Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
White Papers! Is this still good for SEO
-
Does publishing a white paper good for SEO? We are trying to decide to publish one or not for the purpose of SEO. If it will not help, we will spend money for other things.
-
We are an asset based lender that broker a lot of our deals and having a good white paper and bring more attention to us. We plan to release it over the news wire as a press release for links and distribute the articles over the web. Thank you for your response.
-
I am thinking of both - website page and on the same page in pdf format. Additionally, I plan to release it in a news wire article. Thank you for your response.
-
Thank you for your response Casey!
-
I would like to do this too but I am trying to get links so I want to the search engines to see it, rate it and link to it. I am hoping it will get us some good links.
-
When you say... "White Paper"... does that mean publishing it in .pdf? I would not do that unless you need it in that format for controlled printing or distribution.
Otherwise I would publish the paper on a standard webpage because they are easier to optimize, easier to monetize and fit into the format of your website.
If you do go with PDF, remember that you can optimize it to be seen in the SERPs, include links to your website and that many shopping cart links will work within a PDF.
-
From a "pure SEO" point of view, whitepapers (like any rich content) can really help get some good long-tale content on the site, and may earn some links if they're good.
My personal view is that whitepaper are more useful when it comes to conversion.
Whitepapers can be used to support your offering/your proposition by providing evidence that you've understood the prospects needs, delivered a great solution to ther problem that delivers real benefits to the customer. (and explain the unique benefits of your solution that they wouldn't have received from your competitors)
Such whitepapers, like other good content may attract links too (unless they're hidden behind a subscription form)
Well presented solutions to problems that your target audience experience are of interest to people who, as Casey mentioned, may be willing to provide their email address, join a mailing list in order to receive the whitepapers. Think about the value of building such a mailing list for the business.
I'd take a step back and think about what you're trying to acheive and how you can use white papers to support these goals.
Hope this helps.
-
Assuming your talking about generating links from it, It all depends on the topic and quality of the white paper.
Personally I would rather use the whitepaper as a way to get people to subscribe to a email list.
Interested in other peoples comments though!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How good/bad the exit intent pop-ups? What is Google's perspective?
Hi all, We have launched the exit intent pop-ups on our website where a pop-up will appear when the visitor is about to leave the website. This will trigger when the mouse is moved to the top window section; as an attempt by the visitor to close the window. We see a slight ranking drop post this pop-up launch. As the pop-up is appearing just before someone leaves the website; does this making Google to see as if the user left because of the pop-up and penalizing us? What is your thoughts and suggestions on this? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz1 -
Old subdomains - what to do SEO-wise?
Hello, I wanted the community's advice on how to handle old subdomains. We have https://www.yoursite.org. We also have two subdomains directly related to the main website: https://www.archive.yoursite.org and https://www.blog.yoursite.org. As these pages are not actively updated, they are triggering lots and lots of errors in the site crawl (missing meta descriptions, and much much more). We do not have particular intentions of keeping them up-to-date in terms of SEO. What do you guys think is the best option of handling these? I considered de-indexing, but content of these page is still relevant and may be useful - yet it is not up to date and it will never be anymore. Many thanks in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | e.wel0 -
Hiding Elements on Mobile. Will this effect SEO.
Hey guys and gals, I am hiding elements with @media sizes on the mobile experience for this site. http://prepacademyschools.org/ My question is when hiding elements from mobile, will this have a negative effect on rankings for mobile and or desktop? Right now it is a hero banner and testimonial. My interest is because I feel responsive is now working against conversions when it comes to mobile because desktop typically has the same info several times where mobile it can be repetitive and only needed once. Thanks,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | brightvessel1 -
Dodgy backlinks pointing to my website - someone trying to ruin my SEO rankings?
I just saw in 'Just discovered' section of MOZ that 2 new backlinks have appeared back to my website - www.isacleanse.com.au from spammy websites which look like they might be associated with inappropriate content. 1. http://laweba.net/opinion-y-tecnologia/css-naked-day/comment-page-53/ peepshow says: (peepshow links off to my site)07/17/2016 at 8:55 pm2. http://omfglol.org/archives/9/comment-page-196 voyeur says: (voyeur linking off to my site)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | IsaCleanse
July 17, 2016 at 7:58 pm Any ideas if this is someone trying to send me negative SEO and best way to deal with it?0 -
Backlinks in Footer - The good, the bad, the ugly.
I tried adding onto a question already listed, however that question stayed where it was and didn't go anywhere close to somewhere others would see it, since it was from 2012. I have a competitor who is completely new, just popped onto the SERPs in December 2015. Now I've wondered how they jumped up so fast without really much in the way of user content. Upon researching them, I saw they have 200 backlinks but 160 of them are from their parent company, and of all places coming from the footer of their parent company. So they get all of the pages of that domain, as backlinks. Everything I've read has told me not to do this, it's going to harm the site bad if anything will discount the links. I'm in no way interested in doing what they did, even if it resulted in page 1 ( which it has done for them ), since I believe that it's only a matter of time, and once that time comes, it won't be a 3 month recovery, it might be worse. What do you all think? My question or discussion is why hasn't this site been penalized yet, will they be penalized and if not, why wouldn't they be? **What is the good, bad and ugly of backlinks in the footer: ** Good Bad Ugly
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Deacyde0 -
Adult Toy Store SEO
Hi fellows, I'm not so strange to SEO. I have been promoting our spiritual network through SEO and we have received great returns from it. I'm planning to promote an adult toy store via SEO. I have never done any adult store promoting before but I think there are a lot of down sides to it, such as: #1 When I search related keywords many porn websites show up; I assume it seems spammy to google's eye. Also most of the links that I will get are probably from porn websites due to relevancy. #2 Many of our returning customers are coming from retargeting but I assume there is no adult promotion via google display. Is that right? (It's not SEO related) I'm wondering to know if google is against adult content in any way? Any feedbacks are appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Arian-Ya0 -
Cross linking websites of the same company, is it a good idea
As a user I think it is beneficial because those websites are segmented to answer to each customer needs, so I wonder if I should continue to do it or avoid it as much as possible if it damages rankings...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mcany0 -
Recovering From Black Hat SEO Tactics
A client recently engaged my service to deliver foundational white hat SEO. Upon site audit, I discovered a tremendous amount of black hat SEO tactics employed by their former SEO company. I'm concerned that the efforts of the old company, including forum spamming, irrelevant backlink development, exploiting code vulnerabilities on BB's and other messy practices, could negatively influence the target site's campaigns for years to come. The site owner handed over hundreds of pages of paperwork from the old company detailing their black hat SEO efforts. The sheer amount of data is insurmountable. I took just one week of reports and tracked back the links to find that 10% of the accounts were banned, 20% tagged as abusive, some of the sites were shut down completely, WOT reports of abusive practices and mentions on BB control programs of blacklisting for the site. My question is simple. How does one mitigate the negative effects of old black hat SEO efforts and move forward with white hat solutions when faced with hundreds of hours of black gunk to clean up. Is there a clean way to eliminate the old efforts without contacting every site administrator and requesting removal of content/profiles? This seems daunting, but my client is a wonderful person who got in over her head, paying for a service that she did not understand. I'd really like to help her succeed. Craig Cook
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEOptPro
http://seoptimization.pro
info@seoptimization.pro0