Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey,

There are various companies in US who can offer you complete email marketing solutions.

Check out Moz's recommended agencies here:

https://moz.com/community/recommended

Good luck!

Hey Justin,

First of all welcome to Moz

Coming to your question, if you think your content is really original, well-written and in-depth as compare to other "large educational sites and blogs" I strongly believe you can outrank them by focusing on hardcore content marketing activities. Though, it will take some time but it's practical.

Coming to other part of the question, it will look fishy if you continuously and un-ncessary linking up your commercial site with this educational site by thin content. If you're just looking to send only traffic to your main site, make content looks original, add other authority links and implement a no-follow tag to your commercial site and play safe.

I also like to know, is this educational site already ranking up? What actually makes it "educational"? Are you referring to any .edu domain here?

Hope this helps!

Umar

Hey Lina,

I'd suggest you to take a look at these posts from Rand for better understanding,

https://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls
https://moz.com/blog/11-best-practices-for-urls

Honestly speaking, the long URLs doesn't bother search engines, they can process them without much trouble. The issue, instead, lies with usability and UX.

Hey Sean,

I'd suggest you to go with option 2 and 3 i.e. add videos with a transcript and the the summary of that video. I believe by adding the content, you can target your pages with the specific and long-tail queries. Similar like Rand does on his White Board Friday series.

Though it will take sometime but the results will be great. After posting, promote them on all your channels and start attracting new backilnks.  I'm damn sure this strategy will gonna work out really well.

Hope this helps!

I don't see anything wrong in this approach unless you're using the canonical tag. But for KB, I'd suggest to structure in a way that, it's not seems to be the page full of links.. Rather, write 3-4 unique lines with every link. In this way, your KB will look more powerful, credible and because of fresh content the chances of getting it ranked will increase.

Hope this helps!

Umar

Hey Gareth,

Luckily there are multiple alternatives available but you need to run a pilot phase with them before totally skipping adwords and bing ads.

Try our these:

1. Facebook (I'm not kidding)
2. Adroll
3. 7 Search
4. Info Links
5. AdSonar
6. Clickstor

Hope this helps!

Umar

Hey Steve,

I'm afraid it might be caught into Spammy practice because of the latest penguin updates. You should get the links from these sources after all you deserves them but just change the approach a bit.

Rather getting links on "Powered by", "built by" or "developed by", you should try to get the links on your branded term. Something like "Developed by Moz".

Google has no objection, if you're getting links on your branded term and your profile will gonna look more authoritative and natural.

Hope this helps!

Have a rocking Sunday!

Umar

I will not suggest you to apply parameters in your robots.txt/WMT unless you're quite sure that your "wp-content" does not contain any content that you want to get indexed.

If you have any problem with Screaming Frog, you may restrict it to not crawl your site. If you're on WordPress try out this plugin "WP Ban",
https://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/#wordpress-wp-ban

Hope this helps!

Hey Edward,

It's always a pleasure to answer your questions I'll try my best to give you the satisfactory answer this time again

Edward, this practice is usually adopted for the readers and traffic.. Yes, for the readers & traffic..

Let's suppose, if I run a fitness blog and have quite decent readership. I notice that the bodybuilding.com recently featured the interview of Jay Cutler, I would love to re-publish that interview again on mine for my readers. I know, there are high chances that people have already been read about it but as you know every site has different readership belongs to entirely different geography. It would be a great read for my audience as they might have missed to read at the original place.

Plus, it will also help my blog to get rank on "Jay Cutler interviews" related queries. I know, I'll be giving away a link from my site but this one outgoing link can reap lots of benefits in terms of traffic, increasing readership, building connections with original sources etc.

Hope this helps!

Umar

Hey Ben,

Thanks for sharing your problem and it's indeed a very tough situation for your business. If I were at your place, I wouldn't take this step to go with domain that's not matched with my brand name. Even if I had to, I'd go with something that at least partially linked with brand name.

For the email marketing problem, I strongly think this "FREE" word problem can be taken care, if you implement some latest email marketing strategies like Email Schema Markup. You can also work out on the useless traffic by creating some great and targeted content. From the SEO perspective, if you have good amount of quality links at your original branded domain, I'd suggest you to go with it.

Let's see what other experts recommends!

Good luck!

Umar

Hey Josh,

I really do not think you need any kind of hardware-specific approach for this. All you need to do is some understanding of basic programming to do it yourself.

Please look at these guides for your reference:

https://moz.com/ugc/how-to-put-google-custom-site-search-into-your-current-website-design

https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/tutorial/creatingcse

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/web-designer/set-up-a-google-custom-search-engine-for-your-website/

Hope this should help you!

Thanks,

Hi Li,

It's a common problem in E-Commerce sites. Remember, Google crawls dynamic URLs  so I wouldn't say it will deadly harm your page but yes that URL structure is not considered as SEO friendly and it carries some weigh to effect a bit.

So my recommendation is to go with SEO base friendly URLs and set a canonical tag that will tells the search engines to use the base version of the URL. That way you can still use dynamic URLs like http://www.costumedirect.com.au/search.php?search_query=edward to get your data, but the search engines will consider the basic version as the final.

Hope this helps!

Umar

Hey Vincent,

You may want to consider responsive design instead of a mobile and you can totally eliminate these problems. It's been in news that Google no longer favor m. sites because of the fact that they create more for Google to index with duplication issues and sometimes compete with your original site. So you have to deal with multiple issues by going with m. site.

Coming to the question, mobile sitemap is mostly same like desktop with only mobile:mobiletags inserted.

Do check out these links for further reference:
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-mobile-sitemaps-20137.html https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/_YrP2OIuM8k
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/RYjaTIRxesY</mobile:mobile>

Hope this helps!

hmm it would be slightly difficult to get the natural backlinks on that. Obviously, you can link it from your guest posts to other blogs but yielding natural one is bit hard.

Hey,

What do you exactly mean by "brand drop down"? Are you referring to brands domains that contain commercial keywords?

Yes, Google is usually slow in rolling out major updates in some part of the world.

Umar

Hey,

I guess you and your competitors are following similar link building approaches

It might be a co-incident but we have to see that trend from every way before reaching to any conclusion. You have to see is time span also the same? Plus, what was your link building approach at that time? Then only, you can have a solid answer.

Umar

Hello Edward,

If you mean to set up a normal goal tracking, it's really easy and you can setup to yourself. Just follow these steps,

1. Go into your Analytics and then the profile for your site.
2. Go to admin and in the third column of All Website Data click on Goals.
3. You should now see an empty area, Click on the red button of "New Goal".
4. Now you can select a template out of four option with pre-filled configuration or go to Custom option and name your "goal" and select the  type. If it's a normal conversion tracking, select the "Destination"and add the URL of your "thank-you" page.
5. Just click on "Verify this goal" to check everything is set-up correctly and click "create goal" button.

It's the most simplest way to add/track conversions/goals. If you're looking to explore more advanced tracking options, please refer to these links:

https://moz.com/blog/absolute-beginners-guide-to-google-analytics
https://moz.com/blog/building-your-marketing-funnel-with-google-analytics
http://www.optimizesmart.com/e-commerce-tracking-works-google-analytics-ultimate-guide/

Hope this helps!

Umar

Hey Max,

I agree with Lesley here, Google is fetching your previous pages. You need to wait some time to see the latest result but for quick fixing, you can do these things,

1. Run a Screaming Frog and see how many pages it shows.
2. Copy all the links that google is showing into excel sheet and check each one.
3. Block the extra pages through no index tag or redirect them to the relevant current pages if your have.

For more information on the indexing and crawling, refer this useful latest WBF from Rand,

https://moz.com/blog/controlling-search-engine-crawlers-for-better-indexation-and-rankings-whiteboard-friday

Hope this helps!

Umar

Hey Damon,

It's good to interact with the musicians

Damon, I suppose you're referring to www.damonsongs.net here.. I checked this site, it's DA is 21 not 35 and the spam score is raising 2 flags. Please see the shot.

Damon, though 2 flags doesn't indicate any serious action but I still feel there are some links that you need to gt rid of asap. For instance, look out these two links:
http://www.laurawijnhold.nl/fotos.php?commando=fotobekijken&nummer=461
http://www.iopinio.cmslogic.nl/NL/dagdenker/169/46-de-ondemocratische-euro.html

From no way, there is any connection to get the links for a music blog from these kind of sites.

By the way, start writing some more content I'd love to be in your subscriber list

Hope this helps!

Umar

WsS8u2g

Hey,

Thanks for posting your question. Yes if you optimize for "Acupuncture Clinics in Gainesville Florida", it will get you the traction on related searches that you mentioned but not very much on the keywords like "Acupuncture" & "Acupuncture Clinics".

The thing is, if you're targeting "Acupuncture Clinics in Gainesville Florida" kind of keywords, you will be going to adopt local SEO and your content/page optimization and link building will be totally based for that. Plus, the competition level will be totally different on generic keywords.

Hope this helps!