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
-
White H1 Tag Hurting SEO?
Hi, We're having an issue with a client not wanting the H1 tag to display on their site and using an image of their logo instead. We made the H1 tag white (did not deliberately hide with CSS) and i just read an article where this is considered black hat SEO. https://www.websitemagazine.com/blog/16-faqs-of-seo The only reason we want to hide it is because it looks redundant appearing there along with the brand name logo. Does anyone have any suggestions? Would putting the brand logo image inside of an H1 tag be ok? Thanks for the help
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | Aug 16, 2017, 9:40 AM | AliMac261 -
Does type of hosting affect SEO rankings?
Hello, I was wondering if hosting on shared, versus VPS, versus dedicated ... matter at all in terms of the rankings of Web sites ... given that all other factors would be exactly equal. I know this is a big question with many variables, but mainly I am wondering if, for example, it is more the risk of resource usage which may take a site down if too much traffic and therefore make it un-crawlable if it happens at the moment that a bot is trying to index the site (factoring out the UX of a downed site). Any and all comments are greatly appreciated! Best regards,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | Nov 10, 2015, 11:38 AM | uworlds
Mark0 -
The use of a ghost site for SEO purposes
Hi Guys, Have just taken on a new client (.co.uk domain) and during our research have identified they also have a .com domain which is a replica of the existing site but all links lead to the .co.uk domain. As a result of this, the .com replica is pushing 5,000,000+ links to the .co.uk site. After speaking to the client, it appears they were approached by a company who said that they could get the .com site ranking for local search queries and then push all that traffic to .co.uk. From analytics we can see that very little referrer traffic is coming from the .com. It sounds remarkably dodgy to us - surely the duplicate site is an issue anyway for obvious reasons, these links could also be deemed as being created for SEO gain? Does anyone have any experience of this as a tactic? Thanks, Dan
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | Aug 27, 2015, 1:33 PM | SEOBirmingham810 -
Bad for SEO to have two very similar websites on the same server?
Is it bad for SEO to have two very similar sites on the same server? What's the best way to set this up?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | Jul 14, 2014, 7:26 AM | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Why does expired domains still work for SEO?
Hi everyone I’ve been doing an experiment during more than 1 year to try to see if its possible to buy expired domains. I know its considered black hat, but like I said, I wanted to experiment, that is what SEO is about. What I did was to buy domains that just expired, immediately added content on a WP setup, filled it with relevant content to the expired domain and then started building links to other relevant sites from these domains.( Here is a pretty good post on how to do, and I did it in a similar way. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2297718/How-to-Build-Links-Using-Expired-Domains ) This is nothing new and SEO:s has been doing it for along time. There is a lot of rumors around the SEO world that the domains becomes worthless after they expire. But after trying it out during more than 1 year and with about 50 different expired domains I can conclude that it DOES work, 100% of the time. Some of the domains are of course better than others, but I cannot see any signs of the expired domains or the sites i link to has been punished by Google. The sites im liking to ranks great ONLY with those links 🙂 So to the question: WHY does Google allow this? They should be able to see that a domain has been expired right? And if its expired, why dont they just “delete” all the links to that domain after the expiry date? Google is well aware of this problem so what is stopping them? Is there any one here that know how this works technically?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | Jan 27, 2014, 7:54 PM | Sir0 -
Does Ezine articles still make any good?
In the past many of the articles we posted in our blog we post on Ezine articles. After Penguin still make any sense to post on Ezine? Can the post on Ezine make any bad or Good to our ranking? What kind of tactics are guys using to promote articles/post in your blog?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | Oct 3, 2013, 3:28 PM | Felip30 -
href="#" and href="javascript.void()" links. Is there a difference SEO wise?
I am currently working a site re-design and we are looking at if href="#" and href="javascript.void()" have an impact on the site? We were initially looking at getting the links per page down but I am thinking that rel=nofollow is the best method for this. Anyone had any experience with this? Thanks in advanced
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | Jun 18, 2013, 10:33 PM | clickermediainc0 -
Why would links that were deleted by me 3 months ago still show up in reports?
I inadvertently created a mini link farm some time back by linking all of my parked domains (2000 plus) to some of my live websites (I was green and didn't think linking between the same owner sites / domains was an issue). These websites were doing well until Penguin and although I did not get any 'bad link' advices from Google I figure I was hit by Penguin. So about 3 or 4 months ago I painstakingly deleted ALL links from all of those domains that I still own (only 500 or so - the others were allowed to lapse). None of those domains have any links linking out at all but old links from those domains are still showing up in WMT and in SEOmoz and every other link tracking report I have run. So why would these links still be reported? How long do old links stay in the internet archives? This may sound like a strange question but do links 'remain with a domain for a given period of time regardless'? Are links archived before being 'thrown out' of the web. I know Google keeps archives of data that has expired, been deleted, website closed etc, etc for about 3 years or so (?). In an effort to correct a situation I have spent countless hours manually deleting thousands of links but they won't go away. Looking for some insight here please. cheers, Mike
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | Jan 19, 2013, 9:59 AM | shags380