

If You’re "Blogging" For SEO, You’re Doing it Wrong - aerosmile
http://www.airpair.com/seo/seo-focused-wordpress-infrastructure

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herbig
What about posting your own articles for SEO? Is that doing it right?

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hatu
Hint to budding SEO people, posting on HN doesn't bring much SEO since links
expire and it's not very permissive to crawlers.

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benologist
It does work. This submission is literally an example of it working, and we
will see 2 or 3 more today and again and again every day. It's not the single
link on HN that matters, it's the dozens of automated tweets, posts and
whatnot followed by manual links from people if the post is lucky.

I've started flagging SEO campaigns because it's getting a bit stupid that
every jackass can write some dumb crap about "omg startup" and then have their
coworkers or co-yc-alumni prop it up.

Google will eventually address pandering/gaming social networks - it's not
very hard to detect when a company writes and hosts completely unrelated
content for somebody else's audience like when a video chat service writes
about blogging for SEO. 10 years ago it was "free articles"
([http://www.articlesbase.com/](http://www.articlesbase.com/)) you could host
full of juicy content + a couple spammy backlinks for the original author, 5
years ago it was stupid infographics, now it's "social media articles".

It's just a loophole that unfortunately hinges on exploiting us.

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aerosmile
SEO is one of the verticals we support, and is one of the most popular ones.

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lukethomas
While I certainly agree that have blog.domain.com may not be the best move in
terms of SEO, I do think it's important to prioritize users clarify/navigation
above SEO benefits.

Next, I'm curious if you have a sitemap file? I see your using the Yoast SEO
plugin for WordPress, which means typically it lives in /sitemap_index.xml.
Clearly you have a custom url setup w/ your app, but I'm questioning whether
this is setup? From my past experience, this is the first thing you should do.

Finally, your top navigation links apparently go to specific categories of
posts, and I can't help but point out that your title tags could probably be
improved (i.e. -
[http://www.airpair.com/backbone.js](http://www.airpair.com/backbone.js)).
Fortunately since your using the Yoast plugin (good choice btw), you can
change this under Titles & Metas -> Post Types.

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aerosmile
Absolutely, we just migrated 200 articles and are in the process of cleaning
up the site. The title tags on archive pages and some other ones are not
finished yet, but all top landing pages are all green in Yoast. Sitemap (text
and video) is in place. Good observations, thanks for the feedback!

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cateye
If you’re "writing" about SEO, you’re doing it wrong:

It has been explained repeatedly but I'll repeat it again. Optimizing for
search engines is to a great extent wasted energy.

Create just interesting content -> People will refer to it automagically ->
Ranking on search engines will automagically improve -> More people will come
to your site and more people will recommend it.

Optimizing things for search engines -> People don't find what they are hoping
for -> You have to "optimize" more and more. This is a vicious circle.

I hope that smart people use their ability to create beautiful things and not
waste it by performing tricks.

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aerosmile
Where in the flow above would you put items like: "Make sure that Google
Authorship is set up?" Surely, you can't argue that this wouldn't help your
content if implemented correctly. There is a long list of similar technical
SEO items that smart publishers cover with every new article.

Your sentiment is just a reflection of the damage that SEO snake oil salesmen
have created in our industry. These days, everyone claims to be a knowledgable
SEO, and there are no straight forward ways to prove that (unlike, say, when
you say "I know a lot about natural language processing"). Don't throw out the
baby with the bathwater - good SEOs are still generating a ton of value at the
top companies in the world.

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justhw
Under-delivering article that discusses SEO 101.

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aerosmile
It's a very niche topic that I haven't found covered anywhere else (how to
proxy request between Wordpress and Node.js, and serve both apps on a single
root domain).

The lead up was basic, but I wanted to make sure that everyone was able to
follow as I transitioned into the more advanced topics.

Clearly, I could have spent less time on the basics, good feedback!

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gmays
Great writ up. I've actually been meaning to do this for a while, but hadn't
gotten around to it. I'll probably write a guide in the next few days and have
a VA create variations for it on related fields.

Thanks for the reminder and the push, hopefully I'll see some results from
these efforts in the next 6-12 months.

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aerosmile
Thanks, would love to see your guide! You should see some results much sooner
than 6-12 months (assuming you're cranking out good content).

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walshemj
Really about.com ROTFL - pull the other one mate its got bells on.

Good white hats knew that mega spun/thin content sites where on the way out
years ago - even before Matt Cutts blog post a few days ago.

Your own unique original content still has a lot of value say if infinti red
bull racing did behind the scene blogs about f1.

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aerosmile
All I can tell you is that there are a ton of people at About working day and
night on making the content as good as it can be. They are some of the hardest
working people I've ever worked with.

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AznHisoka
The title suggests the author is going to explain some very sophisticated ways
to get traffic/leads from blogging, yet goes on to talk about fairly
straightforward things everybody should know: ie having blog in own subdomain.

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josefresco
Yeah it started out very in depth but then mentioned one very obvious
fundamental SEO practice (something Matt Cutts bestowed upon us many
months/years ago) and then goes off into bizarro land with the CMS stuff at
the end.

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aerosmile
Jose, I appreciate that feedback. I tried to address readers of all levels of
SEO experience, so I started out with the basics and then progressively went
deeper into some more advanced topics. It sounds like I could have been more
clear i my writing. If you have any specific questions about the CMS stuff,
just let me know.

~~~
josefresco
Sorry for the harsh criticism (this is HN after all) I just was confused and
it's probably my fault based on assumptions I had going in. I tend to eat up
SEO articles because I have small business web clients for whom I perform SEO
service but this was more targeted for larger online brands running blogging
or content creation networks.

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sandromur
Interesting article. Do you have any thoughts about what we could do on our
site, babywatch.co?

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aerosmile
Love your product! The site is still a bit basic, with only 6 indexed urls and
a domain authority of 18. Further, your web mentions seem to be split between
babywatch.co and babywatchome.com, and you're not 301 redirecting from one
domain to another. I would pick a domain name (ideally something you can see
yourself sticking with in the long-term), and then consolidate all the inbound
link equity under that one roof. The next step would be then to start
producing content, perhaps even with the server infrastructure I suggested in
my article :)

