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Category: Content Development

Ask and answer questions around the topic of content development for SEO.

  • steph_ba


    Hi, I know it used to be possible but now i don't find any contact to submit an article to the blog. How does that work? Is that still possible to do it? And if yes, what are the conditions to be writer for Moz blog? Thanks. Stephanie

    | steph_ba
    0
  • Wagster


    Right now my company is blogging five days a week, which is way more than our competitors and most other companies do. Back last September, we dropped our blogging frequency to once a week or so, and our organic conversions dropped. I had ascribed that to the drop in our blogging frequency, but now I have my doubts: maybe it was a rise in competition, or part of a larger drop that has been going for over a year and a half. My question to you is: what has been your experience when your posting frequency (or your clients' posting frequency) has dropped? Have you seen a drop in rankings, or have you held fast? Many thanks in advance.

    | Wagster
    2
  • CreativeCow


    I have a client based in the UK and one of their distributors based in the UAE have copied the content for their own website, will this affect my clients rankings because of duplicate content?

    | CreativeCow
    0
  • andy.bigbangthemes


    Hey guys, We're seeing Moz report "duplicate" content on pages like: mysite.com/interesting-category/ and mysite.com/interesting-tag. Why exactly is this, and is there something that we should do about this? Obviously some of the same posts will intersect on pages like category, tag, author pages. Thanks

    | andy.bigbangthemes
    0
  • Frank_Smith


    Dear all, I'd like to know if you think it'd be worth it to compete with a relatively big competitor (160k backlinks from 2.4k domains, citation flow 47, trust flow 43, class C IPs 1.2k) whose niche is however something I have sufficient knowledge of (how-tos and technology) starting from scratch. I am particularly interested because such domain exploits a niche language I have good fluency of (and in which there surely is somewhat less competition, particularly about how-tos and technology, compared to English). Until now I have managed a very small niche domain in my spare time (genre-specific music), which however being so specific, couldn't but have a modest amount of visitors even if ranking high on Google. On the other hand, it's been years I have been closely watching that domain I'd like to compete with (it has around 8k how-tos with good SEO but average or below average outdated content taken from various unquoted sorces, something I'd easily create myself in a few months worth of work, or even sooner with the help of a few collaborators, that domain itself is run by just a couple of people) and consistently ranks its how-tos and comparison on top positions in its niche, yielding most of its revenue in header bidding. Never seriously thought about competing in its niche until I heard about their last year's turnover, had the usual thought ("If I just did it myself! What was I thinking to?") and met a good coder I am grateful to and which I feel could be the right person to take care of the website's backbone. The template they use is nothing overly complicated, it just has the main optimizations one would use to decrease load time and not trigger Google with too many banners. The main doubts I have is if such a domain, having larger economic resources than me, could eventually sink mine (with techniques like giving me plenty of spammy backlinks or something like that) once it finds out I am competing and getting closer than they'd like, or since their texts are already quite good SEO'd, their strongest assurance could be that I'd have to sacrifice too many keywords in order to create my content without having my reworkings seem close enough to theirs to allow a lawsuit against me? Thank you Frank

    | Frank_Smith
    1
  • AdamWormann


    I know this has been answered before, but I don't think it has been in about a year (and we all know how quickly the SEO landscape can change).  We're having a little debate on it right now and I'd be curious to get some feedback from the community. What is the minimum number of words you would use on a page?  Does it matter to you if it's a second tier (website.com/x) or third tier (website.com/x/y) page? It's always a tough sell on design between trying to keep it clean and trying to provide a lot of useful information.  I'd be curious what your thoughts are.   Thanks! -Adam

    | AdamWormann
    1
  • Kdruckenbrod


    There are a few business blogs that I'm currently updating - include more details, information, case studies, statistics etc. The blog was originally published in September of 2016. Once I make the changes, do I keep the same original date or do I change the date to the day that i've uploaded the new information? Example:
    Original Published date: September 2016
    Updated Blog: June 2017. What date should the blog display? Thank you.

    | Kdruckenbrod
    0
  • paulfoz1609


    I've read somewhere that "Request a Quote" can sometimes put people off a little bit and that Ill be better having "Get Price".  Were an installation service company.  I cna have a PRicing page were the customer can fill some information and be provided with a price on the website.  Would this be a better option than having a request a quote page? Has anyone had any positive or negative experience with this strategy?

    | paulfoz1609
    0
  • ninel_P


    I'm currently importing about 15000 posts to my site that are essentially businesses that have posted their programs for people to sign up. To sign up the user clicks the button that links to the program provider's website. I also have the option to link directly back to the original directory site that the program was posted on. I've scraped this information from a different website and I want to make sure I don't get penalized. I don't want to spin the content because it produces poor quality content. I don't necessarily need to rank for the pages because I have relevant, direct traffic coming to the site via purchased domains. I plan on at least contacting all of the larger program providers to let them know that I've listed their programs on my site and to give them the option to manage them. My Questions In order to avoid any penalty, should I just apply a rel="noindex on all of the posts/programs? My domain is still new so I'd imagine that's probably what I should do but definitely need some reassurance. Thanks for your time!!

    | ninel_P
    0
  • drdougweiss


    Yoast keeps pestering me about Cornerstone Content. Is it really a ranking factor? Ryan

    | drdougweiss
    0
  • paulz999


    Hi Moz Community! I run marketing for a DA 43 website. We've been consistently blogging 4-5 times per week for the past 7 years, and its become ingrained in company culture. Due to limited resources, I want to decrease publishing frequency on the blog and focus on other marketing activities (content promotion, higher value content, link outreach, CRO etc). However, our team is worried that decreasing frequency might negatively affect our SEO (organic search is by far our most important acquisition channel, is the main revenue driver for the whole company). When I look at metrics, a couple of things stand out: 1) a very small % of our blog posts get meaningful organic traffic, 2) the majority of organic traffic that produces customers actually goes through the homepage, not the blog, 3) the vast majority of our blog posts are not earning links as we have not focused much on promotion. Anybody have thoughts on specifically whether decreasing blogging frequency might have an impact? (I know Moz and Hubspot have both done frequency experiments, but those were on high-DA, high-engagement sites where every post had a chance to earn links, etc.) so I'm wanting to isolate the case where publishing frequency is decreased on a site where most posts aren't getting links/much engagement. Thanks!

    | paulz999
    0
  • Gautam


    I run a couple of gadget/technology based blogs, which essentially has news based articles and long form articles such as reviews, tutorials, and tips. Looking for some advice on the strategy for internal links: We have been using internal links in the following ways in articles so far: Links to the category pages at the end of the article (we call it related topics) Links to category pages wherever relevant preferably in the first paragraph. The logic here was that if we can add the link to a category in the first paragraph, which appears on the home page and category page, it will pass the link juice to the category page. Link to relevant articles, mostly by using the full title of the post as we thought that it stands out. Issues with the current strategy: In the case of the 1st strategy, it doesn't seem that natural, so we are not sure if people actually end up clicking them. In case of the 2nd, we have couple of concerns: it could result in linking to a category page twice. One within the article, and the second at the end of the article because of strategy 1. Because the first paragraph also appears on the category pages, it would mean that in some cases we will be linking to the same category page (recursive). In the case of the 3rd strategy, the problem is it does not appear natural so we are sure if it increases the value of the content. I was wondering if we should adopt the following strategy: Get rid of category links at the end of the article. Avoid linking to the category pages in the first paragraph, instead link to the category pages after the first paragraph, so we don't end up with the issue mentioned in b. i. Alternatively, we could remove the excerpts from the category pages so we don't hit the issue of linking to the category page from the category page. Add links more naturally. So have a sentence which talks about the related article and link to it using partial match (keyword phrase) or exact match. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

    | Gautam
    0
  • ReunionMarketing


    As we've been refining our metrics for gauging whether or not a blog is effective -- if people are engaging with it -- one of the strategies we've seen (e.g. NYT, WaPo, Yahoo!) is "Read More." I've read a few articles with some who advocate using it and others who discourage it. Does anyone have any history adding "Read More" to their content and the effect it had?

    | ReunionMarketing
    0
  • aphoontrakul


    Hi Moz community, A few businesses that we work with are asking if they can leverage our content such as blogs by basically copying it and post it on their site. They will give us credit for the content though. My concern is that going to cause duplicate content issue and hurt us with our SEO? We'd like to provide it to them in a way that would benefit us or at least doesn't hurt us. I can think of a few possible options... 1. Have them only copy part of the content and link back to our site with a link "Read the original article" or something similar 2. Have them implement rel=canonical back to our site 3. Have them just copy the whole thing (because it doesn't really hurt us?). In that case, do we have them link back to us or no? Is there anything I missed? What's the best option for us? Thank you for the help in advance!

    | aphoontrakul
    1
  • bnulab


    Hi We have 4 websites - 1 for company and 3 for each products. Currently all our blog posts are located on the company website company.com/blog. We will be separating out the blog so that product blogs will be in each product website. i.e. from company.com/blog to: company.com/blog product1.com/blog product2.com/blog product3.com/blog This is with the aim of helping SEO for each of the product websites; and improving user experience so users can easily navigate around the product pages if they are reading a blog post on the product. So now we have to consider migration. We will migrate/copy over all blog posts to each of the relevant product websites, but should we: A. keep the old blog posts on company.com/blog and do a rel=canonical B. only show blog preview on company.com/blog which will link to the new product.com/blog (and using 301 redirect) C. 301 redirect all blog posts from company.com/blog altogether Any suggestions on which of the above options to take would be greatly appreciated in terms of SEO and other considerations

    | bnulab
    0
  • Crichardson1990


    I have a customer that has two separate locations for the same business on two different URLs (both connected via Landing Page). I cannot change this. They are in the powersports industry (snowmobiles, ATVs, motorcycles, dirt bikes, etc). The locations are about 10 miles from one another, essentially sell the same brands & products (there are 1 or 2 exceptions), have the same target audience (local & from out-of-state), and have the same goals. They currently rank #1 and #2 for their industry in their area. They now want a content marketing strategy. I face limitations with the CMS (no blog abilities and technical issues that are out of my control), and content marketing can really only consist of custom graphics & custom page creation. Typically, custom pages are utilized by creating Brand Pages describing the major brands to built out authority in those categories, and then try to branch out from there to create individual product-category pages with more unique content to answer more of a question based on the intent. I am very concerned about creating content that will be too similar between the two locations and will thus compete with the other location, so I am thinking I should devise a completely different strategy for 1 location over the other. Is that a good idea? I think with the smaller location, I choose the typical route of creating brand pages, product pages, etc, and then with the bigger location, try to focus on unique content such as buyer's guide, local SEO ideas about the area, FAQs, testimonials, etc. Thoughts/ideas?

    | Crichardson1990
    0
  • helenlorettahasan


    My copywriter is currently hitting 2,100 - 2,500 words over three articles on an average day. He is employed full time, 7.5 hours a day with a 30 minute lunch break (He has the choice of a 1 hour lunch and leaving 30 minutes later). Let's say only 6 hours are spent researching and writing: 2,500 words / 360 minutes = 6.9WPM The content is generally rewritten from other websites with a little bit of unique content, on topics that are usually not complicated - the articles themselves are along the lines of a broad summary of what the other website offers/does. The content I receive is fairly generic and doesn't really say anything more than the source material. No formatting is done and generally I receive very large wall-of-text paragraphs. The content is written in one program and then copy/pasted into word to be delivered. All keywords to use are provided, as well as ~50 words and phrases related to the topic. The ~50 words and phrases are usually presented in a list ("they offer x, x, x, x and x, as well as x, x and x" etc), so this part of the task shouldn't be taking long. I am trying to gauge whether this is typical and what I should expect from someone who does this each day, as from previous roles I know more is definitely doable, but as for whether it's doable every working day I'm not sure. What do you usually receive from your copywriters for a day of work?

    | helenlorettahasan
    0
  • RACSEO


    We are currently sharing a featured snippet for the term 'Euro emissions standards' with Wikipedia (not sure how long this will be the case for) but I was wondering if anyone else has ever come across this? Thanks in advance

    | RACSEO
    1
  • AsanaOps


    As a fun project, my team wanted to build a mini-food blog based off the lunches we make here at our office -- but we're a software company and, topically, our product has nothing to do with food. Therefore, I suggested that we not publish this content on our website + create a Medium publication instead (this would also help us avoid the headache of creating an entirely new section of our website / potential 404 issues from non-technical editors / etc.) However, I struggled to articulate _why _it's a best practice to only publish relevant content on your website. Is it to help search engines understand what your website is about as an entity? Spam signals?

    | AsanaOps
    0
  • SocialAssist


    Blogging , do I create a huge blog which links to all my sites or do i create a blog on each site, or do i guest blog to each site from other peoples blogs 😞 which is best ?

    | SocialAssist
    1
  • Natifs


    Do you see that ? 
    When you click on facebook post of Moz, the URL is domain is : MZ.CM ans after 301 to moz.com/article... Why ? Thanks

    | Natifs
    2
  • xlucax


    Hello Moz community, Please check out my website http://www.likechimp.com - I'd love to know your thoughts. I have never built links for my website but managed to do pretty well on the rankings organically. Lately, figures have dropped so need to get back up there on Google. Any tips from what you see already would be greatly appreciated! Example ecom product I sell: http://likechimp.com/facebook-shop/buy-100-facebook-event-attendees/ Thanks

    | xlucax
    0
  • Joseph-Green-SEO


    I want to put Adsense on my website, but I have my own company visiting my website a lot using the forms on that website. Can that get me penalized for Adsense seeing so many visits from the same IP and thinking we want to spam click?

    | Joseph-Green-SEO
    0
  • McTaggart


    Ignore.

    | McTaggart
    0
  • GregDixson


    I have a number of clients struggling with publishing frequent blog content. Can anyone recommend any content ordering services? - I've seen Constant Content and a couple of others. I'm just wondering if these are effective?, SEO-friendly? (completely safe from duplication, etc.)? - and if anyone can recommend the best choices based on experience. In the past clients I've been fortunate in working with clients who are writing themselves, or connecting with a copywriter and going through the process of creating content. However I'm looking for an alternative solution to solve content drought with some clients which simply don't have the time to go through that process and need to see results.

    | GregDixson
    0
  • DeanRamadan


    If I add /amp to the end of any of my posts, I can see that the plug-in is working. It's been months since I installed it, though, and Google hasn't indexed any of the AMP pages. Am I missing a step?

    | DeanRamadan
    0
  • Ashcastle


    Hi, I have a client with three companies selling the same products on each. Two brand sites and One which shares all the products. Currently, they are all using the same description and imagery. How damaging will this be for duplicate content? Thanks, Ashleigh

    | Ashcastle
    0
  • WilCross


    I have blog posts on my site that don't have comments. However, I cannot find my pages in google search. Does the lack of comments on my blog posts hurt my ranking in google search?

    | WilCross
    0
  • WilCross


    I'm thinking about uploading photos to my Google+ and then embedding them in my post. Will adding photo from Google+ help me rank better.

    | WilCross
    1
  • Psych2Go


    Hi, I run a psychology blog for millennials and I recently started using MOZ trial. I'm looking for a general blueprint or questions I should be answering as I try to boost my search engine traffic to match up with psychologytoday.com Aside from link building and writing quality content, what are some other strategies that I can implement?

    | Psych2Go
    0
  • whiteonlySEO


    I've asked this to dozens of people already, but I still haven't found a satisfactory answer... perhaps someone here can help me: I keep hearing how important it is to update product descriptions to avoid duplicate content, decrease thin content and improve conversion rates - but for any new eCommerce sites like ours, with thousands of listings going up at once, this is nearly impossible to control. Outsourcing is clearly a bad idea from an SEO standpoint as well as a UX standpoint... But are there any other options? Should I let go of my other responsibilities and focuses as an in-house SEO manager and virtually stop, drop and roll out unique product descriptions? That would be a project that would take me at least a year to complete. Do I just give up? Do two descriptions a day and hope for the best? What do you guys think? What have you recommended for others? I can't imagine our company is alone in this dilemma. Thanks in advance! Hanna

    | whiteonlySEO
    0
  • RoxBrock


    I have used several and had some good results. Am wondering if I can find one that is more cost effective than who I am using now, as they just doubled their prices.

    | RoxBrock
    0
  • ianizaguirre


    Do you think its better to have a published date AND a last updated date on Posts ? Does google even look if you updated but left the published date old I was thinking of adding a "last updated" field to my articles. But is it worth it? or should I just keep it uncluttered and leave only the last published date? I would think that Google would not notice if I updated a last updated meta field since their is a published date field already.

    | ianizaguirre
    1
  • Sneha.chandan


    Hello, When I look for bloggers from blogspot and wordpress portals, I find high domain authority scores on moz but if I check their individual sites without blogspot or wordpress I see a low domain score why is this? and is there a harm in selecting such sites? For example hypothetically : www.lizzie.blogspot.co.uk - high domain score & www.lizzie.co.uk - low domain score. Thanks & Regards, Sneha

    | Sneha.chandan
    0
  • crystal.fde


    My employer has a content writer who is currently working on writing unique descriptions for many pages, on the order of around 150-200 words per piece of content. A recurring theme in this content is to write a list of features such as "it does X, X, X, X, X and X", which can sometimes happen a couple of times during the content and takes up a decent chunk of wording. This content does not require in-depth research over and above reading the about us page of some sites and looking at what services they provide, as well as some quick details like their payment and delivery methods etc. As well as that the writer also writes the Meta Description and then uploads these to a CMS. There are no other tasks. Considering the writer is doing this 5 days a week, 7.5 hours a day, and isn't getting paid a poor or trainee-type wage, what would you say would be an acceptable amount to achieve on the average day? The current average works out to around, or slightly less than 8 of these pieces of content each day. Thoughts?

    | crystal.fde
    1
  • danielreyes


    Hey everyone, We have a couple B2C medical/healthcare clients we produce content for and I was wondering what the industry stance is when it comes to giving references at the end of a blog, assuming there were no statistics or direct quotes used in the content. A lot of our content is written via research on a specific condition/treatment and doesn't really dive deep into specific medical nuances. Things like risks, recovery timelines, questions to ask, etc. are written about mostly. Still, should we be providing general references at the end of blogs to sites like WebMD, Medscape, etc. Thanks for any input!

    | danielreyes
    0
  • Brando16


    I attended Mozcon this year and the session by Joe Hall "Rethinking Information Architecture for SEO and Content Marketing" has me considering some changes to our site structure and architecture. I'm currently putting together a landing page for our webinars but could things like webinars and case studies be considered supporting content to our main ideas? For example instead of my architecture being: home > webinars > webinar about an idea It could be: home > main idea 1 > webinar about an idea So my webinar landing page would link out to all of the different webinar pages on the site instead of being contained in this bucket. Just wanted to get some thoughts on this.

    | Brando16
    0
  • Ben-R


    I’m always hesitant when it comes to purchasing comments but it seems like a natural approach. Is this something that Google would take notice and/or frown upon? - Anything we should avoid? Any additional information would be helpful. Thank you in advance.

    | Ben-R
    0
  • jezweb


    Is there any research or detailed review of whether the jetpack wordpress firehose has a definite benefit for seo? https://wordpress.org/support/topic/enhanced-distribution-to-where/

    | jezweb
    0
  • VelocityWebsites


    I am interested to know your thoughts on which keywords to target for your about page. While most keyword strategies are about creating or optimizing pages on categories.  This is great for product/service page ideas, but I never know what my about page should come up for. Should it just be your name or can you utilize this page to capture some categories or keywords that are difficult to rank for;  I.e  We rank well for "web design [location]"  not so well for "[location] web design" Regards Rod

    | VelocityWebsites
    0
  • Jen_Floyd


    We have about 15-20 articles we'll repurpose on a partner domain (think: media outlet).  To avoid duplicate content suspicion, how much exactly do we need to differentiate the content on the second domain?  Yea, this is assuming we can't obtain a canonical for whatever reason. I've found some good advice here, but am looking for some quantification. Like:  "A sentence/paragraph of introduction at the top of the piece, plus a link back to the original at the end of said introduction ought to do it." Any help is appreciated.  Thanks!  Tim

    | Jen_Floyd
    0
  • SneakerFiles


    Hello, I have noticed this with some articles. Here is an example:
    http://www.sneakerfiles.com/air-jordan-11-low-closing-ceremony-release-date/ For the term "Air Jordan 11 Low Closing Ceremony" I do not show up on the first 3 pages of Google even though the website has a back link to this particular page (maybe more). It's almost like some pages just disappear. Also I will rank very high (page 1) for a sneaker that is going to release for months then all of a sudden, about a week from the release, I disappear entirely.  Not sure why this is (other in my field also rank on page 1 but stay). The site has been around for just about 10 years now with a large amount of backlinks (I don't go out and try to obtain backlinks unless it's something exclusive to share with others). Any help would be greatly appreciated.

    | SneakerFiles
    0
  • tslb


    Hello! I'm looking at picking up the Yoast News SEO plugin extension to add to our company's wordpress site. We're a UK manufacturer but have lots of regular news stories (new products, industry info, new projects etc.) that is relevant to our niche market. We'd love to get these stories featured into the Google News feed and this may be a route. Anyone using the plugin? Any thoughts? Thanks

    | tslb
    0
  • srbello


    Hello, I am working on planning for a redesign of a eCommerce clothing website.  Looking for some inspiration on some good examples of clothing companies using their content well.  The design does not have to be the best, it can be just very well done use of blog type content or video. Thank you in advance for taking time to respond!

    | srbello
    0
  • Mustansar


    I am running Free Article Posting site but I discover people are posting their content which already has been published on different sites before.  What should i need to do in order to save my site from Google penalty.3 waiting for your kind help in this regard Thanks in advance

    | Mustansar
    0
  • MissThumann


    I use a website provider for my website. Sadly, although it has an integrated blog, the blog posts title does not get included in the URL. So now, with my limited knowledge of SEO I'm wondering if blogging is still worth it? Any thoughts Greatly appreciated! 🙂

    | MissThumann
    0
  • MissThumann


    Hi Pep's The blog for my website is integrated, but does not have a URL that matches the text. The company I use for my site say that it can't be changed. Basically it displays numbers instead of text in the url. So I thought, what about starting another blog as well as the original. Would this have any effects on my SEO, negative or positive? Any advice greatly appreciated! 🙂

    | MissThumann
    1
  • nick-name123


    We have a property listing site.
    Wandered if its more important to update the results of the listings (adding or deleting them) or is adding new articles more important.?

    | nick-name123
    0
  • MissThumann


    Which is better? To write my own blog post or, (with permission) use other high DA content on my blog. I'll probably do both, but I'm very curious as to what the search engines prefer or which is better for seo. Thanks in advance!

    | MissThumann
    0
  • Sequelmed


    Hi There, To check if content on my site is plagiarized or not, i copy it from my site and then paste the text in tools available online. They highlight the green text as UNIQUE and in red as PLAGIARIZED. When I click the plagiarized content to see which OTHER SITE is using the same content as that of mine, it leads me to the pages of my own site. I am confused on this. Where is the other site. Can somebody help how to find the other sites online that have similar content as that of mine. Or there is some fault in my understanding?? Thanks

    | Sequelmed
    1

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