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My real estate brokerage firm is promoting a listing via advertising on LinkedIn. The advertising links to a landing page: http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/MidtownLawOfficeSublet3300SFBelowMarket

Rather than photos, the landing page has a 1 minute video. So far we have had about 10 visits to the page. Visitors leave the landing page after a few seconds. So they are not looking at the video.

Would it be better to replace the video with photos?  Or is engagement generally better with video?

My thinking is that business owners may not have the patience or the time for a video and they would more likely have the time and willingness to click on photos.

I would be willing to test this further, but at $5/click it could get costly!

Any thoughts?
Thanks, 
Alan Rosinsky

We have worked with the same Wordpress developer since 2012. They recently redesigned our Wordpress site. We purchased a real estate theme and they performed major modifications to it. The project took 8 months. There are many customized widgets and multiple plugins.

We hired a new SEO. The SEO is very comfortable coding. The SEO performed certain modifications and the code broke. The original developer stepped in and and helped restore the code. The SEO stated that the site should not be so delicate; that too many plugins and widgets are used making it inherently unstable. The original developer is claiming that the SEO did not follow best practices (they did not use a dev server to test). For a non technical business owner this is very disturbing. We finally agreed that the new SEO would make changes on a dev server and the original developer will check these changes to ensure they do not break the code.

My question is, shouldn't a Wordpress site be simple enough to hand over to a decent coder with little risk of breaking the code? Are there any standards regarding the hand over of a site? I am comfortable with my developers, but what if they change professions or close their company? How would I transition the site?

There must be standards and protocols that allow a third party, such as an SEO to change code without causing havoc. Any one have some insight?

Our website has all social media buttons for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ are located in the footer of all pages. These links are set to "no-follow".

Running an SEMRUSH audit shows these "no-follows" coming up as an "issue". Is it best practices to set these links to social media sites as "follow" as opposed to "no-follow"? I am somewhat concerned about losing link juice but perhaps that is an outdated point of view.

Any thoughts??

Thanks, Alan

What is a reasonable cost to set up Adwords Campaign? This would include keyword research, set up of Adwords, set up re-marketing banners, creative and coding landing pages using Instapage.

Lets say there are 3 ad groups and two landing pages per add group. Assuming the vendor is highly experienced and located in the United States, what is a fair price? $700, $1,000, $1,500?

How about for the monthly management of the campaign? Let's assume advertising budget is $3,000. Is $500 per month reasonable, $800, $1,000?

I do not want to over pay not under pay and am trying to determine a cost which is fair to both of us. Answers should be based on a US based vendor with native English and extensive experience with PPC.

Thanks,

Alan

Last April we migrated our old domain www.nyc-officespace-leader.com to a new domain www.metro-manhattan.com. The old domain has been receiving numerous links from very spammy sites such as these:

-adinternet.net/the_worlds_most_visited_web_pages_958.htm

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| -www.online-advertisement.net/the_worlds_most_visited_web_pages_958.html |

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| www.webfind.org/the_worlds_most_visited_web_pages_958/ |

Since the old domain redirects to our new domain we are concerned this could be very detrimental. Oddly enough the 50-100 spammy domains that link to us all are a site called: "http://theglobe.se/start/" when the linking domain is entered in the browser.

What should we do? Should we disavow these links? Is this some kind of an attack?

Would very much appreciate some input/advice.

Thank, 
Alan

When I enter "Site: URL" to check what a search how Google displays  search result, a date appears at the very front. This takes away several characters, really valuable real estate.

How can I stop Google from displaying these dates?

There are certain Wordpress plugins like "WP Date Remover" however the seem to only apply to blog posts. Dates are appearing on results on all my Wordpress pages. Is there an internal setting in Wordpress that will allow me to remove dates for these non blogpost pages?

Hi Joe:

About 35% of our traffic is derived from mobile so maximize mobile conversion probably worth the effort.

Do you think it would be most effective to display the phone number as an actual button with a similar design as the other 2?  Is there any form of protocol for displaying phone numbers on mobile devices?

Thanks, 
Alan

Does anyone have experience with  LinkedIn and Google Adwords for B+B advertising? I own a commercial real estate agency in Manhattan. We aim to generate qualified leads of business tenants seeking to rent office or loft space. The advertising is not meant to build an image or branding.  Approximate total adverting budget is $3,000-$5,000/month.

LinkedIn appears to have the advantage in being able to target a particular demographic (industry, geography, job function, size of company). But I wonder if it is not geared towards branding rather than generating warm leads.

In terms of cost and quality of leads does anyone have insight as to how these two platforms compare?

Thanks, Alan Rosinsky

My site has a spam score of 2/17. How bad is this?

Domain authority is 23 and page authority is 32. The domain is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com.

In total, according to MOZ, there are 38 inbound links. Spam scores for the inbound links are as follows:

1 (8)
1 (6)
2 (5)
2 (4)
3 (3)
16 (2)
4 (1)
8 (0)

The number in the parentheses represents spam score.

Does it make sense to get some of these links removed? Is it necessary for me to remove links from all sites with a spam score of 5,6,7,8?

If we remove these lower quality links will Domain Authority and Page Authority improve?

Thanks, Alan

We migrated our domain on April 4th. Our domain authority has dropped from 22 to 8. Traffic is down from 90 visits a day to 10.

Search console has indexed about 120 out of 600 pages. I have been told it may take several months to recovers some element of domain authority.

My SEO consultant has planned on implementing the following changes immediately:

1. Change in URL structure
2. Build internal links (my site has very few). 
3. Optimize URLs for specific keywords 
4. Keyword optimization of URLs using Yoast.
5. Modify Schema

Do we risk confusing Google further by making these changes until are domain authority and traffic has recovered?

Is it safe to proceed with some "softer" changes such building internal links and keyword optimizing text whicl avoiding more disruptive changes such as re-writing URLs?

Are we better off focusing on off site ranking factors such as link building and local SEO until domain authority recovers? How about only adding new content to the site such as blog posts and listings?

To complicate matters the site is old and dated and we are working on a new UX design. So perhaps it would be better to launch the new UX at the exact same time as the onsite SEO optimization occurs. This could be less work and less disruptive. At the same time I would very much like to enjoy benefits of optimizing SEO now.

Any thoughts?????

Also, my domain migration has killed traffic. It is very concerning!! Is a 90% drop in traffic normal in the first ten days!?

Thanks everyone!!!
Alan

170 of the 420 pages were indexed after March 20th. 222 were indexed before March 11th. There was no drop in traffic until about April 7th, 3 days after the domain change.

I have checked and double checked with my developer and all pages were redirected correctly. We have gotten only a few redirect errors and they were fixed within the first few days of the migration.

Also, I would like to emphasize that no changes at all were made to the content or the structure.

The old site was www.nyc-officespace-leader.com
The new domain is https//:www.metro-manhattan.com

So you see we add SSL and migrated the domain as well.

My developer seems less concerned and believes it could take up to 90 days for domain authority to transfer from the old domain. I am more concerned. Certain MOZ posts claim that if implemented properly the drop in traffic should be minimal and very temporary.

Any thoughts?

I would like to use MOZ to identify a competitors broken links. Does MOZ have such a tool? Where is it?

My SEO consultant suggests that we have bloggers write contend and then link it to our site. I am concerned about the quality of the links that will be generated. He is confident that they will be of high quality and the process will be relatively quick and easy. My concern is future spam penalty or low quality links.

Another consultant suggested replacing a competitors broken links. How effective is this? Is it more labor intensive than other link building techniques?

Thanks,
Alan Rosinsky

I simply want to understand what I am paying for. If a vendor takes 15 minutes a month and uses an automated systems to create links I would like to know. If the hourly rate the vendor is charging me is $4,000/hour I think I am entitled to know.

I am not fixated on $500, $1,000 or $2,000 per month. I am fixated on getting fair value. When one party (vendor) has more information than the customer, the customer is in a vulnerable position and apt to overpay. That is why I am asking.

It seems reasonable to pay an SEO what a CPA, a decent attorney or other professional earns on an hourly basis. But an hourly rate equivalent to a Fortune 500 executive or a neuro-surgeon seems excessive.

I am simply trying to determine what is fair and customary.

Thanks, Alan

Our relaunched website has a much lower bounce rate (66% before, now 58%) increased pages per session (1.89 before, now 3.47) and increased session duration (1:33 before, now 3:47). The relaunch was December 20th.

Should these improvements result in an improvement in Google rank? How about in MOZ authority?

We have not significantly changed the content of the site but the UX has been greatly improved.

Thanks,

Alan

There are 2 or 3 URLs and one image file that dozens of toxic domains are linking to on our website. Some of these pages have hundreds of links from 4-5 domains. Rather than disavowing these links, would it make sense to simply break these links, change the URL that the link to and not create a redirect? It seems like this would be a sure fire way to get rid of these links. Any downside to this approach?

Thanks, 
Alan

We completed a Wordpress redesign of our website in December. The project took about 8 months. Important URLs on the new site are performing slowly according to Google Page Speed Insights. For instance, a key product page gets a score of 18 on mobile and 61 on desktop. Home page scores 37 on mobile and 80 on desktop.

My new SEO believes the website is hindered by an excessive number of plugins and widgets. That reducing the number of these may increase performance. Also, my developers were unable to get WT3 Total Cache to work with our InMotion server and have used about 3 plugins for cache.

We purchased a real estate theme (wpcasa) and heavily customized it. Any suggestions for improveing performance? If we recoded the website from scratch without a pre existing theme (using the existing design) would that speed up performance? Is there anything we can do remove complexity and improve URL download speeds? We are in a very competitive niche and we need decent performance in order to rank.

Thanks, 
Alan

Dear Effect Digital:

Thanks for your very detailed and thorough response. Confirms what I suspected, but with ranking factors in flux great to have this confirmed.

Thanks so much,

Alan

I was horrified to learn that my hosting company, InMotion Hosting does not offer redundant backups, that it is on the customer to set up backups to ensure they don't lose their data.

I plan to back up to Google Drive 3 x a week for 12 backups and also create 3 backups on our server (Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday). So if something goes wrong and we catch it within a week we can generate the backup directly from our server.

There are website backup services such as BlogVault. Do they offer any meaningful advantages to taking the contents of the entire server (16 gigs) and backing it up? They do offer Malware removal. Does this have value?

Is back up on an external service like Google Cloud while simultaneously backing up on the server a safe way to proceed? If not, what is the simplest and most effective manner to backup? I prefer to avoid adding any plugins to WordPress as our site already has too many (about 30).

Thanks!!
Alan