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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?

Greetings:

We are considering hiring a firm specializes in developing .EDU links. Is the ROI on EDU links better than non EDU backlinks from reputable domains? Will obtaining EDU links results in greater domain authority and improved ranking for search engine results?

Thanks,

Alan

Hi Egol:

Thanks so much for your response!! In 2018 we focused on UX, now the plan for 2019 is to improve content and build back links.

After reading your answer, I am not sure about our SEO's plan for 6 blog posts per month. The topics would highly researched and  pertinent for visitors, answering potential real estate questions. From what you are saying we should focus more on . developing and improving internal content.

Assuming the quality of the content is excellent, how many blog posts per month are optimal?

Thanks,
Alan

To what extent will posting quality blog posts 2 to 3 times per week have the following effects:

1. Improve ranking for specific keywords?
2. Create backlinks to our website
3. Increase MOZ domain authority
4. Increase  organic search traffic

Assume that the blog posts are geared towards answering user inquiries and are also posted on our social media accounts. Would such an approach be better than engaging in a link building campaign, in the sense that the links will be created organically by users that want to link to our site?

Thanks, 
Alan

Hi Lauren:

Do on page factors influence Domain Authority as much as building back links? This is a really key question!

I need to decide whether to invest resources in building back links or improving on site SEO. How about internal links? How much do they contribute to domain authority? At the moment my site lacks internal links, would adding them in a relevant manner improve domain authority?

While I greatly appreciate your last response it is somewhat ambiguous.

Thanks, Alan

Hi Again Lauren:

According to Rand Fishkin's post:
https://moz.com/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scores

Domain Authority is predominantly determined by backlinks  from other websites rather than on site SEO factors (content quality, internal linking). This contradicts your response somewhat which make things really confusing. Now I don't know whether to allocate resources towards building backlinks from other domains or whether to work on improving internal links and contents.

If you could please clear this up it would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Alan

Hi Lauren:

Thanks for your response. I was under the impression that domain authority was solely determined by external backlinks. So, are you saying that domain authority can be increased by improving the internal linking structure between pages and improving the quality of pages?

Our site has many, many "orphan" pages. From what you are saying, improving the internal linking structure would improve our Domain Authority, is that correct?

Also MOZ shows certain title tags, URLs and descriptions as too long, some are duplicate and some missing. Would correcting these help improve domain authority?

Is it safe to say that improved Domain Authority would increase the likely hood of improved ranking?

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

The vast majority of the 140 domains that link to our website are very low quality directories or and other toxic links. Only about 20-30 domains are not toxic (according to Link Research Tools confirmed by out manual inspection of these links).

Would removing some of these links improve of MOZ Domain Rank? What if we cannot remove them, can NOZ detect a disavow file?

In general would improving the ratio between good quality and poor quality links improve domain authority?

Thanks,
Alan

Hi Mick, thanks so much for your detailed response.

We took a terrible hit, losing 85% of traffic (65/day) a year ago. In April, we migrated our domain, got an SSL certificate and filed a disavow simultaneously. Everything was done by the book. The redirects implemented perfectly. The design, content of the site remained the same when we implemented this.

In December we launched the first upgraded version of the site since 2013. Within 2 weeks much of the traffic recovered. Bounce rate is way down, visitors click on more pages and spend more time on the site. We are now back up to 50 organic visitors per day.

Now I don't want to do something that will mess things up again. But I see the link profile is so awful that perhaps cleaning it up could b beneficial. No guaranties of course.

I wonder how long Google would take to index links, 3-4 months?

Regarding requesting link removal, I understand and agree, probably total waste of time.

Thanks, 
Alan

Hi Michael:

Thanks for your feedback.

Most  503 error links are from low quality directories, so I would disavow anyway.

We would disavow the majority of our links in one shot. Any risk of doing this?

Is there a reasonable chance that our ranking would improve significantly by disavowing these links? How long does it take Google to process the disavow? Is there a way of checking if Google has actually processed the disavow?

Also, do you think we should reach out to these webmasters and make a written request to remove the bad links? We tried this 3 years ago and it was a total waste of time.

Thanks,
Alan

We are using link detox (Link Research Tools) to evaluate our domain for bad links.

We ran a Domain-wide Link Detox Risk report. The reports showed a "High Domain DETOX RISK" with the following results:

-42% (292) of backlinks with a high or above average detox risk
-8% (52) of backlinks with an average of below above average detox risk
-12% (81) of backlinks with a low or very low detox risk
-38% (264) of backlinks were reported as disavowed.

This look like a pretty bad link profile. Additionally, more than 500 of the 689 backlinks are "404 Not Found", "403 Forbidden", "410 Gone", "503 Service Unavailable". Is it safe to disavow these? Could Google be penalizing us for them>

I would like to disavow the bad links, however my concern is that there are so few good links that removing bad links will kill link juice and really damage our ranking and traffic. The site still  ranks for terms that are not very competitive. We receive about 230 organic visits a week. Assuming we need to disavow about 292 links, would it be safer to disavow 25 per month while we are building new links so we do not radically shift the link profile all at once?

Also, many of the bad links are 404 errors or page not found errors. Would it be OK to run a disavow of these all at once? Any risk to that?

Would we be better just to build links and leave the bad links ups?

Alternatively, would disavowing the bad links potentially help our traffic? It just seems risky because the overwhelming majority of links are bad.

Our website was rebranded and relaunched. The old site did not use a / at the end of the URL. The site uses a forward slash at the end of the URL.

My developer claims that this makes no difference, that in Google's eyes this is meaningless. My concern is that link juice will be lost because this necessitates a redirect. Links that were developed in the last few months now are redirected to the identical domain, but with a backslash at the end.

Is this something to be concerned about or is it meaningless?

Thanks, 
Alan

Assuming we have retained a an award winning journalist to write articles/blog posts about our business. Assuming the content is useful and engaging. Where would be the best place to publish it to create high quality backlinks?

1. Our website blog
2. Social media sites like our LinkedIn or Facebook pages. 
3. Sending completed articles to websites that might potentially have an interest in publishing them.
4. Publishing the articles on our website and then promoting them with Adwords and Facebook to demographics that would find them interesting and link to them. 
5. Combination of publishing an article on our website and posting a related article on social media and linking it back to the original article on our website. 
6. Place a custom written article of extremely high quality on affiliate website run by the HOTH or a competitor. But before publishing check the affiliate website on AHREFS and Link Research Tools to ensure that the metrics are not at all spammy (decent domain rating).

Which of the above options (or combination of) would most likely result in backlinks of good quality? Assume the quality of the writing is excellent.

If pitching the content to other websites (#3) would work, how would we identify these websites?

Thanks,
Alan

Hi Oleg:

Thanks for your response!!

My preference would be to avoid any unnecessary URLs. But I am a business owner and not a coder.

My programmer believes that setting these pages to noindex is sufficient. They cite: https://blog.seoprofiler.com/google-noindexfollow-noindexnofollow-long-run/ [^]

Do you think that adding css/js a time consuming operation to replace the print pages?

Thanks,

Alan

Our real estate website has 400 listings. We have added a button that allows the visitor to print listing pages in the for.m of a PDF.

The PDF exists as a URL ending in ?print=17076. This print URL is set to noindex and follow.

So our site has 400 additional URLs. Is this a negative for SEO? Or neutral?

I have read it using CSS it is possible to set up printing without creating all these extra URLs. Is this method better from an SEO perspective?

Thanks,

Alan

Hi Jeff:

Happy to report that improved metrics are not caused by bots or any unusual spikes in traffic. So I think we are seeing a legitimate improvement. Last year we focused on UX improvements. Will focus on content and links this year in order to solidify our gains.

Thanks for your input!!

Alan

Hi EGOL;

Thanks for your input. I am receiving a dramatically increased number  customers inquiries from the redesigned site. Hopefully there is a reasonable chance that Google will reward us with improved rankings. But I guess time will tell. 
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

www.metro-manhattan.com