Questions from Facebook answered, if we find this format is valuable we will continue to do it!
We answered all questions without seeing each other’s response. It’s a little more fun this way.
Dave Jordan: I deleted the content on an EMD and let it die, and hope to re-purpose it on a new, brandable domain. It had a lot of great content and I’m wondering if I can safely reuse it, after the Copy/Paste test. I guess the main question is how long does it usually take Google to drop a site after it’s deleted.
JW: If you are asking for how long does it take Google to get rid of pages in its index after you nuke them, the hated “it depends” phrase is relevant here – as there are many things in play. For example, you could still have internal links pointing to the page, or external links…so when Google does their deep crawl every 4-5 weeks, it is going to try and index the page again, and since it keeps trying to access it, it keeps it as well. Of course, you can request for the page to be deleted via WMT, but that can be a very time consuming process.
The issue with reusing the content is going to be the Copy/Paste Test. That is always key. In your case, I would not worry about Google dumping the content of the site, I would just put up a new site and a new XML sitemap, ping it and get Google to index it often. The old pages will be purged over time, just focus on the new site.
MR: It depends how many website scrapers copied you and how much juice you can build quickly to it. I think you’ll be fine considering the old domain is dead.
Julia Dunlop: How do you best clean up a mass of duplicate content created – inadvertently – by a client?
Jerry West: Define “inadvertently” Julia.
Julia Dunlop: Without realising she was doing anything wrong! She was aghast when I showed her how much content they’d taken …
Jerry West: She was just copying and pasting other people’s shit? Ha. Well, does she outrank the author? That is the question.
Julia Dunlop: Nope … she was using another site to advertise her stuff – didn’t realise that they’d taken all the site content and paste it into their own site!! They are now the authors (despite the fact that she has G+ authorship)
Julia Dunlop: So, anyway, that’s a Q for your Q&A …
JW: If you have verified the content is, in fact a duplicate according to Google with the Copy/Paste Test and the “partner” is now the author, then she has two choices. 1) Accept her mistake and redo the content on her site; 2) Request the other site remove the content so she can post it on her site. It will take time for Google to dump the content out of their SERPs, re-crawl the sites, pick up the new content and assign the authorship back to your client. It is a process that could take up to ten weeks due to how slow Google is with the “authorship assignment” process.
If it was me, I would recommend to my client to go with Option #1, just make sure there is a link from the content to her site, so she is getting a link credit and a good Call to Action too. It is also a good lesson for her as well.
MR: Hopefully they linked back at least. Admin Management Xtended is my plugin of choice to mass edit or delete posts. You can also look at “screen options” in the top right corner of WordPress and increase the amount of posts it shows by default. Don’t do too many or you will eat up all the memory on the server and crash it. That’s not fun. As a general rule, don’t be scared to kill the posts.
Dave Jordan: There are many conflicting opinions, but I was wondering if forum links have any worth. I have found a number of forums with PR 4 and 5, good traffic, and they’re well moderated.
JW: I love forum links, but more so I just love forum posts themselves. I have learned posting information and not links doesn’t get the mods looking at you and you have pretty much free reign to post anything (within reason). I have posted information to look up at Amazon, or even though Google search and I’ve received a lot of sales doing that. Get it in their head. Plus, if they do the search in Amazon and buy my product, that solidifies that keyword search to me and my ranking in Amazon goes up.
Don’t worry about the PR in the forums. The toolbar is even more inaccurate than ever. Go for how much the forums are populated. You want to spend time on the forums that get the traffic. Especially in today’s market.
MR: If it’s relevant you can get by with it, so yeah why not? It’s just the crap mass spam on profile pages that is so risky.
Dave Jordan: When I’m doing webmaster outreach and a wordpress tag is number 1 instead of a post, should I ask for the link on the first post on that tag page? Or what’s the best way?
JW: Having tags and allowing them to be indexed is one of the worst things you can do in terms of “duplicate content issues” in Google. If the tag page is #1, I personally would opt for the post instead. The post has more long-term benefit to you. If you are concerned, you could always run a small link blast to the post via XRumer or Scrapebox with one of your solid lists.
MR: I ran into that a few times. Some sites were very messy and I ended up not buying a link because I thought it was a ticking time bomb. If it’s a good price, why not? I wouldn’t confuse them with the tag page reference either. They probably have no clue what you are talking about. Just give them a link to a specific post and do a copy-paste test on it before you ask for a link there.
Ilya Bohemia: Questions – do we need to be concerned with proper use of heading structure for ranking in HTML5? Some of it is hard-coded in a theme (as I understand).
Any news on Amazon section in SEO Rev?
An outline on a “proper” site review? Wonder if a section on this could be added at some point?
JW: First question – No. There are not issues like there used to be with the DTD strictness and following the coding needs for what you declare. While having a properly coded page is important, you can spend hours making it perfect and not getting any real benefit from the time investment.
We have a separate Amazon group (which you are apart of) and with the depth of information that is Amazon; we have chosen to defer the Amazon info into the group instead of having it as a section in SEOREV. The training is via Amazing Selling Machine and then adding our model to it has worked extremely well.
‘An outline on a proper site review’ – We will dust off an old one, update it and post it.
MR: Just use Genesis and you avoid the problems if possible. I personally don’t have enough data to say whether the heading structure is going to hurt you or not. Defining “proper” is a little difficult when W3C’s validator is a mess with all of the new markups. I honestly stopped using it.
I think it would be cool if we did a blind review on a site where we pick something out from SEMRush that shows a massive decline in search traffic, and do a screencast to show how we attack it and make priorities of what we would fix first. The tests we have in the algorithm section cover 90% of the issues.
Torda Gabor: What to do On Page with a site that has almost no content just a short html5 animation ( cartoon like, animation plays when user scrolls, few blocks of text appear), at the end, the company name, address, phone number. All text is in the source code. It is basically a one page site.
What can I make out of it?
How can I add more content? It is designed to show the animation (with 3 blocks of text, each has a H1 tag and 5-10 sentences) only.
I think one main keyword + city name is possible, right?
JW: Don’t worry about on-page as there isn’t really much you can do and you don’t want to screw up the integrity of the design. Just focus on getting links and co-citations to drive up the ranking. Great Title will also help. You can even do keywords in nofollow links that will aid your ranking since you have no content on the page.
MR: If you’re doing local, all traditional rules seem to go out the window. As a best practice try to follow the rules, but we know that a lot of stuff gets ignored with local for some reason. It’s like 2010-2011 Google right now. Don’t be paranoid about your on-page. Build links and co-citations, but don’t forget normal citations either. Use getlisted.org as a starting point.
Loren Pleet: What are the recommended tools? i.e. MOZ, IBP, LRT, Spyfu, etc.? How about for social media management?
JW: We use LinkResearchTools, SpyFu, SEMRush mostly. IBP is used about once a month, the same with Moz. For social media management, I have tested a lot of tools that promised management under one login and they have all failed.
MR: LRT, aHrefs as a backup if LRT is too expensive, and SEMRush. That’s all I honestly need and would use if I didn’t have the luxuries of others. I can do the rest by hand quick enough that I’m okay. Social media – I don’t like most tools. I guess my favorite social research tool is SocialSecretSpy.com. There are features in every tool I can become addicted to, it’s just whatever you need for your business.
Loren Pleet: What is the best video hosting method for product videos on an ecommerce site? YouTube? An SEO guy I know highly recommends Wistia – more control and good analytics.
JW: I have not used Wistia. We are testing out TreePodia now.
MR: I’ve heard a good bit about Wistia but haven’t used it. I guess it depends on quality versus ranking. YouTube videos are easy to spam, outside of that I can’t really say one platform is better than the other considering YouTube now has HD for everyone.
Loren Pleet: Any feedback / opinion regarding product feed service providers? i.e. ChannelAdvisor, Godatafeed, Channel Manager Which one is the best?
JW: Great timing as we started testing these with our Amazon products last week.
MR: I don’t know this area well enough to comment. I just know that feeds are generally bad for SEO.
Dave Jordan: Question about manual reviews by G. Let’s say most of my good links are from webmaster outreach and the site gets a manual review, I’m wondering what happens. Does one of their minions go through the back link profile to see what looks natural, and then kick the crap out of me when they decide I paid for them all? I know you mention it’s a possibility in the membership area and I’m wondering if it’s going to be an issue with me doing mostly webmaster outreach. It’s for my main site in my main niche.
JW: Years ago when their manual review guide was leaked, I did a massive post on it and reviewed all the info and such. That was at least five years ago, I think, so a lot of things have changed. We have had sites reviewed that were all paid links and they didn’t get dinged. Mostly, they are looking for phishing scams and things that will compromise their user base. They are also more concerned about the link networks and getting those shut down than going through and penalizing sites one at a time.
Just know Dave that all of this does have risk, which is why you do it, as the reward is great. Doing links the way we have taught you and having them formatted correctly, will make it look like a valid link, and since there is no ad-code along with the link, it looks legit.
MR: Hopefully your links are related. If they are related you can probably still get by with it. Don’t worry about it unless it happens. Chances are the competitor won’t report you but just try to piggyback off your footprint. I remember Don showing me a site that was obvious spam that he reported and got word back from Google it was totally fine. Compartmentalize your network and footprint.
Youchy Dan: I want money, a LOT, and I don’t want to work or think or even blink I just want to fall asleep and wake up in the morning covered with $$$$$$.
Any ideas?
JW: Meet me in the back alley at 3am. Bring a ski mask, gloves, a tire iron, bolt cutters and super glue. This idea can’t fail.
MR: Legally? no.
Piers Moore Ede: What are the best tools for researching potential products to sell on Amazon?
JW: There is no “one tool” to use, but what I do is look at what is selling right now. Amazon has a list, you can look at eBay’s list too. Doing searches for “amazon best sellers” can give you plenty to review. Look at the products via Google Trends, see how much the product is going for on AdWords and how many advertisers are hitting it (the more the better – means money is being made). Also, don’t forget that the more competitors, the harder it will to get a piece of the action, so you are going to have to differentiate yourself very well.
MR: I am loving camelcamelcamel.com right now, aka C3.
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