Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Cedric, You're right to be concerned about duplicate content. I recommend that you take a few more steps to be completely sure that your site has a chance of performing well and being indexed and not penalized.

• You should write a unique title, the titles are much too similar
• You should write a unique introduction before quoting the article and additional unique content after the quote
• 300 words is too much for a quote from another article -- consider doing 150-200
• Consider using just 1 image instead of 4

Because you are only partially copying the article and linking to the original source there is very little chance that you will be penalized. However, your copied article will not be considered valuable because it doesn't have any original content. Just a few tweaks and a little original content should help and give you a chance to be indexed/ranked. Best of luck with your site and keep up the great articles.

You're welcome. Hope it worked out for you. You can mark this as answered if the problem is solved.

Hello, you mentioned you have previously done this with 301 redirects. It is possible to do without penalties or losing rankings on your primary domain.

However, the problem arises that you are essentially splitting page authority with the sub-domain which can potentially be treated as a separate website. I would not recommend using sub-domain for your forum to avoid the issue of competing with your primary domain. Forums can be a great source of content and traffic so I would give it the best opportunity to do so on your  domain. It would also be good to spend some time on maintenance to correct those errors and moderate poor quality / spammy / and thin content if necessary.

If you do decide to use a sub-domain, you would want to make sure to provide relevant links on every page back to your primary domain. Best of luck with your forum.

David nails it here. Most business owners understand they need SEO, but don't know how it actually works. They are often told, you need thousands of back links, and then the company promises them these links. You need to emphasize quality and remind them it takes time.

As far as convincing the client they need to update their information, I would emphasize how the search engines draw connections between different sites and if the information is wrong it may look at the business as inactive. I'm sure you've mentioned that you don't want customers calling the wrong number, but they probably responded with "no one gets the phone number from this site". However, if they are searching for the branded name of the business a business directories information may pop up and show the wrong info. Don't miss out on easy conversions. I would try and provide some information or articles showing why they need to follow your advice.

Hope this helps.

Chris

Adficient.com

Hello,

Personally, my plan for this layout would be to have the old domain, www.blogdomain.com, redirect to the new blog at www.domain.com/blog. Having the blog on your primary domain allows for new content to be added to your primary website. You want visitors on the site where they convert, instead of leaving blogdomain.com to find domain.com then convert.

It's fine to have the same analytics setup, it will probably make things easier to track as well. However, if you're marketing for both sites it would be easier to have two separate accounts.

Hope this helps.

Chris

Adficient.com

We like to use Agency Analytics for keyword ranking tracking. It's updated daily, allows us to add any keywords we want to track, then we can track the keywords over a period of time. It shows the ranking changes since the first time the keyword is input into the program. So after 12 months we can see how a keyword has progressed.

Another great tool is Pitchbox, we do lots of outreach and this program automates much of it. It allows for us to find many new sites, email addresses, and track the sites we contact. Highly recommended.

Chris

Adficient.com

Hey Cole,

Good question. There are a couple of different routes you could take with the old or expired content. Leave as is, redirect to more relevant current content or remove it entirely from your site.

My recommendation would be to redirect these old pages to the most relevant updated content unless they are receiving any significant amount of traffic. If the traffic is at 0 and the page is indexed, you are probably better off increasing the page authority of a more recent article or page by using a 301 redirect. You'll also want to ask what is the best option for user experience, it may be beneficial to have these posts in a searchable archive for users.

There is a great article describing the options in a post on the Moz blog entitled "How Should You Handle Expired Content."

Hope my recommendation and the article help you make a decision. Best of luck with organizing your site.

Hello Allie,

Here is the basic regex redirect code to place in your htaccess file.

RedirectMatch 301 /sub-folder/product-category/(.) /sub-folder/shop/$1
RedirectMatch 301 /sub-folder/product/(.) /sub-folder/buy/$1

Hope this helps. You can also find more information on redirecting old pages using regex from WPEngine here.

Like EGOL mentioned it is considered spammy if a website hides and text or images for that matter. Cloaking text can result in a manual penalty from Google which can be terrible for a site. I would suggest putting in an h1 tag that mentions your brand and a keyword you hope to rank for. If you just have the brand name you want to rank for (and no keywords, which I can't imagine anyone would want to do) you can provide an h1 tag that mentions what the product or service is.

Overall, no, don't hide text.

Chris Hickman

Adficient.com

Gotta agree with Logan, just don't do it! Even if it's tempting. There's tons of great ways to build back links, you shouldn't need to resort to buying them. Sure there's tons of sites that still offer paid links and never get dinged by Google, but as we have seen over the years Google is always watching and penalties can be incredibly harmful. Currently, I've been working on a travel site and have ran into the issue of 75% of blogs expecting payment for links. We have changed our approach to the link building process and have managed to see some success. Be creative, you'll still be able to build links organically.

Chris

Adficient.com

Hey MissThumann, there is no good way to tell Google not to include a specific alt text. You could move the image down lower on the page to the second paragraph if you need to keep that specific image and alt text.

Otherwise, I would suggest that you change the alt text to something better that works in your search description or to remove it entirely and just leave the alt tag empty (alt=""). Hope this helps!

Bob,

There's lots of options for you to write about, however, many of the topics have already been covered. What would be unique is to offer some case studies. Use some of your experiences to share what type of work you do and the results you get. This can help people relate to the problems they are having.

Hope this helps.

Chris

Adficient.com

Hey there, in addition to Oleg's comment you can add an htpasswd file to your server to require a username and password to be entered before any users or robots are allowed to access your website.

You can find information on setting this up here.

Hello,

Keep in mind the spam score is more of a helping tool, rather than a complete tool. In other words it's there to give you an idea of how your link profile appears, more than telling specifically which links are harmful. I believe the tool will be going away soon, so don't look too far into it.

Also, different tools, such as majestic and AHREFs are great for monitoring back links, but are not always 100% accurate. Sites like these, and even Open Site Explorer, don't have to the resources to scan the internet like Google does. With that being said, go to the source. Review your link provide within Google Search Console. Rather than using a tool, do it yourself, the results will be much more thorough.

I hope this helps, if you would like more information on reviewing your back link profile please ask.

Chris

Adficient.com

Option 3 seems to be the most aesthetically pleasing to the eye and shortest option. For SEO purposes the shorter URL is often the best option because the keywords would potentially be displayed in the URL preview and be highlighted in bold. It's also not advisable to repeat keywords as in your other options. Leaving out the .html extension is the most common practice today and makes your website look more modern. Hope this helps you make a decision.

Hello, I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it looks like your website has been hacked or compromised. I've done some Google searches and one of the first items found was one of your portfolio items which has a redirect to a deceptive site. The portfolio item in question is titled "Callidus Consulting."

The hacker has likely redirected or altered some of your content without your knowledge and it has caused your listing titles and descriptions to be thrown off.

I recommend you do a full security audit and clean up. To start, install the Sucuri plugin to scan, lock down and harden your site against future hacking attempts.

Also, you should consider redirecting https to http because these URLs are indexed. Setup temporary redirects to your homepage for the broken URLs that are indexed so that you don't lose any traffic. Best of luck.

Hello Rita, You're correct that you can't copy the review itself.

If you are inclined to do so, you can take a screenshot of the review and post it with no issues.

It's also possible to create a graphic that shows "Rated 5 Stars on Google" and link it to your reviews directly (in a new window.) You can use this link generator tool to create a direct link to your Google+ reviews.

Hope this helps!

Susannah,

As Sean mentioned, it is possible to get in contact with GMB, but it can be tricky. We have ran into similar issues, we had an issue where the suite number was a letter then number, for instance C 109. We contacted the GMB team, left a message with contact info and manged to get a call back the same day. The changed the issue over the phone.

I would suggest getting in contact with GMB and describing your issue with the team. Talking with Google will make the process much easier.

Start by reporting the problem here, https://support.google.com/maps/answer/3094088?from=cuf

Hope this helps.

Chris Hickman

Adficient.com

Hello,

My first suggestion would be to use Google Analytics, it's typically the go to for any tracking. Can you elaborate more on the issue with GA? Are you getting different results? Do you need to create a custom URL for tracking?

Chris

Adficient.com

In terms of SEO, there are no penalties for using a gTLD. Technically you have an equal chance of ranking well for a keyword than those with .com domains. It comes down to preference, marketing and the SEO work you put in.

I can see the .training domain working well for marketing to a younger audience, it may be appealing and seem more modern. An older audience may be more accustomed and feel that .com domains are more professional.

Exact match keyword domains gained notoriety because they would often get great anchor text when people linked to their website. I don't see why you would have an issue with that because I would naturally link to the site as "Foo Training."

To answer your question plainly, no it won't be seen as spammy but the .com may seem more professional and credible to some users. I hope this helped make your decision easier.

Hello, your new site should have the same analytics code. You can get this code from Google Analytics > Site Admin > Tracking Info > Tracking Code.

Depending on how your site was verified you may need to add a meta tag or verify the site through Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools). No data should be lost except for the time when Google Analytics tracking code was missing. Best of luck.

Hello,

There is no definitive answer, it really comes down to how you want people browsing your website. For instance, I would suggest a user stay within the same tab if they click from one blog article to the next. There's no reason they need to have a new tab opened. Now if they are on a product page and you have a suggested items section, once they click the suggested item should open in a new tab. This will let the user remember what they were originally browsing along with seeing additional products.

Also, I believe many users get suspicious once a new window opens when they click something. If they are expecting to stay within the same window or even tab. It can look spammy or like an ad/pop up, which could result in closing all.

Browse any major website, how often are you forced to open a new tab or window? Hardly ever, the only time it happens is when you are leaving the main URL.

I hope this helps.

Chris Hickman

Adficient.com

Hello,

Yes you are able to upload multiple sitemaps to your Google Search Console. Often sites that have thousands of pages will create multiple sitemaps to make it both easier for them to manage and search engines to crawl. Just make sure to keep them separate, what I mean by this is have one sitemap dedicated to your blog and blog only, same with your Magento site. Don't cross-reference pages into both.

Hope this helps.

Chris Hickman

Adficient.com

Hello,

Is everything on your site properly optimized? For instance, is your site speed scoring well? Often people will leave a site if the page is loading too slow. Research shows it's often after 2 seconds.

Are your landing pages associated with the terms or queries that are bringing users to the site? People will often bounce from a page if it's not related to what they searched. However, it often takes more than a second to realize the page you're on is not related to the search though.

Where's this traffic coming from? Search, direct, social media? If it's direct and only a second, then a bounce, that would strike me as spammy.

Hope this helps.

Chris Hickman - Adficient

Hello,

If your links are from the navigation don't worry about having too many internal links. The Moz tool is more of a suggestion and will not differentiate between navigation links and other on page links. Ultimately you do not want to have a page that appears as an internal link farm, and search engines will distinguish between navigation and other links.

Hope this helps, if you have more questions just ask.

Chris

Adficient.com

JP,

The best reason to have comments on a site is to add some additional value and increase in engagement. Other than that, they are not necessary. You want to have comments that are thought out, relevant, and helpful. Avoid the spammy links, which happens quite a bit on a WP site. There are some good plugins that blog spammy links, I would look into those. You can also approve any back links, which I would suggest. This way you don't get the spammy comments. Those comments are not adding any value to your page.

Hope this helps.

Chris

Adficient.com

Hello,

There's an number of reasons of why a site may outrank another site. With a quick comparison it does appear your site is better in a few areas. There are some pretty typical SEO changes I would make to increase the site's ranking.

1. Review your meta - Looking at a few pages on your site I would suggest reviewing your meta, including title and description. Utilize your location and keywords within both the title and meta description. You're wasting some great real estate.
2. Build some back links - The number, and quality, of back links pointing to your site are very low. Avoid posting to strictly directories. I suggest finding quality business listing sites (like FourSquare) to post your business. A few high quality back links will separate you from the competition.
3. Write your own content - I threw your latest blog post into CopyScape and it turns out it's just a copied and pasted article from another site that was posted a few weeks prior. Create some content that people are asking questions about, develop content that is helpful and entertaining to users.

These are just a few points, I would suggest a complete site audit to see where else you are missing opportunities. If you would like some additional information feel free to contact us.

Chris

Adficient.com

Lee,

One of my favorite tools is Agency Analytics, which is excellent for tracking keywords. It updates daily, so you get very accurate reports, and it's very simple to use. You can also track the keywords from the date you entered them, this is great for our team, since we can show ranking increases since we started a campaign.

I would suggest trying them out, it's pretty helpful.

Chris

Adficient.com

All you need is a hosting account and to point the domain to a specific directory containing your .htaccess file.

Place your 301 redirects in the .htaccess file and you will be good to go. No WordPress install is necessary.

Hi, glad to hear your rebranding is going well. I think it would be appropriate to mention your previous brand name briefly within the page content. Because of the backlinks with anchor text to the old name this may allow you to continue to rank for that name.

I can't imagine that it would do any harm so long as you do not change your new title tags also. This might become confusing in terms of branding for SEO. Overall, I don't think it is necessary or a concern, but it could provide you additional exposure if people are looking for the old name.

Charles,

My suggestion would be to jump in and begin playing around with the tools. The best way to get an idea on how things work is to click around and see what features each tools have. You'll quickly learn how to navigate the tools and see how each tool operates.

If you want some videos here are a few links to what Moz has created. These may be helpful in showing what tools are capable of.

https://www.udemy.com/user/seomoz/

https://www.youtube.com/user/MozHQ

Hope this helps.

Chris

Adficient.com

Hello,

A simple solution would be to add a robots.txt that will close the page to bots. This is typically for pages you do not want search engines to crawl, however if it is spammy and it's just 'fake' traffic from bots this could cut down on it.

If you would like it to be removed from your analytics you can add it to a removal page. Essentially, it will not show any traffic that goes to that page.

Hope this helps.

Chris Hickman

Adficient.com

Hi Wallace, You should not be so concerned about going ahead with the 301 redirects. While you will see a temporary drop in traffic, your new website will be indexed quickly and should take over your search rankings.

Google webmaster trends analyst Gary Illyes recently confirmed that 301 redirects will not cause a loss in PageRank or page authority. The backlinks you have acquired for your old domain name will still benefit your new domain name if the proper 301 redirects are kept in place.

There may be other issues that could affect your rankings such as switching to a new web design or changing your title tags. If you keep everything consistent I believe you should not have any major loss in Google rankings. Best of luck.

Aaron,

It looks like the backlink profile has had some ups and downs over the last 12 months. There was a drop in Nov, then peaked around the end of May and has been dropping since. Now if you have been removing links this would explain quite a bit. In the last 60 days 48 domains removed links. You may be losing older links that could influence your organic traffic. Make sure you're always adding new, high-quality links.

I didn't see a blog, are you adding new content to the site?

Also, you should fix the 'our products' drop down menu, doesn't fit in all browsers. You can use browserstack to check this.

It doesn't look like a penalty, but keep adding links, just make sure they are quality links.

Hope this helps.

Chris Hickman

Hello John, interesting dilemma you have. I think you have a good idea as well. I would be interested to learn about the level of competition for this term, I imagine it can not be that intensive if your PDF is ranking #1.

My recommendation would be to build the landing page, but include some of the content from your PDF as a preview. You can then offer the free download sign up to continue reading. It's likely the PDF is ranking well because of the content.

Of course you will want to create a 301 redirect to the new landing page from the old PDF URL. Also, keep the same title tag or anchor text that people are using to link to the PDF or the title that Google is currently giving the PDF. I think you have a good chance of retaining the #1 ranking if done right.

You may also have meta information within your PDF that you will want to migrate to the landing page. We're a big fan of landing pages at AdFicient and this sounds like a promising opportunity. Best of luck.

Hello, because you are using a country code domain name and not a generic domain name for your second site it should not be as big of a problem. Google does have some guidelines for international sites and duplicate content. They say that you should try to have unique content for the specific country.

I recommend you consider doing this for your high priority pages and make them have unique titles and copy. Then you would want to use a rel="canonical" tag to all other pages that directs to the .com site.

If your goal is to get the com.au website ranked on Google Australia then you will want to make it as unique as possible from your primary site.

Hope this helps. Best of luck.

Hello, I took a look at your site and it seems like the responsive design is working fine. The only content I notice that is going off screen is in your copyright text. When the screen is very small the text "WolfAutomation.com/www.wolfautomation.com" is partially obscured. I'm not sure if that's the source of the error, but you could try to include a space or shorten this text to see.

I always like pointing out the linking C blocks when comparing the competition. If you're not familiar with linking C blocks, these are essentially IPs from servers of domains that are pointing to your site. You may have 10k backlinks, but they are coming from 2 C blocks. Ideally you would want to have a large variation of links, coming from an assortment of C blocks. In a nutshell you want to have links coming from all over, but make sure they are diverse, relevant, and high quality. It does take time.

Hope this helps.

Chris

Adficient.com

I think Linda is referring to the head <title>tag. The original question references link title attribute which is not shown on search engines.</p></title>

Hi Myles,

Good question. The short answer is that it is not necessary for SEO if you have pages linked elsewhere (such as your menu and category pages), but it can be beneficial. The reason it can be good for SEO is to cover all the bases and make sure that even your least important posts and pages get some internal links to them and get crawled.

It can be a great resource for users to find things on your site. The main purpose of these pages is for users.

If your sitemap is going to be very massive I would consider using other navigation menus, sub-navigation menus or categories instead. Otherwise go ahead and add one.

Matt Cutts of Google has previously said that an HTML sitemap can be more beneficial than XML sitemaps for indexing. Both are recommended. Hope this helps and best of luck with your SEO efforts.

As far as Google is concerned these are valid titles, however they may be a bit lengthy. You'll notice there is a problem if Google starts to alter your title by using other content on the page. You can avoid this by making sure the content on your page matches well with the title.

For better readability consider changing the comma (or last comma if there are 3 items) to an ampersand (&). This gives the title a better appearance and reads more like a description instead of list of keywords.

Hello Michael, valid question. Unfortunately, the title attribute has no direct impact on search rankings. The title tag is primarily for usability purposes.

I'm not positive, but I believe there may be apps for the visually impaired that read the content of title tags and alt image tags. If you're using the same content on desktop and mobile devices I would go ahead and add the title if it helps clarify what the link is pointing to.

However, it is not recommend to use the title tag if it is the same as your anchor text. It should be unique and clarify what the link is. Hope this helps.

Thank you for clarifying. Nice looking website. This is a pretty common issue. If you plan on creating content in the near future on that page you can do a 302 temporary redirect to your page "How Fundraising Works" this would be the most relevant page, not your homepage.

It's never good to leave a blank page on it's own.

Also, I'm noticing a few other minor issues such as double backslash in your footer links and "Hello World" blog post is published. This can be a target for spammers and hackers.

Hope this helps answer your question.

Can you please provide the actual URLs or replace the domain with X's but keep the structure.

The structure of the URLs in your examples are not valid addresses so it's confusing. Thanks.

From the perspective of search engines your examples would be virtually identical. The first one with the dash is the most common usage and easy to read.

Each year will be a unique term in each of your examples except that in your second example you wouldn't rank for "2017".

The characters you must avoid are the ampersand (&) and underscore (_) which will combine terms.

Hello, there are a few options you can consider. First, you can consider getting a dedicated or semi-dedicated server so that you are not sharing resources with dozens of other websites. Second, as already mentioned a CDN such as CloudFlare is highly recommended.

Also, you can read some insight from CloudFlare about TTFB in that it is not entirely an important metric on it's own. You can enable gzip compression which will make your site load faster overall, but this may increase your TTFB.

Depending on your Joomla theme, there may be caching solutions available which can greatly benefit the load times. I think you might be using Rocket Theme so check out RokBooster extension.

Your site has 11 external JavaScripts. You should look into minifying and combining them to 1 file if possible.

I hope these recommendations help. Good luck speeding up your site.

You're welcome. The canonical tag is used to prevent duplicate content concerns. Your traffic reporting is still going to register traffic at the sub-domain page visit.

As Samantha mentioned, the Spam Analysis tool is not a 100% accurate tool, it's more of a 'helping tool'. With the tool its best use is to get some ideas on what poor links are pointing towards your site. Even then you need to take the results with a grain of salt. The tool may give you a spam score that is not entirely accurate, you need to examine the links and make sure it is actually spammy. You'll also notice that the tool doesn't pull all the back links to your site. Moz doesn't have the capability that Google does to crawl that much quantity. To get a complete list of your links go into Google Search Console.

If you're seeing your rankings and domain authority increasing this is a good sign Google noticed your disavow.

Hope this helps.

Chris

Adficient.com

The reason for the -2 added to the category permalink is because you have a duplicate name. Even if this category is in the trash it will cause the -2 to be added if a new category is made. Delete any duplicate names in the trash to fix this.

I would recommend using the shorter category "womens" and if possible shorten the "product-category" slug so that your keywords have a chance to appear in bold the search listing preview.

Usually your product category links and breadcrumbs will update automatically when the permalink is changed. If you have placed manual links to these categories you may want to consider adding 301 redirects to the updated URLs.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your updates.

Basically your only option is to move the blog from the sub-domain to a sub-folder on your main site and setup 301 redirects to forward the traffic to the new addresses. Let me know if you have any other questions for getting this to work.