Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Vadim,

Yes you need to get both the non-www and www versions of your website verified in GWMT account to be able to set the preferred domain. Its as simple as adding your site without www to the account and hit the Verify this site option. That's it. As you would have your www version already verified, getting the non-www version of your website doesnot require to go through the verification process like uploading the html file or adding the verification meta tag.

Just add your site without www by clicking the ADD A SITE button and click the Verify this site option and you should be good.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Marcel, it is perfectly alright to display your affiliate offer that way as long as you have the relevant content supporting the offer on the page. Personally, I would go with much bigger content like around 650 words so as to please Google especially after the Panda and Penguins. Please make sure that the iframe is reasonable in size and it does not overwhelm the page by being a huge one.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi, the suggestion was not to get the quality articles written that take an hour to write each but I meant to change the products descriptions that were copied and pasted with little variation so that they don't look like a copy, paste job.

Now, coming to the de-indexing part, let us look at a scenario:

Suppose I built a website to promote Amazon products through Amazon associates program. I populated its pages using Amazon API through a plugin like WProbot or Protozon. In this case, the content will be purely scraped from Amazon and other places. After a while, I realize that my site has not been performing well in the search engines because of the scraped content but haven't seen any penalty levied or manual action taken. As of now, I have about 3000 pages in Google's index. Now I want to tackle the duplicate content issue. This is what I would do to be on a safer side from a possible penalty in future like Panda:

1. First, will make the top pages unique.

2. Add, noindex to the rest of the duplicate content pages.

3. Keep on making the pages unique in phases, removing the noindex tag to the ones that were updated with unique content.

4. Would repeat the above step till I fix all the duplicate content pages on the website.

It greatly depends on the level of content duplication and few other things so, we will be able to suggest better if we can have a look at the website in question. You can send a private message if you want any of us to have a look at it.

Good to hear that my friend. Please do not delete the newly added non-www version of your website as you will not be able to set the preferred domain without it. Just leave it as it is.

You can access your preferred domain by clicking on it to get all the stats in GWMT account.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Bob,

If you are new and trying to build the brand online, you can include the brand at the beginning of the title along with doing some value based link building with branded anchors. So this would be your brand building phase and then comes your ranking phase for certain keywords/ phrases. This is when you push your brand name to the end of the title and this can be beyond the 65 character limit. Google strips the text after this limit in the SERPs but this does not mean that Google cannot read or will not consider text beyond this limit for ranking. So, I always say, try to include the essence or vital SEO info in the first 65 characters but come up with good titles that read natural and at the same time very enticing.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi, any plugin like sh404SEF will work and accomplish your goal without hurting your rankings as long as it redirects, the index.php URLs to their corresponding without index.php URLs via 301. By the way, you don't need to list all your URLs in .htaccess file to implement this. You can go with pattern match redirection.

Here you go for more:

http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/301-redirect-with-mod_rewrite-or-redirectmatch.html

and

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/htaccess-redirect-rewrite-rules.html

By the way, having index.php in URLs does not affect your SEO efforts directly but by stripping index.php from all the URLs will make them look pretty, clean and a bit user friendly.

Hope it helps. Good Luck to you.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

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Hi Ramesh,

I checked the URL you gave, http://www.niyati.sg/print-design/57/annual-report-design for missing page title but could not find any issues in there. I used Screamingfrog and others. The page came out with out any issue. I looked at the cache date and it showed 29th August. You can try Fetch as Google in WMT account and then click on Submit to Index.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Usama,

Google will not penalize for duplicate content in this case as it would treat the content unique. So, you don't need to worry in this regard.

Here you go for a video from Matt Cutts of Google on this topic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDg2AGRGjLQ&feature=player_embedded

Hope it helps.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Dear Fred,

Here is your redirection setup:

http://weekend.visitsweden.com/      being redirected via 301 to

http://weekend.visitsweden.com/no    being redirected via 301 to

http://weekend.visitsweden.com/no/

So, I would suggest you to remove the interim URL without the trailing slash after 'no'. Let the original homepage, http://weekend.visitsweden.com/ also be redirected to http://weekend.visitsweden.com/no/ (the one with trailing slash) via 301.

So your redirection setup should be as follows:

http://weekend.visitsweden.com/  - via 301 to - http://weekend.visitsweden.com/no/

This should fix the issue. Essentially, we are eliminating the redirection loop here.

By the way, both the URLs, with and without trailing slash appear in Google when searched with the following queries:

weekend.visitsweden.com/no

weekend.visitsweden.com/no/

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Ramesh,

Thanks for the info and here is the problem.

This URL, http://www.niyati.sg/print-design/57/booklet-design is pointing to the following URL:

http://www.niyati.sg/print-design/57/annual-report-design

The HTTP header status code is still a 200. This is the issue.

To fix this, you need to redirect the URL, http://www.niyati.sg/print-design/57/booklet-design

via a 301 permanent redirection. A 301 redirection gives an HTTP header status 301 and this tells the search engines that the old URL is no more in force and has been replaced by the new one.

Best of luck my friend.

Devanur Rafi

Yes my friend, you should not use language translators for the purpose as these translators do a literal translation and mess up the grammar of the language. You can take help of a writer for the corresponding language and have the translation done. Please remember, bad spelling and grammar lead to bad user experience and search engines will not favor websites with bad spellings and grammar.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi, only one version, either the non-www or www should throw an HTTP header status 200. Suppose you prefer the www version then you should ideally have the non-www version redirected to the www version via a server-side 301, permanent redirection. You can also set the preferred domain setting to the www version in Google webmaster tools account. With 301 in place, you should see things falling on the right track. Care should be taken that only the preferred version URLs are used for any and all of your campaigns as well as link building or link earning purposes.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Ruchi,

Google keyword planner now has only exact match and currently there is no way to extract broad match search volume using GKP. If budget is not a constraint, you can run a PPC campaign with broad match keywords and check out the volumes for your desired geo-location. By the way, if you can let us know what is that you want to do with the broad match search volume, we will be able to comment better.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Prashanth, don't be obsessed with Alexa Rank as its highly volatile with lot of factors that are out of a webmaster's control. A growing Alexa Rank does not necessarily mean that your website is doing bad, it might also be because of other websites out there doing well.

However, if you want to lower the Alexa Rank for your website, you can ask all your people to install Alexa toolbar on their systems and access your website. Within no time, you will see a drastic improvement in your Alexa Rank.

You would be doing good on all fronts if you work towards improving the quality of the content on your website and making the user experience better there by making the site sticky that will result in better site engagement times. This will eventually bring all the SEO goodies to your website and ultimately to you.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi there, though a single Sitemap.xml file can accommodate upto 50K URLs, it is not uncommon to go for multiple Sitemap.xml files for many purposes even with few hundreds on each.

You need to come up with a total of 4 Sitemap files and one among these would be an index sitemap that lists the other 3 Sitemap.xml files with URLs.

Here you go for more: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi, can you please explain the question a bit more clearly? However, let me try to address it:

To view the search volumes for keywords/phrases in Google from so and so geo location, you can use Google Keyword Planner, here:

https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner

You need to login to your Google account to be able to use the keyword planner.

Once you have your master list of keywords/phrases based on relevance and search volume, you then need to think about keyword mapping which is a process that involves, coming up with keyword/phrase specific pages to be added to your website targeting each one of these keywords/phrases. So you will be mapping these keywords/phrases to your URLs (pages). Here is an example:

Suppose your list of keywords has a key phrase, "mutual funds". You can map it to a page URL like:

yourdomain.com/mutual-funds.html

Likewise, you beef up the size of your website with pages targeting keywords that resulted from your keyword research and analysis using tools like Google Keyword Planner etc.

Once you are done with keyword mapping process, you get down to write the content for each of these pages. You also need to optimize the on-page SEO elements on these pages like, the page Title, Description, H1 tag, content itself, contextual linking (internally to other pages) from within the content etc.

Please feel free to elaborate your query so that we can address it more accurately.

By the way, SERPs means, search engine results pages, the ones that Google or any other search engines give us when we search.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

There is no second thought about it and it should be 'slow-cooker' and not slowcooker for lot of obvious reasons both from users' and search engines' perspectives. Try typing 'slowcooker' in Google search and look for suggestions, you won't find 'slowcooker' and more over, slow and cooker are both different words and a hyphen should be placed between them. Even if you search with 'slowcooker', in the results, its no where to be seen. This is for URL structure but coming to domain names, slowcooker.com is recommended and slow-cooker is not for many SEO reasons especially since Google's exact domain match algo update, I would think 10 times before going in for domain names with hyphen(s).  Hope that helps.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

Thanks for the response my friend. The problem without an index sitemap file is, when you have to resubmit multiple sitemap.xml files in webmaster tools account, you will have to resubmit each of them at a time. With an index sitemap file, you just need to submit the index file and it would take care of the job.

Here you go for more: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/71453?hl=en

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi there, the length/depth of the URL structure is very important. The deeper it is, the harder it would be to rank high in the search engines. This also depends on how authoritative the domain is and other factors like the page authority itself.

It is highly recommended to place the resources as close as possible to the root by eliminating unnecessary folders.

If possible, I personally would recommend you to go with a shorter URL structure and as you mentioned, you can deploy a 301 permanent redirection mechanism to pass on the SEO goodies to the new URLs. You can expect a temporary loss in rankings but everything should be fine within 3 to 6 weeks. Also while restructuring the URLs, please take enough care not to include anything that does not convey a clear hierarchy. The URLs should be as short as possible and contain the target keywords/phrases with word separators like hyphens (these are recommended over others like an underscore). Those were my two cents. Good luck my friend.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

If you are talking about the sitemap for the visitors on your website, if you think the newly added pages are going to be helpful to them, you can update your visitors sitemap accordingly. But the Sitemap.xml file is a supplemental indexing tool meant for the search engines to find the pages on your website easily and needs to be updated and resubmitted to search engines using webmaster tools accounts whenever new pages are added to your website.

Hope that helps.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi there, robots.txt file is one of the initial things that search engine spiders look at when they visit your website and a reference to the Sitemap.xml file in there will aid the search engine spider to quickly access to important URLs on your website then and there.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Gary is absolutely correct. Google can alter your page Titles and Descriptions if they find are not appropriate and can even fetch descriptions from other prominent websites where your website is listed with a description. The best example of such prominent website is the Open Directory Project, Dmoz.org.

So its always recommended to come up with relevant page titles and descriptions that are unique for all your pages.

Most of the time, Google will take the titles and descriptions mentioned by the webmaster in the title tag and description meta tag, but there is no guarantee that this happens 100% of the time. If your website is listed on dmoz and you do not want Google to pickup the description from there, you can use the page level robots meta tag as follows:

Similarly if you do not want Google to pickup the description from Yahoo directory,

Use your page titles and descriptions in such a way that they force the visitor to click on your website in the search results. The title should contain your target term in it. See to it that the Titles and Descriptions have a strong compelling message. Using titles and descriptions optimally can have dramatic improvement in CTR from search results.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

No problem my friend. You are most welcome. Yes, you just need to give the location of your sitemap.xml file as given below:

Sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap_location.xml

Here you go for more:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183669?hl=en

Hi Chris,

Even before addressing the duplicate page Title issue, these titles seem to be very long and stuffed with phrases and look spammy.

As you know, page Titles are one of the most important on-page optimization factors that can accommodate the target terms as they  show up in search results. Its better if it is around 55-60 characters in size including spaces with the target term towards the beginning. If the title has to go beyond 55-60 characters, then the essence should be captured in the first 55-60 characters including spaces as Google truncates anything beyond around 55-60 characters and the search engine user  cannot see beyond those ~60 characters in the search results.
Though Google seems to truncate titles in search results based on pixel width(512pixels) and not character limit, in general the 55-50 character limit is a safe bet while writing optimized page titles for your pages.

Coming to the duplicate page Titles issue on your Wordpress website, you can use plugins like Yoast SEO or All-in-one SEO to customize the titles. Here is the deal, no two pages on the website should have same Titles or Descriptions. They should be unique by at least a word or few characters. You can have a look at your Google Webmaster Tools account for duplicate page Titles and Descriptions and act accordingly. And of course, Screamingfrog SEO spider is a superb tool for the purpose. Hope these help.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi, with rel=canonical in place, there is no way that both the pages from the two sites appearing and ranking in the search results. Only the canonical or the preferred page will be indexed and can rank in Google.

You should be thinking along the lines to make the content on both the sites unique. Though these two sites operate and target the same niche, you can definitely make the content unique from each other.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

You are most welcome David. You can use Yoast for Wordpress for handling rel=canonial.

Here for more: https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/#canonical

Here you go for implementing 301 permanent redirection using .htaccess file on Apache server(Linux hosting):

http://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/website/redirects/setting-up-a-301-permanent-redirect-via-htaccess

If you are on a Windows server, here are the steps for 301 redirection:

http://www.iis.net/configreference/system.webserver/httpredirect

301 redirection is definitely faster than rel=canonical and almost same when it comes to passing on the SEO goodies to the canonical page. With 301 in place, in this case with the URLs mentioned by you for example(suppose, the author page is redirected to the homepage via 301), no one will be able to see the author page as it would take you to the homepage but with rel=canonical in place, everyone will be able to see the author page and its just that the search engines like Google will not index the author page as the cononical or the preferred page would be the homepage. So, ideally, you should be going with the rel=canonical implementation here. Hope it helps.

Good Luck my friend.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Except for very exceptional cases, Google considers and respects the rel=canonical implementation and its a strong hint for them.

Here you go for more:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/rel-canonical-html-head/

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi David,

I will be very quick here. 'rel=canonial' can come to your rescue.

Here you go for more: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

Here is another article from Moz regarding duplicate content and how to go about it:

http://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi William, thanks for sharing your experience here. My experience has been totally different from that of your's.

Here is what Dr.Pete has to say..

Taken from: http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions

2) Can I Use Rel=Canonical Cross-domain?

Yes – in late 2009, Google announced support for cross-domain use of rel=canonical. This is typically for syndicated content, when you’re concerned about duplication and only want one version of the content to be eligible for ranking.

(3) Should I Use Rel=Canonical Cross-Domain?

That’s a tougher question. First off, Google may choose to ignore cross-domain use of rel=canonical if the pages seem too different or it appears manipulative. The ideal use of cross-domain rel=canonical would be a situation where multiple sites owned by the same entity share content, and that content is useful to the users of each individual site. In that case, you probably wouldn’t want to use 301-redirects (it could confuse users and harm the individual brands), but you may want to avoid duplicate content issues and control which property Google displays in search results. I would not typically use rel=canonical cross-domain just to consolidate PageRank.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi, absolutely yes, you should go with /wordpress-live-chat as the URL clearly conveys the purpose of the page to both the search engines as well as the users.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Andrew,

The best practice would be to come up with search engine/user friendly new URLs each corresponding to the month/year blog posts and then redirect them via 301. Essentially, you will be implementing a one-to-one or page-to-page 301. Redirecting a whole bunch of old pages to the homepage via 301 is not recommended especially if these old pages have some organic or referral traffic coming in. This would have a negative impact from your user experience perspective as well as from an SEO standpoint. A blanket 301 approach (bunch of pages being redirected to a single page, in this case the homepage) is the last resort that you should think about.

Please do not even think of letting those old pages giving up an HTTP head status code 404. This is a big NO, NO.

If I were you, I would have come up with new pages (URLs) for each of those old pages and redirected those via 301 to the corresponding new ones.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Somanathan,

Suppose:

Website = Car

Content  = Engine

DA/PA   = Turbocharger/Nitro booster

You need to have content that is unique, highly relevant, targeted, updated and useful to the visitors. With this in place, your website will get the boost from DA/PA and thereby can rank well in the search engines. You should do a thorough keyword research and analysis, come up with highly searched terms for your niche, add pages targeting each of these with highly relevant content targeting the main keyword/phrase. If you can let us know the website in question, we will be able to suggest you better. Good Luck.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi, just in case, login to your Google analytics account and please visit this URL:

http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/

Give read-only access to the application and check if this website has been hit by any of the Google updates like Panda or Penguin. Look from October 2012 till date. I see an issue between December 2012 to February 2013. Let us know what do you see and we shall take it from there.

By the way, no on-page SEO tool on this planet is comprehensive. A true SEO audit can be done by only a good SEO expert. Of course making use of best tools of the trade like Moz etc.,

Best regards,

Devanur

Hi,

You need to go in for server-side URL rewrites in this case. With URL rewrite in place, the URL in the address bar for the visitor will be your SEO and user-friendly, vanity URL and the same will be in search engines' indices there by accomplishing your mission. Then you might want to make sure that your old, ugly URL passes on all its SEO goodies to the vanity URL. For this, you can go in for a 301 redirection from the ugly URL to the vanity URL.

Here is a beautiful article from Moz: http://moz.com/blog/url-rewrites-and-301-redirects-how-does-it-all-work

Hope it helps. Good Luck.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi, you should initiate an action against them but before doing that, have a word with them and ask them to take it down. They are trying to hijack your prospect visitors by showing your content in an iframe of their website. This is a known dirty trick. By the way, when I clicked the click you mentioned, it took me to a download and probably an adaware of malware.

Please do not keep quite and act now to have that malicious site to stop showing your content. Also, they are eating up your server's bandwidth. You can even complain this to the other website's hosting provider.

Good Luck my friend.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Oh ok...

This line ensures its a 301:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%1/$1 [R=301,L]

Hi friend, IMHO, you should go ahead with the merger as the idea is to have one stable and wide website. Moreover, all the SEO goodies of other websites will be inherited by the destination site within few weeks. Don't worry about the product site outperforming the main site. We did this  twice in the past and came out with flying colors. Go ahead with a proper page-to-page 301 redirection for the merger and don't kill the product site for at least 6-7 months.

Please write back with more queries.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi