Effect of Publishing Blog Posts Resembling Classified Advertisements
-
Our site (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) markets commercial real estate for lease in New York City.
Any potential negative impact in terms of ranking and traffic by using our blog post in an unconventional manner? I am considering publishing a weekly post describing the latest commercial listings for lease. The post would be formatted and resemble classified advertising appearing in such newspapers as The New York Times. The ads are concise and appealing.
Property listings drive a high click thru rate, so I believe blogs posts based on property listings and formatted like old newspaper ads might really improve visitor engagement. Each add could have a link to a corresponding listing page.
Would using the blog in this manner every week have a detrimental effect or could prove beneficial?
Thoughts???
-
I'm not personally aware of anything that would make it inherently bad, but I do think you should take some time to consider why people visit your blog, and who you'd like the audience for your blog to be. If your blog is mainly for content that's reasonably "evergreen" and that will draw repeat visitors, then using it for this sort of promotional material might not be the best idea. If you're just looking to draw one-off visitors or fill your funnel, it might be fine.
For example, take the Moz blog—the vast majority of our posts aren't about Moz products at all, and when we do post about our own products and events, the posts are in addition to our regularly-scheduled, educational posts. Our blog has a large readership who are generally looking for information they can apply to their own marketing. If they saw posts that serve as little more than advertisements for our products, they'd have no reason to come back. Running the sort of content we run helps us keep our position as an industry thought leader, and keeps us front-of-mind when members of our community are in the market for tools like ours.
You note that property listings tend to draw a lot of clicks, but those clicks are coming from folks who are actively looking for property listings. Those types of visitors strike me as pretty likely to see the listing on your blog, consider whether they're interested, and then bounce along to the next search result. I don't see them sticking around to read and engage with your blog. If you're fine with that, go ahead. If you'd like your blog to be a knowledge source for your visitors, though, maybe leave the listings to the listings.
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
-
Blog with all copied content, should it be rewritten?
Hi, I am auditing a blog where their goal is to get approved to on ad networks but the whole blog has copied content from different sources, so no ad network is approving them. Surprisingly (at least to me), is that the blog ranks really well for a few keywords (#1's and rich snippets ), has a few hundred of natural backlinks, DA is high, has never been penalized (they have always used canonical tags to the original content), traffic is a few thousand sessions a month with mostly 85% organic search, etc. overall Google likes it enough to show them high on search. So now the owner wants to monetize it. I suggested that the best approach was to rewrite their most visited articles and deleted the rest with 301 redirects to the posts that stay. But I actually haven't worked on a similar project before and can't find precise information online so I'm looking to know if anyone has a similar experience to this. A few of my questions are: If they rewrite most of the pages and delete the rest so there is no repeated/copied content, would ad networks (eg. adsense) approve them? Assuming the new articles are at least as good quality as the current ones but with original content, is there a risk on losing DA? since pretty much it will look like a new site once they are done They have thousands of articles but only about 200 hundred get most visits, which would be the ones getting rewritten, so it should be fine to redirect the deleted ones to the remaining? Thanks for any suggestions and/or tips on this 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ArturoES0 -
Should I literally delete all the articles I published in 2010/2011?
We became a charity in December and redirected everything from resistattack.com to resistattack.org. Both sites weren't up at the same time, we just switched over. However, GWT still shows the .com as a major backlinker to the .org. Why? More importantly, our site just got hit for the first time by an "unnatural link" penalty according to GWT. Our traffic dropped 70% overnight. This appeared shortly after a friend posted a sidewide link from his site that suddenly sent 10,000 links to us. I figured that was the problem, so I asked him to remove the links (he has) and submitted a reconsideration request. Two weeks later, Google refused, saying.. "We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines. Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes." We haven't done any "SEO link building" for two years now, but we used to publish a lot of articles to ezinearticles and isnare back in 2010/2011. They were picked up and linked from hundreds of spammy sites of course, none of which we had anything to do with. They are still being taken and new backlinks created. I just downloaded GWT latest backlinks and it's a nightmare of crappy article sites. Should I delete everything from EZA/isnare and close my account? Or just wait longer for the 10,000 links to be crawled and removed from my friends site? What do I need to do about the spammy article sites? Disavow tool or just ignore them? Any other tips/tricks?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TellThemEverything0 -
Client has been COPYING blog posts to wordpress.com for years. Now what?
Just discovered my client has been copying all her blog posts over to her wordpress.com blog account. So she has duplicate content to what is on her site. She has roughly 700 posts on her main site but doesn't look like that many on the wordpress site. There are no inbound links coming off the wordpress site that I could find. Here's an example: http://thevanillaqueen.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/is-canola-oil-a-healthy-choice/ http://vanilla.com/is-canola-oil-a-healthy-choice/ What are you recommendations for what should be done? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | katandmouse0 -
Redirection Effects on Sub Domain
Hi, I would try to summarize my query through an example. Lets say site A (www.siteA.com) have two sub domain (subdomain1.siteA.com & subdomain2.siteA.com) and another site B ( www.siteB.com ) have no sub domain. Due to some obvious reason we need re direct the site site A (www.siteA.com) to site B ( www.siteB.com ) and one of the sub domain (subdomain1.siteA.com) to site B (subdomain1.siteB.com). Now the question is that in case of ( subdomain2.siteA.com ) can we keep the sub domain to site A even though site A has been re directed to site B ? Reasons for keeping this can be traffic, earnings etc. Is it possible to keep it like that or provision for further optimization? Plz help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ITRIX0 -
Help, really struggling with fixing mistakes post-Penguin
We had previously implemented a strategy of paying for lots of links and focusing on 3 or 4 keywords as our anchors, which used to REALLY work (I know, I know, bad black hat strategy - I have since learned my lesson). These keywords and others have since plummeted up to 100 spots since Panda 3.3 and Penguin. So I'm trying to go in and fix all our mistakes cuz our domain is too valuable to us just to start over from scratch. Yesterday I literally printed a 75 page document of all of our links according to Open Site Explorer. I have been going in and manually changing anchor text wherever I can, and taking down the very egregious links if possible.This has involved calling and emailing webmasters, digging up old accounts and passwords, and otherwise just trying to diversify our anchor text and remove bad links. I've also gone into our site and edited some internal links (also too weighty on certain keywords) and removed other links entirely. My rankings have gone DOWN more today. A lot. WTF does Google want? Is there something I'm doing wrong? Should we be deleted links from all private networks entirely or just trying to vary the anchor text? Any advice greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LilyRay0 -
Search result clicks for one of my posts down significantly
I started receiving a warning warning in google webmaster tools about 2 weeks ago that said "big traffic change for top url". On reading the message i saw "Search results clicks for http://goo.gl/EyhUJ have decreased significantly". When I search google using the keyword "sore breasts" for which that post used to rank at least number 2 on google, I dont see anything. The related post http://goo.gl/vP025 is still ranking well. Can anyone give me an idea of what might have happened? I am totally at sea. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adaeze0 -
Subdomain v. subdirectory v. other domain for blogs
I have a good amount of content on our main domain ( http://m00.biz/w4Ljfr ) let's say for discussion it's doctors.com and as you can see, much of it is in subdirectories. Traditionally this was the approach. Now I have some other content on subdomains but it's primarily directories and databases. Now I see that Google is giving subdomains their own SER as if they are a separate site and competitors are locking in the top few results merely by having their content on subdomains. Now I have an opportunity of doing two things: 1. Current content: moving all the content of the past few years on their own subdomain (forum, blog), and I'll be moving forum software anyways. Not sure about our own guide, which has been up there for a while. 2. New content: putting up some new blogs/magazines such as "Doctor's Handbook." Let's say that is a common phrase. I can choose between the following: (a) www.doctors.com/handbook/ (b) handbook.doctors.com/ (c) www.doctorshandbook.com I've got a bit of a quandary here, not sure of the best course of action and am curious to hear from many of you who have handled situations like this before.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | attorney0 -
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