Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Paulius,

This is a good question and one I've come across a lot. There's a lot of messages out there about quality of content, length of content and keywords in content, but I think the purpose of the content is being lost on people. The purpose of content should always be information that is useful to the searcher.

That might mean a 2000 word page, or 4 x 200 word blog posts, a slideshare presentation, an infographic or a 5 minute video. It's really up to you to decide who this content is for and what's the most useful way for you to communicate it to them. If in doubt, check out what other people are doing and what their engagement is like. If you see 2000 word article with 2 shares vs a 5 min video with 70 likes, the video would be the better option... but you might not deliver it right! Experiment, test, get advice and see what works for your brand and your content.

The best content strategies are the ones that are consumer-centric, not search engine-centric.

Stel

Thomas seems to have covered it from a technical standpoint, here's my two cents on Meta Descriptions:

They are pretty much pointless from an SEO ranking perspective. Yes, having keywords that correspond to a query will show up bold, but I prefer to think of a Meta Description's primary source is to influence click thru rate by conveying an enticing message to make users click.

We've done this on many older blog posts and seen CTR improve from 1% to 9% in a very short period of time!

Hi Stu,

I like your idea for directing people to a page after people have left.

If they've got any links directed at their profile page you won't get any of that link value with a 302 redirect, and a 302 is a temporary redirect, whereas if someone leaves it's a permanent change I'd think.

I'd recommend 301 as this is a permanent redirect and you'll ensure you don't lose any link value.

Hi Howard,

Infographic sites have a lot of Domain Authority, but Google decreased the value of these as a lot of people were developing infographics for backlink purposes. Because it's image based, you're not going to get hit with duplicate content issues.

However, the best use for infographics is to get social sharing/engagement pumping. You can watch this video and read our case study on how we used an infographic to get heaps of earned links. http://searchfactory.com.au/blog/case-study-skyscraper-technique-sfgettingsmarter/

All the best!

Stel

Hi Ivor,

I wouldn't pay much attention to those Google guidelines about duplicate content.

Yes, Canonical tags are best practice, but what you're dealing with is dynamically generated query URLs from your CMS. If you opted to follow Google's guidelines on this you'd have to either manually set Canonical tags for each query as it is created, or set up a rule to do this automatically.

Both sound tricky to me so I'd just stick with the robots.txt alterations you've made and you should be fine.

Make sure you set back everything to index, follow. This is because you're giving the search engine instructions to ignore specific URLs in the robots.txt and you're also doing this in the meta robots function.

When this occurs the search engine gets confused and then makes it's own best judgement as per the article you've referenced.

Best to keep it simple and leave everything index, follow and keep the robots.txt in place to block these URLs and see how your results go.

Also might be a good idea to touch up your content on the page. I'd suggest about 250 words of content with your targeted keyword twice and 2-3 LSI keywords once each. You can put this at the bottom of the page, after the products so it doesnt push your products down. For more info on content you can check out my blog post here: http://searchfactory.com.au/blog/optimise-content-marketing-writing-for-google-hummingbird-semantic-search/

All the best!

Stel (@StelinSEO )

Thanks Ryan, didn't see that!

Hopefully it comes down under in the future!

Hi Guys,

I've checked out MozLocal, but noticed the sources that are referenced are more US based. Is there a version that would target Australian sources coming or has anyone in Australia used Mozlocal and had good results they can share?

Thanks in advance!

Stel

Hi Julio,

I wrote a blog post a while ago on how to optimise your site using Yoast SEO, check it out here.

Also another one I wrote was on LSI keyword placement within content, check it out here.

If you do solid keyword research, optimise your Wordpress site as per the first post and optimise your content as per the second, you should get great results.

Hi David,

You're definitely on the right track with bringing all the sites together. Then you've got everything in the one place and will only have to focus on doing SEO, content and link building for the single site. Plus all your authority can be amalgamated together via 301 redirect (provided these are clean and don't have bad backlinks), which will help with rankings.

Aside from general keyword research targeting via meta data configuration, I'll recommend you implement a solid content strategy. If you're going to be putting out a lot of products and you're duplicating the content, I'd consider canonicalising it back to the original source and rewriting any products have big search volume. Secondly, I'd make sure you have at least 200 words of content on your category pages using LSI keywords to boost on-page relevance and get some quality links built to these pages. If you follow that strategy you should get some good results. I wrote a blog post about Google Hummingbird and optimising you content with LSI keywords, you can check it out here.

In terms of an actual ecommerce platform, I've worked with Magento a lot with big ecommerce sites. Seems to have a lot of functionality with plug-ins, a lot of big brand sites use it and it's built by eBay so they must be doing something right.

Here's a guide that highlights common issues with Magento: https://paulnrogers.com/magento-technical-seo-issues-to-look-out-for/

The most common issue I've seen is duplicate content that is caused by the /shopby/ directory. If you implement the below robots.txt file, you should see a lot of the unnecessary, dynamic URLs excluded.

I also recommend using siteliner.com to identify any internal duplicate content on the site.

##Magento SEO Improvements robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: */index.php/
Disallow: */catalog/product_compare/
Disallow: */catalog/category/view/
Disallow: */catalog/product/view/
Disallow: */catalogsearch/
Disallow: */catalogue/product_compare/
Disallow: */catalogue/category/view/
Disallow: */catalogue/product/view/
Disallow: */cataloguesearch/
Disallow: */checkout/
Disallow: */control/
Disallow: */contacts/
Disallow: */customer/
Disallow: */customize/
Disallow: */newsletter/
Disallow: */poll/
Disallow: */review/
Disallow: */sendfriend/
Disallow: */shopby/
Disallow: */tag/
Disallow: */wishlist/
Disallow: */catalog/product/gallery/
Disallow: CVS
Disallow: .svn
Disallow: .idea
Disallow: .sql
Disallow: .tgz
Disallow: /admin/

## Do not crawl common Magento technical folders
Disallow: /app/
Disallow: /downloader/
Disallow: /errors/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /lib/
Disallow: /pkginfo/
Disallow: /shell/
Disallow: /var/

## Do not crawl common Magento files
Disallow: /api.php
Disallow: /cron.php
Disallow: /cron.sh
Disallow: /error_log
Disallow: /get.php
Disallow: /install.php
Disallow: /LICENSE.html
Disallow: /LICENSE.txt
Disallow: /LICENSE_AFL.txt
Disallow: /README.txt
Disallow: /RELEASE_NOTES.txt

## Do not crawl sub category pages that are sorted or filtered.
Disallow: /*?dir*
Disallow: /*?dir=desc
Disallow: /*?dir=asc
Disallow: /*?limit=all
Disallow: /*?mode*

## Do not crawl 2-nd home page copy (example.com/index.php/). Uncomment it only if you activated Magento SEO URL
.
## Disallow: /index.php/

## Do not crawl links with session IDs
Disallow: /*?SID=

## Do not crawl checkout and user account pages
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /onestepcheckout/
Disallow: /customer/
Disallow: /customer/account/
Disallow: /customer/account/login/

## Do not crawl seach pages and not-SEO optimized catalog links
Disallow: /catalogsearch/
Disallow: /catalog/product_compare/
Disallow: /catalog/category/view/
Disallow: /catalog/product/view/

## SERVER SETTINGS

## Do not crawl common server technical folders and files
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /cleanup.php
Disallow: /apc.php
Disallow: /memcache.php
Disallow: /phpinfo.php

Hi Alberto,

Yes that will cause you duplicate content issues.

I'm working with a client at the moment that has a similar situation. I've advised them to have a YouTube description that gives an overview of the video content and contains some relevant keywords.

On your website you can embed your video on individual pages, add a brief summary and transcribe the video on the page. You could duplicate your YouTube description on this page, provided your transcription is lengthy enough so it's still unique content. I like to work on a ratio of 30% duplicate to 70% unique if it's necessary.

Transcribing 90 videos could be time consuming though, so check out these tools that can do it for you: http://www.vagueware.com/top-10-free-transcription-software-that-are-essential-to-your-va-or-transcription-business/

All the best,

Stel (@StelinSEO)

Hi Alberto,

Yes that will cause you duplicate content issues.

I'm working with a client at the moment that has a similar situation. I've advised them to have a YouTube description that gives an overview of the video content and contains some relevant keywords.

On your website you can embed your video on individual pages, add a brief summary and transcribe the video on the page. You could duplicate your YouTube description on this page, provided your transcription is lengthy enough so it's still unique content. I like to work on a ratio of 30% duplicate to 70% unique if it's necessary.

Transcribing 90 videos could be time consuming though, so check out these tools that can do it for you: http://www.vagueware.com/top-10-free-transcription-software-that-are-essential-to-your-va-or-transcription-business/

All the best,

Stel (@StelinSEO)

Hi Paulius,

This is a good question and one I've come across a lot. There's a lot of messages out there about quality of content, length of content and keywords in content, but I think the purpose of the content is being lost on people. The purpose of content should always be information that is useful to the searcher.

That might mean a 2000 word page, or 4 x 200 word blog posts, a slideshare presentation, an infographic or a 5 minute video. It's really up to you to decide who this content is for and what's the most useful way for you to communicate it to them. If in doubt, check out what other people are doing and what their engagement is like. If you see 2000 word article with 2 shares vs a 5 min video with 70 likes, the video would be the better option... but you might not deliver it right! Experiment, test, get advice and see what works for your brand and your content.

The best content strategies are the ones that are consumer-centric, not search engine-centric.

Stel

Hello,

Thanks for your question. My advice is to keep your blog on your main domain, not separate it to be a subdomain.

The reason for this is a subdomain is it's own separate entity and you won't get the benefit of the authority that's part of your main domain, and blog posts should be relevant to a service and internal link to them. For example, how this post links to the Nurse CPD page (except I'd use Nurse CPD has the anchor text, not the brand name in this case).

Matt Cutts wrote about this in 2007, and I think the information is still valid. In his post, he stated that his preferred use of a subdomain was to separate out information that is completely different. For example, if you had a staff portal, this could sit on a subdomain as it's purpose would than the information on your main website.

Hope this helps!

Hi Stu,

I like your idea for directing people to a page after people have left.

If they've got any links directed at their profile page you won't get any of that link value with a 302 redirect, and a 302 is a temporary redirect, whereas if someone leaves it's a permanent change I'd think.

I'd recommend 301 as this is a permanent redirect and you'll ensure you don't lose any link value.

Google personalises search results to you using many metrics and signals, such as your search history, logged in email address' affiliation with a site and location.

If you want fresh search results that ignores these factors, for purposes such as checking your rankings in another city, you can use the Ad Preview & Diagnostics tool in adwords: http://adwords.google.com/d/AdPreview/?__u=1000000000&__c=1000000000

Either structure is fine. Exact match domains still work (somewhat) but they'll continue to fade as time goes on.

You'll have a better chance at getting results if you rely more heavily on producing good on-page, rather than an exact match domain to get you rankings.

My advice would be 250 words with your targeted keyword used twice and 2-3 LSI (latent semantic index) keywords to supplement it once each.

Feel free to Tweet me at @StelinSEO if you have any questions

Hi Angelos,

There are a few ways you can resolve this issue:

1. noindex the page2, page3s by applying any subsequent pages as a rule
2. canonicalise all page2 & page3s to the original post URLs
3. update your robots.txt file to block page2 and page3 by using Disallow: /*/page2, Disallow: //*page3

Any of the above will resolve your issue, just comes down to which is the easiest for you to implement.

Feel free to tweet me at @StelinSEO if you've got any further questions

Stel

Hi Ivor,

I concur with donford's answer, definitely something that can be sorted out by the robots text file. However, I would suggest using the following parameters for robots.txt:

**User-agent: ***
*Disallow: /*/page
*Disallow: /*/sort
*Disallow: /*/descending

My reason for suggesting the extra /* is this will target URLs that appear on the second or below level.

I may be wrong, but it's best to try both by using the robots.txt checker in Webmaster Tools.

This article will give you an overview of how the robots.txt checker works: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062598?hl=en

All you have to do is click the link on the post that says robots.txt checker, login to Webmaster Tools and paste everything you see in bold in the text box. Then paste the following (also in bold) into the field below that says Enter a URL to test if it is blocked anuncios-ciudad-real/?page=13&sort=price_true

Click the test button and if it says BLOCKED you can add this to your robots.txt file, stored at top level in your FTP server.

Feel free to Tweet me at @StelinSEO if you have any further issues!

All the best,

Stel

Hi Ivor,

The problem with _Disallow: /*? _is it only blocks top level queries like this: **mercadonline.es/?page=13&sort=price_true **, but it won't block this: mercadonline.es/anuncios-ciudad-real/?page=13&sort=price_true

So by adding a wildcard directory (i.e. Disallow: //?) this will block queries that occur at any level of your URL structure, like the one second bold example above.

You can indeed just block all queries if you like, but I'm not 100% what your structure is like. If you're sure it won't adversely affect any other pages, then Disallow: //? will solve the sort, price and page issues you've highlighted.

Once you're happy with the robots.txt (just had a look and looks fine to me) run it through screamingfrog and siteliner.com and see if these domains have been blocked and what Duplicate content issues exist.

Hi Ivor,

I wouldn't pay much attention to those Google guidelines about duplicate content.

Yes, Canonical tags are best practice, but what you're dealing with is dynamically generated query URLs from your CMS. If you opted to follow Google's guidelines on this you'd have to either manually set Canonical tags for each query as it is created, or set up a rule to do this automatically.

Both sound tricky to me so I'd just stick with the robots.txt alterations you've made and you should be fine.

Make sure you set back everything to index, follow. This is because you're giving the search engine instructions to ignore specific URLs in the robots.txt and you're also doing this in the meta robots function.

When this occurs the search engine gets confused and then makes it's own best judgement as per the article you've referenced.

Best to keep it simple and leave everything index, follow and keep the robots.txt in place to block these URLs and see how your results go.

Also might be a good idea to touch up your content on the page. I'd suggest about 250 words of content with your targeted keyword twice and 2-3 LSI keywords once each. You can put this at the bottom of the page, after the products so it doesnt push your products down. For more info on content you can check out my blog post here: http://searchfactory.com.au/blog/optimise-content-marketing-writing-for-google-hummingbird-semantic-search/

All the best!

Stel (@StelinSEO )