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Hi there,

I'd say that your first solution is likely to be the best one. It's far better to have a smaller number of high quality pages than a high number of low/questionable quality pages. I'd also recommend thinking about whether it makes sense to combine the content or not when it comes to the user. If the trip reviews would all make sense on one page and add value, then it's another reason to consolidate. If they aren't really relevant to each other,  you may want to be very selective with which ones you combine and possible add some new, fresh content to the pages at the same time.

Also think about keyword targeting for these pages and review how much traffic they already get and use Google Search Console to understand which keywords drive traffic. Whilst the pages may be low quality, if they drive some decent traffic, you may not want to lose that. So if the keywords that are sending traffic are the right ones for you, try to carry them over to the new, consolidated pages where you can.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

For what it's worth, pagination is a source of contention for many SEOs, so you're not alone here

I think part of the reason for this is that there isn't a perfect answer and I'm yet to see consistent, definitive proof of any one answer being right, particularly when it comes to different types of websites. As you say, for a blog, it may not be that useful anyway. Whereas for an ecommerce website, it's probably more important but even then, users are not likely to click through to hundreds of paginated pages, but search engines may need to crawl them.

Anyway, the timing of your question is funny because earlier I came across this tweet thread from Patrick Stox which does a great job of laying out the options. I'd recommend taking a read:

https://twitter.com/patrickstox/status/1370218363440537601

Ultimately, keep in mind what your goals are - I imagine driving more traffic to key pages on your website. I'd also look at how things are performing at the moment and make decisions based on that. If your paginated pages are getting lots of traffic, you may not want to tinker too much with that. If they aren't, then you can make changes far more easily because you're not risking too much.

I hope that helps a bit!

Paddy

Hi there,

You can check the Domain Authority and Page Authority if any domain by using the Moz Link Explorer or the MozBar.

You can read more about how Domain Authority works here.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

Yes, you can. The execution will depend on your CMS and the server config that you have. Some will allow you to type the £ symbol as-is and it will render fine, others you may need to use character encoding because the £ symbol is also written as £.

I'd recommend testing it first and using Google Search Console to see how Google renders the page title and how it shows in search results, just to make sure that it's displaying correctly.

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi there,

Thanks for the question.

It is totally fine to update page titles and meta descriptions over time. I'd recommend to prioritise your most important pages first or where you see the biggest opportunities and start there. Then you can focus on the most important pages first and go through the rest when you have time. I would recommend trying not to change them too much unless you have a really good reason to though.

I'd also mention that you should try to write page titles and meta descriptions which are good for the user, focus on a keyword and read well - try to avoid just stuffing them with keywords if you can.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

I don't think that there is a single tool which can claim to have the most accurate monthly search volumes, they all tend to use different sources and none of them will be able to replicate exactly what happens on Google.

Therefore, I think it's important to choose one that you're most comfortable with and use that consistently, then when you use it, don't focus too much on the actual volume of searches and instead focus on the volume of each keyword relative to another. For example, if one keyword has 500 monthly searches, it's unlikely to mean that you will get 500 visits a month if you rank number 1. But if you compare to a keyword where the same tool says that a keyword has 1,000 searches a month, then chances are that this gets more than the first one by a decent amount and could be worth prioritising.

I tend to use a combination of Moz and Ahrefs for this, along with the Google Keyword Planner.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

In short, it won't matter too much as long as the links that you're getting are good quality and as relevant as possible to what you do. It's natural to get links from a wide range of domain extensions and there are perfectly legitimate reasons for this. For example, you may get a link from a .com website which may actually be for a UK based website who have decided to use this domain extension instead of a .co.uk.

Overall, if they look like good quality and relevant, don't worry

With that said, there is a concept around getting "local" links meaning more if you're serving a particular region or market. So it may make a small difference but it's not something that I'd worry loads about.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

Just to add to the current answers, guest posting can still add value but needs to be done for reasons that aren't just about the link. There needs to be more value added so that you focus on quality over quantity.

I wrote a post on this a few months ago which goes into lots of detail which may be helpful to read.

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi there,

Thanks for the question.

The first thing to say is that DA/PA are Moz metrics and aren't connected directly to Google and how they rank your website. So the actual answer to your question is that having your DA/PA increase will not directly effect rankings because Google doesn't use DA or PA.

Having said that, Moz have designed DA and PA to try to predict how well a domain or page could rank in search results, so generally speaking, the higher the numbers, the more chance you have of competing.

Overall, the focus when it comes to authority should be for you to generate relevant, quality links from other domains to yours which will mean that Google pass authority to your website and give it a better chance of ranking. Alongside this, DA and PA may also go up which gives you a rough measurement of your own authority.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi there,

Sometimes it can take Google some time to crawl and index changes to a page, including the page title. It looks like Google last cached your homepage on 14th September according to this cache date. So it looks like Google hasn't recached the page yet.

Usually, I'd recommend using Google Search Console to ask Google to recrawl the page but this feature has been temporarily disabled but should come back soon. When it does, you can submit the URL to Google for a recrawl which may nudge them along.

It's still possible for Google to crawl and index your new title in the meantime though so it may happen before that point. If your site is new, it can take longer.

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi there,

There are a few reasons why your Domain Authority may still be the same, despite more backlinks being built to your website:

• Moz may not have discovered all of the new backlinks to your website yet, so they may not have been factored into the DA score
• If they have discovered them, then there is a chance that some backlinks may not improve your DA score quickly and it may take more links in order for your DA to go up. This is particularly true the higher your DA is because the algorithm that DA uses is logarithmic which means that the higher you go, the harder it becomes to increase it
• The DA of other websites may have changed and could be skewing the DA of the websites that are now linking to you

You can read a bit more information and watch the videos here for more information on DA

I'd also just mention that you should remember that whilst DA/PA are designed to give some direction on how well you can rank in Google, they are not connected to the Google algorithm, so definitely keep an eye on DA, but don't forget about other metrics too.

I hope that helps!

Hi Troy,

I think a lot of the answer here depends on what your goals are.

If you're trying to get links into category pages by adding this type of content to them, then this is quite tough because when someone first arrives at the page, they will probably see products which can put them off linking to it. Even if you have some great content further down the page, they may not actually see it.

I do however think it is a great idea to cross link from category / product pages to genuinely good content related to those categories and products. This is good for user experience but you should probably keep an eye on conversion rates to make sure that it doesn't distract people to the point that they don't return to buy the product! Also make sure that there is a good call to action on the content pages to let people return to the category / product.

I probably wouldn't worry about duplicate content from snippets of text. If it is literally a snippet, then a link to the full page of content, I don't think that is going to cause you problems. Having said that, you should make sure that there is enough unique content on the rest of the page. With product pages, this shouldn't be a problem because you will have all the product descriptions / images / reviews etc. What I'm getting at is that if you have a page which is made up of largely snippets of content from other pages, then that isn't a signal of a quality page.

I hope that helps a bit!

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi Chris,

Link building can be very manual, particularly in the early days of a website and when you're trying to get going. Ultimately, you should be trying to come up with ways to make your website naturally link worthy so that you end up getting links which you didn't ask for.

This can come a few ways:

• Your product or service being genuinely useful to your target audience or within your industry so that people recommend it/reference it etc
• Creating content which genuinely answers questions and solves problems for your target audience
• Creating content which has some kind of an angle which encourages top tier sites or bloggers to links to it such as informative guides or statistics/data related to your industry

You may find it hard to get links to lots of your product or sales pages unless they are link worthy in themselves. So also try to focus on getting links to your content and then distributing the link equity from these pages to your key pages.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi David,

In terms of whether these links could hurt you, I'd be more concerned about the quality of the links than the topic. If the majority of links pointing at these user generated pages are low quality, then that would be of concern and you may want to disavow the ones that are very low quality such as the spammy sites / directories etc that you've found. You may even want to go as far as removing pages where the people who set them up are clearly spamming the pages hoping to get them to rank for some reason.

The fact they come from websites that are off-topic is a slight concern but they shouldn't "hurt" you as long as they are genuinely natural and it doesn't look like manipulation. If you're also generating links to other areas of the site that are on topic, then I wouldn't worry too much.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Chris,

I'm not sure I fully understand your question:

"The question now is, How with so many ranking keywords do you come up with a solid back link plan."

Do you mean how many keywords you can target with link building?

If so, that's not really the way to think about it because most high-quality link building won't use your keywords as anchor text and may not link directly to your commercial landing pages. The approach should be on getting links into the domain which are high quality which 1) help the domain as a whole and 2) can be filtered to your key pages via good site architecture.

Going back to your first question, if you are going to focus on link building, then you do need to prioritise and focus on key landing pages first. But you have two options for this:

1. Try to get links directly to those pages - this is hard unless those pages are link worthy in some way or you're prepared to pay for links to those pages which I wouldn't advise.

2. Try to get links to your domain/content and then use internal linking to filter link equity to your key pages.

Link building with a focus on improving 15,000+ keywords individually isn't going to happen and probably why you're struggling with this a bit. Focusing on a few at a time by doing the things above or trying to improve the domain as a whole is going to be more helpful I think.

Cheers.

Paddy

Hi there,

Thanks for the question.

It can be a challenge to build links to an ecommerce website, particularly if you're selling products which are widely available and not very link-worthy in their own right. The guide suggested by Rayflexgroup by Backlinko is certainly a good starting point, as well as a few others:

https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/building-deep-links-into-ecommerce-pages - it's a few years old but worth seeing if any of the tactics are relevant for you at the moment.

https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/creative-link-building-for-ecommerce-sites

https://geoffkenyon.com/ecommerce/link-building/

A few other things I'd suggest:

1. Look wider than just your products to look at your audience and what their issues, problems or concerns are. Then create content around those and look to build links into these. This takes time and you need to put a lot of effort in, but essentially you need to "surround" all of your products and categories with genuinely useful content which is as good as it can possibly be. You won't "go viral" with this kind of content but it will have the ability to pick up links over time.

2. Depending on your niche, spoof products can work well. A few examples are here and while these were not link building plays, they certainly generated links and attention.

3. Also look at the people at your company and their story - do you have a founder or CEO who is open to talking to business press or websites about business growth or retail trends? This can work well and get links from the kinds of sites that your competitors may not think of.

I hope that helps!

Hi Nicholas,

To lead on from what others have said, I'd agree that these links are unlikely to be passing value from a ranking perspective i.e. they're not likely to pass PageRank. Google do try and detect affiliate links and as Matt has said, they see these as placed to get affiliate revenue as opposed to being placed because someone genuinely endorses the website in question.

In terms of how this actually works, I'm not too familiar with Sharesale personally. But I know that similar affiliate programs provide plugins / scripts to affiliates which can make the link look natural, but when clicked, some JavaScript kicks in and adds the affiliate URL and the redirect. The website owner themselves can also do this themselves if they want to "mask" the affiliate link so that when someone hovers over the link, they see a nice clean URL rather than a potentially long and messy affiliate link.

In terms of what you can do - it really comes down to whether you value the traffic from the affiliate and if that drives revenue. If it does, then that's more valuable (I'd guess) than having a normal link. Plus, would they actually link to you at all if they couldn't get affiliate revenue? If not, then stepping out of the affiliate program may cause more harm than good. But it's really a balance between the affiliate revenue and potential link benefit.

I hope that helps a bit!

Paddy

Hi there,

Thanks for the question.

I wouldn't worry as much about DA/PA as I would the relevance and "human" quality of a link. DA can be a great indicator of the authority of a domain, but remember that it's just one metric. If you are working through large lists of links, then filtering from highest DA to lowest can help you prioritise, but I wouldn't necessarily rule out links below a certain number.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Jeeyaul,

As long as the links pointing at the 2nd and 3rd level pages (and the site in general) are good quality, then I wouldn't worry about this too much. I certainly don't think it's bad for rankings and is actually more likely to help those 2nd and 3rd level pages rank better.

If, on the other hand, these links aren't great quality or could be seen as manipulative by Google, then that could be bad for rankings.

You could take a look at this blog post that I wrote late last year which talks about what makes a good and bad link:

https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/the-anatomy-of-a-link

I hope that helps!

Paddy

Hi Ivan,

Thanks for your question. To answer each of your points:

1. Google Webmaster Tools and Open Site Explorer will often report different numbers of links from each other. They both use different crawlers and different methods of sorting the data, so they will never match up 100%. The same is true of other backlink tools such as Ahrefs or Majestic. I wouldn't worry too much about the numbers being different.

2. It can be hard to say why you're not ranking but it usually comes down to:

• The quality of your content
• The quality of your links
• The technical setup of the website

The quality of content generally seems to be fine and unique. However you don't seem to have many high quality links and as others have pointed out, there aren't that many. You may want to take a look at the following guide:

http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building

You may also want to carry out a technical review of your website to ensure that there are no major problems, here is a very good checklist:

http://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015

It can often take time for traffic and rankings to grow, particularly in the industry you're targeting which looks a little bit competitive. So I'd advise taking a look at your competitors and seeing if you can learn anything from what they do. It does look like you're making progress though, I found this example of where you rank pretty well:

http://screencast.com/t/jRiE4BRllcd

I hope the above helps!

Paddy