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Hi there, we are launching a theater tickets membership service in the New England area.

We've named our site the New England Theater Club everywhere: site header, footer, FAQ, email correspondence, logos, you name it.

The URL, however, will read http://boston.theaterclub.com.

It'd be a fair amount of technical work to instead use newengland.theaterclub.com (and a nonstarter to use a subdirectory e.g. theaterclub.com/newengland, but that's for another post).

My question is - what would the upside be if we invested the resources to change the URL name to newengland.theaterclub.com?

Hi there, a disgruntled ex-employee requested that my company (a large publisher) unpublish a large number of at this point fairly dated articles.

We're going to honor his request. The traffic numbers to these articles aren't significant, but I wanted to understand the SEO ramifications. Two questions:

1. These articles in sum account for 0.51% of site traffic. Will removing them outright cut off just that chunk of traffic? Or will it also affect search rankings for all of our remaining articles?

2. How should we handle unpublished URLs? Is it better to redirect the user to our homepage or a friendly, recirculation-oriented 404?

Hi there, my company is a national theater news publisher. Quick question about a particular use case.

When an editor publishes a story they can assign several discrete locations, allowing it to appear on each of those locations within our website. This article (http://www.theatermania.com/denver-theater/news/full-casting-if-then-tour-idina-menzel_74354.html), for example, appears in the Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Denver section. We force the author to choose a primary location from that list, which controls the location displayed in the URL.

Is this a bad practice? I'm wondering if the fact that having 'Denver' in the URL is misleading and hurts SEO value, particularly since that article features several other cities.

I work for an online theater news publisher. Our article page titles include various pieces of data: the title, publication date, article category, and our domain name (theatermania.com).

Are all of these valuable from an SEO standpoint? My sense it'd be cleaner to just show the title (and nothing more) on a SERP. But we'll certainly keep whatever helps us with rankings.

Is there any evidence that using Taboola, Outbrain, etc., style ads negatively affect the host brand, causing said host brand to lose future visitors?

Hi there,

I work for a theater and live performances publishing site. We write 15-20 quality articles per day on the New York City and national theater community.

We show a "Most Read" stories widget on all of our pages, but click rates for these are really low - 1% of readers click to read a story from this.

As such we're considering replacing this with higher-value content.

My question, however, is this: Is there any SEO value in keeping this widget? I want to make sure we're taking this aspect into consideration.

Thank you!

Hi there, is there any evidence that participating in Google News' 'Editor's Picks' program will increase the rank of stories that appear in news search results and news alerts results?

Or, does participating in this program only mean that stories will appear in this box on the Google News homepage?: http://screencast.com/t/cDHOkEDGRy6f

What's the best practice for displaying author information at the beginning of an article?

We're presently displaying it as: By <Author> • Jan 16, 2015 • <City>.

We're considering making it even more concise by removing the term 'By'.

Would be shooting ourselves in the foot if we did this? Any other ways we should optimize?

OK, thanks so much for your help.

Quick clarification - can you explain why it'd rank better if all the content were on a single page?

Cast names, for example, wouldn't be indexed under the keywords 'This is Our Youth.' I'm not following why combining cast content with show description, pricing, venue, etc. content would cause that page to rank higher for the 'This is Our Youth' query string.

I work for a Theater show listings and ticketing website. In our show listings pages (e.g. http://www.theatermania.com/broadway/this-is-our-youth_302998/) we split our content into separate tabs (overview, pricing and show dates, cast, and video).

Are we shooting ourselves in the foot by separating the content? Are we better served with keeping it all in a single page?

Thanks so much!

Hi there,

I work for a theater and live performances publishing site. We write 15-20 quality articles per day on the New York City and national theater community.

We show a "Most Read" stories widget on all of our pages, but click rates for these are really low - 1% of readers click to read a story from this.

As such we're considering replacing this with higher-value content.

My question, however, is this: Is there any SEO value in keeping this widget? I want to make sure we're taking this aspect into consideration.

Thank you!

Hi there, my company is exploring creating an online magazine built with Adobe's InDesign toolset.

If we proceeded with this, could we make these pages "as spiderable" as normal html/css webpages? Or are we limited to them being less spiderable, or not at all spiderable?