidelines say "Do not ever pay for a link", that gets really fuzzy in instances like local business bureaus (where you pay a membership fee and happen to get a link on their site), scholarships (where you're giving money and happen to get a link), and a lot more. Even the old Yahoo directory (retired in 2014 or so) was $300 a year and was followed and everyone had it. So the question is a lot more nuanced than "should I or shouldn't I?"

In this case, I would shy away from this specific instance simply because of the following:

• They are actually advertising different types of links depending on what you pay. They also don't say where the additional links for the higher price will go.
• They're willing to link deep for more money. This is a red flag.
• Their WHOis info is private. Not a good sign for an above-the-board company.
• They have another directory on this same IP. If that one got hit, so would this one.
• They may have a DA of 56, but if you look at their links they're (almost) all comment links that were likely built with an automated tool.

All of these are red flags to me. The fact that it is topically relevant to your site is a good thing, but in my opinion the bad definitely outweighs the good.

Spend your money creating things and then outreaching them to get the links that will actually build your business.

John

Hi Terrysun -

It's a good question to be sure. Why not have separate pages targeted at the different keywords? Since you have both iOS and Android apps, your homepage can be targeted at [Property Inspection Software] and then you can use site.com/ios-property-inspection-app and site.com/android-property-inspection-app to rank for those specific keywords. If you want, then have a page a level higher at site.com/property-inspection-app to target that specific keyword.

Hope this helps!

Hi Gina -

Great questions here. Some of these you should worry about, others are just notices and not necessarily an issue.

Fix the 4XX errors if those pages have links, or have a 404 page that redirects users. 404s are not always bad, but if the user isn't supposed to end up there (ie your product page is expired), then redirect.

Don't worry about the duplicated meta descriptions on archive pages, but do think about if these pages are needed. Ayima had a good post on pagination recently - http://www.ayima.com/seo-knowledge/conquering-pagination-guide.html

Same as above with the title tags on paginated archives.

Rel-canonicals are fine. Once again, just notices that they are there.

Did you implement those 301s? Moz notifies you of them because they might pass less link equity than straight links, but 301s are not bad.

What do you mean by "These are blog articles but only some of the posts. Don’t know why we are generating this for some and not all. And half of them are for the exact same page so there are really only 4 originals on this list. The others are dupes." It seems that this may have been implemented manually on your side, though I don't know how All In One SEO Pack handles it (I use Yoast).

I'm with EGOL on this one. It has to be a local ranking, as I am in Denver and don't see them in the top 100 for the [custom sign] query (I used to work in that space, actually). I see local sites and way down in deep pages I see random sign companies in random cities.

I bet all of the following is coming into play, beyond what EGOL said:

• Results are likely personalized to you since you have obviously been watching this site and been to it, I would guess, more than a few times.
• Localized results and they have citations squared away well. Check for local listings etc to see if they have those. If they're hyperlocal and you're local, this would explain a ton.

I do see one redirected domain into this one, so I actually wonder if they are doing something like that (buy dead domains with links, redirect them in) that is kind of undercover, if you will, but really works. Could be something else to investigate.

Hope that helps.

Hey Graeme -

Good questions here. I think there is something else going on with your page than over-optimization, though you could definitely remove some mentions of your keyword in that top chunk of text. Any idea if some of your competitors have done anything to move up?

I checked your page's cache and it hasn't been re-cached since November 20th, which surprises me. I checked your robots.txt and there's nothing there that causes alarm. Have you made any other changes to your page?

A few things I'd also think about on this page and your site:

• Bulk up pages like https://www.hurtlegear.com.au/bmw/ as that should be able to rank for some head keywords
• On this /s1000rr/ page, remove the links from the images and rely on the anchor text link. Reducing unnecessary internal links like this has been shown to help rankings
• You could expose these model pages in your HTML sitemap. They're currently 3-4 clicks from the homepage, and bringing them up in your hierarchy could help get them crawled more.

Good luck!

I love this question, Adriaan. It's one that a lot of people have asked over the years and that a lot of people have had to deal with over time especially with ecommerce sites like those you work on.

As you well know, there are multiple ways to handle duplicate content:

1. The way you are proposing, which is moving to a static URL structure that always keeps the same order
2. A web of canonicals like you seem to have set up (and it sounds like you have it set up correctly)
3. The whack-a-mole approach of periodically looking for duplicate content and implementing redirects, which can lead to further issues with internal redirects. This is not a good scalable option.

SEO is all about processes. If you have a canonical process that is working for you and has been scalable (eg you are not manually specifying the URL for each new category created, which is probably done when the merchandising team or feeds update the site), that works to a certain extent.

However, this is like treating a bunch of cuts on your hands with bandaids but not dealing with the fact that a) you only have so much space on your hands and can only apply so many bandaids, and b) that you're still getting cuts on your hands.

I prefer to deal with the root of the issue, which in your case is that you can have multiple URLs targeting the same terms based on the user's (or Googlebot's!) crawl path on your site. I am assuming that you are only putting the canonicals in your XML and HTML sitemaps, by the way?

If I were you, this is how I would tackle your problem:

1. Make sure you are only putting in the canonical URLs to your XML sitemaps. Start here.

2. Do a full crawl of your site and pull all the URLs that are canonicaling elsewhere. Then get your log files and see how much time the search engines are spending on these canonical'd URLs.

3. Also check to see that Google is indeed respecting all of your canonicals! At this scale of canonicals, I'd expect that they are semi-often not respecting them and you are still dealing with duplicate content issues. But again, that's just a hunch I have.

4. Make a decision from there, off of discussions with your engineers/designers/etc about how much work is involved, about if you think it's worthwhile to make the change.

I am **always **a fan of eliminating pages that are canonical'd and not serving a purpose (example: a PPC landing page might be canonical'd and noindexed, and you don't want to remove that page). My suspicion in your case, as well, is that having /brand/mens won't convert any differently from /mens/brand.

At the end of the day, you need to decide how you want your site organized and if your customers (the people buying things on the site) prefer to shop by brand or by gender/sport/whatever. This will help you decide what way to architect your URLs and your site's flow.

Hope that helps!

John

Hey Vahid -

A few questions for you:

1. Have you seen a drop in traffic to either?
2. When you search the brand name in Google, does the correct title appear?

The site: command is notoriously misleading a lot of the time, so much so that some Googlers have hinted that it might be going away. I also don't read your language so I can't really investigate too much further other than looking at canonicals and such and they all seem correct.

I wouldn't worry about it too much. If you have the same content on both, then you should look into making that unique to each site, and maybe change the page title on the wrong one to see if that helps.