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Hi Jason,

Thanks for the question.

I'm not sure if you've made changes already or if things are fluctuating right now, but I see your category page ranking for the keyword "twin dvd player" - not the advice page. I am however seeing your advice pay rank for "site radio" and understand that this is a problem.

In case you haven't seen it yet, this post from Rand is an old one but still very relevant to this topic.

There are a few things that you can look at here that can play a part in the wrong page ranking:

• External links to the page - I can't see many links at all but this is definitely a big factor
• Internal links to the page - you mentioned this and your site architecture looks logical
• Content of the page - I'd look for ways of being unique, useful content onto the category page so that it becomes more than just a list of products. I'd look to incorporate things like unique reviews for the products on that page, extra content on how to choose the best product, technical considerations etc. I know this is tricky as you don't want to push the products too far down the page, but with some good design, it can be done
• Page title - I'd possible look at making the page titles of your advice centre pages a bit more focused on the types of keywords someone would use when looking for this content. For example one keyword may be "Tips for Buying a DVD Player" "DVD player buying guide" etc which may help Google undertstand that this page is more to do with advice and info rather than products themselves

The other thing I'd recommend (this isn't a long term solution but makes the best of the short term) is to add some product images to your advice pages so that you stand a good chance of getting someone to click through to the product page and convert. You could choose your most popular three or four products and list them at the side. At least this means that people landing on this page stand more chance of converting.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

Thanks for the question.

I'm afraid that I'm not too familiar with "Hoth" link building so I can't answer that directly. Regarding subdomains though, from a technical perspective, they are different websites and therefore are capable of passing link equity in the same way that any other website could. It really comes down to the quality and relevance of the subdomain.

I'd recommend looking at them in the same way you would any other link and assess them for quality. The one thing to maybe flag is when you have lots of subdomains which are on the same root domain. There is a chance that these may not pass as much value but again, it comes down to why they are there and the quality of them.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Aaron,

The advice from the other guys here is spot on in that it's more about the quality of the domain linking to you than the number of links coming from it. If it's a relevant link and makes sense for users, it's pretty unlikely that it would cause you any problems.

Just to chime in on this question:

"My question is, is it worth have 2-4 articles from one highly relevant website, or will 1 article have the same weight?"

To give you a concrete example, I've guest blogged here on Moz multiple times and each post has links to my site. The first time a link was found to Google would have had more impact than the subsequent ones, but the subsequent ones would still help me because of the trust and relevance that the Moz.com domain has to my own. It's just that these links probably won't be as powerful as getting brand new links from new domains to my website.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi David,

Thanks for the question and I'm glad to see that you found my list of infographic sites

I think that infographics can still be a good way of marketing your website and getting links, the key really is to make sure that you're not just doing an infographic for the sake of doing an infographic. To be more specific, it shouldn't just be created in order to get links. There needs to be a solid, accurate story and data behind it as well as a nice design. Too many infographics these days are thrown together very quickly and shouldn't even be infographics! These are the ones that are probably not going to help very much in terms of links or traffic.

I believe that this is what partly led to Matt Cutts saying back in 2012 that Google may seek to discount links generated by infographics at some point.

It sounds like you don't need to worry about this but I wanted to point it out anyway.

Re your questions - I would avoid using commercial anchor text and stick to branded anchor text - this helps reduce the chance if the activity being seen as spammy and causing you problems with Google. I'd certainly recommend linking back to the original source of the infographic or the data behind it, I'd avoid linking back to commercial category pages because this can also make it look a bit spammy.

In terms of how many you should distribute to, it is less about the number and more about the quality of the site. The list I provided was put together over two years ago now (I need to update it!) so I'd recommend you review the sites and make sure they're of a good quality before submitting to them. Ultimately, you want your infographic to be covered on good quality sites that have the potential to send you quality, relevant traffic. If you use this as your benchmark, it will mean that you should end up going for good quality sites.

I hope that helps and best of luck with your infographic!

Paddy

Hi Jason,

It sounds like when you moved to the Hubspot CMS, the URLs of your website changed? If so, 301 redirects are needed from the old URLs to the new ones. Unfortunately, redirecting all of your pages to the homepage is not optimal and is the likely cause of the traffic still remaining very low on your website.

It has been some time now since this work was done but I think it's worth a shot removing the 301 redirect from all your old pages to the home page. Then you should 301 redirect every individual old URL to the most appropriate new URL. This makes for a much better user experience, it stops 404 errors and it helps maintain traffic.

I'm honestly not sure if it's too late to fix the traffic, but it is worth a shot I think.

For future guidance, here are some good guides on moving your website:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6033049?hl=en&ref_topic=6033084

http://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

This is quite a common issue and happens because technically, the addition of those parameters at the end of the URL mean that it's a new URL from Google's perspective. These kinds of parameters are very common and Google often figure it out and drop these URLs from their index and focus on the correct version. However, they don't always do this and may not do it as quickly as you'd like.

One way to deal with this is to add a rel=canonical tag to any duplicate versions of the URL and have that tag point back to the correct URL. Based on your question, this would mean that the canonical tag would look like this:

This would go into the section of this URL (and any other duplicates):

https://techplusgame.com/hideo-kojima-not-interested-in-new-silent-hills-revival-insider-claims/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=hideo-kojima-not-interested-in-new-silent-hills-revival-insider-claims

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Christine,

As Alex said, this shouldn't be a problem. I'd just advise keeping things consistent where you can, if only from a maintenance/debugging perspective so that if something breaks, it's easier to diagnose.

You should also make sure that markup is consistent between mobile and desktop sites if you have separate sites or change content based on each one.

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi there,

I'd agree with the comments from Richard and Jim below, the types of techniques you mention are not really the ones that I'd endorse when you're trying to build a business online. Social media links using Fiverr and link directories aren't as effective as they used to be and can cause link problems if you use them now.

Instead, I'd recommend trying to make your website link worthy and using your business USPs to try and generate links. Here are some good guides to help you with this:

• http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building
• http://moz.com/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links
• http://moz.com/blog/link-building-101-the-almost-complete-link-guide-updated-for-post-penguin
• http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

These guides and tactics focus on more sustainable methods of link building which should help you in the long term,

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

There are plenty of really good resources online that cover this area, so I'd like to point you towards them rather than copy and paste their guidelines here!

Google has a good guide here with lots of visuals on how they crawl AJAX -

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/getting-started

They also have a short video here covering some of the basics of Google crawling AJAX and JavaScript:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6mtiwQ3nvw

You should also become familiar with pushState which is cover in lots of detail, with an example implementation in this blog post:

http://moz.com/blog/create-crawlable-link-friendly-ajax-websites-using-pushstate

The guys at Builtvisible have also put together a few good blog posts on this topic which are worth a read:

http://builtvisible.com/javascript-framework-seo/

http://builtvisible.com/on-infinite-scroll-pushstate/

Essentially, you need to make sure that Googlebot is able to render your content as you intended and that this looks the same to them as it does to users. You can often test how well they can render your content by checking the cache of your page or by using this feature in Google Webmaster Tools.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

YoastSEO should do the job for Wordpress - it allows you to define the canonical page URL on each of your pages/posts:

https://yoast.com/help/canonical-urls-in-wordpress-seo/

Another option which I usually find effective which I initially skipped over is the URL parameters section in Google Search Console. You'll find it in the legacy tools section and you can set these parameters to "No: Doesn't affect page content:" which is the option for tracking code parameters:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6080548?hl=en

Hi Ben,

I'm a big fan of Talkwalker.com, it seems to work better than Google Alerts for me these days. There is a free version which allows you to give it a try and a paid version which lets you check more keywords.

Of course there is also Fresh Web Explorer which tends to spot mentions pretty quickly as well.

I've never used it myself but I've heard good things about Sprout Social which has a social media monitoring feature as well as a bunch of other things too.

I hope those help!

Paddy

Hi there,

To add to what others have said, I don't think this is a good idea.

If you have lots of low quality backlinks already, then you need to clean these up by removing as many as possible and adding the rest to a disavow file in Google Webmaster Tools. Building more blog comment links is very, very unlikely to help with anything and may actually hurt you more.

Once you've removed or disavowed the low quality links, you should then concentrate on building good quality links instead.

Here are a few links that may be helpful:

https://moz.com/blog/link-audit-guide-for-effective-link-removals-risk-mitigation

https://moz.com/blog/category/link-building

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Will,

The previous reply is a good one - these are answer boxes and are becoming more and more common. Here are a few more resources for you that may help:

http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-onebox-plus-box-direct-answers

https://moz.com/blog/more-google-answer-boxes-with-bonus-experiment

https://moz.com/blog/101-google-answer-boxes-a-journey-into-the-knowledge-graph

It's definitely worth following Dr. Pete on this topic, he tends to spot these new features pretty early and often talks about what they could mean for the future, as he has in the blog posts above.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Becky,

I'm not sure that product titles / descriptions would directly affect rankings as such i.e. writing good titles and descriptions is unlikely to make the category pages suddenly jump up in rankings. However I can see how it would help Google better understand the topic of the category as a whole, which may allow the category page to rank for a wider range of keywords.

The one thing to be careful of is that you don't accidentally confuse Google with your keyword targeting. So you should try and make sure that your target keywords map to different pages and don't cross over too much. If you cover the same keywords across a category page and a product page, it may confuse Google and they won't know which one to rank for that set of keywords - which means they may rank the wrong one and not rank as highly as they could.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi,

Thanks for the question.

Here are some relevant sections of the Schema.org vocabulary which should be useful for you and confirm that the example you've given is correct:

https://schema.org/MedicalEntity

https://schema.org/MedicalSpecialty (Plastic surgery is linked from here)

This may also help:

http://moz.com/learn/seo/schema-structured-data

In terms of productontology - this looks sensible but I'm not sure if Google recognise / accept them as a vocabulary to better understand your content. However, Schema.org doesn't cover everything you're trying to markup, so it should work fine for now but I'd recommend running your code through the rich snippets testing tool to see how Google respond to it.

Hope that helps!

Hi Syed,

Thanks for the question.

There could be a number of reasons why you can't rank any higher in search results. One place to start is to look at the websites that rank above you and see what they have that you don't. The things I'd look for are:

• Are they stronger, mainstream brands or established websites who are naturally stronger than you? For example from the UK, I see websites such as Buzzfeed and Amazon ranking for this keyword. These types of competitors are going to be very hard to move above.
• Do they have more and better quality links than you? Radi pointed this out in his answer and Open Site Explorer can help give you an answer here.
• Is their content better than yours on this topic? Be honest with yourself here and see if they're doing anything better than you and see what you can learn from this.
• Do they have larger audiences (you can get an idea of this from their social channels or engagement such as blog comments) which means they may be generating more user signals to Google?
• Is their content more keyword focused than yours? You can use the Moz on-page grader here to get an idea of this.

It can be hard to jump above stronger websites, but focusing on lower competition, niche keywords first is definitely the right approach.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Radi,

In terms of cleaning up your links, there is a good article here on Moz which may help with the process and it's still relevant:

https://moz.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-google-penalty-removal

Even though this is for penalty removal, step 3 talks about how to spot low quality links and before that, the article talks about how to gather your link data. I also wrote this guide a while ago which is still relevant except for the use of PageRank which is probably too out of date now. But the process is still relevant:

http://www.stateofdigital.com/step-by-step-guide-finding-low-quality-links/

To give you a very quick overview of the process, I tend to use something like this:

1. Gather all of your backlink data using Google Search Console, Open Site Explorer, Majestic and AHREFs
2. Combine it all into one dataset and remove duplicates
3. Look for patterns of links that may be low quality such as spammy anchor text, directories, article submissions etc
4. Review them in more detail to assess the quality

In terms of the citations for the old business name, these on their own shouldn't be harmful - it's perfectly normal for businesses to change names / rebrand etc. It's only an issue if the citations / links are low quality. It is probably worth changing the citations to the new business name where possible just to make sure that Google pass across any equity for them.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

I'm not sure how many redirects you're doing, but generally, they're not a problem if you're trying to redirect broken pages to new ones so that users get a better experience. A few things to bear in mind though which can cause problems:

• Avoid multiple redirect "hops" e.g. going from page A to page B to page C. Wherever you can, write the redirects so that they go directly to the new page which is the final destination for the user.
• Keep the redirects "one to one" - basically avoid redirecting lots and lots of pages to a single destination if you can.
• Redirect to the most relevant page that you can in terms of the topic of the pages e.g. redirect a page about blue widgets to a blue widgets page, not a red widgets page - if that's possible.
• Do a crawl of the redirects using a tool such as Screaming Frog in list mode to check them all and make sure you turn on "follow redirects" and check the "redirect chains" report it provides.

I hope that helps!

Hi there,

There isn't a definitive answer regarding the number of links that you should add. The way I'd suggest thinking about this is what would make sense for users - do they need to have links on every single page? Does it make sense for them to be able to click to different subdomains from anywhere or could you list them all on your homepage or another page?

It's pretty common practice to cross link between subdomains that are related to each other, but you do want to be careful not to do it if it doesn't make sense i.e. if you're doing it just for SEO benefit, it's worth considering if it's the right thing to do. It's also worth avoiding a focus on keyword driven anchor text, because that could definitely be seen as manipulative if you overdo it.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Rob,

There are some great answers in this thread, so I won't repeat too much. But just a few additional points:

• Ultimately, the quality of the site should be an important factor for you to consider. If the site is high quality, then it's likely to help you in terms of traffic and rankings no matter what the anchor text is.
• Anchor text still plays a big part in rankings. But as others have said, it can be risky to have too much anchor text which doesn't look natural i.e. is stuffed full of keywords. So you do need to be careful not to look manipulative and I'd advise not taking risks and focusing on the quality of the link as noted above.
• There are lots of other signals as well which Google can look at besides anchor text. A few may be - the position of the link on the page, the surrounding text, whether the link is in a list or not, whether the link is followed or not.. countless things which can help Google decide if a link is good or not.

I hope that helps!

Paddy