Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Moz community,

I appreciate the title is confusing, so let me explain.

We use blogspot to host our blog. It's set up as a subdomain of our website. Let's call it: lovelyblog.lovelytraining.com

Our website, in this example, is **lovelytraining.com **

We're migrating our website to a new domain: lovely.training

We'll be redirecting everything on the primary website, so our link profile won't be lost.

However, as the blog is hosted on blogspot, we'll lose links pointed to the blog. The blog would remain lovelyblog.lovelytraining.com - but our website would now be lovely.training

The question is, has anyone migrated/redirected a blogspot blog in this way, to retain links?

Secondly, is there another way we can tell Google that this is blog should be treated as a subdomain of our website?

I'm sure I'm missing out something stupid, so don't go easy on me!

Thanks all.

My question is sparked by how Moz uses its Whiteboard Friday videos.

We are currently capturing video stories from our customers. Its excellent and engaging content we'd love to share with a wider audience. I'm puttting together a strategy for video SEO to drive traffic to our site and Moz's approach intrigues me.

As we know, the world of video rich snippets changed in 2014 - their appearance in universal search reduced dramatically and what remained was almost entirely (90%+) YouTube snippets. Useless if you're looking to drive traffic to your own site. Of course, it's still possible to earn SERPs for video in Google video search, but I imagine the search volume is greatly reduced.

From what I can see, first Moz host their Whiteboard Friday video on Wistia, complete with transcript and whiteboard capture. Suprisingly, I see no Schema markup for video. Can anyone shed a light as to why this might be a good idea?

3-6 months later the same video is then uploaded to youtube, with the same title and a similar description.

The end result is multiple SERPs in universal search, almost always in the following order:

1. the original post on Moz
2. a YouTube result complete with a video rich sippet

This has me asking the following questions - I have some theories - but i'd love your input:

• Why use two platforms to upload and host the video? Why not just YouTube?
• Why avoid using Schema on the Wistia video hosted on the original post? Surely, this would allow an additional result in Google Video Search?
• Why wait 3-6 months after the first post to upload the YouTube video?

Greeting Mozzers.

I have a question for the community, which I would appreciate your input on.

If you have a single gTLD that services multiple countires, what do you think is the best homepage UX for the root homepage and why?

So the example would be you own website www.company.org and target content to Germany, Japan and Australia with content through the folder structure eg. www.company.org/de-de

If someone comes to the www.company.org from a region, would you:

• Redirect them based on location IP – so if from Germany they land on www.company.org/de-de
• Let them land on the homepage which offers location selection
• Let them land on a page with content and offer location selection eg. pop-up or obvious selection box
• Something I’ve not thought of…

I'd appreciate your input.

Thanks

Absolutely, loving the content, my one request....might be worth date stamping the content...i.e. "this information is correct as of 14/07/2013"

As we all know algorithms update and best practice changes....might help users determine the freshness of the content.

Greetings Mozzers.

I would really appreciate some input / advice / a sanity check on our existing SEO strategy.

A year into implementing the strategy (outlined below) there appears to be no uplift in our existing traffic volume. I guess i'm wondering.

• • Am I on the right track?
• • Is there something I'm perhaps additional should be doing / i'm doing something wrong?
• • Am I suffering from Penguin?

The strategy:

We produce a range of content, this is written 100% for our audience, How-to guides, infographics, industry news etc. - this has lead to getting a wide range of publications with high powered relevant domains, widely shared and read. As a result we now have a series of ongoing columns where we regularly produce articles that our widely read and shared.

We have a wide variety of homepage and deep links from quality sources.

We have our own blog producing a wide range of content relevant to our audience. Industry trends, news, changes that affect our readers, guides.

We optimise our pages using the Moz Page Grader for select keywords.

We've structured our site architecture appropriately for the most important pages.

Additional info:

We received a WMT penalty last year in march - unnatural links. We engaged an SEO agency who simply went rogue, automated link building with spun articles.

We fired the agency, asked them to remove the links they had "created" and set about a resubmission. Between March and May when we made our resubmission traffic dropped 40%. Now we did have he resubmission accepted after several reconsiderations but  whilst we've seen a slight recovery we have plateaued for almost a year.

This penalty obviously straddles the time penguin arrived, so I wonder if perhaps we haven't seen a recovery as we are still affected by penguin. Despite all the great work we have done.

If anyone has any advice or insight, please do get in touch.

I am considering running a competition and wanted to get some feedback on SEO Best Practice.

We will have a  unique competition URL - following the completion of the competition it will be 301'd to home page

Every entrant will be given a unique URL for the competition to share, if someone enters using there URL they get an extra ticket. This means we will create a large number of new unique URL's over a short period of time, the pages however will have the same content. Is this potentially bad for Duplicate content?Any advice? Perhaps a canonical tag on all unique competition entrant URLs?

Any other considerations?

Greetings Mozzers,

Doing my standard run through Webmaster tools and I discover up to 30% of my sitemaps no longer exist.

Has anyone else experienced the recent loss of sitemaps/can suggest reasons why this may have happened?

Re-submitting all sitemaps now but just concerned this might become an on-going issue...

Thanks for the responses guys, looks like an SQL Injection.

We have cleared the import and all is back to normal. We'll be looking in to beefing up protection. Thanks for the advice. Will be keeping my eye on the traffic via analytics and watching out for messages in Webmaster Tools

Just logged into our CMS system and it appears we have been hacked.

All page titles have been hijacked adding a secondary title tag linking out to website http://emapaydayloans.com with anchor text pay day loans.

Our Web Dev team are working on fixing the hack now. My concern is the potential knock on effect to SEO.

This looks like a bad neighbourhood site:

• 3 pages indexed
• PR 0

And for I don't know how long we've had almost every page on all our domains linking out with the following page title including the same link and anchor text:

payday loans

I assume its a wait and see at this stage.

My advice, they are all warnings for a reason....

Missing Meta Description - your missing the opportunity to include a description of what your pages is about (google doesn't always select your meta description). A good meta description can improve CTR of your SERPs which is an SEO Indicator, its also a missing signal (though not a powerful one) to Google about what your page is about.

Duplicate Page Title - this is the first indicator to Google about what your page is about and is an important indictor of what keywords your page should be found for. How will google know which page to prioritise? Again this is also included in the SERPs - relevance to the reader = improved CTR

Duplicate Page Content - never a good signal to Google, but depends if the pages are identical or not.

Too Many On Page Links - depends where these warnings are and how you think about site architecture/internal linking - loads of links on the homepage mean more link juice is divided between pages you may not want to prioritise

Title missing or empty, again your missing an opportunity to tell Google and users in the SERPs what your page is about .

I wouldn't worry to much about the Title Element being to long - its not a detractor but in the SERPs the headline is cut down to 70 characters - so just make sure you get your message in their. Overly Dynamic URL's, i'll be honest I don't know much about the impact.

Temporary Redirects again not to sure.

I wanted to also ask the wider moz community this question.

Our blogs are currently run on blogger/wordpress using a subdomain strategy - blog.website.com and has now gained a home page PR3. It's been running for 2-3 years.

This runs contrary to best practice of website.com/blog.

I'm now considering making the blog internal but want to get your opinion as the longer I leave it, the bigger a decision it will be....

Do the pro's of making the blog internal outweigh the cons of doing so ?

Pro's

• Blog benefits from root domain
• Fresh content on the site that people can interact with
• Root domain benefits from links the content gains
• Easier to analyse user activity

Con's

• Loss of Page Rank
• Effort to 301 all URL's and content
• CMS altered to allow creation of blog content

Hi Dan,

If it's clear they are doing comment spam and gaining high volume low quality links from irrelevant domains I'm not sure you have to much to worry about.

With Penguin and Panda on the loose sooner or later i'm sure they'll take a hit.

Trust in doing the right thing......high quality content on relevant target domains with varied anchor text. Or take a note from SEOMoz's book, create a location where your community can come an interact and gain relevant shareable information. UGC from multiple trusted sources on your site being linked to from everywhere.

And perhaps try not to go after such a competitive high value term like "business phone lines" perhaps try similar more long tail terms that are less competitive but combined outweigh the head term. Like "uk business phone lines" etc.

Good Luck.

Good afternoon Mozzers.

I have a discussion based question and I'd be interested to know your thoughts.

I currently implement a content strategy where we create a series of high value How-to written articles, relevant to our audience and then work at getting them placed on multiple high value websites.

I have just been offered an opportunity with a PR6 domain to create a similar series of content but place it all on their site with links back to ours through a dedicated section.

So my question is would I gain more value from small amounts of great content in lots of places vs. a lot of great content in on place?

Effectively 1 link from 20 sites vs. 20 links from 1 site.

HI James,

We were previously hit with a manual penalty and did 3 re-submissions before the manual penalty was removed.

Google just release a disavow tool  in webmaster tools where you can effectively tell google which links you don't want. Check it out here. I'd read up on it first, lots of pro's and cons.

My advice show Google you are trying to do good. Highlight the links you don't like and have had removed or asked to have removed, keep it all in a spreadsheet/google docs highlighting which ones have now been removed/asked to be removed/aren't your fault.

Then once your confident you've cut out the bad, resubmit with the evidence, close your eyes, cross fingers and wait roughly 2-4 weeks in the hope they will remove the manual penalty.

But be warned you may be in for the long haul, I mean months.

Just to put your mind at ease, our brand see's a similar CTR but I have put below some considerations.

• With Google Privacy settings and the emergence of "None" it might be possible that Google registers the impression but counts the click as "none" - very unlikely.
• Do you run paid adverts on your brand? Is it possible people could be clicking these? Factor this in when considering the overall CTR.
• You said Google Maps is on the right - if your brand is a restaurant /venue/shop it's possible they click that result and go to Google Maps, and still find what they are looking for.
• Is your brand name unique - if other companies have it, people may see the results and decide thats not what they are looking for?
• Could your brand name be confused with other products?
• Are other people bidding on your brand name.
• Is your Meta Descritpion fully optimised? This is basically a written advert for your site. Is it as optimised as can be? Is there a call to action.

I'll think of more but lots to think about.

I'm going to agree with the Noisey Little Monkey and Andy,

I answered a question similar to this a while back - check it out

The summary - Rand did a great article on this a while back- http://www.seomoz.org/blog/unders...

There are also multiple other questions of a similar nature.

http://www.seomoz.org/pages/searc...

General consensus is be sub-folder over sub-domain.

Main reason - Sub Folders get the benefits from the root domain, Sub Domains don't.

Here's the key take away from Rands article:

"1 subdomain under 1 root domain (but feel free to use subfolders as it makes sense). Starting a blog? I almost always recommend yoursite.com/blog over blog.yoursite.com. Want to launch a new section of content? Use yoursite.com/newstuff rather than newstuff.yoursite.com."

Hopefully this will have helped you make your mind up.

Hi Dan,

As Andy said, Incognito is a great way.

If you need to search loads of queries, you might be better off with Google Webmaster Tools. You can see a wider range of details and gain insight into your change in rankings.

How to do it

Go to the left hand tool bar, select "Traffic", then click "Search Queries".

Here is the Link - but you need to be signed in.

This should give you a fairly comprehensive list of:

• Search Queries
• Impressions
• Clicks
• CTR
• Average Position

What you can also do is just above the queries select the "With Change" tab which will give you movement over time.

There is also a 'Filters' tab at the top that allows you to filter by specific search queries.

The draw back is that you can't go back more than 3 months and the data is aggregated, unlike in Bing Webmaster Tools where you can get exact figures.

To overcome this loss of data due to only being able to go back 3 months it's worth checking out this post on Automating Search Query Downloads written by Ben over at Distilled.

Hope this helps.

Ed

Agreed!

Thanks for the feedback.

Hi Shaun,

Already been offered the Custom URL, as you rightly point out it will be good for expanding our brand name.

I just wondered if anyone had evidence or input of any initial perceived or expected SEO benefit. eg. Strengthening of Brand Terms if you have G+ account with the same brand terms as your company pointing at your home page.

Google Plus have just released Custom URLs, see here

So instead of the messy https://plus.google.com/b/012345679 you can have http://www.google.com/+{yourbrandname}.

This would be much better for memorizing.

But any opinions on added or future perceived SEO benefit?

Hi,

Putting together a URL for a product we are selling. We sell IT Training courses and the structure is normally

Top Folder=Main Courses section

Sub Folder=Vendor

Page Specific=Course Name + Term

An example is

courses/microsoft/mcse-training

However I have a product where the vendor and course name are the same. How should I best organise the URL - double mention or single mention

So a)

courses/togaf/togaf-foundation-training

or b)

courses/togaf/foundation-training

Good Morning/Afternoon fellow Mozzers,

I recently created an infographic and am now looking to get it distributed via as many publications as possible. I discovered some great sites with collections of infographics.However I have discovered a multitude of sites offering to review and feature the infographic, or "express" submissions so the graphic features faster for a price..... links below.

http://www.amazinginfographics.com/submit-infographics/

http://infographicjournal.com/submit-infographics/

2 questions

1. Is this considered as buying links? My instincts say Yes.

2. Some sites offer mix of free and "express" paid submissions. If the answer to Q.1 is yes, should I avoid them all together even if my graphic gets picked up free?

Thanks in advance for the feedback.

SEO Keith has pretty much hit it spot on.

I would try and use a combination of all 4 if at all possible.

From my observation GWT accuracy seems to vary dependent on how often your content is crawled..... showing a history of all your links i'm not sure it can be beaten. But accuracy of what is included I am unsure. We have a few external links that were pointing at our site which we know no longer exist. 3 months on they are still in our link profile according to GWT.

I'd dread the answer being the latter rather than the former as we've spent two years building it blog.domain...

However I noticed SEOmoz are domian.tld/blog and it got me thinking....

Cheers.

R.

That was the original email - Google has detected evidence of unnatural link building.

We're still not entirely sure what caused the issue. I assume it was in our last reconsideration request but at that point we were just hoping.

Hi Marie,

Thanks for the feedback. Hopefully it won't be months as we have already been suffering since May.

If there are underlying algorithmic issues related to Penguin...we would have a notice right?

Thanks for the feedback, greatly appreciated.

Forehead slapping moment, I know of this. Just for some reason hadn't thought to give it a go!

Thanks you. I'll keep you posted on the outcome.

Ps. if you don't want more people to know, perhaps take it off the public domain! Ha

Thanks for the 2c.

Keeping my eyes peeled, fingers crossed and working on the good stuff!

Great Video!

As you say, if the manual penalty removal doesn't allow traffic bounce back then I will be looking at any penguin related issues that I need to work on.

At the moment our big focus is on creating high quality unique content for high quality sites. Whilst focussing on all the on page/on site content in our control to make sure everything is up to scratch.

I'll keep you posted.

Howdy Mozzers,

For anyone who has had experience of a manual penalty i'd appreciate your feedback.

How long did it take to recover from a Manual Penalty?

Of course every situation is different and its only been 8 days so perhaps it's to soon.

Below is the email we received, I highlighted "believed" they didn't state we had. We highlighted a bunch of back links we didn't like however most of these remain in our profile in GWT so not sure what was really the problem.

"Previously the webspam team had taken manual action on your site because we believed it violated our quality guidelines. After reviewing your reconsideration request, we have revoked this manual action. It may take some time before our indexing and ranking systems are updated to reflect the new status of your site."

Your feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Sure

Go to your respective google, in the search box type:

site:domainname.com

This should give you a list of most indexed urls...not always right.

Also try checking out your Google Webmaster Tools Account (GWT), in the dashboard on the right hand side labelled sitemaps is a list of submitted and indexed urls.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for responding guys....

After some back and forth and research from the Web Dev team, turns out our hosts messed up when upgrading RAM to our host server.....site was down for 3 hours overnight.

All appears to be fine now but will keep my eyes peeled.

Thanks

Great advice from Stephen....

Speaking from experience, we had a reconsideration accepted....it took 4 re-submissions, get to work ASAP as it can take 2+ weeks per response.

To add to Stephen's advice, one thing we did....extract all linking domains...search each domain in Google Search, any domain that has very few or zero indexed pages is also a red flag. If Google don't index it, then they likely don't like it. I'd send a list of those links to google asking them to ignore them.

Look out for sitewide links with non Brand Term optimised anchor text.

Good luck.

Good Morning/Evening Mozzers,

I arrive at work this morning with 5 emails from GWT for my separate domains reading,

**"Googlebot can't access your site - **Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 39 errors while attempting to connect to your site. Your site's overall connection failure rate is 15.1%."

I have passed this on to the Web Dev team to resolve ASAP.

My Question, will server connectivity issues harm my rankings? Is there a danger if this continues that URL's could be de-indexed?

Input would be greatly appreciated.

Ha, very true.

Or we're both wrong. However at this stage in SEO, Rand's comments are practicably gospel...so I feel pretty confident.

Great minds think alike!!

In answer to your question, Rand did a great article on this a while back as a follow on to a white board friday session.- http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites

There are also multiple other questions of a similar nature.

http://www.seomoz.org/pages/search_results?q=sub+domain+vs.+subfolder

The general consensus seems to be sub-folder over sub-domain. As Sub Folders tend to get all the benefits from the root domain.

To quote Rand from the top article his advice:

"1 subdomain under 1 root domain (but feel free to use subfolders as it makes sense). Starting a blog? I almost always recommend yoursite.com/blog over blog.yoursite.com. Want to launch a new section of content? Use yoursite.com/newstuff rather than newstuff.yoursite.com."

So both A and B - www.domain.com/keyword

Hope this helps.

Site 24x7 is quite good - http://www.site24x7.com/tools.html

Its more of an all round website monitor - but one of the built in aspects is response time.

Hi Justin, thanks for the feedback.

I'm not sure I would have been concerned had it just been a couple of links from the sites.

The sites linking are credible well established blogs, with great content. And the response on the sites are genuine unique responses in the comments section to articles created.

It seems to be the nature of the comment form and the set up of the blog plugin that makes this look suspicious.

I believe I will see if its possible to keep the comment and just remove the link.

Irving, thanks for the feedback, in answer to your questions:

A)The 2 blogs are not shady in the slightest, both are long standing technical blogs created by respected individuals in their field.

The comments are technical response's to articles created by the individuals.

B) Our site has an extensive link profile with a domain age of 5+ years.

C) Yes, easy to remove the links. Agreed, 80 pages linking to 1 does not look natural. I will see if the comment can remain, its a good response.

Howdy fellow Mozzers....

Since Googles Penguin Update I am overly cautious when reviewing our link profile. I spotted 2 domains linking to us yesterday, 80+ links from each domain to our homepage. This looked superstitious, site wide links effectively.

At first inspection I couldn't spot the links....they turned out to be two individual comments, but as the site had a plugin with "most recent comments", 1 link became 80. The link is an exact match of the individuals name who made the comment. And is a result of filling out the comment form.

Name:

Website:

Comment:

By filling out the name and website the name becomes the anchor text for the link to the website.

Long story short...do you think this is penguin esq. link spam? Is it not? Or is it just not worth the risk and remove them anyway???

Thanks Matt,

Some very helpful feed back, this is exactly what we want to do as we know some of these search terms will be there for the long haul as they are related to some major products which we know will be popular until the eventual update/replacement.

Jeff,

Thanks for the response. Both articles are exceptionally helpful.

Reading between the lines the decay is natural, especially when related to new terms being launched.

My challenge is to slow/prevent this decay from rankings, most of the terms I want to maintain are for new products which will be around for a while much like the releated terms. Ideally I would plant the flag early and defend my SERPS to the very last slot above the fold.

I like your strategy however, continued postings every week when a new product comes out to ensure we can maintain position.

Something tells me I know the answer to this question already but I'd always appreciate the advice of fellow professionals.

So.....fresh content is big now in Google, and i've seen some great examples of this. When launching a new product or unleashing (yes unleashing) a new blog post I see our content launches itself into the rankings for some fairly competitive terms. However after 1-2 weeks these newly claimed rankings begin to fade from the lime light.

So the question is, what do I need to do to retain these rankings?

We're active on social media tweeting, liking, sharing and +1ing our content as well as working to create exciting and relevant content via external sources. So far all this seems to have do is slow the fall from grace.

Perhaps this is natural. But i'd love to hear your thoughts, even if it is just keep up the hard work.

I'm not using it, but my spammy spidey sense is tingling....

Banner Ads (which aren't ads because they are free?) on your blog linking to other peoples blogs and vice versa. Sounds risky.

Imagine one of those Ad spots is on the Blog Roll - 500 links from 1 domain to 1 page. Red flag.....