Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Scratch_MM,

Yes optimising for pdf´s still matters and follow some specific optimization rules, You can find a great post about this on SEJ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/pdf-seo-best-practices/59975/.

In relation to competing with the parent page, the pdf is just another page and as such eligble for ranking dependent on the content.  If the pdf contains the same content as the parent page than it would be better to use a canonical to the parent page.  Otherwise its will compete as much as normal pages would do, based on there content.

Hope this helps

Hi Camilo,

thanks for the clarification.  As this content wil not be available anymore on the "old" pages it will only exist on the newly created blog pages there will be no duplicate content issues.  These newly created blog pages with the content removed from "old" pages will start from scratch for ranking. and the "old" pages could loose some ranking because you reduced the onpage ranking.

This is not per se bad as it is part of your strategy to improve on conversions (which should be the most important kpi anyway).

You could help these new blog pages a bit by linking to them from the "old" page.

Hi Jenna,

In relation to the client searching their Business name, that shouldn´t be a big issue (unless they have chosen highly competitive generic words for their business name like "low interest loans") as EGOL mentioned they should rank fairly fast for this.

For adwords you can show them this http://www.tbkcreative.com/why-you-shouldnt-google-your-own-ads/ .  Many times though the clients will still continue to search anyway.  One of my clients only stopped after i showed him in his account that the keyword he was constantly searching had a ctr of 4% where all others in the account were more close to 20% and that it was the only one with a Quality score 3 points lower than the rest.  After this i showed him the results of him having stopped searching and he hasn´t restarted.  In this case though we were talking about 15-20 searches a day minimum.  Sporadich searches shouldn´t impact that much.

You need to also setup a regular reporting where you can show the results and this should be part of the inicial agreement.  Here you can show either data from analytics, GSC, Adwords, Moz etc... that will assure them there are actual results from your work. And be very clear from the start about what they can expect.

Hi VTmoz,

Although it sounds there is no big risk involved to do the redirect when there are no backlinks and no traffic, it might be better to err on the safe side and simply setup an information page on the domain with a link to your main domain. So that way when people accidentally enter the taken over domain they can easily navigate to your correct site, and you don´t risk any legacy issues with the taken over domain.

If you do decide to redirect you could additionally check in the GSC for manual penalties, check spam score on Moz and citation flow / trus flow on Majestic and view archive.org to check for any spam content in the past (though all these are unlikely when you have not found backlinks or traffic).

Anyway good you got the domain that was infringing on your trademark!

Hi  AdvimateLtd,

Yes you need to do 301´s to pass link equity to the new url´s .  You can use a tool like this one here to facilitate the work https://donatstudios.com/RewriteRule_Generator

Hope this helps.

Hi Chuck,

Yes i have seen this before.  I understand this manufacturer is also your supplier so they would also be cutting out a middle man (more clients would purchase from them directly) and leaving them with higher margins whilst at the same time reducing there cpc´s.

If you remove all competition but one from a keyword auction it would lower cpc (how much depends on the minimum cpc for that keyword) but it has nothing to do with "low search volume" which is a result of a keyword having very small amount of searches (this is influenced directly only by the buyers and not by the sellers).

Google will handle this by reducing the cpc that was increased because of competitor bidding auctions.

Its not a pleasant situation and in my case there was nothing to do about it (or it must be a generic product for which you could find another manufacturer, which i think is not an option in your case)

hi  Luke Rowlands,

You can use another name (although i can´t come up with a reason why a client wouldn´t want that format in the url).  You should however than

Link to it in your robots.txt or submit the sitemap directly to the search engines

Hi Becky,

In general this will depend a lot on the kind of impact your looking for / companies objectives.

First thing is find your high converting keywords and work on improving ranking for those.

Second find ways for automating work with templates for your onpage optimisation. Though not always best for SEO, unavoidable for Big ecommerce sites.

Build links e.g. by producing quality content relevant for your audience.

Hi Alick300,

isn´t .ie a ccTLD though for Ireland or does google treat this one as a gccTLD as seen here https://www.screencast.com/t/5YgjXIriy ?

Hi Neil,

I think complementing your local seo business for your clients with adwords makes a lot of sense.  Since both have there strengths and weaknesses you can maximize the results for you clients while gaining a lot of insights.

Google Adwords express is mainly for small business owners that don´t have the time neither the knowledge to use Google Adwords.  You have a lot less control in the former, especially the lack of control over the keywords, and most is automated.  This doesn´t give you enough control to effectively manage these campaigns for your clients and add value for them.  More info on how to start with adwords for smb you could find here https://www.pickaweb.co.uk/blog/complete-guide-to-google-adwords-for-local-business/

If you should have them all in one account or each one have there own depends on various factors, like:

1. Payment - Will each client pay directly to google, in this case you need to create a different account for each
2. Recourses - If you want to spend as little time as possible maintaining the accounts this would be much easier in one account with all your clients
3. Portability - Do your clients value the fact there account is portable?
4. Quality - If you have all clients in one account they all contribute to the overal accounts quality score (positively or negatively) this might not get you the best performance for each client

Hope this helps and good luck

Hi Seoanalytics,

Is there a correlation or causation between the search popularity of a keyword an the difficulty to rank?  I would think the primal reason for dificulty in ranking is a high comercial value of the Keyword that could be because a lot of people search it or because it has high values + margins.  So not just the popularity of the search term is key and a keyword could be highly popular but have no comercial value.

e.g. for "tying shoes" (i know not very exciting example) i find 6.600 monthly searches in US and moz ranking diifficulty 50.  and for "ty slippers" 390 monthly searches moz ranking difficulty 65, whereas you would excpect the other way around if there was causation.

so i would say there is correlation but no causability.  Just my 50 cents

Hi,

Did you maintain the meta tags for the img (alt text, filename) for the newly compressed images? I imagene that the time  between the replacement and the drop is fairly close for you to deduce this is connected, has the drop occured long ago (could be a temporary issue)?

Hi,

I have been working with several writers in the past from peopleperhour with excellent resuts.  They however did not do the keyword research and were only used to write the copy according to our instructions.  There are several people offering this service though so you could give them a try.

Hi  Cesare Marchetti,

Thanks for you question.  I think there are several things to consider here:

1. are you the only one appearing on adwords for these keywords or are there other competitors as well.  If latter is the case you would simply be loosing potential business to your competitors as 20 - 30% of the users click on adwords (these are the ones left over after the 70% - 80% that never click on ads) for commercial terms.
2. Different people with different intent, devices, place etc.. will click on different results so i would like to dominate the serp as much as possible so i can cater to those, and adwords would just be one of those results.  This way i think i can maximize the results and return.
3. But these are mostly empirical assumptions to really test this objectively is almost impossible as there are many factores influencing results.  like you said seasonality, competitores, positions you have in the serp based on device, location, time etc... You could stop adverting adwords for one month for one of the keywords, compare how results were for this keyword compared the other keywords (and compare that to how they would compare in previous months), ajust for seasonality based on historic monthly results. But there can still be other factors incluencing the results.

Hope this helps and give you some perspectives on the issue, althouhg i don´t think this is completely what you were looking for (and if somebody does know a way to test this i would be very interested)

Hi Brian Nash,

Don´t think this funcionality exist.  Can you explain why you would like to nofollow instead of disavow?

hi vtmoz,

I can see all this keywords of being there own topic, sure they use the same main keyword / topic "seo" but they are not the same. A page about "seo history" and "seo strategies" can have substancial different content and cater to a different search intent.  If you have good content for all these keywords its a sound strategy to create multiple landing pages for them.

Since i am new to Q&A this was really helpfull (should have probably seen it before i started posting answers:-))

I Agree with James,  for the 404 pages you could also configure Google Search Console to find them (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6001104?hl=en.)

Hi Alex Cox,

I understand why you would want to do this and i have seen instances where this was done (not with the shoping aggregator markup but using the product markup with aggregateratings) and they got the rich snippets in the serps, like you mention. But for how long?

The point though is that your not following the intentions of the schema markups.  These reviews that you would be using on the category would be from people reviewing your products and not the category itself.  Hence you are gaming the system.

I´ve had the urge in the past (had to use some restrain) but refrained from doing it because at the end of the day you are eluding your users and thats not good business in the long run.

Hope my thoughts helped

Hi vtmoz,

On your first question i wouldnt do a redirect i would show a message with a link to your website for users ending up on that domain.

The difference is that with a 301 redirect you are telling Google to pass all the link equity of that page to the page you are redirecting to (the good and the bad)  when you implement a link on the page pointing the users to your correct website you can use a nofollow which will result in google not passing any link equity at all.