Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks!

How do you identify a domain that has a solid link profile? It seems like it's sorta a shot in the dark. Plugging them into OSE to see what the domain returns?

Oh that is pretty great!

Do you know if there is any impact from using either? They don't directly answer that in the article.

The site I am working with is offering video which would be behind a paywall. My thought is lock down the video, but make the text free, especially since google can't read videos anyway!

Good Morning!

Does anybody have any experience with SEO behind a paywall. If we have a portion of a website that is going to be locked, will google still be able to access all of that regardless of paying? If not is there any way to circumvent that?

Any thoughts are greatly appreciated!

MOZel Tov!

Good Morning!

My father asked me about Domain Forwarding yesterday and it's impact on SEO. The example he gave was if he had website xyz.com and it was an educational website that sold anger management programs would purchasing the domain socialskills.com and pointing that domain at xyz.com help rank for social skills?

My immediate answer was no it would not simply because Google doesn't associate any content with that domain, and Domain Forwarding is different that a redirect, which would apply if a website is already established.

Am I correct in my thinking?

Thanks guys!

Morning!

A long time ago I had a mentor who taught me something which has stuck with me through everything. He told me about the Rule of 3's, and I use it as a rough guide. The end user has 3 pieces of currency, and your website is going to take it. Every time the user gets to a new website that currency refreshes. If a user can't find what they are looking for in 3 seconds (ie. page takes too long to load) or 3 clicks, then there is a good chance they will leave.

Obviously if you have a decent fan base and dedicated followers that number goes up, if they individual is driven and knows that what you have is worth the time that number goes up. But, anything that you put in front of your end user is a potential barrier to entry. The less obtrusive you can make the lead generation the better. From an SEO standpoint, adding a pop up or something that asks for an email won't do anything, but if it causes people to leave etc, then you are looking at a different type of SEO impact.

We are in an era in digital media of people seeking information they want WHEN they want, that is why auto play videos are so annoying. Let your followers decide when and if they want to download something, and then provide them with the easiest way to do it. People are hesitant to give out emails, I know I am, I have a specific email that is dedicated to signing up for stuff that I know I'm never going to check.

I personally think it's better to build trust and then ask for their information. What good is a lead that just goes to a spam email?

Best of Luck!

Let us know what you end up doing!

Hey Roshni,

It usually takes a few hours to a few days for Moz to fully integrate all of your data and run a audit of your website. I would give it a little more time before making any changes.

What is the problem that you are running into? Is it not displaying data? Not accepting your domain? Have you authorized your Google Analytics and Webmaster tools to work with MOZ? I need a little more information about the error!

There is also this: http://moz.com/help/guides/getting-started which is pretty straight forward and should give you a pretty good breakdown of exactly what to do from there!

ps. I don't work for MOZ

Brian,

I personally come from a slightly different stand point; relax. When changing themes these days I personally think that the Meta data is on the lower end of your concerns. Matt Cutts said even said in a video that if you have many pages that are missing H1, H2 etc. it isn't even worth your time to go back and add them.

RobertFisher of DrumBeat marketing is an avid poster on this forum often says that SEO is a lot more than just ranking. I don't want to speak for him but from what I have gathered he uses a lot of the meta data has a hook, more than just a ranking feature.

Combining the two pieces of information I stated, I try not to concern myself with H1,H2 as far as ranking, I view it like the text on a billboard or the marketing behind an advertisement. This is where the lines of SEO and Marketing begin to get blurred in my opinion. Use your meta data to sell your website and get the individual to click on the search result. Rankings will follow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBTBEfd7z_Y <-- Matt Cutts video on meta Data

Good Morning!

Wikipedia is a strange beast. It ranks incredibly well in Google because it is full of expertise, authority, and is very trustworthy. When writing for Wiki the most important question to ask is how are you going to make sure it stays there.

Wikipedia was built on the crowd sourcing premise. At first anybody could add content, and anybody could modify content. This is why many Universities were/are hesitant to accept Wikipedia as a reference in research. As time progressed, in an attempt to keep things more accurate, wikipedia started giving members more power, and gave them the voluntary job of monitoring sections. For example my brother earned a PhD in linguistics, he voluntarily acted as one of the moderators for anything that was posted in the linguistics section of Wikipedia. He would read everything, spell check, proof, and most important verify, verify, verify.

As a moderator he would look for 3 things:

• Validity- Is this information true?
• Benefit- Does this information progress the body of knowledge?
• Spam- Is this someone just trying to get a link?

The last one didn't happen as often. As much as he loved it, linguistics isn't exactly the hottest subject in the Wikipedia library, but none the less people would add content that on the surface appeared to be beneficial, but was actually superficial and just trying to get a link.

Every subject has a moderator. Everything is moderated now. That being said, the Wikipedia page for the "Olympics" is looked at much more closely than the Wikipedia page for "plastic infused rubber flux capacitor pencils"... A link from the Olympics Wikipedia page will be much more difficult to get, but potentially MUCH more valuable.

Wikipedia links are great, but they can be removed very easily if you are not careful. Find something special about your company to mention. Maybe some big mortgage/commercial trust laws that were passed that you participated in. Some sort of event that received coverage. Something about your founder/ceo. I personally think creating a link simply because your website is informative isn't enough to keep the link there. It might, who knows, but if you can find something else, something that had more of an impact, I would try and go with that. Go big, find something that really had an impact, and put that on wikipedia. If that doesn't work, you can always go smaller.

I also really like PixelByPixel's idea, veryyyyyyyyyy clever!

Hope that helps!

Edit In response to what Darren said (his post went up when I was typing) like PixelPixel said, all Wikipedia links are now NOFOLLOW. So there isn't really a link benefit from doing it. However, seeing as how every category is competing with Wikipedia for placement, might as well use it to your advantage.

Edit I just realized that 6 people posted while I was typing... geeze you are all fast!

Hi Chris.

I don't work for Moz.

Most of the time I have found that a the best way to get in touch with company representatives like Moz etc, is to state your question, or issue, as opposed to leaving it open ended. Not only that, but you would be amazed at the wealth of knowledge that people on these forums are willing to share. Even Rand, the founder of Moz, is known to drop in and share a few words.

Part of the reason I signed up for Moz, not only because of the analytic tools, was because of the forum. And the resources that were available to me from my colleges. I met with an SEO director one time and he explained to me one of the reason he didn't like many of the SEO tools that gave you "answers" was because all it was doing was giving you the opinion of who ever wrote the code. He also explained that one of the reason he liked Moz, Majestic, and Ahrefs was because they left the data open ended and allowed him to make the decisions.

Agreed, at first it is frustrating, I pay good money for an expensive program, and at first there is just SO much information that I became overwhelmed and felt like I couldn't take advantage of everything the program had to offer. Essentially what Moz has done is crowdsourced support. They have done it in a brilliant, controlled way that not only saves them money, but actually helps people LEARN in the process. I have learned more in the past few months of asking/answering questions than I had in the previous classes/tutorials/seminars on SEO I had taken.

Not only that, but people like KeriMorgret literally has Moz implanted into her head, so anytime people have serious problems regarding Moz products, her or the other team members seem very quick to answer.

Sorry for the frustration! I promise it's worth the blood, sweat, and code!

Good Morning!

We currently have two websites which are driving all of our traffic. Our end goal is to combine the two and fold them into each other. Can I redirect the duplicate content from one domain to our main domain even though the URL's are different. Ill give an example below. (The domains are not the real domains). The CEO does not want to remove the other website entirely yet, but is willing to begin some sort of consolidation process.

ABCaddiction.com is the main domain which covers everything from drug addiction to dual diagnosis treatment.

ABCdualdiagnosis.com is our secondary website which covers everything as well. Can I redirect the entire drug addiction half of the website to ABCaddiction.com? With the eventual goal of moving everything together.

Good Morning.

I am going to come at this from a slightly different viewpoint. There is a difference between rewriting an article to suit your needs by adding/cutting/modifying an article to suit your website, and simply spinning an article.

I'm being slightly presumptuous simply for the sake of discussion and from personal experience cleaning up a website full of this sort of content. EGOL, a Samauri Mozzer said a long time ago on another SEO board far far away that one day search engines will rate websites on content alone, and nothing else. It seems like that statement is coming true.

The recent updates, and even dating as far back as updates like Hummingbird have all pointed toward the importance of relevant, powerful, new content. Google new EAT standards even supported that more; expertise, authoritative, and trustworthiness. In my opinion, Google is trying to emulate how a human would search for things, the days of tricking Google into thinking your website is something that it isn't are close to being over.

Right now I am cleaning up a website that has content that is different enough to satisfy Google (at least to the point of not getting manual actions), but similar enough that any person who reads it laughs. We were getting plenty of traffic, but people were leaving once the noticed the similarity in the content.

It's tough to truly advise tactics without looking at a website, and again I am not suggesting you are spinning articles, trying to pull the wool over Googles eyes. I merely bring up another point.

I have learned that getting to the top of Google really is only half the battle. You still have to convert the people once the get there. You have an opportunity here to not ONLY satisfy Google, but also convert customers. Writing unique content that not only meets the needs of Google, yet ALSO convinces someone to purchase a car, in that moment.... well that's a win win! I would suggest spending the extra time writing individual content. It will help in the long run. And in the event that Google gets even better at determining duplicate content somehow, you are protected!

If shortcuts were easy, they would just be the way. This may be faster, but in the long run, it probably won't help as much as spending the time to write them all out.

I need a new car....

I love him...

Good morning!

Before you go cutting 10,000 404's I personally would try and address why your getting 404 errors for your RSS Feed.

Having 10,000 errors is a broad number, plenty of those could be duplicates, and some of those are probably not just related to the RSS Feed. If there is anything I have learned in SEO is that I can almost never use broad strokes when painting, and if I do, I have to be absolutely SURE what my brush is covering. A little while back Matt Cutts made a video about RSS feeds and the benefit they can have to websites. They are not as important as the blog itself, but still, it's a nice feature that you could take advantage if you already have.

The reason I bring this up; if you make the broad statement the restrict /feed/ how to you know for certain that you aren't cutting off other pages that have helped?

I don't know enough about your website to truly advise but I would take a look at all of those errors, put them into a spreadsheet and first get rid of all duplicates and pull out all of the /feed/ 404's to try and get as specific of a number as possible.

Look in your referrals in GWMT and GA and see if your RSS feed is bringing you traffic/referrals at all. If it isn't helping then I think you can put a 410 code for the /feed/ although as pointed out to me, there really isn't much benefit for using the 410 over just letting the 404s die on their own.

Hope that helps a little!

Good Morning!

I have been trying to clean up this website and  half the time I can't even edit our content without breaking the WYSIWYG Editor. Which leads me to the next question. How much, if at all, is this impacting our SEO. To my knowledge this isn't directly causing any broken pages for the viewer, but still, it certainly concerns me.

I found this post on Moz from last year:

http://moz.com/community/q/how-much-impact-does-bad-html-coding-really-have-on-seo

We have a slightly different set of code problems but still wanted to revisit this question and see if anything has changed.

I also can't imagine that all this broken/extra code is helping our page load properly.

Thanks everybody!

Thank you both!

I would tend to agree with you about not rewriting my url's however we are redoing the website 100% and the website is in terrible shape. The previous seo guy tried to do what I am attempting to do, but to such a degree that a url would look like.

evananas.com/bannana/bannanas/organic/organic-bananas/recipes/cooking-at-home-with-bananas

literally.....

In that case would you consider doing a rewrite with a 301?

Good Morning!

Now, I'll admit, I may be obsessing a little too much on this, and it may not make that big of an impact in the long run, but with Google being introduced to the world if I were to start a business today I would try and include my keyword into the title of my business. For example Dollar Shave Club, at least they got the word shave in there.

My business doesn't have a keyword in our name, is it beneficial to structure our URLs to include a keyword so that all of our URLs include that word? So if I sell organic bananas, but my company is called Evananas, is it worth it to have all domains become a child of Evananas.com/organic_bananas? That way at least we have the keyword "Organic Bananas" in our title?

So I could then have things like:

• evananas.com/organic_bananas/recipes
• evananas.com/organic_bananas/benefits
• evananas.com/organic_bananas/taste_really_freeking_good

Vs.

• evananas.com/recipes
• evananas.com/benefits
• evananas.com/taste_really_freeking_good

I'm not sure it makes a difference. The other problem is I want to keep our URL's as short as possible. I feel like less is always more, but I was always under the impression domain/URL based keywords were rather powerful. What is the best practice in this case?

Thanks Guys!

Evan(ana)

I figured I would add a general link suggestion before I respond.

1. Before you do anything, measure twice cut once.
2. Plug your domain into the Open Site Explorer and see if you can find the same links that GWMT is showing.
3. Head over to Majestic and verify ownership of your website and make sure you can find these links.

After those are done, if the links are indeed there, start asking yourself these questions:

• Does the potential referral benefit your website at all?
• Is the content pertinent to your website?
• Does the website make YOU uncomfortable? (My personal theory is that if it makes you uncomfortable it's going to make Google uncomfortable. That doesn't include ethics/morals etc, I am strictly referring to the website itself.)
• Check the link itself and find which page on the other website its coming from. Are the links in various comments, pictures, some block text? How are the links themselves being displayed?

At the end of the day, it's going to be your decision of how to proceed with this. After looking a bit more thoroughly and after my 2nd cup of coffee I agree with Travis wholeheartedly. With the general trend of Panda, I personally assume it's just a matter of time before those links are worthless if they aren't already. Who knows what these guys are up to, it looks to me like a project that started well and was sorta taken over by the sea of the internet!

Hope this helps!

Simon,

I just wanted to jump in really quick and add my 2 cents. First off, being that this is the internet a lot of times you are going to get links from sources that you don't know, or didn't ask for. In fact, it actually violates Googles TOS to write content and send it to someone for the sole purpose of getting links. In a perfect world Google world, you would be writing content/making a website for yourself/Business, and yourself/business only. You would become an expert in your field that would attract customers, referrals, etc on its on and your website would grow from there. You would gain all of these links organically. Of course that doesn't always happen, and that's why we advertise etc.

As to your original question; are these links "hurting you". This is much more in depth question that will be hard to evaluate on a forum. I say that simply because I have run into a similar problem asking questions like this on forums. Of course everybody want's to help, and motives are good, but when you start talking about removing "500+" links from a website, the potential impact is rather large, the impact could be quite small as well.

In GWMT you can see which pages are being linked by the various websites. Go to the websites and try and find how your website is actually being linked Is it in the comments? Is it in articles? Does it look like spam? Do some research on the website in question, see if it has good stats.

The backlink profile doesn't look terrible, at first glance. There appear to be some solid websites linking to it. I would have to see how that specific website links to your website.

All I'm saying, before you take any direct advice from any of us on a forum, make sure you feel confident in what it is that you are going to do. It never hurts to get a second opinion and consult with someone else who can look deeply into your backlink profile!

Hope that helps a little.

Yea, I cleaned all that stuff up! This website was a mess.

Anyway, back to the .htaccess, I have no idea what they are being used for.... but we are actually in luck!

I was doing a little research and I came across something interesting.... Not only is that the original file that our old webmaster pulled from, but that's the updated version with 2 sets of entries commented out. Seems like a good place to start?

Thanks!

Here is the link, because it seems to not want to display properly.

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/wp-super-cache-force-to-https