SEO basics for Q&A tool
-
Hi everyone,
our company wants to launch a Q&A forum on our website. The goal is to keep the useres interacting with our website, generate leads (of course) and... last but not least... to generate UGC for our website (and Google of course)...
[We organise career events with big companys for students, professionals, give career advice etc..]
From a SEO perspective, I find the following points difficult to overcome:
-
the possible problem of "thin" content, many URL's with a question and only 1 or 2 answers will not look good for Google, especially when there are a lot of it (Panda-Update). One solution could be to noindex pages with thin content, but imagine that you have an active community, this could take ages and we got other things to do...
-
the problem of finding ALL content: what would be the best solution to make sure that G finds all UGC, even the older content? Would it be enough to link to older questions on the page of the actual question? Let's say, this page contains links to the 5 questions before and so on... Or should there be categories of questions, where you list all of the questions ever asked???
-
would you/can one optimise the content? Users do not ask questions with the beloved keywords and if there would be a standard solution that the URL and the Title-Tag contains the question, there could be a lot of strange/not useful pages on our domain...
I hope I could make clear what my problems are and I hope someone can give me some good advice...
Thanx!!
-
-
Hi Russ,
thanks for yiur help, made things clearer to me!
One last question concerning the linking of the content: if we noindex all pages with less than x words, we can still put the links on dofollow, or doesn't it make sense?
Because if we create an overview page with the latest questions on it, it should be good for G and our users. So if we link to all latest threads (index and noindex), the users and G will find all the relevant content, G can follow the links on the noindexed pages and finds other content and so on...
Or doesn't it make sense to you? I am just worried that we will have many pages with small content and the Q&A will look empty to both G and our users...
-
Automation Automation Automation
1. Noindexing Thin Content: Perfectly fine strategy, but it should be easy to automate. Just have a combined word count of the question and the answers provided. If that word count is greater than X, then remove the noindex tag
2. Finding All Content: Good interlinking is all you need. First, you should have a page that lists all the latest threads that DO NOT have noindex tags on them. Second, you should interlink them well. If you have programmers, they might want to look into Yahoo Query Language (YQL) Term Extraction API. If you feed your QA content through this, it will find relevant words. With this, you can then create tags, and then you can show "related questions" based on those tags. This additional interlinking will help a lot.
3. Optimizing the Content: No. Users write questions the way they search for questions in Google. I would let the users control the content, and you just edit it for appropriateness.
-
Here is one way we did it on one of the sites I work on: http://mbmisteelbuildings.com/faq
You write all the Q&A on one page and you use anchors on each Q within the page to link to each A.
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
-
Do subdomains negatively impact SEO
If we want to eliminate one of our domains and consolidate it with our main domain by the subdomain approach, would that negatively impact our SEO? Example: change www.xyz.org to www.xyz.abcd.org, Thanks, in advance, for your feedback.
Technical SEO | | Shirley.Fenlason0 -
Magento SEO question
Hello Moz Community, I am wondering if these magento settings are correct for seo. www.domain.com 301 > www.domain.com/main-language www.domain.com/main-language/main-keyword (index & follow) www.domain.com/main-language/main-keyword/shopby/size-m (index & follow & canonicalized to www.domain.com/main-language/main-keyword) All layered navigation links are no-follow
Technical SEO | | mhenze0 -
Google Blogger Intergration, any SEO benefit?
I want to use google blogger for my website blog, we want to intergrate it into the existing website (which is why wordpress isn't ideal as there is no php) if the domain was www.blog.mysite.com will www.mysite.com still recieve the seo bonuses of having a blog? or does it have to be www.mysite.com/blog otherwise i have little use for a blog, what i also want to ask is how does it intergrate? i don't want the blog on my site to be like a 'window' into the google blog site as that defeats the purpose, i need the content to actually be on my site to ensure the seo benefits. Thanks Dan
Technical SEO | | DanBrayfield0 -
SEO Ultimate Plug in problems for SEO MOZ
Hi Newbee here! SEO ultimate seems to work ok for other url I have on this problem. http://www.pureescapism.co.uk and performing the on page grader for hair salon broadstairsI have canonicalizer on for the plug in and I have made it the rel=canonical targetIt tells me I haven't.Further down I don't get a tick also and am told : Remove all but a single canonical URL tag.Not aware I have more than one.I am also told : No More Than One Meta Description Element ( Cant see how I can do that either as I havent changed any code)Help please
Technical SEO | | Agentmorris0 -
Expressionengine SEO
One of my clients is using expressionengine CMS, and even the simplest things like creating unique page titles seem to be a nightmare. When I try to change page title via cms it also changes navigation menu. Any help will be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Thommas0 -
Where to get expert SEO help?
I joined SEOmoz knowing very little about SEO (it turns out even less than I thought!) I signed up because my business website that had be ranking very well for years made a fast and furious fall to the purgatory of page 2, 3, whatever. We'll I've definitely learned a lot and made a several changes that have helped. Specifically link building (directory submissions) and eliminating duplicate content. But we're still far below where we used to be and I've done everything I can do without making a career change to SEO. I've hired a few offshore SEOs to help but they have all failed to live up to their promises. So, I would love to find a GOOD SEO that can 1. Fix the remaining on-page technical issues in our CMS website (Business Catalyst), and 2. help us develop an SEO strategy for the next year. (I prefer not to post the name of the website for competitive reasons) Our keywords are really not very competitive at all due to the uniqueness of the business. Where should I look for help? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Placeboo0 -
301 Redirect & Cloaking
HEllo~~~~ People. I have a question regarding on cloaking. I will be really greatful if you can help me with question. I have a site www.example.com and it is targeting for multi countries. So I use sub directories for targeting multi countries. e.g. www.example.com/us/ www.example.com/de/ www.example.com/hk/ ....... so on and on. Therefore, when people type www.example.com, I use IP delivery to send users to each coutries. Here is my question. I use 301 redirect for IP delivery, which means when user enter www.example.com, my site read user's IP and send them to right country site by 301 redirect. In this case, is there any possibility that Google considers it as cloaking? Please people.... share me some ideas and thoughs.
Technical SEO | | Artience0