Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Nope, not seen that here and been reviewing a few campaigns for updates this morning. Want to post a link? Happy to check from here.

Hey

If you consider what a low quality page actually is

• tiny amount of content
• no content
• spammy
• near duplicate
• external duplicate
• internal duplication created by CMS
• etc

Then, really, a forum post should not really be low content as it should be relatively unique due to the various inputs from different folks.

That said, I don't see forums doing so well as they may once have done and you do need tight moderation for it to be effective.

Really, I would try to think of this outside of the SEO mindset and if it adds value for your visitors AND you can handle the inevitable management then it should be a good idea. If you are adding it purely for search and landing pages, then some smart blogging may be a better option.

Hope that helps

Marcus

Sage advice as ever my friend.

Hey, I did about 5 seconds of research.

Google 'progesterone cream' and skimmed over the first few pages. One was an FAQ with some of these questions skim answered on one page. Perfect candidates for creating a better answer on a single targeted page.

Then, I played around with the suggestions that Google.co.uk made for me when I typed in those words in different orders and then googled around those suggestions to get a few others.

Just do some research. Go to blogs, forums, blog comments, see what questions people are asking and if you can give better answers then you have a piece of content.

If you find a common question that has no authoritative answer then that is a great opportunity and remember the old saying: hard answers make for easy links!

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Yep, this is really worth a read:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-update

These guys were kind of collateral damage, a great site, but got some kind of penalty due to the anchor text from WordPress templates.

They managed to nuke a big percentage of the links in one hit via a single multi user WordPress installation and bang, they were back at the first refresh.

Don't 301 though, that is not going to help!

Keep me posted mate, would really like to hear how you are getting on.

Cheers! 
Marcus

Hey James

It is super tough. The SEO world has for years tried to bend search to their will. Trying to find ways to get sites to rank when often they do not deserve to rank. Organic search is now a fairly mature channel so you will see heavy competition from the big online players (Amazon, Ebay etc) and the more traditional department stores.  Further to this there are the established niche online players in your space.

The problem here is with the entire philosophy - there is no safe, long term way to just build links. You have to create something of value first and answer that 'why would someone link to this site' question. Tough if the product range is just too generic.

Likely there are some content pieces you could create and then promote via digital PR and guest posts - a guest post can still have value if it has a branded link to your homepage and then a link to some content on the site you are trying to promote. If that content is also part of your sales and marketing funnel then all the better.

It's also true that organic search is not the best option for every site. If the budget is not right or the expectations are not on point then... it can be the case that there are other, better options for ecommerce vendors. Shopping Ads are a big win in most cases if done well.

It is tough. Not every national business is well suited to organic search. Not to say it would not help them.  But due to factors from budget to timescales it pays to explore the whole digital marketing playbook and determine what is the best fit.

Hope that helps.
Marcus

Hey

The answer here is pretty simple - you need to prioritise a single domain. The one you choose does not really matter in the long run so I would tend to favour the one people know best. I like .co.uk for uk businesses personally but...

1. Make sure both sites are registered in webmaster tools & put through a change of address for the one you want to change. Make sure the other is registered and you set any URL preferences (www. etc)

2. Add a 301 redirection to prioritise the main domain - you can use one rewrite rule to handle all www, non www, co.uk & .com variations - instructions here: http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/one-301-rewrite-to-rule-them-all/

3. Add canonical URLs for the correct TLD to pick up any slack

4. Claim your local listing and update the URL to the correct one

5. Ideally update any external links if easy to do so for consistency

Ultimately, don't over think this one. If you have both domains indexed then you will only see improvements from getting this all consistent on the one TLD.

Hope that helps
Marcus

Hey David

really, nothing has changed, other than the manipulative tactics, so if you were always doing things by the book, the game is the same now as it was ten years ago in 2003 when the Florida update kicked a lot of sites out the index.

You ask how to rank a site for a competitive term now rather than in the future, well, it does not, and really never has worked like that.

If it worked any other way it would not be fair, big results are earned over time and if there was a tactic or technique to just push in at the front of the queue, then that would be a nightmare.

It's a crappy, clichéd answer, but to rank the best, you have to be the best. If you want to rank for a competative term make sure you deserve to rank for that term and just about everything else to do with that term.

For us though, it is content. Content that gives us topical scope and supports the transactional terms, content that gets shared, content that drives soft conversions and content that drives the email and social campaigns that back those soft conversion up. Content that wins links and content that we can use to stimulate the link building process. Content on external sites, blogs, comments, guest posts, forums that helps people find us and click back for more referal traffic, exposure and more soft conversions and even a sale or two.

This is probably exactly the answer you did not want but content is at the very core of everything we do now and will likely continue to be for the foreseeable future.

Hmmm, these visits don't matter so maybe noindex the page first and then when it drops out just remove it. Then add a 301 to the showcase so that if anyone has it bookmarked for any reason or has linked to it they are not thrown a 404.

Really, it's not a big deal so just do whichever you think works best for the business.

Hey

Not always easy to answer these questions in general terms.

• Your national keyword indicates how relevant you are for this product / service / widget for non local search queries.
• Your local keywords indicates how relevant you are for this product / service / widget for local search queries.

If you have lots of local competition then you may be stacked behind others that are closer to a given location in the search query (or the user could be closer to the competitor than to you).

Lot of assumptions here. Lot of moving parts as well. Location targeted. Organic or pack results. Location of user conducting the search. Local intent behind these keywords.

Caveat - It is often hard to advise on these issues with all the information but in a very general way like this it is incredibly hard to give truly accurate and insightful guidance.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Hey, I am not aware of any such tool, but it should not be too hard to put one together, maybe a useful little tool as well.

If you have all of your pages in spreadsheet or database, it should be  easy enough to write a little script that cycles through them.

Start Loop

• request page

• parse code to get canonical URL

• compare page to canonical

• output problem URLs

End Loop

Slightly over simplified and requires a list of all your URLs but would be willing to help put something like this together, could be useful for all of us, especially for those (like me) that work with a lot of CMS sites.

Cheers

Marcus

Hey Steve, it is difficult, especially if you inherit these problems with a new client and there is just not a great deal of case study data out there.

You just need to be brutal in your clean up and attempt to remove anything that is obviously manipulative and as Robert mentioned above, if you have links from other sites that are clearly spam honeypots for Google then get them removed.

Best of luck
Marcus

Hey Noah

They are probably not doing you any harm but seeing as it's WordPress you could easily just noindex this whole category or all of these pages with the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin.

As ever, make the change, measure the results, and move forwards!

This is not really thin content though, the pictures are the content, they are unlikely to rank but I would be highly surprised if they did you any harm.

I just reviewed the rest of your site and they are perfectly in context so seriously, unless you have some kind of issues then I would not worry about this.

Hope it helps. 
Marcus

Sarah is a whole lotta woman, one man, even SEO titans like ourselves, is simply not enough for her lusty appetites. Or something like that.

Hey Josh,

Right, cool. I have got a few jobs to sort out but I am going to have a bash at knocking this up this afternoon. Should be easy enough (he said, damning himself to hours of problems).

Leave it with me for 24 hours.

Marcus

Steve, sorry, I completely misread that original question, if it is a manual penalty, things are somewhat worse and recovery, in my experience is a whole lot harder. You will have to be absolutely fastidious in your approach and get rid of everything manipulative or start over.

Sorry buddy, skim reading whilst stuffing my face at lunch time!

The obvious suggestion is to get the client to move his site to something a little more SEO friendly. I know this is not what you want to hear but if you are unable to make even relatively simple on page changes then you are really fighting an uphill battle from the go.

I can't imagine the site is huge and technical on the godaddy platform so recreating it or something very similar in WordPress would give him an affordable site with far better SEO prospects.

Ultimately, it's tough enough out there, why start the race with a wooden leg?

Hmm, it's not a simple matter of just buying up domains and you have to consider a bunch of things:

1. are the links to this site relevant to the new site (branded links etc)
2. is the old site a safe bet? Has it got penalties etc
3. if the site is valuable, why is it for sale?

I remembered this article from ages ago but it pretty much hits the nail on the head: 
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/buying-expired-domains-whats-the-best-strategy

Also, are you going to pick apart the old site and do specific redirects to relevant content on the new site or are you just going to funnel everything into the homepage with a catch all redirect rule? Again, if the other site was relevant and you could distribute the juice out to relevant places it would likely herald better results.

I guess the best tip here is to buy a site that is relevant and to not expect miracles! Also, make sure this is done as a complimentary strategy to other promotion and not as a sole approach.

Hope it helps

Marcus

Cheers Robert, thumbs up right back at you! As it happens, I have seen some cracking answers from you recently!

Hey Fraser

Is this your site: www.towelsrus.co.uk?

If so, the simple answer here would be to lose your drop down menus and give that a go. You already have a sub menu on each page once the user clicks through and a breadcrumb so someone can easily anchor themselves within the site should they land on one of these pages.

You then have a sub navigation on the primary category pages that allows people to navigate down to the long tail sub category pages like this one: Egyptain Cotton Hooded Bathrobes - which I am sure does not need to be linked to from every single page.

That should be technically easy enough and will make for a better overall site structure which is still easily spiderable via the sub navs. Equally, the canibalisation is likely not as big an issue as it appears but you will be removing multiple instances of keywords from the nav so that's not going to hurt.

I would give this a read:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

Hope that helps!
Marcus