What's Moz's Strategy behind their blog main categories?

[carralon]

I've only just noticed that the Moz' blog categories have been moved within a pull down menu. See it underneath : 'Explore Posts by Category' on any blog page.

This means that the whole list of categories under that pull-down is not crawlable by bots, and therefore no link-juice flows down onto those category pages.

I imagine that the main drive behind that move is to sculpt page rank so that the business/money pages or areas of the website get greater link equity as opposed to just wasting it all throwing it down to the many categories ?  it'd be good to hear about more from Rand or anyone in his team as to how they came onto engineering this and why.

One of the things I wonder is: with the sheer amount of content that Moz produces, is it possible to contemplate an effective technical architecture such as that?

I know they do a great job at interlinking content from one post onto another, so effectively one can argue that that kind of supersedes the need for hierarchical page rank distribution via categories... but I wonder : "is it working better this way vs having crawlable blog category links on the blog section?  have they performed tests"   some insights or further info on this from Moz would be very welcome.

thanks in advance
David

[Cyrus-Shepard]

1. Right, each post is linked to in the author byline at the top of the post. I don't believe the links there carry much weight either, but there are literally 1000s of them throughout the site for each category, and the links are connected to semantically relevant blog posts, as opposed to a topic-agnostic sidebar link.

4. Whoops, I goofed by calling it a "non-html" pull down (typing too fast). Of course it's HTML. I simply meant we moved them from a static sidebar format into a pull-down, non linking sidebar format.

Cheers!

[carralon]

Hi Cyrus,

thanks for taking the time to explain... this comes in as very useful answers at the time where I'm writing directives for some architectural changes at work.

I have just two further questions to get full understanding into your replies:

Re: 1. when you say "each blog post is linked to several juice-passing category links"... do you actually mean within the body of the posts. I have looked at a few and cant see links to categories within the body, but just the ones on top that go: "Posted by Rand Fishkin to Marketing Industry" ... where 'Marketing Industry' is one of the categories... is that the link-juice passing link you refer to?

Re: 4... I guess you meant "when we moved the categories onto the non-html pull down section..."    or did you actually mean to write  "sidebar"?   I asked because as far as I remember the blog categories have always been on the sidebar, just in a different shape?

cheers
David

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi David,

Great question. Couple of points I'll go over, and realize the answer only applies specifically to Moz. Others may find different optimal solutions.

1. Crawling categories isn't a problem for us. Each blog post is linked to several juice-passing category links within the body of the post. And we have 1000s of posts all linking to individual categories.

2. Our reason for putting categories in a drop down was simply to save space. We could have made the links crawlable using pure CSS/HTML, but we suspected it really wouldn't make a difference.

3. Sidebar links have diminished value. It's doubtful much link equity was flowing through them in the first place (for other architectures it may be beneficial to have completely robot friendly sidebar category links, but in our case they were so redundant they weren't really necessary)

4. Finally, when we moved categories into the sidebar, we noticed no change to rankings/traffic to category pages, so we left it as is. Had this been different, we would have reconsidered our strategy.

Again, this strategy is outside traditional "best practices" but practically speaking, it works just fine for us, but may be different for newer sites, sites without as much link equity, etc, etc.

Hope this helps! Best of luck.

[carralon]

Chris, I am sorry if you think my response was abrupt...  I actually got the impression that you hardly read my question, hence my reaction.  By all means I didnt mean to diminish or undervalue your efforts to help the community, but perhaps you can consider to cut down your contributions : less but better responses.  Things like the  TAGFEE mention and "great content" thingies only sound like the usual MattCutts-style patronising responses, I am sorry to say. But hey thanks for trying to help anyhow  

@moz - anyone out there to add any insights to my questions ?

david

[GPainter]

Hi David,

Whilst you could technically sculpt with the canoincal tag main reason you wouldn't be able to (in my first thought) is it redirects any link juice to where it (the tag) is pointing to, having taken a secondary look however my initial thoughts were incorrect ( I only took a very quick look initially) and the canonical tag wouldn't do as i thought. Its currently there for other purposes. The link juice is still flowing via the line e.g.

January 12th, 2015 - Posted by Casey Meraz to Local SEO and Advanced SEO

Did you consider they may have changed their blog category for user benefit rather than sculpting.

Regards to your last paragraph in all respect again I take time out of my day in between projects to help as best I can here whilst I get Moz points they are limited to 20 per month (1 per post) more info here I've already stopped getting Moz point at this point in the month but that doesn't stop me from coming here and trying to help. Everyone here in the Moz community is an "expert" whilst they may be in different fields it is still the case which is why I take a lot of pleasure in being part of this community.

You may find you get better options if you want direct answers from the Moz team via [email protected] or their twitter (@moz), you can also keep an eye on the Moz dev blog for some insights - http://moz.com/community/mozpoints

I always try hard I hope you find you get a better answer to your question than you seem to think I was able to give.

[carralon]

Hi Chris, thank you for the prompt reply,
Excuse me for sounding naive, but could you shed some futher light on the point that you make about the canonical tag? I am not sure I get it.  Are you implying that if a page contains a rel canonical then the overall linkjuice for that page cannot be sculpted?

The reason why I suggest that they are sculpting PageRank in some way is because they've moved their blog category navigation (on the blog pages) from crawlable (as far as I remember),  to non crawlable. So they are 'apparently' making economies on the level of linkjuice that flows out of each blogpost. My question/doubt is simple. Although you may be right that they have not done that with any intention. It'd be good to hear from them.

As for your last paragraph, with all due respect, I'd say well done for earning 3 more moz points on your profile for a very  irrelevant reply. I'm not here to discuss the best way to help the users creating "great" content but simply seek input/opinions from experts or the Moz team on a specific aspect of their technical webpage layout and built. Thanks for trying hard anyway

David

[GPainter]

You're over-thinking this far too much, first thing if you look in the source code you will see there is a canonical tag meaning there is no sculpting as well as this there are other links on the main pages linking to the categories so the drop down list is not the only section to get to the categories. I don't see them trying to sculpt any link juice.

I would think the answer to the question directly would be:

"what's Moz's Strategy behind their blog main categories?"

To create great content thats helpful to the user also all whilst being TAGFEE the catagories are just a way to help users find content more relevant to them e.g. email markeintg, technialy seo, local seo etc. not to gain any rankings. You may find you get a different answer direct however but from most Moz related thing i see the above to be correct in my opinion.

Hope that helps.