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
-
Pop-ups ok for SEO?
Are unintrusive pop-ups okay or is Google likely to impose a black mark? I'm not talking about making people stay on the site, just talking about little one corner pop-up for a special offer. An example would be an embedded live chat pop-up. Have you had any experience?
Technical SEO | | seoman100 -
Site redesign. Possible SEO problems?
Hi! Our website has enjoyed good rankings for lots of our keywords for the past 9years. Over the years the site became heavy, so we want to change the design radically. Content, filenames, titles, urls etc. will all remain identical just the change of a template. The new one is minimalistic and responsive design. We are worrying this may drop our domain or page authority and kill all our past SEO efforts. **How to do this with the least harm to our rankings? Anything we need to avoid?**Articles/advice/suggestions comments on design and SEO would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your help! Alina
Technical SEO | | skalfa0 -
Web server locations for international seo
We have a site that is currently hosted in the far east for the far eastern market. We are having issues with the hosting co. so we are considering bringing the site back onto our servers in the UK. However, we don't obviously want to damage too much the bit of uplift we get from local hosting. What is our best approach? Is it ok just to have the site in the UK even though its aimed at the Far East? Or is the use of a proxy server good? Or should we look for other local hosts? Any help very gratefully received. Iain
Technical SEO | | iain0 -
Are pagination a bad thing for seo
hi i am just checking my errors on my site and it is telling me about duplicate pagination results, so i am just wondering if pagination is bad for seo for example http://www.in2town.co.uk/benidorm/benidorm-news/Page-2 i also have page 3 and page 4. should i stop my site from having this to help with seo
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Does Dublin Core Metadata have any effect in SEO.
Hi, I wanted to know if anyone here can give me an answer about Dublin Core metadata standard, is still this metadat effective for SEO, or maybe I need to go with just microformats like Schema or microformats.org.
Technical SEO | | FisnikSylka0 -
Basic Multi-Site Question
Newb question. We run a site in multiple cities under the same domain. Often times one city will provide content that is "syndicated" to other cites. For example, here is the master post: http://www.styleblueprint.com/food-and-entertaining/kale-salad-quick-healthy/ The content will also show up in the following domains: http://atlanta.styleblueprint.com/food-and-entertaining/kale-salad-quick-healthy/ http://birmingham.styleblueprint.com/food-and-entertaining/recipes/kale-salad-quick-healthy/ Should I be marketing the posts in Atlanta and Birmingham as "no index, no follow" for SEO purposes? Thanks in advance, Jay
Technical SEO | | SSBCI0 -
Redirect links add seo value?
Does anyone know if urls on the 'Websites' part of a LinkedIn public profile create any SEO value (meaning, does page rank flow)? The links looks like this: <a href="/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Espeechpad%2Ecom%2Fpage%2Fspeech-to-text&urlhash=Xk3F" target="_blank" title="New window will open" name="overviewsite">speech to texta>
Technical SEO | | scanlin0 -
Best Joomla SEO Extensions?
My website is a Joomla based website. My designer is good, but I don't think he knows that much about SEO . . . so I doubt if he added any extensions that can assist with SEO. I assume there are some good ones that can help my site. Does anyone know what/which Joomla extensions are must haves?
Technical SEO | | damon12120