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There's no hard & fast answer really, as it depends on your situation.

Personally, I'm a big fan of blogs in a subfolder on ecommerce sites. It gives you a great platform for publishing content that's useful to your target audience at various stages of their sales cycle.

For example, educating people about different solutions to a problem, guides on how to do stuff...

Not sure of the exact niche within gamers you sit, but, for example, a post with a detailed guide to streaming on Twitch, including photographs:

• That shows how to set-up OBS (Open Broadcaster Software),
• Explains the best settings in OBS are for Twitch (I know from experience people DO struggle with this part),
• Details how to set-up chat boxes and donation boxes etc in-stream,
• What your options are in terms of Headset/mic,
• What to look for in a webcam and how to do picture-in-picture style streaming (with an explanation of why this is good... It increases followers & encourages engagement etc)
• Detail external streaming hardware (Elgato boxes etc)

All of this will be VERY useful for any gamer wondering how to get into streaming and what hardware and software they need. Of course all the info is already available, but a lot of it is scattered across the web. Make it easy for folks and create an 'ultimate guide' style post.

Provide really uber-useful guides like this (varying depending on your exact sector), mix it in with genuine hardware reviews and comparisons... get a few mid-tier gamers to do hardware reviews on your blog too... and your blog may become someone's 'go-to' place for advice on gaming hardware, software and configuration. The benefits of this happening are that you may get subscribers to mailing lists, plus the brand trust - compared with JUST having an ecommerce store, will be huge.

You can also lock content with an email gate (e.g. in the Streaming example, offer a cheatsheet checklist that goes along with the post, in exchange for their email)... But personally? I'd be sure, if you do this, to have PLENTY of decent, helpful posts first. People will be more willing to give you their email once they know they can trust you. It's a value exchange and the onus is on YOU to provide the value first

The brand trust you should earn from this sort of work will likely increase your conversion rate considerably, as people prefer to buy from who they trust. On the subject of conversion rate, if you've not seen it yet, watch this: https://moz.com/blog/how-to-craft-the-best-damn-ecommerce-page-on-the-web-whiteboard-friday 

The only thing is, if you don't think you can support this level of quality on a blog, don't do it.

However, bear in mind that you DO NOT need to product 'x' posts a week... What dictates the amount you publish should be the capacity you have for producing stellar content. Better to publish less, but better. Also take the time to think about amplification of the content. Lots of good info here on Moz and other places.

Also, are there any folks you can partner with? Gamers who could get involved with the blog in exchange for gear or discounts?

Just to say I'll be sorting the htaccess for you later this afternoon

I'll ping you a private message on Moz when done and will include my contact details in case you need a hand or run into any problems.

Generally gTLDs allow you to set a target country in WMT (Okay, I'm old fashioned... Search Console), whereas ccTLDs don't. This tends to mean it's generally harder to target other countries with a ccTLD from another country. Not impossible, perhaps, but harder.

.es domains are Espana, of course - not Spanish language, Spain the country. Same with the others. When you use ccTLDs it's generally much harder to rank in other countries, regardless (to some extent) of the language. THAT SAID. I've personally seen several .es domains ranking in Google.mx (set to Mexico as the gl). In fact I just checked now and found a couple of .es domains ranking on page 2 for a moderately competitive term. They didn't have hreflang etc set either.

I'm more of a fan of a .com and subfolders (I'd pretty much always go with subfolders over subdomains) with geo-targeting in Search Console (you can target countries per subfolder) and hreflang, such as:

).

Also, as you mention marketing support, if you had a gTLD with subfolders, the juice would pass between the different country pages easier than with separate ccTLDs or even subdomains, meaning they'd stand a better chance of ranking without so much country-specific marketing spend, giving you an easier start in new markets due to internal links etc.

This is also partly just my own bias though, I fully appreciate that it sounds like you may have brand reasons for preferring separate ccTLDs.

I don't think there's a one-language fits all solution as it's not just about language, as with ccTLDs it is generally harder to rank in other countries (not impossible, but harder). As I say, though, I've seen evidence of es domains in google.mx.

As regards trying to target the countries but not being confident due to a lack of support in those countries yet... Tricky one! If there's not a huge time difference, if the language is the same for some markets, and being able to offer support is a concern, what about a web-based support solution, such as Intercom?

Personally, though, I'm a fan of starting as you mean to go on, or waiting until you're ready to launch fully. I'd be worried about going into a market and ranking there, if I didn't have the support to back up any queries, as it could hurt the brand. That said, I don't know your exact situation, so maybe you have a plan for this.

Not really my place to say this... But why not book one of Moz's free onboarding sessions? They'll give you a walk through of all the toolset's features and help you understand the metrics a bit more.

Best of all... it's free!

What I'd recommend (both as a long term SEO and someone who's used Moz for years), is first book an onboarding session with Moz. I've been using the Moz suite for many years, but recently booked one, just out of curiosity really! (and to see if I had any knowledge gaps with regards what the Moz tools can do).

Don't expect strategy advice from Moz, of course, but sitting through a short onboarding session will really help you get to grips with the Moz tools and:

1. Mean you need to pay a consultant for less time training on Moz's tools (so your money can be directed more to strategy & advice, rather than learning the tools)
2. As you'll be a bit more comfortable with the Moz tools, you'll likely understand what the consultant you hire is talking about better
3. Without meaning to be rude to anyone, you'll also find it easier to spot those who can and cannot help you.

I'm not pitching for the work or anything here btw (am booked out solid with project work for the next few months, so couldn't even if I wanted to!), I just though the above might be a good way forward for you.

Another option is if the site uses a CMS. If so, then you can create a sitemap for content pages/posts etc,.

Personally, I'm with Krzysztof Furtak  on SF. Screaming Frog rocks. It'll find most pages, except perhaps Orphan pages as it wouldn't be able to find a link to crawl to discover the page.

If it's really important to get as many pages as possible, I'd do the following (I've put an Astrix (*) next to ones that some people may think are a tad extreme)

• Run a Screaming Frog crawl
• Grab a sitemap from your CMS
• Check any server-based analytics (AWSTATS etc)
• Check your access_log file & parse out URLs in there**(*)**
• site: queries, with & without www, and also using * as a subdomain (use something like Moz's toolbar to export)
• As Krzysztof suggests, Scrapebox would extract data too, but be careful scraping, you may get an IP slap.(*)
• Export crawl data from Moz & a tool such as Deep Crawl
• Throw the pages from all into Excel and de-dupe.
• Once you have a de-duped list, as an optional last step, go back to Screaming Frog and enter list mode (I have the paid version, not sure if it's possible with the free one) and run a crawl over all the de-duped URLs to get status codes etc

If you're going to do this sort of thing a fair bit - buy a Screaming Frog license, it's an awesome tool and can be useful in a multitude of situations.

The site: command is handy for asking Google what pages it knows about, however if Muzzmoz wants to know the number of pages on a site, you'd need more than this.

Also, re: your different ways or querying, I like to use:

site:*.domain.com - This can show other subdomains too, that may otherwise be missed

Good answer Dirk.

I like your idea of adding valuable, relevant content to the pages Dirk, good thinking.

Personally, I'd rather Iet Google know these pages are removed intentionally and not due to errors, so 410 rather than leaving as 40.

One thing to be mindful of, though, is how much crawl budget you're willing to give to these pages. If we're talking about a lot of pages in bulk, I'd be worried how much crawl budget they'd eat up over time. As you point out, they'd likely drop in rank anyway due to loss of internal links too, so might be the cost to the crawl budget isn't worth it?.

Another solution (using your idea Dirk), would be to somehow automate the process of, when a listing is marked as sold, the listing is removed, other properties in the same area are added (as you suggest),  then some time later (month or two?), a 410 header set.

The other option would be to 301 the old pages back to the area page for the properties (perhaps with something like a bootstrap message saying the property is sold but others in the area are available). This would pass juice etc back to that page. but, of course, you'd be telling G that the page had permanently moved, which isn't quite the case.

Hmmm looking at the first 2 pages, I think I can see what's happening here

Not 100% on how Moz's tool figures out dupe content, but I think this is why (3rd point is strongest, I think):

• Similar URLs (first part up to the last folder, then first word, then both ending in 2016) means the URL is a close match
• The title tags are also quite similar
• Perhaps most importantly, it does look like the VAST MAJORITY of the content on the page is in fact duplicate of other pages. It's not obvious at first BUT... To see what I mean, click on the 'Guidelines' tab (looks like jQuery tabs or similar) and we get a big amount of content - the most on the page - that's duplicated between both pages.

Perhaps consider making that a link to a dedicated page that has this content, opening in a new tab or similar?

For your 2nd two examples, check the 'About Your Instructor' and 'FAQs'. I'd advise that where content is repeated over & over, move it to it's own page and then link to it from there, rather than having the same several hundred words indexed on many pages.

Hope that helps?

Ps. There may be a better solution for displaying the content, iframing it into the tab etc, but if you go down that route be careful, it's an effort to make iframes responsive!

If it's a system that doesn't support .htaccess, it's likely IIS as Kevin said. That said, when you say:

So, I don't have a way to do 301 redirects.

... This makes me wonder if it's not IIS (as 301s are possible with IIS, just in a different way, as Kevin outlines). It'd be good to confirm what your hosting environment is either way though, as it'd be hard for anyone to give a decent answer without knowing this.

Ah! Okay cool. I'm based just outside Bristol - Been to Gatwick a few times... hope it wasn't too stressful!

I'll sort a htaccess file out for you tomorrow, no problems. Might be good to exchange Skype or Twitter details though, in case you run into any issues when adding it, though I'll put a bit of advice into the email I send the htaccess file with, so you should be fine Also, let me know when you've implemented the htaccess and I'll run a quick screaming frog crawl over both your site and the list of error pages, just to make sure all is as it should be

No worries re: returning the favour, just help the next person in line who needs a bit of help that you're able to provide, that's enough

Personally, if you're 100% that you don't want the Wordpress install, I'd:

• Delete all files in the myblog subfolder, except the .htaccess file
• Edit the .htaccess file (or create a new one if you deleted it)
• 301 Redirect any good posts (had rankings, traffic or links) to a specific, related page on your main site
• Add a redirect rule to 301 all remaining pages to / (main site's homepage)

This may sound odd, but I'd then submit a sitemap with the pages that caused the 500 and 404 errors, aiming to get Google to recrawl the error pages & find the new 301 rules.

If you need a hand with this, I'm busy today but I can make the .htaccess entry for you tomorrow morning *UK time) and ping over to you.

EDIT: I'll be out for the next few hrs, but will keep an eye for a response when I can. If you want to drop me an email, check my Moz profile page, look under 'Mike Gracia's Blog:' and email me at that domain (my email is mike@).

Not much to add to Sean's answer, except make SURE that what you want them to link to is worth it! Ideally, you'll have an angle, such as something the competitor doesn't. Even better, a new feature that the blogger could write about, to give them some 'juice' for their article.

Remember to think like them - What can you give to them, to help them make their piece of content better. To get what you want, you really need to figure out what they want

• Screaming frog! All day long

I love SF, it's amazing. I have the paid version (as I use it a lot) but their free too is good too. For smaller sites, the free tool is absolutely fine. It's not som crappy demo that has most features blocked or anything, it's very usable. Their paid version

Their paid version I'd put under 'low cost' for what you get too. Love the fact you can ingore robots.txt, great for testing dev sites.

One thing I REALLY like about SF (vs SaaS based online tools), is the ability to edit my hosts file & add a dev domain, then run SF on the site, even though it's on localhost - A benefit of desktop tools).

Then there's:

• **Google Analytics **- I like to create custom dashboards for various things, such as segmenting mobile vs desktop, PPC dashboards, social dashboards etc. I think as SEOs we forget how many clients either don't realise custom dashboard exist, or don't realise how useful they can be

• Search Console / WMT (can't get out of the habit of calling it WMT!)

• Deep Crawl - Very handy. I use this, Moz's crawl and Screaming Frog for all my crawl testing needs

• Various free page-speed checks (GTmetrix, Google page speed insights, Yslow, testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com, Pingdom page speed tool also)

• OSE & Moz (not free but for what you get, I think it's low cost)

• Moz's keyword explorer (AMAZING tool. Not just saying that as this is on Moz, I genuinely think it's awesome)

• Chrome & Firefox inspectors

• Firebug

• GA plugin for Chrome

• GA debugger for Chrome (handy for testing GA events in Chrome console!)

• Check my links Chrome extension (for when you don't need a full crawl and just want to check for broken links on a page quickly in the browser)

• Google Alerts - Great for finding unlinked mentions as they happen, keeping tabs on competitors mentions & press, or even being alerted to related topics etc.

• Excel or Google Sheets - Great for a multitude of data analsys!

• access_log file - I possibly saved one of the best till last! The access_log file is great for parsing out stuff like Googlebot visits. Pop the data into a (paid) tool like Screaming Frog log file analyser, or (as I like to do) insert the data into a MySQL database and run some queries... You can find a WEALTH of tasty info, like:

• What pages get the most Googlebot activity

• Group pages together (e.g. all posts within a category, or pages under a URL folder) and calculate what % of Googlebot crawls they got

• Identify any important pages that are not getting crawlled much

• Cross-check your sitemap (in MySQL I like to select all pages from the sitemap - which I store in a MySQL table, then do a JOIN with the access_log table in the same MySQL database, then pull off a count how many times the sitemap pages were crawled, according to the access_log table. Of course the access_log needs to be for a decent time period).

These are not strictly for SEO, but useful for SEOs I think:

• **Awesome Screenshot **for Chrome - good for taking quick screenshots & annotating screenies, for devs/staff/clients etc
• Pocket - Brilliant for 'bookmarking' articles to read later... Helps me stay on-track when I'm head-down working but spot an SEO related article I want to read later... Add to pocket & close tab
• Onetab - For the times when the number of open tabs makes my mac sound like a Boeing 747 Closes all open tabs, saves them in a list for later - Can export to a file too. Handy!

Argh! That's a long list, sorry!

Veronica (my keyboard doesn't do accents I don't think! Lo siento Veronica!) gave a good answer, I just wanted to add...

With internal links, if you're using WP or another CMS platform, there are plugins that do 'related posts', 'top posts', and even 'top comments', all of which could, in theory, send extra internal link juice to the pages. Though, many of these plugins would return the most popular/recent etc, not necessarily the pages you want

An approach I'd consider is manually finding posts that are related to the posts you're looking to give a little boost, and see if it'd make sense (from a content perspective) to link from any of the related posts you've found, back to your target posts. You may want to use an in-content link, or could even add a small 'recommended post' promo area - within or under the related post.

• Also, as you publish new content, remember to internally link to the target posts where it makes sense.
• You've mentioned content relaunches, did you update the last-modified meta (if it exists) or last-modified header?

Can the on-page SEO be improved at all? When you get to the first 2 pages, small improvements can yield results, so:

• Can the standard SEO be improved? (Go back to SEO 101, check things like filenames of images on the page, alt tags, what about subheadings? do you use < strong > when you could use < h2 > or < h3 >?).
• Page load times - can you optimise the images to increase load speed? What about page bloat (CSS/JS from old plugins - cleaning that will help the entire site!)
• Structured data - can you add any Schema markup? (article etc)
• Click through rates from SERPs... Can you improve the title tag (careful!) or meta description to try to get a higher CTR from the SERPs? As you get closer to the top, this gets more important (in my opinion/conjecture not fact)

That's all I can think of off-hand.

Very good answer by EGOL. Quality over quantity any day. As for being awesome content, remember that it should be awesome content that answers the needs, questions etc of your target audience.

Also, remember that to be truly effective, your content should speak to your demographic at different stages in their buying cycle. From 'Discovery' pieces, through to comparison articles etc, always be mindful when writing an article who you're targeting the content to, what stage of the funnel they are likely to be, and how you can HELP them understand the issues and move on to the next stage. Sounds like a lot of work, but once you get into the workflow, it's worth it.

For content ideas, think of questions too - If you've been in an industry for a while, you may already know what common questions come up - use this! It's gold. Also, if you have any sales folks (or any customer-facing folks) ask THEM what questions they get asked by customers most often - keep a list, look for trends and there you have an ideas list for your articles. This is just one idea - there's loads of great advice out there on the web for this sort of thing. Check some Whiteboard Fridays on content topics too, there's some good ones from what I remember.

I'd then mix really stellar content with some outreach. Be careful with outreach though, be smart and always think of adding value. Can you partner with any businesses in the articles? Can you write any guides that mention other (non-competing) businesses and produce or co-authored piece that'll be shared to both your social audiences & email lists? If you do base an article on customer questions, would the customers be happy to be mentioned in the piece (always ask!) as if so, perhaps they'll share it? (who better to help you reach more

If you do base an article on customer questions, - always as permission - but, would the customers be happy to be mentioned in the piece ( "Joe Blogs from [town] raised a great question which lead to this article...] as if so, perhaps they'll share it? (who better to help you reach more customers, than your existing happy customers).

Anyway, just a few ideas.

If you've uninstalled Wordpress, then all URLs in /myblog (assuming this was your WP install dir, looking at the screenshot) will return 404s.

It's odd that they are returning a 500 (server error) response, though, I'd expect 404 errors. Have you

Have you done-away with your blog entirely? The only thing I can think of is the uninstall of Wordpress didn't go quite right and some files remain. All of the files in the screenie were for the Jetpack plugin, are there other 500 URLs?

• How did you uninstall? Manually?
• Is the directory /myblog still there?
• Is the MySQL database for WP still there? (this wouldn't cause the 500 issue, that'll be file related, still a valid question in case you need to salvage your WP install for a later date!).

301 Redirects

If you have removed the Wordpress site, it's going to be important to 301 redirect (permanently moved) the /myblog (in .htaccess assuming you're using Linus). Otherwise:

• You'll lose any link juice to the blog posts
• Visitors will hit 500 errors (at present) or 404 not found errors (if you fix the 500 error, which I suspect is due to a problematic uninstall)

Recommended Actions (if you don't want a blog):

• Check to see if WP was uninstalled correctly, any remaining files in /myblog
• Check if the MySQL database is still there - if it is, WAIT! Do you have any old WP posts that you want to keep?
• 301 Redirect any decent posts to a relevant new page on your website
• Add a blanket 301 Redirect for all other pages under /myblog (redirect rules can do this, no need for lots of individual 301s!)

Don't You Want a Blog?

A final question Don't you want a blog? Were you using it to publish decent content etc? If so, no reason to ditch Wordpress. If WP is causing issues, must be a problem somewhere (likely a in a theme or plugin file, or a conflict). Wordpress can be a great CMS but the downside is the number of plugins. It's too easy to install lots of theme and run into problems. Same with some cheap or free WP themes too.

If you do want a blog still, perhaps post here with what the problems were? Maybe the community can help get you back on-track with a blog?

Bump for this too! Jon's answer seemed quite positive... any more news?

Okay - After some tweaking, it's actually not TOO bad. Not sure if it was just me, but they are looking okay now.

Shame that they are just scanned images as PDFs, rather than true (searchable) PDFs, but they are not too bad. Odd filename though - Vanguard something or other?

I think I'll stick with this and perhaps with some testing of dragging the elements around, I'll be able to get the page breaks at a decent spot!

In fact - using Chrome's 'Awesome Screenshot' plugin to take a screenie of the whole page gives a MUCH better quality result! allbeit a flat image not a pdf - But then again, the PDF output from Moz appears to be flat and uneditable/unsearchable (scanned image converted to PDF according to Adobe) too, so might as well be a flat jpg

Only different is the screenie doesn't put page breaks in, but I guess I can live with that for now