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Hi MR,
Could you be more specific?
Are you looking to publish the article on one blog, and quote it on the other blog? If so, I typically would choose one or two paragraphs to quote, and use the actual quote tag in Wordpress, and then link to the rest of the article if people care to read more.
Pages with only 1 paragraph of unique content probably won't be worth much to anyone: Google or users. So, in my opinion, the number of links in an article that short isn't worth bothering with.
Are you paying for these articles? If so, instead of paying for 5 short articles, pay for one longer article from a better writer, and distribute that as a guest post on a real blog, instead of submitting to an article site.
Gotcha. I agree - don't cut off the traffic if those pages are already ranking. Unique descriptions for each tag page are definitely the way to go, if you can keep up with all of your tags. This will obviously be much easier if you use 1-3 tags per post, and not 10 random ones. I personally try to reuse tags as much as possible, and combine similar ones... helps keep your sanity.
For the record, I consider the unique paragraph approach the ideal solution for categories and tags, but typically tags are harder to keep up with.
I usually noindex Wordpress tag pages, meaning I tell Google not to show them in search results. This is because they don't add a ton of SEO value to the site - tag pages are typically 100% duplicate content.
That said, IF you provide a custom description at the top of each tag page, you could make an argument for keeping them indexed, since there would now be relevant unique content at the top of each page.
Here's an example from a personal site where I keep my category pages indexed: http://www.seattlehomestead.com/category/gardening/. See the paragraph at the top of the page? That's the minimum amount of unique content you'd want on a tag or category page to keep it indexed.
Yes, absolutely. Anchor text is one indicator of topic of the page, but the link itself is valuable regardless of anchor text.
Most links in a "natural" link profile won't have ideal anchor text. Your brand name, the raw URL, and things like your personal name or "click here" will typically appear frequently, so those are good things to have in your link profile alongside your optimized anchor text links.
I'm pretty sure Keyword Difficulty and PA are not correlated like that, they just both happen to be on a scale of 100.
Take a look at the DA & PA of the top 10 sites for that keyword. If you're in the middle of the pack, you've certainly got a chance. If you're below everyone, you better start link building and getting your site trust and authority up in order to have a competitive chance with that keyword.
Then use the On-Page Analysis / Grader in your SEOMoz campaign for the page you want to rank. Score an A and you're on your way.
Depending on the niche, I would follow that with more link building to the specific page. Keep an eye on rankings, it could take a day or it could take a few months, depends on difficulty. You should be seeing progress after doing the tasks above.
Do that stuff, and if it doesn't work come back here and let me know, we'll take it to the next level...
"Do as we say, not as we do..."
No site is perfect, and Google is far from it. But kudos to them for testing much of the time and backing off of poor designs, like they did a few weeks ago with the extremely flawed nav menu they were testing: http://searchengineland.com/google-moves-away-from-large-navigation-drop-down-menu-111057
Interesting question. I'd bet that they just serve up normal results in many cases, unless there's an example where it happens frequently and unintentionally.
For example, when I search "Google Seattle restaurants", it's a bunch of google offers and search engine marketing discussions, not the normal results for "Seattle restaurants" or even local results for that matter. Just did a couple other quick tests on mobile and desktop and I don't see any examples of them ignoring it.
If there's an example where it happens frequently and people don't click on the results, I'd imagine they'd start testing different styles of results, but I doubt that'd be based on the fact that "Google" was included so much as the fact that people weren't finding the results useful.
Site was done a year or two ago by a branding agency. To their credit, they produced clean and reasonably-well documented code, and they do excellent design work. However, they relied too heavily on Flash and javascript to load content throughout the site, and the site has suffered as a result.
Site is entirely HTML, CSS, & Javascript and uses Dreamweaver template files to produce the portfolio entry pages, which then propagate into the XML files, which then get loaded by the rest of the site.
I wouldn't call it AJAX - I think it loads all of the XML file and then uses the filters to display appropriate content, so there are no subsequent calls to the server for more data.
User interface is great, and makes it easy to filter and sort by relevant portfolio items. It's just not indexable.
Thanks Doug,
I forgot to mention it above, but I am definitely mentioning other workaround methods of getting the content indexed, specificallly:
Those aside, there is a fundamental issue with the way the data is working now and I want to address the ideal solution, since it's within the client's budget to have that content redesigned properly.
I have a client who has about 100 portfolio entries, each with its own HTML page.
Those pages aren't getting indexed because of the way the main portfolio menu page works: It uses javascript to load the list of portfolio entries from an XML file along with metadata about each entry. Because it uses javascript, crawlers aren't seeing anything on the portfolio menu page.
Here's a sample of the javascript used, this is one of many more lines of code:
// load project xml
try{
var req = new Request({
method: 'get',
url: '/data/projects.xml',
Normally I'd have them just manually add entries to the portfolio menu page, but part of the metadata that's getting loaded is project characteristics that are used to filter which portfolio entries are shown on page, such as client type (government, education, industrial, residential, industrial, etc.) and project type (depending on type of service that was provided). It's similar to filtering you'd see on an e-commerce site. This has to stay, so the page needs to remain dynamic.
I'm trying to summarize the alternate methods they could use to load that content onto the page instead of javascript (I assume that server side solutions are the only ones I'd want, unless there's another option I'm unaware of). I'm aware that PHP could probably load all of their portfolio entries in the XML file on the server side. I'd like to get some recommendations on other possible solutions. Please feel free to ask any clarifying questions.
Thanks!
Hi Michelle,
Without further information, you're asking us to choose between two bad solutions, so that's a choice we can't make.
What is the piece of information missing that explains why you don't want to put them in subfolders?
How different are the content topics?
If you go with (b), what content is left on the primary domain?
OK, so, a flat architecture would suggest more links on the homepage, not less. You're trying to reduce the number of clicks from the homepage to each piece of content, not increase it.
If there's good quality content on those pages that helps your sales team, leave it up! If it helps the sales team, then removing it will probably cost you sales, right? I'd stay away from nofollowing those links, and I'd stay away from using rel="canonical", since the way you mentioned using it isn't how it should be used.
Removing 9 links from the homepage won't do all that much for you IMO. I'm looking at your homepage now. I don't think you need to worry about removing internal links. I would recommend changing the links for "QuickBooks, Peachtree, Simply Accounting, MAS 90, MAS 200, and Line 50." Either remove the links and leave the text, OR a better solution would be to link them to an internal page on the site such as /quickbooks-pos-integration.html, and target those types of keywords. But definitely don't link to quickbooks.com's homepage, they don't need that link juice and it isn't valuable to visitors.
Taking a look at the link metrics for your site, you're at homepage PA 53 and DA 43, which isn't far off from the page 1 ranking sites. I think some link building would make you much more competitive for that keyword. You're currently on page 4 when I search for "POS software", and it's an internal page that's ranking, not your homepage. Get more links to your homepage using POS Software as the anchor text, and do it in a non-spammy way. That will help quite a bit I think.
Without knowing anything else, none of the above.
9 times out of 10 I'll recommend the use of subfolders instead.
Is the content dramatically different (babies, acne, race cars, etc.) or is there an overall purpose to the site that makes sense?
To quote myself from some other Q&A answer:
Subdomains are treated slightly differently by Google. Essentially they are seen as less connected to the rest of your content than a subfolder. So, when you get a link to one subdomain, it doesn't count as much towards the other subdomains.
Take wordpress.com as an example:
By using subfolders, you'll retain more value across the single subdomain rather than spreading it among multiple subdomains.
Wow, no, those are the best ones that I'm aware of.
There's another one called Traffic Travis that I've tested in the past, but there wasn't any useful data provided that I couldn't get from another tool, and they're a bit heavy handed on getting you to upgrade to their paid version. That said, it is positioned as a full-featured tool. It seems to do more with traffic & keyword analysis but it does have some onpage functionality.
WebCEO is one I have seen show up, but I know little about it.
If you're including more basic ones (the kind you'd pull up during a phone call with a new prospect), I believe AboutUs.org's business model is related to providing at-a-glance SEO audits.
The folks at Koozai offer a free iPhone app (SiteAnalyser) that is handy on the go, but this is also an at-a-glance tool.
Looking forward to the review, please post it here when it's finished.
I'm no xpath expert, but using the scraper extension for Google Chrome, I'm able to scrape the date just fine. Here's what the xpath output is showing:
//li/div/div/span/span
Seems like all of the dates are the only span with class="f", you should be able to drill down on that I think.
Are you scraping in Google Docs?
One of the tragic downfalls of Facebook Pages, in my opinion, is what you just noticed.
The 8 likes are referring to http://www.fibers.com
Your 1500+ likes are referring to http://www.facebook.com/fibers
At this time, there's no way to combine the two counts (which is just as stupid as it seems, because the likes for a domain homepage should absolutely be tied to the business page's likes, in my opinion). Unfortunately this is an inherent flaw in Facebook's open graph, and not something related to the SEOMoz tool.
So, if you go to put a Like button on your homepage, you have to make the decision of whether you want that to count as a like for your homepage (which may help your SEO a little, but does little to nothing for your Facebook marketing) or count as a like for your fan page (which is great for adding fans, but does little to nothing for SEO).
For what it's worth, I tend to use the Like button box using my facebook page URL throughout the site to make sure people are fans, then I'll use a page-specific like button on all of the subpages of my site so that people can like individual products, etc. This is also how SEOmoz approaches the issue if you take a look at one of their blog pages. On the sidebar you'll see the like box (pointed at their Facebook page), and on the bottom of the post you'll see a like button for that specific post.
The link you provided has an iFrame, but if you leave the iFrame and go to http://www.interactivegoods.com/fss/#/options you'll see the actual page.
When I open up the source, I see two things:
In the code, you see this:
If you take a look at those page2.html files, they're not even full html files, they're sections of code being used as if they were PHP include files. I haven't seen html files used that way before and I don't think it's a standard practice.
I avoid content loaded via javascript, because I've seen it cause issues for clients. I am not a javascript developer, so maybe there's a way to do it correctly, but I"m not familiar with it.
Personally, I would not use this plugin on one of my sites. Find one that uses divs to contain the content, and javascript to animate the sliding, rather than using javascript to load the content, too.
That's a pretty comprehensive prompt for most skilled writers I think. Tone of voice kind of covers it, but writing style might be an added factor: conversational, encyclopedic, persuasive, etc.
Here's a few other SEOMoz resources you should check out:
Q&A: What Should I Look For When Hiring a Blogger
YouMoz: How to Outsource Content That's Worth Reading (Be sure to take a look at the 2nd comment by iPullRank)
Whiteboard Friday: Outsourcing Content Creation