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"apart from main page, contact page, about us and some other generic pages, site name should be removed as it might produce duplicate content."

As a blanket statement, this is misleading at best.

Default title tags for most websites are "Page Title - Site Name", or something similar.

I generally like to keep the brand name in the title tag because I'm usually working on sites where the brand is valuable. For instance, "Seattle Lodging - Airbnb" is more compelling than "Seattle Lodging".

The main reason I usually get rid of the brand in the title tag is when I'm trying to create a high-clickthrough-rate title tag and the brand portion is getting in the way. For example "Seattle Lodging & Vacation Rentals - Nightly Rates Starting from $79!" might be a really compelling title tag and I can't fit the brand name on there, so I'll drop it. BUT I won't drop it elsewhere on the site where I want a solid default title tag format.

The only caveat is that if your brand sucks (eg DavidsCheapAffiliateReviews.info) then it might actually detract from your click-through rates, and you might want to leave it out.

Hey, something I've been thinking about lately is "where is the point of diminishing returns for keyword research detail?" I get that keyword research is important for finding out stuff like "people generally search for 'doctor' way more often than they search for 'licensed medical professional'", but what about after that? Is there much useful information to be found by sifting through spreadsheets of stats about "doctor" vs "dr" vs "doctors" vs "physician" vs "physicians" etc? Especially when Google seems to treat a lot of those as interchangable?

I wouldn't worry too much about "doctor" vs "dr" vs "doctors" - those are synonyms and the intent of the user doesn't change much.

Or another example: If a remodeling company did basements, do you think there's much to be gleaned from AdWords data comparing "basement remodeler", "basement remodelers", basement remodeling", "basement remodeling contractor", "basement remodeling contractors", "basement renovation", "basement renovations", "basement renovators", "finished basements", "basement finishers", "basement finishing", etc.?

Should those variations be analyzed and each targeted by their own sets of pages and pieces of content (e.g. a blog post that specifically targets "basement remodeler" and a blog post that targets "basement finisher" and a third blog post that specifically targets "renovated basement")

This example is different. The intent behind "basement remodeler" and "basement remodel" are rather different. The first is looking for local businesses, the second is looking for general information about remodels. To confirm this, all you need to do is look at the search results. Remodeler has a big local pack and list of local companies when I search it. When I search for the "remodel" version, I get a big photo pack, then local businesses, then People Also Ask questions, so there is clearly multiple search intent scenarios behind that example.

I wrote a bunch more about viewing the SERP closely to measure and classify intent here: https://www.contentharmony.com/blog/classifying-search-intent/ in case you're interested in diving deeper on those approaches.

To your point regarding targeting separate pages for it, yes and no. A local business should try and rank for one but may not be as focused on the second one. But it is worth creating a page that captures one overall intent and then figuring out which other keywords match it.

Or should the takeaway be "there aren't any combinations that people overwhelmingly prefer to use, so let's just make content about basements and topics relevant to basements. Keyword research complete."

Nah you need to be more specific or intentional about it than this.

Yes, example.com/blog/ will typically perform better than blog.example.com and exampleblog.com, and the more decent links that are pointed to the blog and the main site, the bigger the expected impact from combining them.

One word of warning - reverse proxies are complex and many teams encounter major developer headaches. Oftentimes it is easier to find a different way to set up content to be published on a subfolder like /blog/.

If you want to leave notes on what type of website you are working on (CMS or other software type for both regular site and blog) I am happy to leave notes if it's one I recognize.

The normal way to handle internationalization is to have separate Geo/Language subfolders, and potentially redirect users based upon IP address, or prompt them to switch to the appropriate language or country if they want.

For example, a US-based publisher with separate UK content might do this:

• domain.com/news
• domain.com/uk/news

Is there a reason you want to keep the URL the same while doing multilingual?

Google's overview of methods and why they're good or bad is a good starting point: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en

That's an interesting question - if you have examples of some of the secondary keywords you're looking at, that would be helpful for comparison.

There's a few things I would recommend.

The first is rather than guessing or trying to search for the right keyword, analyze competitor domains or specific competitor URLs to see what they rank for. For example, here are 400+ keywords that https://www.coursera.org/learn/songwriting-lyrics is ranking for. That number of overall keywords will typically make up for low volume on some of them.

The second thing is that lots of long tail searches, when combined, can produce meaningful traffic. So it is often worth testing out publishing a page on a keyword and seeing what type of traffic occurs naturally over 3-`12 months. 10 people who really really want a $10 or $100 solution to a problem and more valuable than 1,000 people not interested in buying anything.

The third thing is that sometimes people aren't searching for a product, but, if you rank for another term they're interested in, you can make some sales by giving them something worth buying. "how to write a song" has 11.5k-30.3k searches per month - I'm not certain you can make 500 sales off of those types of volume ranges, but, you might be able to make 10-50 when you rank for a big head term, or lots of longer tail terms. This "rank for other stuff and then sell our product" approach may be what is working well for the competitors you mentioned.

Finally - consider other types of queries that might make sense - 'music production classes" instead of "learn music productin online", for instance.

How to react to 3rd party content like this really depends on some other factors such as:

• Is this content showing up for your brand name, or just generic industry terms (if we were talking drones this might be "dji drone reviews" vs "4k drones")?
• Are they saying negative things about your company?
• Is the content obviously slanted or poorly produced? Usually savvy B2B buyers can ignore those on their own.

(I am not a lawyer but) It's not a trademark violation to mention your name without permission, so, you probably don't have much standing. If they're saying bad things about your company, then it really depends on whether they have a good reason for saying whatever they said. Either way - they're probably not going to take it down for you.

The broader question is really about content marketing strategy - how does your company go about producing better content that deserves to rank for whatever phrases these press releases are showing up for? Google doesn't love showing press releases in search results - if you give them something better to rank, and your site has some decent domain authority, you have a good shot of outranking that type of content.

Those are some general thoughts - this is one of those scenarios that depends on more info or specific examples.

Hey Mat,

Answering your second question here - "I do have another question though: the links and images that are embedded in CSS (so for example links that are not 'a href') are not recognised by the Moz toolbar. I know that the toolbar only can see normal 'a href' links, but can this hurt my SEO? Or will Google recognise these internal links?"

Generally images that are stored in CSS, for example a background image on a div, will not be indexed by Google. If you're storing links inside CSS I'll assume it's a scenario like a :before pseudo element. In that case, I would default to guessing that Google does not treat these the same or as highly as a standard link, and I'd suggest you change how that content is added to the page to get it out of CSS or JS files and into the core HTML file that is being crawled.

I'm getting a bunch of 500 errors in my browser console when attempting to view the link you shared, so I can't see any content being loaded by CSS, so I'm guessing those resources are blocked to non-logged-in users on your staging server. That is also a  potential reason why certain toolbars might not be able to load the content, however if you're logged in they should be able to fetch that content.

Answering the first question for anyone that stumbles on to this thread:

1. Go to the Appearance >>> Menus page
2. Select the correct menu you are looking to edit (some WordPress sites have multiple menus, or a separate mobile menu)
3. Click the down arrow on the menu item you want to enter, and edit the "Title" field:
   Screenshot example on imgur

If that doesn't work, then my next step would be seeing if A) you're using a custom menus plugin, eg MegaMenu, or B) you're using a theme with it's own interface. In either case I'd be looking at that theme/plugin to see if they are overriding these WordPress defaults.

Agreed with Kevin on the timing - give it 1+ weeks after publishing on your site to syndicate it elsewhere.

Unfortunately LinkedIn doesn't offer a canonical option that I'm aware of, unlike others such as Medium who I think are offering it. As a resutl, the LinkedIn post should have a citation back to the original post. Something like this:

This post was originally published on our blog at https://www.norhart.com/blog/2018/08/08/great-leadership-is-about-influence-not-authority/ - take a look here at the rest of our XYZ insights on how to be a better leader.

Putting this at the end of the post is fine. Italicizing or formatting it differently is fine. Adding or tweaking a call to action on why they should go to your site and subscribe or whatever is fine.

Good luck!

Lots going on here, so, a laundry list of follow up questions and thoughts for you...

Are you seeing AMP results showing up in the Search Console? Are you seeing them indexed as intended?

If you're doing Native AMP, you won't be able to diagnose pages by /amp URL types of formatting. It might be worth trying to fire off an event, or custom dimension in GA, for AMP = Yes / No or something like that.

For the sitewide view, have you tested loading pages on a private browser and incognito mobile browser and seeing if they show up in GA realtime in each of the 3 views when they're supposed to?

It looks like you might be using Cloudflare - I haven't dealt with an AMP site that uses it, but have you checked whether there are compatibility issues or anything you need to activate?

Are any Google Tag Manager pages set to fire on HTTPS only?

Are any GA filters in place that specify HTTP/HTTPS that need to be broadened?

Your Amp Analytics code seems to match the one on a site that is functioning as intended, so I don't think it's a formatting issue.

For the GA view filter - it seems like you should be able to simply include/exclude traffic to shop.winefolly.com - why the added complexity beyond that?

Your best bet would be to read specific reviews of each toolset due to all of the overlap and conflicting focus areas.

If you're just looking for an all around organic toolset, then you're fine with Moz, and you might selectively want to do single paid months on other tools like SEMrush and ahrefs to collect additional data.

But, if you do enough work in a particular function (eg link building, or keyword research, or technical SEO), you'll need more than one of them. I personally use Moz, ahrefs, & SEMRush the most from your current list. Screaming Frog is another one that is a must-have agency side. URLprofiler is a strong choice as well.

Decision should be made on what you're doing most of the time. Doing tons of keyword research and technical SEO? Your best bet would be Moz, Screaming Frog, and SEMRush, in my opinion. Doing tons of content creation and backlink analysis? You'd be best off with access to Moz, Ahrefs, Majestic, Buzzsumo, and SEMRush. So - everyone will be different.

Here are what I would call the "generally accepted best features" of the ones you did provide:

• MOZ - Good balanced toolset covering content, offsite, and technical SEO considerations. Link database is smaller than ahrefs/majestic but getting larger all the time, and focuses on higher quality links and less "noise" from spam and scraper sites.
• Ahrefs - Very thorough link database, and some of their newer tools are strong.
• Majestic - Very thorough link database.
• Spyfu - Strong for keyword research & discovery - both PPC and organic.
• SEMRush - Strong for keyword research & discovery - both PPC and organic. I use this one daily.
• Raven - One of the best options for reporting. I think they focus on being a balanced toolset.
• Wordstream - PPC-only toolset to my knowledge, aside from keyword research that could be used for SEO.

These are all generalizations, however, and you're going to have to have a tool budget discussion with your agency at some point. $99 or 199 per month isn't going to cut it for an agency of any size. $499 would be a more reasonable budget cap.

College grad with perfect English?

1 - Show them how to run a CSV of a competitor's websites in Open Site Explorer (also Blekko and Majestic SEO are worth considering)

2 - Open the CSV in Excel, sort the entries by domain authority and then by domain name, and have them start color categorizing each row by the following (you'll have to hold their hand for a bit):

• (A) we already have a link from this domain
• (B) we don't have a link but I submitted our info
• (C) we don't have a link but maybe we can get one or it will take work (like a guest post or building a relationship or sending an email request) - in another column have them categorize what type of link it is (sidebar / resources / guest post / ad / etc )
• (D) we can't get a link from this domain (other sites owned by the competitor, etc.)

3 - Tell them not to bother with any site with domain authority under 20 or 10 or whatever your personal cutoff is.

4 - If they can get the link automatically, like submitting to a directory, have them do it. Quick them a run through on best practices for things like URL, phone numbers, and how to vary the descriptions, and then have them use some sort of auto-fill extension or plug-in so they're not retyping the same thing over and over.

5 - Have them transfer any links from category (C) to a new spreadsheet, which will be what they work on after the categorizing is done. The spreadsheet should be sorted by type - guest post, resources link, ad, etc.

6 - After a  few weeks (or a month or two) of that, they'll appreciate the value of creating awesome content and getting people to create the links for you, and they'll have an excellent idea of the types of link building your competitors are engaged in.

Their next project should be learning how to approach each link from the new spreadsheet they created in step 5, which you'll need to teach them a little bit. Have them start with writing guest posts and contacting guest post sites under your supervision. Then they can advance up to email requests and relationship building after they've done a bit of guest posting. That should keep them busy for 4 to 12 months depending on your niche.

I've got a couple ideas here.

1 - Set up Cross Domain GA Tracking

This would measure literal overlap in users over time. Basically - has this person been on any of our sites before?

I'd probably do this with a new GA UA account to keep the current accounts the way they are.

If you're not doing affiliate tracking between the sites then this added analytics layer may be a good idea anyways.

2 - Set up Leadfeeder.com accounts

This can show you some information based upon user IP address. Not much different than GA data but fun to look at.

3 - Analyze email lists

Assuming you've got lists built for each of these sites, compare them in rapleaf or full contact and do a subjective/manual review of the customers that you can pull data on.

4 - Set up retargeting scripts on all of the sites, and then run some retargeting campaigns

You should be able to get some general insights from Facebook, Twitter, etc on basic audience demographics. Basically building a custom audience and then pulling them into Facebook audience insights once you have enough people in that audience group for each site.

5 - Check social insights

If you have any social followers that are separate you should be able to compare page owner insights on these audiences.

6 - Keyword Overlap

Use the domain comparison tool in SEMRush and see how much ranking overlap there is. May or may not be relevant to the audience, but I can make an easy argument for a site merger if there's cannibalization there and neither site is ranking 1st for many of those keywords.

7 - Look at conversion data

If you're getting a strong conversion rate from referral traffic from sites B, C, and D, that should bolster your argument. By strong I mean above your site's average conversion rate.

General takeaways:

From what you've said so far, I think you can make an easy argument to merge sites C and D into the main site.

Site B is the harder decision, especially since I'm not sure how many constraints you have in regards to claims made on site B and the laws surrounding supplements and vitamins. Microsites can go either way IMO - I've seen great ones and I've seen some that never should have been separated. There's an easy SEO argument for merging them but it may not be the best brand decision.

A good relevant example is the bulletproofexec.com site and their upgradedself.com ecommerce store. Pure SEO standpoint would be to merge these 2 sites, but I think they've got a strong brand built up in one and they may not want to sell those products on their main lifestyle/blog site.

I can't speak to the current Godaddy website editor - but most wysiwyg website editors won't offer you the option to specify a canonical tag.

Additionally, if you put ... code inside of the body copy, Google will generally ignore it since it could be manipulated by third parties with access to comment fields or other content editors. So, that's not going to help unfortunately.

You might be better off implementing the 301 redirect if they'll let you do that.

Also - if you can edit the navigation menu to make sure users are sent back to domain.com instead of domain.com/home.html, that should remove the URL from being crawled, which will help as well. Do they give you the option to get rid of that "Home" link and add a custom one that points directly to http://www.answer2cancer.org/ ? That would get rid of Moz crawl errors as well for the most part.

Hey Patrick,

I have a good guess as to the problem. Has anyone installed Bot Filters on these accounts? If someone installed a bunch of bot filters incorrectly (for example a hostname exclusion instead of a hostname inclusion) that would cause tracking to disappear despite proper on-site installation.

August 2nd was the day that Moz published a blog post on this exact topic, so that in particular makes this my best guess.

If you want to post screenshots of the filters on these account I'm happy to glance at them.

Regarding this:

"I've also noticed that a lot of my competitors have links on lots of blogs that I can't seem to get links on. I would normally contact them and offer to guest post but I can find any contact details. I'm beginning to think my competitors have set these sites up as well for link building purposes. Is that ethical?"

Is it ethical? That's the opening question to a long and drawn out debate. It's certainly a bit spammy, depending on how crappy the content is on the blog. It's hard for me to tell you not to do that, because it's obviously working for them, but before you do, please try the "create awesome content and promote it" option first.

How about creating "the UK guide to hiring a wedding band" or something like that? Should be worth a good number of links from all of the bridal/wedding blogs in the UK if you make it a darn good piece of content. Or interview the bloggers at the 20 biggest bridal/wedding blogs and see what the most popular wedding music trends are or some BS like that. They'll often link back to your article after it's published because you asked them to contribute.

Please try that stuff before you start building crappy link networks.

The best solution is to use  on those pages.

I believe that using robots.txt will still allow the URLs to be shown as URLs in search results, so that is less ideal. Not certain if that's still the case, but it used to be that way.

I personally would not nofollow links to that page, because if you use "noindex, follow" it will in turn pass value to other indexed pages, and nofollowing links to a noindex page isn't supposed to increase pagerank to other links on the page.

I only see one sentence before each video that has unique content on the pages. I ran the two URLs through this tool: http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php and it reports 98% similarity. I'm guessing it's based entirely on text, which is likely what SEOmoz is based on.

The good news is that it's easy to fix. One video is 20 minutes long, and one video is 40 minutes long. Write at least a paragraph of good description about what the topic of each video is, and add that to the page.

Bonus points if you write more than one paragraph for each page, and 100x bonus points if you provide a transcription of the speech.

Once you do that the duplicate content error will go away, and you'll have better luck with getting traffic to those pages if that's a goal.

Yes, absolutely. Lots of benefits here - locking in a domain that otherwise may have been taken by someone else, aging the domain with some basic content, etc. The downside is $10 and the risk that you don't move forward with that product.

Only caveat I would add is that it may make more sense to simply claim the domain and redirect it to the product page on your existing website, but this really depends on branding and other business factors as much as SEO best practices.

You're not going to see any damage in terms of SEO. I can hardly imagine a case where hashtag consistency directly or indirectly contributes to anything search-related. The decision should be made on what's best for the conference attendees. If they're seeing tons of junk in their hashtag stream, especially within 7 days before or after the event, then it's probably best to switch (and make sure your new choice doesn't have the same problem).

As far as buy-in, just make it very obvious to everyone what the new hashtag is - if it was really that much of an annoyance last time, the vets will do it and the new people won't know the difference. You can also have someone start sending @replies with the correct hashtag in a friendly manner if you really want to enforce the change.