First things first, I ran Noodle through an in-depth site audit to address what the top priorities. We needed to tackle the site architecture to allow Google to properly crawl and index Noodle.com. So, we broke down the millions of pages of Noodle into buckets in order to attempt to fix one section of the site at a time while also offering site wide advice. After a site wide inspection, Noodle faced a few technical SEO issues that needed to be fixed immediately.
Here’s a sampling of the problems and solutions we implemented:
Problem 1
Duplicate content was being scraped from public data and inserted into school profiles.
Solution
As a band-aid, we added theto all of the profile pages. This helped us allocate the crawl budget to our main category pages and avoid a Panda penalty. As a long-term solution, we began a partnership with a content development agency to write original content for each of these profile pages. And, we added more questions and answers from the forum for each profile page.
Problem 2
Heavy internal linking to low priority content on main category pages.
Solution
We removed the internal links in the footer to increase flow of equity to important pages.
Problem 3
No pagination on main category pages causing duplicate content.
Solution
We added the pagination code rel=”next” and rel=”prev” to the main category pages to reduce duplicate content issues and increase crawl depth.
In addition to the above, I also cleaned up 404 errors, shared schema markup language code and breadcrumbs with developers to implement, and created a content gap analysis.
While addressing technical SEO issues, I also created a local PR outreach campaign to the top 10 DMAs, launch content syndication with key partners (Fatherly, CNN, and Forbes) utilizing Outbrain and Taboola, restructured the affiliate marketing campaigns, and build email marketing campaigns to increase registrations on the site.
In addition, as a result of our content gap analysis in our content strategy, we developed an editorial calendar to create long-form ego bait articles every two months that coupled nicely with our manual outreach link building strategies. We also added a rewrite of competitor articles to the editorial calendar every two months to capitalize on our competitors top performing articles and keyword searches.
