Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Richard,

I've never had a good experience with Yext. As far as I know, they may even create these nuisance listings to drum up more business for themselves - stay clear of Yext is my stance.

Unfortunately, there is no easy process for listing removals when they are involved. You need to send in a message to them directly. Provide a link to the listing, explain that Yahoo! is directing you to the Yext database for removal, and get a verified listing up ASAP to outrank the unclaimed listing.

Then you have to wait 4-6 weeks to even see if it is removed. PITA. You can hangout on this page and wait for one of their operators to come online to speak with directly, that may get you faster and more direct results.

I suggest using Screaming Frog SEO Spider - it has an XML sitemap generator tool and the tool itself is cheap and very useful in many other ways.

http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

**I'd like to think not ALL duplicate content is bad. **

I agree. However, more often than not, it is bad. It's best to approach each situation with caution.

As long as your site has been crawled and that page is already in the SERPs, and the new website puts a link to the original article on your website, I don't think there should be any issue.

I don't feel that confident in this statement. In theory, yes the original article would get the attribution. However, in practice, that can not be the case. If the site posting the duplicate content has higher authority and traffic, they may get the attribution even though you published the content first. Google does a decent job in figuring this out, but it's an area they need to drastically improve upon.

I personally would re-work a new article or ask them to summarize your article, to be on the extra safe side. But that's just me.

Summaries are a good idea. Still, you can't beat new unique content. Use the article for inspiration and create a new article that takes a point the original article made even further. Definitely include a link back to the original article, if possible. This strategy would give you a better gain the simply posting or summarizing the original article with a link back.

Hi  ImprezzioMarketing,

I suggest adding localization to the URL structure of the blog and removing the keyword stuffing from the titles and such. For example: www.domain.com/chicago-plumbers/title-of-the-blog-post

With the above structure, every post listed in the local are would include localization in the URL and not require him to stuff the keywords into the other areas. You'd still want to try and localize the content as much as possible. E.g. talk about specific jobs successfully executed in the Chicago area.

Also, try and consider the human readability of the keywords. Would you search for "plumbers chicago?" I bet more people search for "chicago plumbers" instead.

Google adjusted to understand 'tags' in blogs and discount those links. I do not put much weight into tags, they are more used for UI/UX and allow for visitors to quickly find content related to the current content they are viewing / search the site easily. As with most SEO strategies, make sure to diversify as appropriate.

Hi WMCA,

Unfortunately, I doubt that the community can provide a resource that says 'if you improve local seo, your traffic will increase by x%' - you're assumption that these numbers are highly dependent upon the locale and website is correct.

You can do something like the following:

• Identify key, local terms that your company will target
• Determine the overall local search volume for the above terms
• Use search term ranking estimates for each term (i.e. come up with a SERP rank for each local term)
• Estimate the CTR for each term (use your historic CTRs with estimated improvement)
• Use the above to conclude to the total new traffic your site will get if all criteria is met
• Use an estimated ecommerce conversion rate (again, based of historical data if possible) and AOV to calculate new revenue earned

That's a tough one - if I could only choose one tool for SEO & marketing, then it would have to be something that encompasses both Organic and Paid search. I would be inclined to go with something like Raven Tools or SEMrush, which has a suite that can cover many areas needed for my total analyses.

PPC and Organic tend to work together. In Adwords you can see the click through rates and numbers when a term is in both the organic and paid section. Try and figure out how many additional clicks you're getting because you're now doing a branded campaign.

You may be getting a better CTR and/or increased organic traffic simply because you have two campaigns targeting the brand term now (organic and search). If so, then the worry you have would be false, since the engagement has increased overall.

To answer directly, I would not be concerned that your organic rankings are affected because some clicks moved to the paid channel. However, if you identify a lot of cannibalization, maybe you want to stop the paid campaigns simply because you're paying for the traffic instead of getting it for free. But, cannibalization doesn't happen too often (as mentioned, the campaigns more often than not work together).

I would say that the only piece missing is the notification to the user that the article content has been updated.

Let's say that I read your blog everyday. I've seen this post previously, read it, and the content is value-added. Now I notice that the same post is again at the top of your blog - why? When I click into the article it seems similar to me, at first glance.

I would suggest putting a highlighted notification at the top of the post that informs the read the content has been updated for the latest trands|content|info|your word here

Now it makes perfect sense to update the publish date, informs the user that there is new content in the article, and it makes perfect sense for articles that are as old as your example.

Hi RobertFisher,

I've recently integrated Cloudflare Business into a large ecommerce site (top 50k Alexa). The site had several issues that impacted page load speed, our new visitors were experiencing very long load times in the 4-7 second range.

Cloudflare is amazing for the price. at $200/month it greatly reduced the amount of HTTP requests, minification reduced our page size, and it even saved a lot of bandwidth (which translates to server cost savings and/or more for your money).

Their support service has been consistent, however, I know their Business and Enterprise customers are priority.

Most other CDNs are going to cost far more than $200. It reduced our page load speed around 50%, before optimizing the other performance configurations they have available.

You do need to do some quality and assurance testing. With any CDN, when you deliver certain things differently, like javascript files, a new conflict could arise. For example, our sliders were having trouble rendering after integrating CF, so we had to adjust the settings to get them loading properly again.

Is there something more specific I could tell you about it?

Next steps:

• Identify the keywords you'd like to improve your ranking for

• Identify the pages you'd like to rank for those keywords

• Go into the Moz grade page tool and grade each page for the assigned keywords

• Optimize the pages for an 'A' rating

• Make sure to add the keywords to the Moz tracker to see how your SERPs change over time

It sounds like Google Analytics tracking could be implemented twice. Google fires a pageview when a visitor lands on the page. If two GA snippets are implemented and someone lands on your page, they cannot track the bounce since they think the other snippets' page view counts as an interaction and the bounce rate drops to nearly nothing.

I think that the most important piece is the content itself, not the author.

If you think that the author's name will be a main attraction (i.e. if the president has his name as the author it will be more attractive to link to) then it may be worth editing it to their liking and publish it under their name.

However, I don't think that is the advantage. The advantage is putting out quality content around the topic you've found. If you have it edited for the president, make sure they are willing and knowingly speaking as the subject originator. If there is something controversial in the article, it will be viewed as the president's opinion - which can have greater negative effect than positive.

Everything is to be as expected - in time Google will adjust appropriately and drop the old domains from the index to include the newest domains (which are 301'ed to the new URL).

Content optimization should be a continual process and ever improving. As you receive more traffic, business, and analytic data you will continue to improve your website content quality. For example, once your site has been live for a few months you may notice new traffic trends and previously unknown topics and keywords that resonate with your audience - you'll want to capitalize on these findings and incorporate them into your site's content.

Since your site uses a big, beautiful image and it's probably important to your branding, you may want to consider adding content below the fold.

Some ideas could be...

• short snippets of information about the services you provide
• testimonials from previous customers
• profiles of the psychics
• bring a summarized version of the 'how it works' information to the home page

I hope those help.

Make sure to 301 the old URLs to the new URLs - this will pass along 99% of the authority and you should see an increase in the SERPs for your new URLs.

As long as you keep your URLs the same, you shouldn't see an impact on SEO.

However, if your previous host was causing site performance issues and you expect the new host to serve your website faster and more efficiently, than you can see an SEO impact through site performance.

Make sure you get those rewrite rules consistent on your new host prior to switching, you don't want to change URLs, if possible.

Cross-domain canonical tags?

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html

It's not a good idea to repost content from one source to another, unless you have Canonical settings applied so Google understands which page is the true authority/source for the content.

Without those canonical settings applied, you are running the risk of it being seen as duplicate content.

I suggest using Linkedin as a gateway to your own website - post unique content on both sites. One idea could be posting an introduction of your blog post on Linkedin and then expanding upon the theme in greater detail on your own blog.

No, generally a 301 redirect will transfer 99%+ of the authority to the new link. I would anticipate waiting about 2 weeks before noticing the new URLs rank as high as the old URLs.

If you change the URLs back to the old structure, those rankings should return more quickly. However, if you new structure is more user friendly, it may be a good idea to make the change now rather than later, when the URLs gain even more authority.

I suggest not to block foreign traffic.

• You do not know why someone might be searching from a foreign country.

• Foreign traffic may help you identify key content areas for optimization, curation, opportunities, ect

• Your site may provide value to foreign visitors in some way that you don't yet understand and removing all traffic could have a negative impact. For example: Foreign visitors cite your content and routinely link back to it (helps you in the SERPs).

If you're seeing many bot attempts on your admin, change its login address. That is a good first measure to preventing brute force attacks.

You can also use a plugin to limit the login attempts. If a bot comes and tries to login it will be prevented from logging in after X attempts.

Use a service like Cloudflare for additional security. Cloudflare is a free CDN provider that will give you an additional layer of security for your site. It has a list of known ip abusers and can filter those out from reaching your website.