Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I have my commerce site. In the last 6 months, I started a blog where I hired professional writers to do about 2-3 blog posts per week related to my industry and products.
I host this blog on my ecommerce site, not as a separate domain. For example, example.com/blog
We are creating legitimate, related, and valid content that our readers find interesting. I mean our writers are first rate--they are not SEO people--but industry-knowledgeable writers.
Recently, I was told by an SEO company that the search engines frown on what I am doing, and called it "Internal Link Influence" because I am linking back to products and categories within my site related to each blog post.
I was actually shocked, because I thought I was creating legitimate, high quality content related to my industry. It's not like I am writing about Car Parts and then linking back to a pair of diamond earrings over and over again on my site. I am writing about relevant content.
I thought Google and Yahoo would smile upon something like this? But I am told no ...
Primary, I am concerned with Google, much more than I am with Yahoo.
Should I take the advice of the SEO company -- and not link back to my relevant products from my blog? They were primary doing this audit of my website for Yahoo's Product Submit.
Is this true for Yahoo perhaps but not Google?
I can really use your insight! They are saying I should remove the links and just do the content.
They also said that if this was another website separate from my main website that it would be okay as a blog. But because it's hosted on my commerce site that it is a "no-no". In other words, if it was mywebsiteblog.com pointing back to mywebsite.com it would be okay -- but because it's all on my main website, it's frowned upon and could be a killer to SEO.
PLEASE HELP!
[edited by: tedster at 8:21 pm (utc) on July 9, 2009]
Does a blog help your site if it's on the same domain? If it's on the same domain, do too many links to relevant pages somehow count against you with google?
Would a separate blog (different domain) that links to your domain be better? Or do you then run the risk of seeing this blog do better in the rankings than your actual site?
Or do you then run the risk of seeing this blog do better in the rankings than your actual site?
For any given term, only one page will rank, plus an indent if you are lucky.
Whether you are on a subdomain or not, the blog will push your main site off the page if its content is worthy of higher ranking.
The way I would approach it is this. If the site and blog could each stand-alone if the other didn't exist, stick them on subdomains. If the blog is just a marketing tool for the site, put it in a folder.
Disclaimer: YMMV, and others disagree. Googlers say subdomains and folders are now treated more similarly.
They also said that if this was another website separate from my main website that it would be okay as a blog. But because it's hosted on my commerce site that it is a "no-no". In other words, if it was mywebsiteblog.com pointing back to mywebsite.com it would be okay -- but because it's all on my main website, it's frowned upon and could be a killer to SEO.
If the purpose of the blog is to generate links to your pages only, I'd say just the opposite. A separate site linking back to your main site from each blog post might very well look like blogspam. At best, Google will ignore the links. How Google reacts will likely depend on the rest of your inbound link profile.
If it's a blog in a folder on your domain, at least deception is no longer a consideration. Overoptimization, though, might become a factor. Restraint in this situation is likely to be a virtue.
Additionally, unless your blog posts are good enough to actually attract good quality inbound links, the cross-links to your other pages won't help.
My blog folder has the same PR as my home page.
It sounds to me like if I limit the # of internal links to say, 1-3 links per blog post, I should be okay.
How does everyone feel about "tags" -- I have say 10 tags at the bottom of each blog post.
We have excellent content too -- it's not just content writing for SEO -- we market this blog to our customers as high quality info about our industry and our products.
The hard thing about it is we're really not trying to trick the engines or anything like that, but of course, we want everything that we do to benefit us on an SEO level as well as be educational and productive to our customers.
Should I take the advice of the SEO company -- and not link back to my relevant products from my blog?
Sounds crazy to me, at least on the face of it. There are many successful examples of this kind of linking back from a blog to the rest of a website - even when using example.com/blog/ urls. Linking between the directories/folders of a domain cannot be a problem in my view.
It sounds to me like if I limit the # of internal links to say, 1-3 links per blog post, I should be okay.
Reasonable - with a strong preference for the "1" side of things.
How does everyone feel about "tags" - I have say 10 tags at the bottom of each blog post.
There are all kinds of ways to execute tags, and some might cause problems. In your case, are the tags consciously chosen for each blog article, or are they on some kind of autopilot? Also, do the tags link to pages (or even websites) outside the blog, or are they all internal to the blog?
