Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi,

First things first, the page, http://www.thinkdigit.com/top-products/Ultrabooks/top-10-ultrabooks-153.php is not in Google's index.

Secondly, for both the phrases, 'top 10 laptops' and 'top 10 ultrabooks', the page,

http://www.thinkdigit.com/top-products/Ultrabooks/top-10-ultrabooks-153.php, ranks in the first position from your website, thinkdigit.com

So when you try to look-up the cache for a non-existing page in the index, Google tries to return the closest match and which is, http://www.thinkdigit.com/top-products/Ultrabooks/top-10-ultrabooks-153.php

I see a problem with the Sitemap.xml file for your site. Its not comprehensive and if you look at the cache of it in Google, you will see, the page, http://www.thinkdigit.com/top-products/Laptops-and-PCs/top-10-laptops-124.php is in there but its missing in the current Sitemap.xml file.

Here are three things you might do to make http://www.thinkdigit.com/top-products/Laptops-and-PCs/top-10-laptops-124.php in to the Google's index.

1. From Google webmaster tools account, Fetch as Google the above page and submit.

2. Come up with a comprehensive Sitemap.xml file

3. There is no reference to the Sitemap.xml file from Robots.txt file. You can add it as follows:

Sitemap: http://www.thinkdigit.com/sitemap.xml

You should be good after that. All the best to you my friend.

Regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi, when you have the rel=canonical implementation in place, you don't need to bother about noindex or nofollow for those pages as they will not be indexed. When you have noindex with nofollow in place, you don't need the rel=canonical implemented as it does not make any sense. Hope that helps my friend.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi,

If you want to focus on multiple niches using one domain, you have a huge task ahead (while this is highly recommended rather than coming up with multiple niche websites focused towards their corresponding niche). You would need content of great quality to cover all those niches. If you wish you make this domain to be able to rank high for different terms in multiple niches, you should prove the credibility of your website in terms of content quality and usefulness of it to the visitors. Take an example of websites like Wikipedia. They rank high for hundreds if not thousands of niches. So quality of the content is the key here.

Websites that try to target multiple niches with thin content will go no where in search engines and will be flattened within no time. By the way, big and authority websites with quality content can out perform niche websites (focused on a single niche) in many ways.

Hope you got the idea my friend.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Sam, my friend...please never think along those lines like how and why someone doing spam or blackhat tactics and still be able to rank high in search engines. Even if someone from Google guarantees me in written that there won't be anything happening to my site  if I go the blackhat way, I will still stay away from those as I am here to stay forever and I never ever think of doing anything that the search engines frown upon. Please don't bother about those who do blackhat and still get away with it. Thinking along those lines itself is incorrect. Let them do and they will repent one fine day. Today, there are thousands if not lakhs of sites that do not follow the guidelines of search engines and are still ranking high. Just because they are doing good despite their shady tactics, we should not follow them or even bother or worry about them. Its obvious that they are not doing the right thing and we just have to laugh when we see them. They won't last long. Here is the deal, if you want to be here forever, then stay clean.Only quality content and quality links can secure you a lasting high rank in Google.

However, you can report those spammy websites here:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreportform?hl=en

and here:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport

You need to login to your Google webmaster tools account to be able to access the URLs above.

So don't worry my friend. I know how does it feel when you see worthless sites ranking high in search engines.

We are here to play a fair game and not to manipulate the search results to rank high in search engines and please do not even think about those who try to out-smart the search engines and their algorithms. Wish you all the very best.

Regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Stu, as the root domain and sub-domain are targeting different geo-locations, moreoever Google treats the sub-domains a little more like a stand alone website, it is highly recommended to earn links for both of them individually, by all possible means from their respective geographies, I mean from the web properties operating or targeting audience in those geo-locations. For example, it would be odd for me to earn links for a Japanese website, targeting Japanese audience from web properties operating or targeting USA audience. Though this is not uncommon, it will not serve the purpose. Over and above this, fetching quality back links from any where is always recommended especially if those links are from authority web properties with high DA, PA and other SEO goodies like good Google PageRank etc..

I would conclude by addressing your question that fetching links to the root domain will not help much to make the sub-domain rank high in search results for many obvious reasons. Just like  we do deep link promotions for promoting pages other than the home page so that they can rank high for their respective target terms, we should be promoting the sub-domains also as if they were standalone websites so as to get maximum benefit from an off-page promotional campaign.

Hope it helps my friend.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Kamran,

For a quick solution, you can go in for rel=canonical implementation that will take care of the duplicate content issue. Here is how you implement rel=canonical: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en

Here is another good information about the mistakes regarding rel=canonical implementation:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html

rel=canonical implementation will be lot easier to go with and will fix the issues at hand. However, if you look in the long run, getting rid of the frames will be an ideal way to go with.

Hope it helps.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Stu, here is a quick link from Google that can guide you in this regard:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en

Once you go through it, please feel free to get back with further queries.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi, Redirect and RedirectMatch are two ways you can implement redirects on Apache web server. The RedirectMatch directive allows pattern matching while the Redirect directive is for a single file.

Here you go for more information: http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/301-redirect-with-mod_rewrite-or-redirectmatch.html#301_Redirects_RedirectMatch

Hope that helps.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi, country specific search engine spiders cannot be blocked using robots.txt file or any other method. However, you can block certain IP ranges pertaining to certain countries.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Amelia, while the link you mentioned covers it all, here you go for more insights while moving a domain:

http://moz.com/webinars/domain-migrations-lessons-from-the-moz-transition

and

http://moz.com/blog/domain-migration-lessons

Hope they help.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Just in case, you are not trying to look up the PR for the HTTPS version of it. Are you?

https://www.yourcityoffice.com/office-space.php

You cannot check Google PR for HTTPS pages by the way on many websites.

Gary, for the page, http://www.yourcityoffice.com/office-space.php

the PR is 3. Checked with different tools and they all show the same. Very strange.

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

Agree with Manny. Your site is absolutely fine Gary. I use the Search Status plugin on Firefox. You can also use PaRameter to check the Google PR for bulk URLs. Here you go: http://www.cleverstat.com/en/page-rank-software.htm

By the way, PaRameter is free

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

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 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

Hi there,

Please try again by removing the trailing slash at the end of the URL. It should be good.

So the URL should be:

http://lensoutloud.com/san-antonio-real-estate-photography

Hope that helps my friend.

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, 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 Andrew,

Let me start off with folkd.com. Its a very reputed social bookmarking website and there is no harm in having a link from there pointing to your website. Coming to how to evaluate a link, here you go:

http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/2012/06/link-removal-flowchart/

Its very useful and extremely helpful to perform link evaluation.

In general, the intent behind the link matters and it can be determined by looking at the factors like, number of outbound links on the page (pointing to different not so useful or credible websites), the relevancy of the page to you, Moz stats of the domain etc..

Links from websites like linkdirect.info, backlinks8.com, tolinkup.com, findyourlink.info, searchengineurl.com, websubmissionfree.com should be avoided like plague as their intent and sole purpose is to manipulate search results by providing a back link which would be absolutely of no use and can do more harm than good.

Hope those help.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi there, I assume, you want to generate an XML sitemap. If that's the case, you can try GSitecrawler? Its free. Here you go: http://gsitecrawler.com/

It has many options to include and exclude certain file types and all other features that you would need for the purpose and much more.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi there, blocking the HTTPS version of your pages from being crawled by the search engines is a bit tricky. You might need to come up with a separate robots.txt file to handle the HTTPS requests.

Here you go to know more about the process:

http://www.seoworkers.com/seo-articles-tutorials/robots-and-https.html

Hope it helps.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Here you go for everything about Google and Doubleclick partnership:

https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2472739?hl=en

Best

Devanur Rafi

Hi there, since 24th of September (though started on 23rd), Google Webmaster tools account does not show anything in the Search Queries section. There is absolutely no data in there

Definitely not a time to press the panic button as there is nothing that we can change from Google's end, we SEOs, now need to look at other SEO KPIs. Just another nightmare...and the journey goes on.....

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Sawan, as David suggested, you need to consolidate the data from different tools as no one tool gives you a comprehensive list of backlinks. You can check out Google webmaster tools account for your website as it gives you very good list.

Just because you have backlinks, you will not be able to drive traffic. It depends on what kind of websites have your link. If you look at your link profile, you can see directories forming the major part. This is 2013 my friend. Generic web directory submissions will take you no where. You need to promote your website on niche directories. You operate in a very narrow, B2B
niche and you should ideally be getting listed on directories like, indiamart.com, indianindsustry.com, tradeindia.com, infobanc.com etc.

You should also target websites or blogs or forums where people are talking about your niche who might be interested in your product line. You need a lot to be done on your website regarding on-page optimization also. You should perform a comprehensive keyword research and analysis to come up with the most searched keywords/phrases of your niche, optimize the content of your website for these keywords and so on. Essentially, you will be trying to make your website rank high in the search engines for good keywords in your niche.

Best of luck to you my friend.

Devanur Rafi

Agree with Martijn. A non-existing resource on your website should ideally pull up your custom 404 error file throwing an HTTP header status 404 and you should give an option to the visitor regarding what wants to do like showing him a link to the homepage. You can also include some links to other important pages of your website. But you should not redirect him to anywhere automatically.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Ben,

You should be using a 301, permanent redirection to redirect the non-preferred version of your website to the preferred version. This is the best way you can pass on most of the link juice to the preferred version of your website.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi,

I just checked the backlinks to www.apollopowersystems.com using Moz OSE and it says, 161 total links and 58 root domains linking to it. When checked with MajeticSE OSE, I got 858 total links and 148 domains.

Just wanted to let you know that different tools have different data update intervals and frequencies and no two tools will show you the same data. For more info about the backlinks, you can check the Google Webmaster Tools account for the website in discussion. Hope that help. Please feel free to post all your queries you might have in this regard.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Brad, my take on this would be to remove the site-wides, leave the link only on homepages and no-follow them. In the past and recently I have seen few instances where a web design firm left its link on the websites built by them. Later, some of those websites were never developed and left as it is with very thin content providing no value to the visitors and the Internet. In cases like these, you will be left with a low quality link pointing to your site. The other case would be what if those websites built by you will never get good content and moreover turn out to other shady businesses, you will have a big problem here too. Just not to take a chance, I would always recommend to no-follow your link on the homepages of websites that you build unless you are very sure about the credibility of the website or its owners. But as far as site-wides are concerned, big NO.NO.

Hope that help my friend

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi, I would stay away from any and all kinds of site-wide links for obvious reasons in this post Penguin update era. If I were you, I would have left the link only on the home pages of my clients' websites and of course no-follow them. As you know, more than the bad links themselves, its the intention behind those links harms you in the long run and Google is very good at finding the intention behind a link profile. So why take a chance my friend?

Here is a similar discussion about the topic recently:

http://moz.com/community/q/are-these-links-to-my-site-bad

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Keri got it right. With multiple websites all your SEO efforts are scattered and with all other operational overheads. Here is my take on this. One website, very stable, high and wide that will become an authority in the niche going forward. Let that one website  target all those keywords/phrases. There is really no need to come up with new keyword specific domains. There might be some level of keyword cannibalization with multiple domains targeting the same niche.

If at all you want to cross-link the domains you own, you should ideally make those links no-follow.

I conclude by saying, one big website with loads of quality content will always win over multiple small websites in many respects. Those were my two cents.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Thank you Karl and you are absolutely correct, if at all we go for cross linking, we should ideally no-follow those links just like we no-follow all the out-bound links pointing to websites that we think will be useful for our visitors. For example, a link to Wikipedia from a page on our website.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

I totally agree with Robert as having those against your website listing in SERPs can have a dramatic effect on the CTR.

No matter what, site-wide links are not recommended in the post penguin era. Other than the number of links, the intention behind having site-wide links matters which quite doesn't go down Google's throat easily. So better stay away from site-wides and blogrolls.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Understood my friend. By propagation, I meant the propagation of the sitemap.xml file for newly added preferred-version of the site and yes, you are absolutely correct. It takes a while for Google to get the stats for the preferred version. Yes, I knew you would be having a 301 in place already, I mentioned about it just in case

Wish you good luck for all your endeavors.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

You just need to add the sitemap for the preferred version and refresh the page. All your sitemap info will be readily available. Here we don't need to bother about it propagating or anything of that sort. As the sitemap.xml is still there where it was (in the root folder), nothing has changed for Google.

If you have not done this already, you should go in for a 301 permanent redirection from your non-preferred of your site to your preferred-version.

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 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

You are most welcome my friend. Improving the stickiness, as you said is a bit hard but if we can make it happen, then nothing like it. Let me share a personal experience here. Few years back, I had a client with an e-commerce site. The avg. time spent on the site was around 1 min and few seconds (sorry do not remember exactly). He wanted to improve it. When I saw the product pages, for example, a page related to a coffee making machine, the page had nothing but only the product image, description, features and a button to place an order. We then took some good videos of the product from Youtube and embedded them on to the page. We also added some related products to the right hand side of the page. We did this to all the product pages of the site and the results were very dramatic. The avg. site engagement times jumped to over 3 mins. Then we also had few clients whom we got gamification implemented on the site, small flash games related to the niche and this also got them amazing results. Site engagement time as you know is very important and Google knows who is sticking around and who is leaving once they click through the search results pages and land on a site.

Coming to your blog, I really enjoyed reading it and I would continue visiting it.

Good luck to you my friend.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

No problem Ruchi and thanks for the info. Its time to educate the clients

Broad match search volume numbers can be very, very misleading and the client should know about what broad match is all about and how it cannot help them, of course we need to first ask them what is that they want to do with those numbers. Good luck.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Shabbir,

Without digging deeper, I would like to say that your website is relatively new and please have a look at your competitors' websites and the time they have been online. You can use archive.org for the purpose. New websites can take time to gain the traction and 6 months is very little that too when you say, its an e-commerce website hence, cut throat competition. Its good that you have been getting 100 -120 organic visits per day. If you continue the way you have been doing, you should be in a good shape soon.

As you know, content that is unique, highly relevant, useful to the visitor and serves the purpose of their visit will do the magic for you. Please don't worry about websites that use low quality or scrapped content ranking at the top. Its not going to work for long (but can greatly depends on the kind of authority they have like DA and PA). In general, search engines have higher tolerance levels for highly authoritative websites.

I would like to conclude by saying, please do not worry as your website is very young and concentrate your efforts to improve the quality of your content, you can try to include some small videos and images (on the product pages) related to the products' functionality, features, USPs etc..improve the stickiness of your website (make your visitors hang out for reasonable amount of time on your site), earn links rather than building them desperately (I am sure, you will never do this as I read your blog). Try to build citations to your site from good websites and you know the rest.

All the best to you.

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

No problem my friend. You are most welcome. Once the redirection is in place, please double check that its indeed a 301 and nothing else. You can use any of the HTTP header status checker available online like web-sniffer.net or Screamingfrog.

Best,

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