Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Good Morning!

Is your old website in WordPress? If you are considering building a new website in WordPress, I PERSONALLY would just as soon start building a responsive theme. Or even put a responsive child theme on individual pages to hold its place until you have something ready.

We don't totally know how much any of these algo updates from Google impact us until after the fact. Everything is speculation until it actually launches, Hindsight is 20/20. You will also see impact from making changes to your layout, website organization, etc.

Making your website responsive means the least amount of change overall. Its very hard to answer and give suggestions on what to do with another persons website, especially without having looked at the site at all. There are so many things to take into account, such as timeline for a complete overhaul, the impact of a incomplete mobile site on sales etc.

So, assuming you have done the necessary research before hand, for example this Moz article on mobile Google makes it pretty clear that it is not going to hurt your desktop rankings, so before any panic sets in, I sincerely believe in checking the data and making sure its worth the investment.

For example if only 2% of your traffic is coming from mobile, and there don't seems to be many conversions from that, I personally would take my time finding the perfect solution, and hold out until everything could be made responsive.

Also based on this website you sent, I fear it will end up being a lot more work than it appears. I HAVE NEVER USED IT, but based on my 10+ years in graphics/web design, conversion tools generally are not as effective as they appear, although some work very well.

In conclusion, look at your mobile traffic and conversions. Look at what people are using mobile for, are they simply getting a phone number? Then a Google + Business Page can help serve the same purpose while you start the new site. Are they making purchases? Then maybe it would be worth looking into the solution they sent simply to keep revenue. If mobile isn't incredibly influential to your overall web presence, I would just hold out and do it right. Measure twice, cut once.

Hope this helps!

Thank you! I just wasn't sure if I was losing my mind or not!

Well, that's what I had thought initially, but then it says "Add or Manage Page Grades" which I took to mean I could state I was trying to rank for this keyword on this page etc.

If you are using a CMS, Content Management System, think of it as a database. When someone hits your website the CMS looks into its files and serves up the information to the browser, which is different than the older static websites. A true CMS will be able to determine what browser/device the individual is viewing from and then serve up the appropriate information.

If you have two separate domains however you may need to tell Google what's going on, i.e rel=”canonical”.  Not doing so may run trigger some duplicate content issues. However, having two different websites is perfectly acceptable by Google, just make sure you have the proper rel=”canonical” tags and you should be ok.

This one one of the benefits to Responsive templates within a CMS. It allows you to have one set of content, that alters depending on the browsing device.

Hey everybody,

I am unable to delete/manage the keywords in my on page optimization. I can select them, and I hit delete, and nothing happens. I've tried a few different browsers and everything, any thoughts?

Hey there,

I am in a similar situation and I have posted about it on these boards. If your company can afford it, it is probably in your best interest to just hold onto them. At the same time, as you stated, all this can change in an instant. Take .mobi for example, that was supposed to be the mobile browser extension, but clearly with responsive design, there isn't as much of a need for the .mobi in my opinion.

On the flip side, Google keeps doing more and more towards local, or so it seems. So having the domains in other countries, may become more beneficial. I have all of our extensions forwarding to our primary domains.

My personal opinion is the vanity domains aren't going to take off. Everybody was so excited with the .tv extension for example, but once people find a way to keep all of that, or display similar information on a .com it becomes useless. There used to be benefit to having a .org, and people realized it was being abused. Now the only other benefits are .edu and .gov, because there are restrictions to owning them.

If you can, keep them, it certainly doesn't hurt. Is it going to make or break your company by not having them? Probably not, but it could save you a headache later down the road.

Hope that helps.

SEO is no longer about strictly writing for Google. In fact, SEO has become more and more about PR and Marketing. So looking at your possible outcomes

1 Article:

• From an SEO perspective the further down the page, the lower the value. You would certainly have A LOT of keywords and a lot of content, but you may suffer from keyword cannibalism and end up not really optimizing for any one keyword. Potential for lots of linking, etc.
• From an end user perspective, if this wasn't a research paper on something I was incredibly passionate about, it would be hard to read.

10 Articles:

• From an SEO perspective your article isn't nearly as dense but you potentially gain 10 pages as opposed to one. That poses a link issue and makes the linking a little more difficult but very doable.
• From an end user perspective it drives me totally BANANAS when I have to keep clicking through an article after every 10 words. However, when done properly, and spaced out correctly, it feels just like turning the page.

Just my thoughts. I would lean toward the 10 articles, I think there is also more marketing potential there. Spacing it out, turning it into a 10 day release, etc.

I had a similar issue where my sitemap and my robots.txt didn't match properly and they were causing a slew of errors to show up. Everything falls under a crawler error but "should" clean itself up as its being indexed. I resubmitted an updated sitemap that matched my robots.txt and I have gotten rid of the errors.

Google also states that these errors don't directly hurt your ranking, but they can indirectly hurt because of user experience. You can always double check and see if the pages are being indexed by doing a "site:" search in google and checking if those pages exist.

Now, the errors are somewhat of a blessing. We had a design firm who redid our website and they had contracted an SEO "expert" to optimize the site before launch. They launched our website, and the next day I open up GWMT and our entire website was still under "noindex". The forgot to take the noindex from the dev site off of our main site.

Also I would consider just redirecting the thing content all together.

EDIT: And again Ryan sneaks in before me!!!!!!!!

Sounds good! That's what I was hoping for.

I was warned early on as the Disavow is a very very powerful tool and to use it as a final step, so I have been trying to be very strategic with my usage etc.

Thanks!

First off, I am incredibly excited about this tool.

Secondly, I have a slew of questions, but the ones that are lingering for me are as follows.

There are a few URLS that we used to control which are showing up in our list as spammy. The websites no longer exist as of roughly a week ago and I presume they still show up simply because of the last indexing.  That being said, if a website doesn't exist anymore, yet the link is showing up in our GWMT or MOZ, is it still necessary to disavow? Is that overkill?

http://alcoholdrugrehablosangeles.com/ is an example of a website we used to control and I have removed.

My second lingering question is if there are a handful of links that are registering as spammy, and I presume it is due to lack of content/duplicate content, and I move that content to its appropriate place on another website and 301 that domain to its new home, will the "spam score" carry over?

EGOL, along with a few others on this board, aided me in a similar situation, and no matter how many times I tried to ask the question by altering my language or spinning it in a different light the bottom line was simple, I needed outside assistance. If you are being penalized, there is a very different course of action to be taken given the circumstances. If the competing website is merely ranking better because it was optimized more effectively, that opens another avenue of action.

Again, these are questions that ultimately are much bigger than the forum can answer. In my situation we had 1500 domains that had been built into a link wheel. After a lot of analysis and slowly unraveling the web, we were/are left with 5 domains that are still active, and we have built a plan around 301s. A lot of content movement, content cutting, relinking, etc. Also building new links to replace a lot of the old ones that were removed.

This process has been going on for the past 8 months and continues to be monitored pretty consistently.

If you are not getting receiving Manual Actions from Google, and you are still making some income I personally would act swiftly but be smart. I'm happy to share our solution with you if you want as well!

That would be my concern, if they control the DNS, that would scare me as well.

I still think your best bet would be playing by their rules while spending your time building up a new website.

I would also recommend getting legal advice. I remember long ago I came across Nissan's website which now is functional, but for a while it was just a landing page that stated neither Nissan Computers nor Nissan Motors was allowed to use the website.

If you did a 301 redirect, and this company went hard enough and ended up demanding you to pull the domain, I would hate to see you loose all the 301 potential anyway, simply because they pulled the rug out from under you.

Good luck!!! If I were them I would try and just buy you out!

Wow,

Now this is quite a quagmire. TWP owns TWP-Stain.com and obviously is upset that you rank higher than they do for their own product, even though you sell their product. I probably would have thought you were the company if I didn't snoop around and hadn't met you on Moz.

Unfortunately because your domain name does include their brand, and is an identifying factor of the company to the public I believe they could technically take legal action. If the domain was "woodstains.com" it would be different because that's a generic term. (I AM NOT A LAWYER I JUST HAVE GONE THROUGH SOMETHING SIMILAR).

Regardless, in my opinion you are in a situation where they could potentially take over if they wanted to regardless of your wants and needs.

My Thoughts:

1. 301 redirects do work, they will cause a drop in ranking, the more similar the content the better, but they will hurt.
2. Another option would be to start a new website selling your goods and just negotiate a price to let them use that domain? That's what I do currently. I was in a situation where I ended up stepping out of a company, but I owned the domain. I still own it, but the DNS records point to their server, that way they are still in control of everything.
3. Create another website, give them control of them domain, play by their rules, and link this current website to your new website. Take the stipend from them, let them worry about this website and profit. (Ryan typed it faster than me)

Hope this helps a little!

As far as basic SEO work is concerned I agree with Ryan, I see his posts everywhere and he has a very good grasp on all of this, in my humble opinion. Let your competitors spend all the money on research and replicate!

On another note, I think there may be something wrong with your sitemap. I believe you are using Yoast as well, but the sitemap you have doesn't look anything like the sitemap yoast makes. It's also converting into an xls file and not displaying... ANYWAY, check your Google Webmaster Tools and make sure you don't have any errors with your sitemap. If you're saying that google isn't seeing many of your pages having them reindex your website with a new sitemap might help!

You can always do a "site:bestcomedytickets.com" search and Google will tell you exactly which pages have been indexed. Hopefully this can eliminate any technical issues you may be having if any!

Unfortunately this is a tough one.

Google doesn't really want you buying links, and really, they want everything to happen as organically as possible. So maybe I'm misunderstanding your question. Based on the second paragraph, it sounds like you are looking to be the one giving out the backlink, or are directly negotiating the purchase/trade of a backlink.

If you were looking to "create an opportunity and a potential blogger or prospect can apply." you are either saying we want so give someone a link, or your want to give someone xyz for their link, which pretty much violates Google TOS. Now, if you happen to work for a fortune 500 company, you are in a position where it should be very very easy to convince people to write someone for you by simply jumping on social media and posting something that incites people to write about you. If you are a small business it's a little more difficult, this is where old school PR/SEO comes into play.

Content is king. If you are pumping out quality content, someone will either want a guest blogger, or need some content, or want to write something about what you wrote. As far tools to help, the moz Link Analysis and Link opportunity tools are a great place to look and try to determine where to start.

Some of the other ones are things like PRWeb or PRNewsWire, which you pay, they distribute your post, and it gets picked up by various news outlets (hopefully). Another option is HARO (help a reporter out), I personally haven't had success with it, but I know a few who have.

Good Luck links are tough, but the time spent invested in getting valuable links will be worth it in the long run. If shortcuts were better they would just be the way.

Are you talking about infinite scroll?

Or literally making a "footer" but writing it at the top of the page and having it display at the bottom of the page.

Hey Everybody,

Is there any downside to the smart link plugins that I see all over wordpress? Basically in short I enter a keyword and where I want that link to go (primarily internal) and set the parameters of repetition etc and it automatically adds the link to that.

Now other than the obvious situation where it might put a link in an awkward place, is there anything wrong with this sort of software? Part of me things that this sort of software would not be liked by Google, and that it isn't really getting counted as a true link, but i wanted to see if there were other thoughts or experience with this.

Good Morning!

I have been in a similar situation and I found two different videos which helped me out in my decision making process.

This is Matt Cutts on keywords in domain names https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAWFv43qubI

This is Matt Cutts on keywords in URL paths https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=971qGsTPs8M

What I ended up doing was making a short list of "static" pages of content that wasn't going to change much. Think of these as my services.

So for example

• www.domainname.co.uk/asbestosis-diagnosis
• www.domainname.co.uk/asbestosis-treatment

or

• www.domainname.co.uk/asbestosis/diagnosis
• www.domainname.co.uk/asbestosis/treatment

Then from there in our blog section, I started making the more specific, long tail keyword URLS.

• www.domainname.co.uk/how-to-diagnose-asbestosis
• www.domainname.co.uk/how-to-treat-asbestosis

In the long run, I don't believe it will negatively impact you repeating keywords. Although I may be wrong. My personal thoughts are that Google is getting closer and closer to searching things like a human would. So I try and view my URL path like a filing system. If I can understand it, and it makes sense to Google, then it's going to end up safe. The last thing you want to do is make a system that is overly redundant and/or spammy, although again i'm not entirely sure if this would qualify as a spam URL path.

Hope this helps!

As long as your are clear and transparent about everything, and state Blogger B received our Blue Widget to try for the weekend, you are in the clear.

I personally think a lot can be gained from the negative reviews as well. Sometimes you can leverage those negatives and use those as a platform for communication. If I visit a website, and I see a company who was humble enough to post a negative review, and then took the time to respond to the negative review, and started implementing their changes, I will be impressed.

If you can fix a problem for a customer, you will have a customer for life! At least in my opinion.

-e