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Hey Jean,

You shouldn't worry about that. There are people who had domains parked for years before starting to build content.

Write quality content, promote it, and Google will take notice regardless of when you launched your blog.

Cheers

No problem! Basically Google will recrawl the old URLs and should find the 301 itself. Your issue should resolve all by itself, just give it a few weeks. When it finds the redirect, it should remove the old URL from the index.

Hey Kyle,

I think that your problem is that you have the same (duplicate) category meta description for all categories, so Google discards it as being irrelevant. Your product meta descriptions on the other hand are unique, so they show up fine.

The solution would be to create unique descriptions for each category and subcategory.

Hope this helps, cheers!

Hey Christian,

The issue here might be that Google still has a cache of the old URL before the 301 redirect. In that case, you'll just need to wait until the Google data centers refresh the data.

Also, instead of using a server header tool, you could use the Webmaster Tools "Fetch as Google" option on the old URL, and click on the "Success" link to check how Googlebot retrieves the page (to make sure Googlebot sees the 301 header as well).

Cheers!

Thanks Tom! However, I'm not interested in the URL structure, as I got that figured down. I'm mainly curious on what's a good practice for designing the blog category page when you have subcategories, and all the posts belong to the subcategories themselves.

Hey,

Here's my situation. I'm building a WordPress blog for product reviews of a certain niche.

Current category setup is 4 main categories with 4-8 subcategories each. Each subcategory has a unique description that will help it become a landing page for certain keywords, after which it lists the posts from that subcategory.

The posts will always be assigned to a sub-category, never to a main category.

My issue is what to do with the main categories. They're fairly general so they're not really targeting any keywords, and don't have any unique descriptions attached to them. I was thinking of choosing between three options on designing the main category pages:

1. List the subcategories + normal posts loop that bring the latest posts from the subcategories (may create a lot of duplicate content since the subcategory pages are also listing their posts)
2. List only the subcategories (+ maybe just the latest post from each subcategory)
3. Don't link the main categories at all, instead only use them to create dropdowns for the subcategories

So, what would you choose, and why?

Thanks for the response Anthony!

However, I'm mainly interested in link prospecting / building opportunities. The client himself is building the content, so my job is prospecting sites, doing outreach and building relationships.

Good stuff, thanks! I have to say, I wasn't expecting a video actually tailored for my response (thought it might be some general link building video that I might find useful).

Let me give you some more details:

• the client is actually building all the content (though I will advise him on what content performs best, what are people looking for and so on), so I'm there only for the actual link building (outreach + promoting the articles)
• the client doesn't care about monetizing his website atm (so no affiliate links, at least for now)

Regarding what you said, a few questions:

1. You've mentioned getting/buying some products and sending them to a local blogger for a review article with a backlink. Would this get  higher return than the client actually reviewing them himself?
2. Web 2.0 websites, any idea which work well with non-english websites? Already checked hubpages and couldn't find anything related to cosmetic related local language queries.
3. You've mentioned link building from universities and colleges in your answer, but haven't seen this in the video. What did you have in mind?
4. What do you think about getting "blogroll" backlinks, on blogs which are in related niches (lifestyle, nutrition, what you mentioned in the video)? Being blogwide, are those too spammy?

Thanks again, really appreciate the effort!

PS: You can call me Mike

An interesting idea, though not so popular with non-english speaking countries. Also, the website being new, I prefer to have most if not all content on the website itself, at least until there's a minimum dozen of posts/reviews.

Thanks!

I'm doing SEO for a product review website, and I'm curious what link building opportunities are best for this category.

Assume only the following:

• The website is basically a blog
• Most of the articles are reviews on cosmetic products, though there are also articles regarding news, product roundups, tips&tricks and similar content
• The website is in a local, non-english language

Disregarding low-value opportunities such as directories, what kind of websites should I aim for outreach purposes?

So far, I'm thinking the following:

• Product manufacturers (very low success chance, as the review site is fairly new and in a localized language)
• E-commerce sites selling the products (average to low success chance, since a lot of them use CMSes that might not allow integration of a review)
• Other cosmetic blogs, particularly for guest blogging (average to low success chance, since the website is fairly new)

Any ideas would be appreciated, thanks!