Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Andrew,

Honestly, I don't think you should be looking at links if they are 'follow' or 'nofollow'. Instead of building links desperately, you should be investing your quality time and effort in developing high quality content which would be a natural link magnet. The link profile should look natural and you should not be even thinking along those lines where you intend to build so many 'follow' links and so many 'nofollow' links.

Content based promotional methods like blog commenting and forum posting still work good provided, your comments or posts are worthy enough.

Here is a very good article that can be handy:

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/50-ways-to-increase-the-domain-authority-of-your-site-infographic/77281/

Good luck my friend.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Susanta,

If you can share the URL of your domain, we will be able to answer better as the rate of indexing differs from site to site and also depends on lot of things like the website internal linking structure, website architecture, your backlinks and the list goes on..

Sitemap.xml is definitely a good way to give the indexing rate of your website a boost. But the story does not end there as there are lot of things that come in to play.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Prashant, have a fligth to catch..so will be quick..

What is DA:

http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority

Nice infographic that shows different ways to increase DA:

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/50-ways-to-increase-the-domain-authority-of-your-site-infographic/77281/

And a nice one from Neil Patel:

http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/05/19/5-practical-steps-to-improving-your-websites-domain-authority/

Domain authority is directly related to the quantity and quality of your backlinks. If you increase your DA by backlinks that have good Google PR, then yes, you are likely to get your PR a boost. Good luck.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Chris,

Frankly, don't have a perfect answer to the situation but, its just not the purpose that pagination exists for.

You go in for pagination under the following scenarios if you wish all your paginated content to appear in the search results: (Taken from Google): https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en

1. News and/or publishing sites often divide a long article into several shorter pages.
2. Retail sites may divide the list of items in a large product category into multiple pages.
3. Discussion forums often break threads into sequential URLs.

Moreover, the pagination mark-up provides a strong hint to Google that you would like them to treat these pages as a logical sequence, thus consolidating their linking properties and usually sending searchers to the first page. This would not be the desired outcome in your client's case Chris. So, you can convince them not to implement the pagination mark-up for generic top-level navigation pages as these pages should rank individually for respective search terms if any and they are definitely not the part of any logical sequence and this defies the very purpose behind paginated content. Those were my two cents friend. Good luck.

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

Oh yes Andrew. You should invest some serious time to clean the link profile so that it looks natural and organic. We have seen dramatic improvements with clean link profiles.

IMHO, no link audit software can give you the whole picture of your link profile but a combination of all those can. We use almost all of them while carrying out a major backlinks check especially when dealing with penguin recovery.

Hi Andrew,

I meant, the competitor's website is much bigger and is driving loads of organic traffic for high search volume keywords/phrases.

"I thought that the more pages a website had, the more the link juice had to be distributed. "

This theory is not a correct perspective. Even with more pages, the link juice will be still within the website unless you have a ton of out-bound links pointing to external websites.

There are  a lot of other ranking factors that make the competitor rank ahead of you. If you look at organic search competition for your website in SEMRush, the competitor website is number one competitor for your website and if you look at the organic search competition for your competitor website, your website stands at 9th position. Please have a look at the ranking factors list provided in my previous post. Moreover, no matter how good a website is, it cannot rank for all the keywords/phrases in the niche. When I looked further down in the organic keywords data for both of your domains, its very evident that your competitor ranks excellently well for search queries with the term, 'envelopes' in them. Infact, they are the number one site in Google for almost all the envelopes related search queries. Their domain name must be playing a bit role in this along with other ranking factors.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Moosa got it spot on. Just by looking at few parameters, we can't say that a website can rank high in Google. Here is something that can be handy while doing a comprehensive SEO audit. Though the list in there is not an official ranking parameters list, it can give you a fair idea about how and what things come in to play when it comes to search engine rankings. Hope it helps:

http://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Just another addition to the above. When I checked the backlinks using AHREFs for the jampaper page, most of the links come from Chinese domains. This might not be good if your target market is not China. You might want to look in to this.

Hi,

Before digging deep, the striking difference is the URL structure. Your competitor has a clean URL structure with hyphen as a word separator. Looking at your URL, it has no word separators and looks sub-optimal with too many words held together without word separators.

Coming to the duplication issues. Just because a site has duplicate content, its not bound to be penalized. The intention matters here than the duplication itself. If you look at the size of the websites. The competitor has about 6 times more pages in Google index and drives much more organic traffic.I looked at SEMRush data for both the sites and the competitor is a clear winner.

Moreover, the search query also matters a lot in this case and the competitor has it in the domain name. This also plays an important role. Those were my two cents and the first thing that I would do is to make the URL structure a little better.

Good luck friend.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Thanks for the heads-up Dan. Its much appreciated.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

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,

While the page-level robots meta tag is the best way to stop the page from being indexed, a domain-level robots.txt can save some bandwidth of the search engines. With robots.txt blocking in place, Google will not crawl the page from within the website but can pickup the URLs mentioned some where else on a third-party website. In cases like these, the page-level robots meta tag comes to the rescue. So, it would be best if the pages are blocked using robots.txt file as well as the page-level meta robots tag. Hope that helps.

Good luck friend.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Just my two cents friend..

4 days back, Google released Panda 4.0. You can check if that caused the drop.

Here is a tool that can help you find if any of the Google penalties are behind the drop:

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

Once on the page, click on the 'Log-in to Analytics' button and allow the tool to access your Google Analytics account and check if the recent Panda caused the drop. Hope this helps.

Good luck. By the way, thin content is of no use these days and you should be investing all your quality time in producing quality content.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Yes, Dan is correct. As long as the intent is not malicious, you should be good. Moreover, it is a common practice where a JS overlay is displayed before the actual site is served. For example, the adult sites and liquor related websites show an age gate page using JS overlay technique for the human visitors to confirm their age before they can access the website but the search engines bots (like the Google bot) do not see the JS overlay and can directly access the website. With this kind of setup in place, there is nothing to worry about different experience being served to visitors and bots. This is definitely not considered, cloaking. Hope it helps.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi there,

As you know, there are tons of websites that publish IP blacklists and not everyone of them are authentic. It is no uncommon that IP that belong to legit companies get blacklisted. While these are false positives, there is nothing to worry if you find your IP blacklisted in one or two places. However, you might want to investigate if your IP has been blacklisted in many places.

You can use the following tool to check the same:

http://whatismyipaddress.com/blacklist-check

For barracuda removal request, here is the URL:

http://www.barracudacentral.org/rbl/removal-request

1. Does your ranking get affected if you are associated with a website who is linked to you and is on the blacklist for spam only on Barracuda?

• No, not at all

2. If a website has a bad rating on WOT or WEBUTATION. Does that also hurt your ranking?

• Not directly and moreover, WOT and Webutation scores/ratings can be easily inflated and manipulated. As long as your website stands upto the expectations of your visitors and serves the purpose of its existence, you should be good.

Those were my two cents. All the best to you my friend.

Regards,

Rafi Devanur

Hi Bob,

Hope this tool will be of great help if you want to check whether the drop is because of Panda or Penguin or any other updates from Google:

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

Please use it and post back the findings so that we can take it from there.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

No problem my friend and thanks for the information.

I still do not favor the idea of redirecting the low traffic pages to the high traffic ones.

Instead of doing it, you can run a banner kind of thing that apprises the visitors on the low traffic pages about the products (the pages that receive high traffic) that drive most of the traffic. Display a message with a link to the high traffic pages prominently so that they can access those pages from the low traffic pages themselves.Something like, "You might want to check out our all time bestseller or hot product". You can add a button or some kind of call to action when clicked upon will take the visitor to the page that you want to.

Redirecting bunch of pages will bring down the size of the website in the search engine index and you don't want that to happen.

Please feel free to write post back Mark.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Agree with Chris. Redirecting low traffic pages to their high traffic counterparts is not a solution here for all the reasons mentioned by Chris. First of all, please do a thorough keyword research to find out if there is sizeable search volume for the keywords/phrases that are being targeted by the low traffic pages. It is quite possible that the phrase, 'black shoes' has higher search volume than any other colored shoes and that is the reason for that page to attract and drive good traffic.

Let me quote a situation here that we faced in the past. We had two products, one with a healthy search volume from local geography and the other had very low search volume. Except in few ways, the second product was as good as the first one. So we decided to create market for it as it lacked one here. We threw some freebies and ran a contest on our website and on social media platforms. This not only created awareness about the second product but also increased sales dramatically. Slowly, over a period of time, the search volumes for this product shot up which made us jumping with joy. Though this situation does not directly relate to your issue at hand, but just wanted to convey that, because something does not convert well, we should not drop our efforts to create more and more awareness about the product. Sometimes, adding in few extras with it might change the game for you. Just my two cents.

Wish you good luck my friend.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi,

I would like to address the following part of your original query without even going to the article that you referred to:

"everyone seems to agree that you shouldn't canonicalize all pages in a series to the first page"

The reason for this is, if you canonicalize all the pages in a series to the first page, you are giving a hint to Google that only the first page is what you are concerned of and it should be indexed. With this, all the non-canonical pages will be taken out from the index which you would not want to happen especially when the content of these pages is unique.

So depending on your requirement you can opt for either a 'view all method' or 'rel=prev/next' method for your pagination requirements.

Good luck.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Agree with Travis if you want to go in for social media tags:

Here you go for more:

http://moz.com/blog/meta-data-templates-123

and here:

http://www.quicksprout.com/2013/03/25/social-media-meta-tags-how-to-use-open-graph-and-cards/

The page level meta robots tag perfectly complements the robots.txt file. For example, if you have blocked a page or a section of your site using robots.txt file, Google will definitely not index the blocked content while crawling your website but, they can crawl the blocked content from other sources on the Internet where there are links to the blocked content. That is the reason you see in Google results that says,"A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more."

So to completely stop Google from indexing your content, you should go in for the page level meta robots tag along with the robots.txt.

Here you go for more:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156449?hl=en

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Scott,

Other than the following 3, I don't think you should bother about anything else:

1. (this can also be declared in the HTTP header also instead of the section)

2. The title tag (this is not a meta tag and can be declared as follows in the section:

For example:
<title>Your title goes here</title>

3. The meta description tag

Here you go for the list of meta tags that Google recognizes:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en

Hope that helps.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Dear Tim,

Here is an example of an article URL the Google recommends:

http://www.abc.com/breaking-news-exclusive-story-2314

Here you go for more:

https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40787

and

https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/191283

and here:

https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/68297

Hope those help.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

I responded to one of his recent queries and then he pointed me to this question that he posted long time back that has been lying without being answered.

Hi, while thousands of lines in the .htaccess file is not recommended, here you go for more info about the question at hand:

http://moz.com/community/q/thousands-of-301-redirections-htaccess-alternatives

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Thanks Doug. Really an eye-opener.

Hi friend,

Yes, the code you mentioned should work the way you expect without any issues.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

I am sorry my friend. Somehow I missed your response.

It should have been: RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ /$1 [R,L]

So, you missed the /

And it is also used to remove the trailing slash from URLs just like the one that I gave you earlier.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Sorina,

I can tell you that the index dates shown by Google are accurate but is not the case with the Cache date sometimes as the date shown in the Cache and the copy shown in the cache don't match many times but the index dates are accurate. Send me a private message with the actual URLs under discussion and I will be able to comment with more clarity.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

It should have been something like this: RewriteRule ^(.)/(?.)?$ $1$2 [R=301,L]

But no where to be seen. So no idea.

Hi Sorina,

This is a common thing and it all depends on a site's crawlability (how easy is it to crawl for the bot) and crawl frequency for that site. Google would have picked up that post first on the bad site and then from the good site. However, just because one or two posts were picked up late does not mean that the good site is not crawler friendly. It also depends on how far the resource is from the root. Let us take an example:

A page on a good site: abc.com/folder1/folder2/folder3/page.html

Now a bad site copies that page: xyz.com/page.html

In this case, Google might first pickup the copied page from the bad site as it is just a click away from the root which is not the case with the good site where the page is nested deep inside multiple folders.

You can also give the way back machine (archive.org) a try to find which website published the post first. Sometimes this might work out pretty well. You can also try to look at the cache dates of the posts on both the sites in Google to get some info in this regard.

Hope those help. I wish you good luck.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

A quick suggestion to you regarding PPC work. You can charge a part of the total adspend. I know many who charge 10% of the total PPC adspend. I also know people who charge based on the performance of the campaign like, per/lead. Hope it helps.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi, honestly, as long as the page you want to plant your link on does not allow many other doing the same, you should be good. If your content, back on your page gels well or is related in someway to the content of the linking page, it would be even better. To put it short, you should plant links on a clean site which in this case is and it does not matter how many such links you have. Such links will definitely have a positive impact to your SEO campaign.

Another suggestion would be, you should take enough care about your link profile and make sure it looks natural with links coming in from different quarters rather than only from a single source (type).

Good luck friend.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

100% agree with Alan here  as the purpose of rel=canonical implementation is to hint Google about the non-preferred pages (the duplicate or near duplicate pages of their original versions or the preferred ones) and not to index them.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

You are welcome my friend. A good website navigation can really help in this regard. The more easier for the Google bot to crawl your site, the better for Google to show site links in SERPs.

Wish you good luck.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi, those are sitelinks and are currently automated. There is no way you can force them at Google.

Here you go for more:https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/47334?hl=en

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi, while I do not know why Yelp uses 303 but all that I can say is 303 does not pass the link juice and it is not recommended to be used in place of a 301 as 301 is the best way to pass on the link equity to the destination URL.

Here you go for a small experiment that proves 303 redirection worthless. Hope this helps my friend.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Brother, I am sorry  but I don't see anything that says 'Right' or 'Left' in the current Google cache. Please copy the following and paste it in Google to find out:

cache:www.billigste-internet.dk

Let me know if you were able to see 'Right' or 'Left'

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Absolutely..we can also use the Fetch as Google feature to expedite the crawl..

Hi friend, the Google cache date is from 28th October and at that time, you had this in the source code:

# Forside

So now that you have changed the source code, you need to wait for Google's next crawl update for the page and you won't see those things in the cache.

Hope it helps.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Greg, we have done something similar in the past. Here is what we did:

We had few images (flow charts and stuff) and some of them acquired some decent links. So, we came up with pages that had content highly relevant to those images. We redirected all those to these new pages via 301. After few weeks we saw great results both in web and image searches. And yes, the link juice flows to the new pages though not that much which used to flow in the past but most of it will. Hope this helps.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Andrew,

The server on which your website is hosted is throwing a 500 server-side error. You better contact the hosting provider and get the issue fixed. You can use the HTTP header status checkers online like, web-sniffer.net and put the URL, http://www.interconnect.org.uk

All the other tools like W3C validator, http://builtwith.com/interconnect.org.uk etc gave the same result:

500 Internal Server Error

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi,

Here you go for an excellent write-up regarding local SEO: http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Greg, first things first.

The page /nov05 is the permanent page containing the content for the day on the website.  This means page /nov05 should have a Canonical Tag that points to itself and /foo should have a Canonical Tag that points to /nov05.  Correct?

For the page /nov05, why would you need to place a canonical tag? Canonical tag has to be placed on a non-canonical page (page that is not preferred to appear in the search results) pointing to the canonical page which is the preferred one. In case of a home page where it can have multiple variations like, www, non-www, index.html etc, you can go for a canonical tag pointing to itself. In case where someone copies your page as it is along with source code, a canonical tag pointing to itself can be beneficial as no matter where it is, the page would be pointing to the original page on your website. But in general, you don't need to have a canonical tag pointing to the same page on which it resides. This is not mandatory.

Coming to your original issue at hand. It is not a sin to have duplicate content on the website and the intention behind it matters way more than the duplication itself. I don't think you are doing anything wrong here. In a situation like yours, considering the importance of the page /foo, you should not be placing a canonical tag on it. The best solution would be to leave it as it is and don't bother about the issue. Search engines like Google are very well aware of situations like this and can handle very well. Those were my two cents in this regard.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi, here you go.....

RewriteRule ^(.)/(?.)?$ $1$2 [R=301,L]

Please note that the thing which looks like a capital V in the above rule is actually the backward slash and forward slash together.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi my friend, if you look at the cache of the URL you gave:

http://www.thinkdigit.com/top-products/Laptops-and-PCs/top-10-laptops-124.php  ::::  Click Me

You are actually looking at the source code of the following page:

http://www.thinkdigit.com/top-products/Ultrabooks/top-10-ultrabooks-153.php

To confirm this, look at the meta data in the source, it says Ultrabooks.

Now comes the issue where the rel=canonical implementation is incorrect on both the pages as they both point to themselves. Check out the source code of both the pages. Their rel=canonical attributes point to themselves. So as per my original explanation, Google is showing the cache of /top-10-ultrabooks-153.php for top-10-laptops-124.php which is the actual issue at hand. So when you look at the source code of cached page, you are actually looking at the source code of /top-10-ultrabooks-153.php page.

Best,

Devanur Rafi