On blog structure and topic [Advanced]
-
What if you run a university website with 20 faculties, how would you approach building a blog for them?
- Would you do it like most universities do - put all blogs in a subdomain and each individual faculty in a subfolder. Like this: https://blogs.monash.edu/
- Would you put the blog in a subfolder and create categories for each faculty - like Mashable does for tech, entertainment, etc.
- Or, create separate subfolders for each faculties?
- If you have other ideas, please share.
For argument's sake, the goal of the blog(s) is to generate leads. It's part of a larger content marketing effort and they want to maximize the blog's SEO benefit.
And by the way, please state what you think are the advantages/disadvantages of your chosen option.
Thanks!
-
This is a difficult question because the buy-in of the authors (faculty) matters. What you really want is that each blog created is regularly updated with good, fresh, vibrant content. If only 1 of the 20 faculty members is actually going to blog regularly, you will probably want to create a single blog and have them post to various categories. Otherwise, you will end up with one regularly updated blog and a ton of dead ones.
If you have good buy in, I would create blogs on a category basis. It is highly unlikely that these blogs will be accessed by people looking for the faculty members specifically, so they don't each need their own blog.
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
-
Site structure / IA out of balance? What does that mean to SEO?
I often see commentators mentioning out of balance site structures/IA but what does this actually mean in SEO terms? For example, Yoast advises: "If one category grows much larger than others, your site’s pyramid could be thrown off balance." Neil Patel advises "Try to balance the amount of subcategories within each category. Basically, try to keep it approximately even. If one main category has fourteen subcategories, while another main category has only three subcategories, this could become a little unbalanced." Does this have any direct influence on SEO (crawlability, etc.) or is this more a UX issue? I look forward to receiving your feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
SEO's Structuring Your Work Week
Hi I wanted some feedback on how other SEO's structure their time. I feel as though I'm falling into the trap of fire fighting with tasks rather than working on substantial projects... I don't feel as though I'm being as effective as I could be. Here's our set up - Ecommerce site selling thousands of products - more of a generalist with 5 focus areas. 2 x product/merchandising teams - bring in new products, write content/merchandise products Web team - me (SEO), Webmaster, Ecommcerce manager Studio - Print/Email marketing/creative/photography. A lot of my time is split between working for the product teams doing KWD research, briefing them on keywords to use, checking meta. SEO Tasks - Site audits/craws, reporting Blogs - I try and do a bit as I need it so much for SEO, so I've put a content/social plan together but getting a lot of things actioned is hard... I'm trying to coordinate this across teams Inbetween all that, I don't have much time to work on things I know are crucial like a backlink/outreach plan, blog/user guide/content building etc. How do you plan your time as an SEO? Big projects? Soon I'm going to pull back from the product optimisation & try focussing on category pages, but for an Ecommerce site they are extremely difficulty to promote. Just asking for opinions and advice 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey3 -
New blog post URLs due to WordPress permalink structure changes. Any SEO repercussions?
A client site had the follwing URLs for all blog posts: www.example.com/health-news/sample-post www.example.com/health-news is the top level page for the blog section. While making some theme changes during Google mobilegeddon, the permalink structure got changed to www.example.com/sample-post ("health-news" got dropped from all blog post URLs). Google has indexed the updated post structure and older URLs are getting redirected (if entered directly in the browser) to the new ones; it appears that WordPress takes care of that automatically as no 301 redirects were entered manually. It seems that there hasn't been any loss of rankings (however not 100% sure as the site ranks for well over 100 terms). Do you suggest changing the structure back to the old one? Two reasons that I see are preserving any link juice from domains linking to old URLs and ensuring no future/current loss of rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VishalRayMalik0 -
Is site page structure hurting its chances to rank?
I have a client that sells geotextiles and related products. None of his keywords gets a lot of traffic google as it is a very B2B niche specific industry. For instance, and these numbers are off the top of my head The phrase geotextiles may get 80 searches a month and we have a domain.com/geotextiles.php page Then there are woven and nonwoven geotextiles which may get 30 searches a month We too have a domain.com/nonwoven-geotextiles.php and etc It then goes even further and has things like slit film series non woven /woven and we have subpages from there. To me, I feel as if we need to merge all of these pages to just a singular geotextile page with headers for woven and nonwoven and product info for the sub branches of those two. I feel as if we are basically competing for the same phrase again and again and again for very small amounts of traffic. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Link exchanges of specific blogs work if relevant?
Hello, I've always wondered if I have a tech blog and wrote about "why Droid phones are better than Iphones", i would need more links pointed to my specific blog. Doing so, i find another blog that's reputable with high domain authority that talks about the SAME blog/subject. Is it wise and good for SEO if i contact the blogger and have each other reference each other's blog with the anchor text link as the brand name in our respective blogs? It's a typical link exchange, but this is more niche. Would this help my efforts? And would Google accept our good faith linking to a great article vice versa. Thanks, Shawn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
How would you structure this content?
We have a site where we write about our son who was born with Down syndrome. I had a question regarding some content I'm trying to create and structure and hoping you guys can point me in the right direction. One of the things we are often asked by new parents is what toys we suggest for people to buy for their child with Down syndrome, or as gifts for a friend who has a child with Down syndrome. So I'd like to write some posts that suggest great toys for each year of a kids life (and continue that as Noah grows.) However, there are some variations of key words that I would like to rank for as well and it gets a little messy, which is where I need the help. For example for each year I could have a post titled: Top Ten (I could also change out top ten for Best, etc..)Toys For A One Year Old with Down Syndr Top Ten Christmas Gift Ideas For A One Year Old With Down Syndrome Top Ten Birthday Gift Ideas For a One Year Old With D.S. Top Ten Learning Toys For A One Year Old With D.S. Top Ten Toys Under 25 Dollars For A One Year Old with DS Top Ten Developmental Toys for a One Year Old With DS Top Ten Fisher Price Toys for a child with ds Best Light Up Toys For a one year old with ds best muscial toys for a one year old with ds I could also think of other variations as well. Also I can make each of these with the various ages. 2 year old, 3 year old, etc... So I'm not sure what the best way to go is. I could easily have a ton of content that is all virtually the same (birthday gifts / christmas gifts..although I could suggest different toys) so I'd have a ton of different toys pages trying to rank for one term each that is good for google searchers but probably not so great for folks coming to my site as I would have toy pages scattered all over the site. I also don't know how landing pages would fit in to all of this. Would I want a "Down Syndrome Toy Guide" landing page, or "Down Syndrome Gift Guide" ... or both...or something else, and then link all of those other pages on that page? I have a few pages on my site now that I wrote before I started to think about all the different combinations I wanted to rank for: http://noahsdad.com/gift-ideas-down-syndrome/ and http://noahsdad.com/best-fisher-price-learning-toys/ I'm open to any feedback you guys may have on this. I'd also like to do some posts on "Down Syndrome Books" and hope to use the same info that you guys give me and apply to books. (Therapy books, touch and feel books, resource books, new parents books, etc..) Hoping some folks chime in as your help would really be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NoahsDad0 -
Changing Structure of Links... Yay or Nay?
Hello there,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NikitaG
My site: MigrationLawyers.co.za was made with no sub structure.
It has no categories, and no child pages, all the pages are simply added to the end of the URL.
Sometimes this results in a rather lengthy URL like:
**/Immigration-Permanent-Residence-Work-Permit-South-**Africa
I was hoping to arrange the pages a bit into a logical, parented structure that looks more like:
**/Immigration/Permanent-Residence/Work-Permit-South-**Africa I would have parented pages, making up the same pretty much URL Now the Questions:
Is it worth it?
Will google read my parented URL with all the keywords, or only the page's keywords?
What should I expect to see from google?
Will my SERPs be all messed up? I will, without doubt, 301 redirect all the old URLs to the new parented ones. Any advice would be great,
Thanks,
Nikita0 -
Duplicating an article I wrote on an external blog
Hi, I wrote a blog article on another site. I would like to add the article to my site as well and would like to know the best way to do it. If I duplicate the article that I wrote would I then risk getting a penalty for duplicate content? If so, then what is the best way for me to include the article on my site for the benefit of my readers, but not lead to the duplicate content problem? Would it be better to use a canonical tag? Or to noindex the page? If I use the canonical tag, am I helping to make the article on the external blog stronger? Where is I use the noindex tag I am not helping my site nor that article I think, is that right? Last question, if I offer the copy of the article on my site and use the canonical or noindex tag then my site does not receive any direct benefit from the article for SEO. In other words the article wont appear in the search index with a link to my site. What about the comments that people write on the article on my site? That is unique content which may have great questions or points. I want to ensure those can be indexed properly. If I noindex the page I lose out. If I canonicalize (is that a word?) the page then I don't know if will send search results based on those comments to the external blog where that information (the comments from my site) does not exist. Thank you for any help to better understand this part of seo.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NikkiGaul0