Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks!

Toby

Hello,

I see Buzzsumo being widely touted as a great way of seeing what other people are writing on a niche topic to give an indication of what is performing well according to the number of social media shares.  Is this a good metric considering that any proportion of the shares could be paid for or secondary to advertising?  I have looked at some of the sharers and often there is no data logged, or only a few listed.  I see that often the longer posts have more shares; if I had written a 7000 word post I would be more likely to push it harder on social media and spend more promoting it, I wonder if this is skewing the data also.

Thanks for your opinions on this.

Toby

I run an ecommerce site and am keep to increase the time on site and reduce bounce rate.  I have had some good results from writing good articles and advertising them on Outbrain and Twitter; both of these metrics have improved.  However, I am wondering if Google will see this.  Clearly if people land on the pages from the SERPS and return there they will know what is happening but will they know if people get there from an advert?

Thanks Andy.  The articles were mostly on ezinearticles, some on Articlesbase.  It has never been spun and passed copyscape to begin with, I thought it might be worth doing to make sure no-one had scraped part of the article and reposted it somewhere.  When you say 'external links from the article itself' what exactly are you referring to?

I have some good articles I wrote for article directories a couple of years ago. I took them down 6 months ago.  I am hoping to repost them somewhere better if the content isn't listed on google and passes Copyscape.  Would this be safe?

Thanks for these answers, very helpful.

If a site has more pages and also has good internal linking, then logically it would rank better.  Is this the case?  Should I be building big (but high quality) sites?

Thanks for your help everyone, you have answered my question very thoroughly!

I find it hard to recognize unnatural link patterns when the links to my site are so familiar.  It can be hard to see the wood for the trees!  How many links from one site is too many?  Does it depend on the size of the site?  Thanks for your advice on this.

Thanks guys, very helpful advice.

Hello, to see all the links to a page have a look at Google Webmaster Tools (now called Search Console).  If you go to 'Links to my site' there is a list on the right called 'Your most linked content'. If you click on this it will give you a breakdown of the links to each page which Google are using as ranking factors.

Personally, I would go for something much shorter. Long domain names can appear spammy, and I believe are one of the spam metrics used by Moz in their spam score. The other problem with a long domain name is that pages and posts on your site may have titles which will be much too long to fit in a search engines search window, although you may be able to tweak this.  You may well be better off having a very short domain name so that as new keywords come through which you want to target you can do this effectively without having too long a URL.

Hello!  Do you have a few strategically placed, non-spammy calls to action?

It is definitely a good idea to go after the long-tail keywords as well as the moon shots when you are looking to increase traffic.  I would include pages about 'web design' and 'website design' and use a good keyword tool to find a list of great keywords which are less competitive, as well as including the more competitive/higher traffic variations.  It is also very important to use a tool like Moz's On-Page Grader to check you have done a good job of your page optimisation.  I would also have a look at their competitor analysis tool to find out what the other sites which are outranking you are doing.

Which platform are you using?  If it doesn't work you could make your own button using an image of your choosing with a live link to your Facebook page, or use one of the buttons Facebook supplies in their Developer section  Many sites now very easily give sitewide social links but I have heard that some users are being penalised for this.  I have taken mine down and manually apply social links in a few appropriate places instead of using the built in systems which often spam your whole site with unnecessary links.

Hello!  Are the pages being built manually or automatically?  How many pages are you talking about? If they are being made manually and there are not too many you can include unique text about the products and the choices.  The way I would do it would be to minimise the duplication of text and instead try to list the products using images with minimal text to reduce the duplication issue.  It clearly isn't going to be in the interest of the user to have multiple pages which which consist predominantly of very similar lists and little else.  Each list and page needs to be significantly different in order to offer value to the user and so as not to be hit for duplicate content.  Good luck!

Hello,

I often list my address, even though we don't serve customers from the address.  There are a couple of reasons for this; firstly it strengthens your brand identity and gives people confidence that your business is real, and second because there is no other reliable way to get local search on your side.  If you use another address this may look odd and make people suspicious about the business. If you do list your address you can set up your site for people to contact you in the ways that you wish, rather than by coming to your address, if that's what you prefer.

Thanks!

I would use the following tools;

• Google.  I got a great list by typing 'key west blog' into Google and then clicking 'Search Tools' and then 'Past Week'.  The search results tell you how long ago the results were posted.

• Google Alerts.  Set this for the key word to be notified of new content being posted in (almost!) real time.

Toby

Do you think having a link to your sitemap from your homepage is any use for SEO? I am getting mixed messages.