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Forget about links.

Instead focus on content that will be useful for your visitor.

An article that explains how to use a product with a nice video, illustrative photos  and clear text will inspire people to buy.  It will also be out there in search and pull in traffic, and some of those people will buy your product.  These types of articles, done well, can serve you in many ways.

Articles that compare products are also good.  Photo tours of product features, articles that calculate costs or savings, histories of product development....  think about all of the popular cooking, home repair, history, even reality programs that are on television.

If people are calling you  or emailing you with questions, your replies to those queries can be a great starting point for articles.

(Note that I am deliberately using the word "articles" instead of "blog posts" because I want to elevate this content to something that is much more substantive and will be fully integrated into your website.   Too many people think of a "blog"  as a caboose on the tail end of their website where they go to slurp coffee, type prattle, and make mindless pages of yada yada stuff without mental effort.  If you want content that works you gotta make something of substance and attitude that can be promoted on your homepage.)

I think that "2017 Diaries" has a bit of competition and this site is still getting started.  It probably has slowly rising traffic but needs some high-quality linkable, shareable, noteworthy content that people want to read.  The blog is focused on product promotion rather than something to inspire the customer to write, plan, schedule, etc.

I agree with James... but if you place all of these links at the bottom of the page you will not make much money.

Also, consider who persists to the bottom of your articles.  They are your very best visitors and your potential evangelists and linkerati.  Instead of blowing them off to an affiliate site, recommend more of your content to them.

And... when your affiliate links are higher up on the page your less interested visitors or your highly distractible visitors will use them and you will make money as they leave - probably a LOT more money.

All of my best producing ads are high on the page and the bottom of my page is where I recommend more content.  I learned not to sell my most valuable visitors.

My point is... When you focus on your visitors needs and interests you are in a better position to produce content that will be shared widely, convert visitors into buyers, rank high in search and get the links that you are looking for.

When you start building a great website, people will start typing your domain into google search and that is more valuable than links.  When google sees visitors asking for you buy name, that is when you have something.

It is possible to be so focused on "links" that what is really important is ignored.

"buyparts.com doesn't work"

I don't want to give a response without having a clear understanding of this.

I don't have any formal testing to back these observations.  These are simply what I have noticed by experimenting with affiliate programs for twenty years.

**  I believe that google strongly dislikes "thin affiliate" websites.  These are sites that are monetized by affiliate links but that have very little real content or low value content.  I believe that they are subjected to a "quality filter" that is more strict than the "Panda" algorithm.

**  If you link to affiliate websites, expect those links to drive the affiliate site higher in the organic SERPs.  So, if you are competing in the organic against the affiliate program site, you will empower them at your own expense.

**  I have used Adsense on all of my websites since the first week that Adsense was available.  I've learned how much money different ad positions on the page can produce with Adsense, then I have compared that to what affiliate ads produce in the same position.  Adsense almost always make more money - not a little more money, a lot more money.

**  I have also compared the amount of money that I can make using affiliate links to the amount of money that I can make by stocking the product and filling the orders myself.  I make a lot more money filling the orders myself.  There is no comparison.

**  What I have not tested is how much can be earned by using hypertext affiliate links within the paragraphs of my content.  In those locations, I am using links to sales pages on my own website or to articles on my site that are relevant to the links.  I am confident that the sales links to products that I sell and fulfill myself will make a lot more money.  I think that links to my own article content are valuable, but if they are more valuable than a small commission, I can't answer - but I'd rather keep the visitor on my own website.

Justin, Daniel, Bryan.... Love the responses!

Got me smilin'   

Keeping all of your business on one domain will help with your branding, since there is a natural overlap in buyers and sellers of auto parts.  It will expose your buyparts business to everyone to comes to the sellparts domain.

My preferred method would be to keep all of the pages in folders on the sellparts domain.  That is best for SEO purposes since Google does not give subdomains the full benefit of their root domain.  I would work hard or pay for development to make that happen.

My very last resort would be to use a subdomain.  The pages on the subdomain would not perform as well as if they were on the root domain.

The search engines probably value these links in some way, but nobody outside of the search engines nobody knows exactly what their value might be.

In my opinion, it is essential to have these types of links on your pages.  They decrease bounce rates and help engage visitors.

If you go to almost any of the most important news sites you will see links to their related content in  the side bars and immediately below their articles.  You will even see them within articles.  They are often accompanied by interesting images, beautiful images, provocative  images, all to get your attention.   These content blocks can direct visitors to  related content, most popular content, most shared content and serendipitous content.

Some websites even make money by displaying links to content on other website using services such as outbrain, taboola, and others.

Promoting your own content in this way is a very important thing to do.   Promoting the content of others might be a good idea to make money, but it might be a better idea to promote your own instead of giving your engaged visitors to other website for a few cents.

I've looked at your website for a few hours.  And, given you enough suggestions that I feel justified in making those statements.

what is the point of spending thousands of dollars to own all these variations?

I would allow them to expire and spend the savings on beer.

Put links in the pdfs.  Edit their "properties" to optimize them for the SERPs.  You can place "buy buttons" in pdfs, include ads in them.  Track the number of views through log analytics.

Search here and here to get lots more information about using pdfs.

You got a comprehensive answer from Patrick.

Adding to his comments on "writing content"....   new websites are often promoted before the content is full and impressive.  Your goal should be to welcome visitors with enough  content and high enough quality content that they say WOW!.

Promotion is a lot of work.  You want to get full value out of that, otherwise visitors land, see a small amount of content, and even if it is great stuff, their motivation to share or return is diminished.

If they are not saying WOW! then keep on the content task until you will get your full mileage.

I have been looking at questions posted in forums (such as Moz Q&A) every day since 2003.  Just scanning the titles of the threads will give you some idea of what people are doing to improve their site, what they are getting whacked for, what they are doing to recover, what google is up to, what common technical issues are being encountered, and much more.

You will learn a little by reading and learn the most important things by answering a few questions.  The "answering" isn't where the benefit is derived, instead it comes from when you ask a question the members will know you and give very generous help.

You will also learn who has expertise in specific areas and when you need help with something you will know who can help you.  Every item of outsourced work that I have ever paid for has gone to a person who I observed in a forum and learned to trust.  I am lucky to have such friends.

We're a radio station posting original content each day.

Nice work!  You are making a big investment to make this happen.   I hope that you are getting a lot of traffic from search out of this and that people visit your site daily to read your new content.

It's been proposed that we all contribute content to this group so any radio station can grab this content and post it on their own websites.

Those weasels who proposed this want to ride your train.   I bet the ones who propose this run the laziest stations on the planet.   Tell them to get off of their lazy duffs and write their own content.

As the site with the most content and web traffic, could this potentially harm us?

In reality it has a greater chance of tanking your competitors because they could be viewed as the republisher - because your site is probably stronger and may be credited by google as the original publishing source.  BUT, that can not be guaranteed.

If you think that there is little overlap of direct traffic, meaning people who visit your site are unlikely to visit their site, you could consider this....

For a monthly fee, you would allow them to publish a certain number of your articles on their site but the requirement is that they have rel=canonical properly installed on every one of your articles.  That would generate income for you and the article would be attributed to your site, thus protecting you and them from Panda problems and duplicate content filtering.

Or, with rel=canonical installed on every page, you could allow them to use a limited number of articles and you get the ad revenue.  I think that there are some ways to do this that will be to your advantage, but I would not do it without contracts and regular inspections of how things are implemented.

If I search for "custom sign" where I am right now, which is about 3+ hours drive from this company, the customsigncenter.com website is no where to be found.  Instead, I see local sign companies because Google knows where I am and applies localization.

So, I am guessing that you are located near Columbus and your searches for "custom sign" are getting local influence from that area.

If you are not in the sign business in the Columbus area you should learn about this company to understand this website.  It is  owned by Yesco, one of the world's foremost sign companies, with 100 years of sign-making history, in its seventh generation of the same family, with some of the biggest name sign designer's in the world working for them, and fame from Las Vegas, NYC, LA, Undercover Boss, Vegas Vic, Stardust.

One link from the Columbus page of the Yesco site should be enough to kickdown the doors of the sign SERPs across most of Ohio.  Add that to their featured spot - right in Columbus - on Undercover Boss - and the buzz from that should be enough to rank them with few other links.

Links and mentions from this page on Moz contribute further to the abilities of their website, even though the links are nofollowed.

Great, maybe you can get your partners to write this stuff.

I do not believe that a few blog posts that do not focus on your competitive keywords will have any negative impact upon your rankings.  If you have done a good job on these blog posts, they might pull in traffic, get shared, earn links.  Just do a great job on everything that you publish.  If you do that this content might help all of your rankings.

**I am not sure why the car accident pages were de-indexed. **

New pages often perform fine until Google figures out that they are cookie-cutter duplicates.   Then they are filtered from search results.  The next time Panda runs the rankings across your entire site could be reduced.   What you see today could be just the start of your problems.

If you want unique content, make it entirely, completely, absolutely unique.   Shortcutting by plugging in different place names and synonyms has not worked with Google for several years.

Google knows all about Pinterest and the types of links that are created there.  The links are nofollow so they will not be helpful to your rankings.  At the same time there should be no problems with having an enormous number of links from that site.

We have two sites with over 100,000 Pinterest links and there have been no problems.  We have not created any of these links and I would not spend one minute trying to make them.  They are all created by people who like our images.   They send a little traffic and we do get a few sales from  visitors referred by Pinterest.

Landscapers, architects, and construction companies who want search visibility in multiple cities write articles with photos and descriptions of previous work that they have done in those cities.  Companies who have stores, beauty salons, and restaurants in multiple communities have photos of their places of business with nice descriptions of what they do, the people they serve and the professionals who work there.   If you are unable to do these things they you really have no business presence in these areas and Google sets a high bar to block out spam.

Nice work!  Thanks for sharing the details.

I am betting that this "author" is not authorized to be offering links for a fee in Huffington Post articles.

So, you might pay $1000 for this link and be told that it is permanent, but this person does not own the Huffington Post website, then the site owners or staff can take his article down at any time or remove this link at any time.

Also, if that author offers to make links for the wrong person and they report him to the Huffington Post, he will be fired, and all of his links will come down.

Ask him how the check should be payable and then you will find out if he is the link seller or if HuffPost is the link seller.

301 redirects no longer lose pagerank.

https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo

But, even though there is no loss of pagerank, I would recode those links promptly if they were on my website.  Each redirect places load on the server, creates a small delay in page delivery, and it is simply best practice not to redirect links on your own site.

1. Publish articles that are "best on the web for their topic" (or as close as I can come to that) and always with unique perspectives and great images.  If you do that your visitors will spread the word about your content for you.

2. Grammarly, Hemingway, any good graphics program

Sometimes this targeting comes from your content on other websites.  It could be your content on one strong website or many weak or even spammy websites.  These weasels grab your page and slap it on their website(s) and then Google gets confused about "Who owns this content?".  Google says that they are pretty good at knowing who owns what content, but I don't think that they are as good at it as they think they are or as good as what they are saying.

This problem can be especially bad if you publish lots of new pages and the spammers can easily identify them, grab them and republish.  Blog content with posts identified by month all on a same page or retail sites with a "new products" page could easily be targeted.

I agree.

If you have a site with a very limited product range (such as the items in your main category), then this might be a good idea.  Visitors will see the focus of your business when they land on your homepage and they can dig a little to find ancillary and accessory items.

However, if you offer a lot more than this main category, and the "more" are unrelated items, then making such a heavy emphasis on your homepage might not be a good idea.

Bottom line:  I would make this decision based more on customer expectations and where you sales are focused, rather than basing it on an SEO strategy.

I agree.  And that is the reason why it is better to spend your time improving your website than worrying  about a site above you that is impossible to understand.   It's possible that they earned those rankings.  It's possible that Google has incorrectly ranked them (which most often happens in low competition SERPs such as the ones here).

Your homepage is probably more powerful than your category page and that is why it outranks it.

The category page, if it was strong enough to rank in the top ten, would likely be on the first page of the SERPs with your homepage - or instead of your homepage.  That tells me that it lacks strength rather than relevance.

The first thing that I would do is make sure that I have taken advantage of all opportunities to build internal links to the category page.  These would be links within paragraph text or a breadcrumb system of links throughout the site.

I often add lots of text to category pages.  This can be details about the items shown on the page, relevant information at the top of the page, relevant sidebar information, or supplemental information at the bottom of the page.  Use these to make links to relevant secondary pages within the category.

That's what I would do.  If that isn't good enough then you need links from external sites to obtain enough power to rank higher.

"Manufactured links" on "duplicate websites" have been discounted by Google for at least 15 years.   If you build an identical website and link from Identical Page A to Identical Page B, Google has been killing one of those pages or the entire site for a long time.  In the long run you still only have one site, sometimes it will be damaged by these efforts.

If these people were competing against me, I would enjoy seeing them buy a few more domains and put time into tossing up identical sites.  No need to report them.  Google has deindexed these "New" websites.

I think that watching Google patent filings is an extremely important thing for an SEO to do.  Google applies for lots of search-related patents and it is likely that much of what they apply for is never put into practice.  If you want a single source to watch for Google patent information, explained in plain English by an experienced SEO, then Bill Slawski's site is where to watch for it....

http://www.seobythesea.com/about-seo-by-the-sea/

I agree with you, Alan.   That's how most people do it.

I've found through a few small retail sites and a couple of information sites, that publishing useful or interesting content can be enough that other people will share it for you.  There are still niches out there where one or two people, working as a team, can produce, in two or three years, more content and better content than all of the competitors in the niche combined.  Once you have that, then some of the people who find your site and see the depth of content, will share it for you.  And, there are some topics where people will search deeply for the right information.

If you have a hardware store or a toy store or a jewelry store, you don't have to attack the entire industry.  Instead, focus on a very small niche of products that are typically not represented well in local stores, and that do not have an online champion.

The niche must be chosen carefully.

I don't have any interest in social media, or making personal connections, or in soliciting others.    But, I do have an interest in learning the deep technical details of things and enjoy writing about them.  Through that, I provide the community service similar to what you provide.  Then a steady stream of visitor questions coming in and being answered, first by email and then published to the content library that provides a service to a consumer community - these are coming from people who may have first purchased at amazon or or some other vendor who places 100% of their effort in making the sale but places zero effort in helping the customer after the sale.

These people are out searching deeply.  They feel like they have been abandoned. This is today's internet -  Walmart, Amazon, Jet, and others are all focused on the aggressive price competition.  Service after the sale and deep information for the consumer has been abandoned at the very time when you think it should be abundant.  Nobody wants to write it.  How many times have you purchased something and could not understand directions that were written on another continent and then translated into English by someone who knows the language poorly.

That leads to a problem in that you become the default service department for amazon!  They don't do it.  But if you step into that role you quickly obtain a knowledge of what information people need and when you answer an email, you also place another brick in your relevant content library.  So, although I am not making any direct outreach at all to advocate a brand, engaging a community, or soliciting on my own behalf in any way, the questions keep coming in, the content mass continues to grow,  and it attracts more and more traffic year over year.

Most business owners are not going to do this because they don't like to write content and they don't have a situation that allows them to invest a lot of time now and not be paid back until years down the road.  No SEO will do this because the upfront labor is very high and the return isn't fast enough to satisfy a client.  These opportunities are perfect for the person who enjoys working from the cloister. 

what should we do to make sure that we aren't diluting our ranking power?

If I was in a low competition niche then I might be able to get both pages ranking in the top ten.

If this is in moderate or higher competition, then I would be afraid that I was going to war with a rubber knife.

I frequently see backlinks being the biggest factor at deciding rank for keywords, while content and keyword page grading can say great things, it always comes down to backlinks it seems

I believe that it is important to consider the age of the document and the on-site traffic that might flow into it.   New pages with great content might have very little popularity on other sites.  If you see them ranking high then it is the authority of the domain on which they were published that is lifting them to high rankings.  Young product pages on amazon, new pages on wikipedia are examples.

Great content that has not been marketed to other websites but that is seen by lots of people who visit the domain where it is published can climb the rankings to top positions but that takes more time.

Great content on less visited domains can still rank high over time but the climb up the SERPs can take years to happen.

I still think that there is no problem with having title tags that match your H1 tags.

Ten years ago, I wrote title tags that focused on keywords.  Now I am writing title tags that focus more on presenting something interesting from the article that might elicit clicks.   A lot of the old title tags remain on the site but I revisit them every time I update or rewrite a page.

**this didn't really answer my question about OSE.  I'm curious about how sophisticated the tool is.  Does it take into consideration reciprocal links for example?  **

A lot of people worship the numbers out of OSE.  I do not.

I don't use them for any decisions, although if I hear that a site is 25, I think that it is probably a lightweight.

I beleve that almost everyone who uses it sees  lightweights ranking above heavyweights on a regular basis.  In fact, one of the most common posts in Q&A is something like this.. ... "Wah! my site has a DA of 32 and a spammer with a DA of 26 is beating it.  I am getting screwed by Google."  These posters have high levels of consternation and distress.

So, it is a service that a lot of people are using to "bet their fortunes" but it is not accurate at what people perceive as its primary job at worst, or is widely missunderstood at best.

That's my honest opinion.

I think that Google knows what (keywords) your articles are about - so there is less need to stuff them into a title tag.

However, matching the keyword to what the searcher has in mind and will see bolded in the SERPs is still important.

"providing variety within the SERP when compared to other results"

Exactly.  You need to stand out.  Show that your content or product has special value, inspire the searcher to click on your page.  I believe that title tags can move rankings if you can get the visitor to click and hold them after they land.

Here is what I would be thinking if I owned that blog....

It has been out there for many years, has around 248 posts and has only accumulated a domain authority of only 14.  That tells me that the blog is probably not a vibrant asset.   It has probably attracted very few links, has not attracted much attention, pulls in very little traffic and refers almost no traffic to the primary domain.

A link from this blog will be worth very little.  The second link will be worth less than the first, the third less than the second and the 100th link will be worth almost nothing - that is if the links are branded links.   If the links are keyworded and that blog is loaded down with them, it is possible that the links could be passing poison to the main site.

So, before I spent any effort on this site and its content, I would look at the analytics and see if the blog pulls any traffic, identify the valuable posts and at the same time identify posts that have less value than the cost of moving them.

If there are some valuable posts and they are moved with 301 redirects placed permanently on the old server then the move might have a positive benefit to the main site.  At the same time, I would not hesitate to prune posts that pull no traffic, serve little business purpose, or have attracted no external links.

Effect on the link profile of the main site?  If the blog site has very few incoming links of its own that are from domains that are not already linking to the main site, then those links might be useful if they are 301 redirected.  But, it depends upon the quality of the links.  The DA of the domain is 14.  I would not expect much.  I would treat this as a salvage job that might cost more than its value, rather than an opportunity to recover treasure.

We add appropriate internal links in all of our articles.  Although we don't syndicate or grant permission for our articles to be republished, many webmasters copy/pasting quotes into their content have produced thousands of backlinks.

I get lots of links from Google sites, orkut, productforums, groups, plus, app

If you drill down you can get the details.

To submit a DMCA to Google, log into your search console and go here https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-dashboard

Fill out the form, press "submit" and the complaint will be filed.  Then push the back button, edit the form, press submit again and your second complaint will be filed.  Using this method you can file a hundred complaints in an hour or so.

Before you start filing DMCA complaints you need to have a thorough understanding of copyright law - especially fair use.  I suggest going to an attorney, explain your problem, how you intend to solve it and let the attorney educate you.  Filing an inappropriate DMCA against another webmaster can get you sued.

I think that Google will consider the trust and the authority of the linking website.

Google will also consider the context and relevance of the page and the paragraphs and the sentences that are associated with the link.

So a link to a privacy site from a privacy page is relevant in my mind.  Nobody knows what Google really thinks about these things, but to me the value of this link ranges somewhere between good and superb.

In a lot of cases, this is caused by thin or duplicate content in one of the following ways.....

---  verbatim use of manufacturer's description

---  description of minimal length

---  two or more websites using the same description

One of my websites was selling a number of products that were made in China.  I wrote unique and lengthy descriptions for each one of them.  Then dozens of other websites grabbed my descriptions and used them verbatim.  My page (and many of the duplicates, went into supplemental).  Back then I did nothing and stopped selling those items.  Today, I would get aggressive and file a lot of DMCAs to Google, to hosts and to Adsense, if they are using it.

Just a few years ago, internal links where hugely important.

Today, the impact is reduced, but I can still add a link to the persistent navigation of my website and the page pointed to by that link will move up in the SERPs.  I can even add one link to the homepage of my website and that page will move up in the SERPs.

This might not be so true for nascent sites, but for mature and powerful websites the effect is obvious and strong.

Google uses logic.  If you have lots of links to a page all around your site then that page must be pretty important.  If there is a page deep in the bowels of your site and you link to it once from an obscure page then Google knows that the page is not very important.

Use both.

Breadcrumbs help search engines and visitors understand the structure of your website.

In-content links get clicked by visitors, and they might pass anchor text value to pages within your site.

The only safe move here is to create amazing content for both blogs - but why have 2 blogs? Why double your effort when you could be using all the content to prop up the main site?

Andy makes a very good point here.  If you have a good article about Brass Widgets on your website and you decide that you want to write a second Brass Widgets article to publish on another website, then you are going to publish a second article that will compete with you and take some of your traffic.

Even if the articles are slightly different or very different they will still be "competing" - either at the short tail keyword level or the long tail keyword level.   The result will be damaging to your traffic.  The amount of damage will be proportional to the strength difference of your domains and  the diversity of keywords in the articles.  If the second domain is a lot more powerful than your own domain you could lose almost all of your traffic to the second website.

I have a website that publishes only unique articles.  Some of those articles have been written by other people in my industry who have similar articles or entire websites about the topics that they gave me to publish.  I never asked any of these people to write an article for my website.  Every one of them came to me with an offer.  With content written by these other authors, my website frequently outranks their website for primary and secondary keyword of the industry.  They might have a website that is powerful for the topic, but I have a website that is authoritative in the industry.  It can be hard to predict who will win at different levels but my site now competes and brings in lots of traffic for topic areas where I have never written.

Publishing on your own site, as Andy suggests, builds the strength of your site and does not invite potentially strong competitors into your keyword space.   There are benefits of sharing articles.  You get exposure as an "expert" on another website, which might have amazing traffic that includes visitors who will seek you out to do business.  You can often get a link on those websites that  will send lots of traffic to your website.  The best situation for all is if you simply want to get your message out to as many people as possible, but if there are competitive concerns then you must weigh the value of a link with the value of the exposure and the risk of a very strong competitor moving permanently into your space.

The answer to this question depends upon

-- the strength of your site

-- the competitiveness of the niche

-- who is competing in the niche

-- how much work you plan to do to promote the page

-- your skill level

-- and many other factors

One of the biggest problems in online marketing is faced by the client who asks an SEO to promote his website.   SEOs often give them a monthly price to work on the site - such as $1000/month - and have no idea of how long it will take to get a return for the client.  SEOs can give a severely low number and work happily for a long time without producing results. Why? Because the SEO is doing $1000 worth of work per month but the competitors are doing $5000, and the client sees his rankings fall after hiring the SEO.  Furthermore, the SEO might be charging $1000 and don't know what he don't know and that $1000 has negative value for the client - for example, those hit by Penguin.

It takes a lot of experience, knowledge and study to know how much force must be applied to move the needle.   Sometimes you can know what to do and how to do it but you don't have the ability to pull it off.

"One may know how to conquer without being able to do it." Sun Tzu

"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."  Sun Tzu

http://classics.mit.edu/Tzu/artwar.html

There are lots of good sites in Ukraine.   I'd make my decision about the quality of the site rather than where it appears to be located.

There are probably  more spammy sites out of New Jersey than out of Ukraine.