Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Alex,

Without diving in to the issue of increased number of 404 errors being reported by Webmaster tools account, let us first look at the core issue where, 404 pages (non-existing resources) that return an HTTP header status code 200. These are called, 'soft 404 errors'. Ideally all the non-existing resources on the website should return an HTTP header status code 404 or 410 as per the situation and not a status 200 which is very confusing for search engines and a bad practice. This should be fixed immediately. Please have all such pages return 404 and not 200 as soon as possible.

Here you go for more about the soft 404 errors:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/181708?hl=en

and here to know more about when to return a 404 status code:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2409439?hl=en

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

I use GsiteCrawler all the time. Its free and gives you lot of options. You can get it here:http://gsitecrawler.com/

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Whoa Tom! I am glad to have similar thoughts as yours in this regard.

Hi Ben,

Just because you have an exact match domain name or keyword in your domain name, Google will not penalize. Google penalizes or intends to penalize such websites if they don't have credible content or don't provide any value add or do not justify a visit to them or do not serve the purpose or intent behind the visit to them. For example, thin affiliate sites that have any or all of the above qualities.

In an attempt to pull down or weed out such thin affiliate websites from top positions in the SERPs, search engines like Google may sometime seem to do injustice to some legit websites but this is very rare and soon such websites may crawl back to their deserving ranking positions. The point here is, Google wants to stop websites that do not have quality content from leveraging the advantages of an exact match domain name. If your website has quality content, does not rely on shady techniques to rank high along with other SEO goodies like fast loading pages, clear navigational hierarchy, useful and informative content, provides good user experience etc., then Google will not have any problem with the exact match domain name.

Google will definitely frown upon websites that have exact match domain names, which are very young and do not provide a value add to its visitors with little to no credible or unique content. The intent behind coming up with exact match domain names should be clean and I think Google wants to discourage or change the perspective of webmasters who want to enjoy the undue advantages that an exact name domain name brings along.

Hope it helps and am sure other Mozers will add their valuable views in this regard.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi, let us take a scenario. test.html has been blocked using robots.txt file. In this scenario, the bots that respect the robots exclusion protocol will not crawl the page to encounter the page level robots noindex attribute. So does not make any sense to use both the page level robots exclusion method and server side robots.txt file.

Here you go for more:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93708

And here:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93710

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

The very first thing that I would ask the traffic seller is about the referrer information of the traffic. Have seen many of the traffic sellers online and used many of them for SEO experiments. Almost all of the cheaper ones drive traffic from PTC or PPV ad networks, some of them spoof the referrer information to look like coming from organic searches.

To cut short the story, traffic like like will be of no use if not harmful (which it can be sometimes) from an SEO standpoint as this traffic will be almost all the time stale and is of no use. Would like to mention that the bounce rate of these types of traffic can be sometimes very impressive and looks very legit. This might be because of the ad networks' rules as to earn credit, they visitor should be on the page for so and so time and should browse at least so and so number of pages before exiting.

I have also seen that such traffic can be used to improve the Alexa Rank in many cases. Other than this, I have not seen any considerable advantages related to these kind of traffic sold by many so called traffic sellers online (the cheaper ones). Forgot to mention that most of these traffic will look either "direct" or some ad server's IP or host name in web analytics.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi there,

PR is one of the most effective ways to gain traction within minimum amount of time if done properly and a PR with unique content is the way you should go otherwise, the purpose behind gets a hit. Having said how powerful a PR can be, utmost care should be taken not to abuse it. We should be coming up with a PR only when we have a newsworthy article or some interesting stuff about something like a product launch etc. Over doing or releasing PRs too frequently will do more harm than good.

Hope that helps.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Andrew,

I saw this particular page being served over SSL. I don't see a reason that this page to be served over HTTPS. If you want Google to crawl and index it, put it outside the secured portion of your website. I have seen this issue many times in the past. It is as simple as this:

"If you want search engines to crawl and index any resource of your website, you better keep it out of the secured portion of it"

Hope this helps my friend.

BTW, Google does not index all of your pages served over SSL and ideally, the HTTPS portion of your website should be blocked from search engines otherwise, the purpose behind it is not served.

In Google search engine, you can check for HTTPS URLs in Google's index as follows:

site:invoicestudio.com inurl:https

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

If you can then, by all means you should get a link from the homepage. This would be far more powerful back link compared links from internal pages. Higher the PR, higher the link juice passed. By the way, a back link from an internal page with PR 2 is not bad either as most of the time, your back links from an internal page would have a PR of 0.

Hi Sameer,

Its very good that you managed to get a link from an internal page that has a Google PR 2 from a domain whose homepage has a PR 5. Without going in to stuff like the link relevance etc., I would like to tell you that a link from an internal page of a good PR 5 domain will always have a positive effect on your website's link profile, from an SEO stand point.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Carla,

Good to know about your project's completion. I would be happy to have a look at it.

Best regards,

Devanur

First things first, with 1500 daily visitors, its unlikely to lower the Alexa Rank to 1500 as your current rank (4,497) itself is far better than your website can ask for. As the other members mentioned, putting your effort to lower your Alexa Rank is absolutely useless, it would be great if you can let us know what is that you want to achieve with this. Does it in any way add value to your organization's bottom line? Or you want to do it just because someone has asked you to? If you can throw some light on these, we will be able to help you with your goals.

If you are hell bent on lowering your Alexa Rank, you can ask all your friends and family to install the Alexa Toolbar and ask them to visit your website.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Dear Jonathan,

Moosa and Kane have given nice insights. Here are my two cents. No matter what, an original piece of content which is unique, fresh, relevant and link worthy, always gets great traction online and goes viral with little to no help. So all that we need is try and come up with such content. All the SEO goodies will follow it after...

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi there,

Its still a highly debated question whether or not if search engines like Google use WHOIS info while ranking a website. Even if you make your WHOIS info private, Google being an accredited ICANN registrar, they can access your WHOIS info.

Now coming back to the question at hand, if search engines use WHOIS info while ranking.

There was an instance in my experience where a client's websites were penalized because they had multiple domains that targeted the same set of keywords /phrases and were ranking in the first page. While the client took all the care to keep those websites look different in all possible respects  like the design, look and feel, navigation, content and even the link profiles of these domains, separate webmaster tools accounts and none of them were interlinked or cross-linked etc., the one obvious thing that was not changed was  the WHOIS info behind these domains which was same. So this incidence in particular made me believe that the search engines like Google might not leave any stone unturned in an effort to put a check on the quality of their search results and also to minimize the chance of any one individual or company trying to grab multiple positions in the first page of their results pages.

That was my experience but I would suggest you to be honest and complete while filling the WHOIS info.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi there,

While it is ok to have substantially similar content reachable from different URLs intended for different geo-located audience, taking few precautions will minimize the confusion for both the search engines and the visitors. Here is what Google has to say in this regard:

"If you have several alternate URLs targeted at users with the same language but in different locales, it's a good idea to provide a generic URL for geographically unspecified users. For example, you may have specific URLs for English speakers in Ireland (en-ie), Canada (en-ca), and Australia (en-au), but want all other English speakers to see your generic English (en) page, and everyone else to see the homepage. In this case you should specify the generic English-language (en) page for searchers in, say, the UK. You can annotate this cluster of pages using a Sitemap file or using HTML link tags like this:

For language/country selectors or auto-redirecting homepages, you should add an annotation for the hreflang value "x-default" as well:
"

For more info:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077&topic=2370587&ctx=topic

&

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2013/04/x-default-hreflang-for-international-pages.html

Hope the above help.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

The cache date and crawl date need not necessarily be the same. This was pretty evident till late 2006 but after that Google changed this to great extent but still there are lot of technical limitations where it is not possible or rather I must say not feasible or unnecessary (Google also uses the, 'if modified since' status to know if a page has been updated or not) to update the cache date every time they crawl a page.

Here are two URLs that will give you more info in this regard:

1. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/video-crawl-dates-in-the-google-cache/

2. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2006/09/better-details-about-when-googlebot.html

3. Most importantly: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-cache-update-12686.html

We see these cache date anomolies daily in our job and personally I have seen these for over a decade. Once you hit the main stream SEO where you start working for clients realtime, you will see these first hand.

Regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Nitin, thanks for stopping by and posting your reply. Just a word of caution regarding Google's cache date. Sometimes, even if the cache date shows an older date, Google might have already updated the changes done to the page recently and it would have included those changes in its index which can be seen in the search results.

Let us take an example:

some changes were made to abc.com/test.html on 7th of April and when we check the cache date on 9th of April, it still shows on older date prior to 7th when the changes were made to the page but, when we check the page in the search results of Google, the changes made would have been already updated  and can be seen in the search results.

Hi there,

First things first, Google does not guarantee to use the mark up to display rich snippets in its search results for any website. The time taken to display rich snippets may vary from website to website depending on lot of factors and if you have trouble with Google not displaying the rich snippets for your website, you can check out the following URL:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1093493

Hope this helps.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Jayneel,

In this case of yours, you should ideally go in for URL canonicalization as you are dealing with content duplication due to product category pages.

For more info : http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139066

Here is another one from Google regarding the duplicate content issues:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359

Hope these help and please feel free to post here if you have any queries in this regard.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi there,

There are no thumb rules about the repetition of your targeted term in the description or for that matter any where on the website. Titles and Descriptions can be used to optimize and maximize the click through rates for your website from the search engine results pages.

Try to come up with enticing and compelling titles and descriptions that will literally force the visitor to click through. Just make sure to capture the crux of the title within the first 65 characters including spaces as Google strips beyond that and for descriptions, its 150 characters including spaces.

Descriptions are concise summary of what the page is all about and they should go hand-in-hand with content of the page that they belong to. They should complement the titles in some form. Titles and Descriptions can be descriptive and at the same time can also have a strong call to action if possible.

Having said the above, make sure you include the target term in the description and if possible a call to action to maximize the click through rate. As it is not always possible to include a call to action in the description, you can follow the guidelines given by Google at the following URL:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35624

Hope that helps.

Best regards,

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.

Yes my friend, it is true that there will be a small amount of link decay with 301 but as you know, this is the best solution out there for the purpose.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Yes, with a correctly implemented 301 re-direction mechanism in place, your new domain will get all the link love inherited from the old domain within few weeks.

Here you go for more info:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83105

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi there,

If you are bothered about Google indexing multiple URLs that lead to the same page, you can try using the parameter handling tool in Google Webmaster Tools account. For more info:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1235687

Hope this helps.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Scott,

If you want that page to rank for that particular long tail term, you should by all means create that page and make sure to link (if this term is very important) to it from the homepage from within the content or by a text link from somewhere on the homepage with the exact anchor text. You should ideally link to that page with the exact anchor from other pages of your website also.

Best regards,

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 Luis,

You can do a change address in Google webmaster tools account once the 301 re-direction is in place.

Here you go for more info:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83106

For more about moving your website:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83105

Best regards,

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.

Hi Pete,

While going for a listing in free directories (except handful of good ones with DMoz being at the top) is quite futile, the paid ones with editorial control will be beneficial. Top paid directories like, Yahoo directory, botw.org, business.com etc are still good to go for.

You can refer to this video by Matt Cutts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rKUlVquEImc

It all boils down to how much editorial control is exercised over the listings compared to automated listings.

Hope it helps.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Great post Matt. You nailed it.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

No problem my friend. You are most welcome. If you wanted to go for HTTPS intentionally then it is ok. However, it seems Google does not treat HTTPS the way it should as of now. Probably at some point later this may change and who know if they have already rolled it out and it is just under way. Bigger changes like this take time to propagate fully through out. Till that time, all that we can do is sit tight and have our fingers crossed

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi there,

Though as per Google, it is ok (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeFo4ytOk8M) to go for https for your entire website, personally, I saw in many instances where https URLs find it very difficult competing with http URLs in Google.

Normally, I do not see a need to go in for https for plain pages that do not need to be served over https. Only the secure pages that might need a login to access them may be served over https. Hope our friends over here will jump in with their views.

Let me conclude by saying, I would go for http for all the pages that I desire to rank high in Google and this view is based solely on my personal experience.

Hope it helps.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Excellent answer by Gil. Thanks for the great post. The purpose behind the search engines' very own existence is to provide and present the visitors with, the most relevant and comprehensive information about the search term and as long as your pages provide this to the visitors, they will rank high in the search engine results pages and can possibly withstand the future algorithm changes.

Hi Carla,

Thanks for stopping by and asking a question. While there are many great websites that implemented parallax scrolling, only few of them were able to strike a balance between both, SEO and UX. Please accept my sincere apology for not being able to name them here for many obvious reasons. However, let me tell you few things about your project at hand. If your website is not in to creative niches like, design (can be website design also), art, e-commerce (catalogue websites), studio etc..

1. you should be giving more emphasis to the quality of the content and its size on the homepage especially if you want to rank for any keyword /phrase using with your homepage.

2. Good content of about 600 words should be great with a keyword density of around 1% (this is excluding the keyword presence in other indexable content on the page like the meta information, heading tags, image alt text, image titles).

3. Good code to text ratio, though this is not a hard and fast rule. Personally, I like it to be around 25%.

4. Sizeable content in the first fold and this does not mean to dump all your content in the first fold.

5. Other on-page SEO factors.

If you are into the creative niche, you can lean a bit more towards the UX side.

Hope the above help and again please accept my apology if my response has not lived up to your expectation.

I wish you all the very best for your up-coming project.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

This depends on your target requirements. If you want to target Sony followed by generic terms then you go with domain.com/sony/abc-product or if you want to target generic terms then you go with domain.com/abc-product/sony

Keeping the targeted term close to the root domain will have slightly better chances to rank compared to being away from the root in some sub-directory. And again other factors like the link profile of that page also matters a lot. So you try to earn more quality links to which ever page you want to rank for.

So you first decide upon your targeting strategy that may depend on search volumes of the search terms and the commercial intent behind these terms etc.

Regards,

Devanur Rafi

Oh, Ok got that. In this case you can go ahead and have domain.com/sony/tv

if you are targeting Sony TVs and domain.com/sony/dvd-player/ ideally to target Sony DVD players.

Regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi there,

Google or for that matter any legit organization should be very cautious with their privacy policies and stuff like that. Its part of their legal requirements. They try to implement these with whom ever they work for or with. From an individual's stand point these may sound silly but its a best practice to have a privacy policy statement, an About US page and a page of Terms and Conditions for all your web properties. These pages can instill the much needed trust factor among your visitors.Hope this helps.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi there,

Technically, with parallax scrolling, you are dealing with a single page. Ideally, from an SEO stand point, it is highly recommended to target one keyword /phrase per page. So if you are targeting one keyword with your parallax scrolling page, provided you have good content on it, then you are good. Especially after the page layout algorithm from Google, it is good to have sizeable content in the top fold. This holds good for any type of websites.

There is no doubt that with a technique like parallax scrolling you will definitely grab a lot of attention and love from your visitors, in fact this can heighten the site engagement times to a great extent. So the user experience is taken care of as long as the page serves the purpose of its visitors. So SEO is all about striking a balance between pleasing the visitors and search engines. You can take care of finicky search engine spiders by giving them what they love and that is great content with right keywords taking the right places on the page.

As far as SEO is concerned, targeting multiple keywords /phrases on a page leads to keyword dilution and we should ideally target a single keyword /phrase per page.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Sam, you can definitely use the list on SEOMoz. However you can also have a look at the directories' PageRank, Alexa Rank (yes this helps sometimes), number of indexed pages related to your subject from the directory in Google and the list can go on..

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Sam,

To be frank, you do not need to do deliberate link building activities to be able to rank in SERPs. However, the above statement greatly depends on the quality of the content that a page has and other on-page SEO factors. Pages with great content acquire links in a natural way as good content will be syndicated by active bloggers and webmasters all over the Internet.

So to answer your question, you can try to earn links by giving out (posting) quality content in the form of articles.. You can post these articles to the top article directories. Stick to top 5 and you should be good. Please be careful not to submit the same article to multiple article directories. This is how to can squeeze the most out of your article marketing effort.

You can also submit unique articles to top document sharing sites. Another method to expedite the process of acquiring links by contributing some quality work is, to join forums that operate in your niche and actively participate in them by doing some legit postings. Though most of the forums incorporate nofollow on the external links, this should not stop you in anyway from doing forum posting. Please never look at if a link is followed or not followed as long as you are adding some real value. Legit, highly relevant and informative content automatically becomes a links magnet.

There are other legit ways of acquiring legit links but the above should keep you busy enough. Hope these help.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Vikas,

To host a blog on your website there are numerous approaches. You can have Wordpress installed on a domain in its root folder or you can install Wordpress in a sub-directory (domain.com/WP/, you can re-name WP to blog so that it becomes domain.com/blog/ ) or you can install Wordpress on a sub-domain (blog.domain.com) etc. Personally I have had great success with installing Wordpress on a sub-directory. This way, I am not separating my blog content from its root and moreover adding strength to the root domain in terms of all SEO goodies. Hope this helps.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hello friend,

If you are serious about ranking for the brand 'Sony' then you should be at least for the first one year or two targeting the very long tail versions of the brand. Even after one or two years I will not be able to rank for a short branded term like 'sony tv' in the top 10 results looking at such a big brand and lot of top online stores competing. Even if someone work their whole life optimizing a page for a generic branded term, it is not possible to be able to out rank the brand's website for the term. Example would be, I cannot take away Microsoft's rank in SERPs for the term 'windows' no matter how hard or how long I try optimizing a page for it.

Coming to your question, if your page consists only Sony TVs and your targeted term is 'sony tv', it would make sense to name your URL, domain.com/sony-tv

Ranking in the top 10 or even top 5 in SERPs for long tail branded terms is possible even today with exceptionally well written content with all the SEO elements in place. For example, you can try to rank for a term like this: 'samsung smart led tv d7000'

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Ali, my friend it seems someone is trying to do some negative SEO. First of all, by all means try and stop the guy/s from doing this. Next, try to contact the respective webmasters to have those rogue links removed. Then, use the Disavow tool in Google webmaster tools account and submit a request with proper documentation and details.

For more info about disavow: https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2648487

Good luck.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Ali,

Your ranking is directly related to your content, on-page optimization and off-page optimization (link popularity). So if you want your pages start ranking for different variations of a keyword, you should be adding content related to these variations (each page targeting one keyword / phrase), you should be doing the on-page optimization keeping the emphasis on the targeted term for that page and placing it in places like title, description, H1 and other heading tags (H1 is recommended and others are optional), page's content (along with few tightly related variations to the targeted term. The keyword density can be around 1% in the article content of the page i.e. excluding to the term present in the other crawlable content like, the meta information, image attributes etc), in the anchor text of your internal links, in the image names, image titles, image alt text, bolding, italicizing the term in text etc and in your link building activity with approximates 20 to 25 % with exact term as an anchor.

For your second question, you can submit a sitemap through Bing webmaster tools account.

Hope these help.

By the way, any particular reason whey you used the term, "buy cocks" as an anchor in majority of your backlinks??

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi,

If I were you, I would have thought about the user experience and the better logical site structure rather than thinking about my rank in SERPs. Its always good to go by a URL structure that is logical, simple, easy to comprehend. So having the product category (in this case tv) next to domain name followed by the brand is more logical URL structure. Coming to the rankability of a page, it depends on lot of parameters with the quality of content being at the top. Of course having a page as close as possible to the domain's root is good when it comes to crawlability factor but this cannot be a substitute to the quality of the content that the page has on it. Hope this helps.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi,

To reduce the bounce rate of your landing pages, you can have some teasers on them that lead to other pages. For one of my clients, I did the same. I added product related textual and graphical teasers to the landing pages with high bounce rate. When the visitors clicked on those teasers they are taken to another page on the same website that will have some how to videos and / or slides. This strategy worked pretty well for my client. One thing that you have to remember is that when including teasers on these high bounce pages, these should be tightly related or belong to the same subject matter of these host pages they reside in.

Coming to the question related to if high bounce rate is good or bad, it all depends on the purpose behind the existence of these pages. Take for example, a visitor lands on a Wikipedia page in search of a topic. He reads the article and leaves Wikipedia. In this case, the page on Wikipedia served the purpose behind its existence and the visitor got what he wanted. Bounce rate on Wikipedia is good in this regard.

Hope that helps.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

I strongly agree with David's response. You will never be penalized to have a BBB logo linking out to their site. Infact, its good for your website's trust factor among your visitors. However, you can nofollow your BBB logo link though this will have little to no effect. So the conclusion is there is absolutely nothing to worry about this issue and all that you have to worry about are the link building techniques or methods that you employ to grow your website's link popularity. Make sure you earn links by good content that automatically earns links from good neighborhood rather than being an active and deliberate link builder.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Kollin,

No matter what, for me a blog has always been synonymous with Wordpress because of unmatched options to customize, very easy on-page SEO opportunity with very nice plugins and the list can go on...

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.