Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Vikas,

As you know the country specific TLD is a strong hint to Google about the target audience for the site, personally I do not recommend this approach of having a different place in the domain name with an entirely different geo-specific TLD ext. Its confusing for both the visitors and the search engines. Here we have to also look at how important is the user experience factor from search engines point of view and I strongly feel that UX can be a very important factor while ranking a page in Google going forward if its not already one today.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi,

For people to care or not to care about the Google places listings in the SERPs may largely depend on the search term and the intention. If they are doing a search to find a Dentist in so and so location, then the Google places listings can serve the purpose of search and if the search is intended to find out information or to check out a product or prices, then these Google places listings will be skipped by the searcher. Despite of all these, wherever or whenever possible, we have to get our website optimized for Google places also.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

No problem friend. You are most welcome.

That's true Ayaz. 301 does not serve the purpose in this case. As you have stopped this, sit tight and let us see how the 301 from the sub-domains to the sub-directories setup works. As far as my experience goes, adding new, unique, original and fresh content will speed up the process to come out of a penalty if there has been applied any.

Wish you all the best.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Ayaz, by now you should have asked those guys to stop this thing. If you have not, please do so quickly. Coming to undoing these, even I don't have a clue. Most of these would be some fake accounts or accounts created for only this purpose. The best thing you can do as of now is to stop this from growing further. Moreover, we are not sure about if these inflated social signals are the cause for the drop in the rankings. Gut feeling says, there is nothing that you should be worried about and these are not the ones responsible for the loss. Having that said, please stop this immediately and consult your SEO guy who did this and find out what he has to say about this.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Ayaz,

Though I cannot tie a knot with a proof between the drop in your rankings and the artificially inflated social signals in this case, I can definitely say one thing that Google can sniff things like these very easily and it would be too late before you even realize the axe coming down on you. As we know that social signals have strong impact on the search engine rankings in certain niches, we should not try to play with these with an intention to get a boost in SERPs. Next time when you hire an SEO or SMO please make sure to get a list of deliverables from them. Black hat or acts of cheating search engines might work temporarily but you should run away from them by all means if you want to be safe.

Best regards,

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 Bob,

All of us SEOs run into situations like this very often where a client's website though not up to Google's guidelines performs well in the search engines and we as SEOs tend to correct these so called, 'not so Google compliant' elements despite apprehensions from both the client's side and our side about these changes being made.

Personally, I always stick to what's going to be a winner in the long run and go ahead and implement it. At times, we might need to educate our clients about the purpose behind these changes. We have to make it very clear that, just because something is working out really well does not mean it will do so forever and it takes just another update from Google with some black and white animal name to make the website vanish overnight from the SERPs.

Believe me my friend, I did a lot of practical research with live domains that I maintain which are dedicated just for the search engine tolerance level tests and learned the above. Whenever I train someone in SEO, I always urge them to stick to the best practices and they can reap the fruits from search engines. Going or taking the other route might give you or your client some temporary gains but in the long run, this will not only destroy the rankings of your website but also leave a big dent to your reputation.

Always remember, a happy customer might fetch you one or two new customers but an unhappy customer can sometimes cause irreparable damage.

Let me cut the crap and conclude by saying, please have those titles re-written in a descriptive way and so enticing that they literally force the visitors click through the listing in the SERPs. If possible, include a call to action in the description. And always remember to push the brand towards the end of the title and let the primary keyword /phrase be at the beginning. Also never include multiple keywords/ phrases in the title tag as this will leave the search engines confused. Ideally wherever or whenever possible, optimize a page for only one keyword/ phrase

The above is based on my experience and please do consider the other valuable suggestions that our friends write in here.

Good luck my friend.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Richard,

PageRank differs from page to page and it depends on the inbound links for a particular page.

So, if you see different PR for your homepage and any other page, there is nothing to worry and its not that Google treats them two different domains. Coming to your query regarding the sub-domain for your news section, please go through the discussion given below:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/multiple-subdomains-my-worst-seo-mistake-now-what-should-i-do

Good luck.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

No problem my friend. You are most welcome. As most of your site gets served through https, you need to have your http version of URLs re-directed to their https equivalents. I repeat, HTTP to HTTPS. Make sure that the re-direction gives an HTTP header status message 301 and not anything else. If you do so you do not loose any of your efforts put in to building links to the https version.

You can check the HTTP header status messages for your URLs by using any of the tools like the one found here: http://web-sniffer.net

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi,

there is no fixed time after which or under which an indexed page starts appearing in the SERPs.

I just checked your sitemap.xml file and it has only the https version of the URLs. In the index, I saw non https version is URLs are also listed. So there is no consistency. You have decided to serve the entire site in https and parts of it are still non-https. Serving the pages in https puts an overhead on your server. This might result in poor page loading times. If you have good resources on the server side, then this should not be a problem.

Though guys at Google say they don't care if the URLs are https or http when in comes to ranking but here I would like to mention as site loading time is an official ranking factor, when Google comes across two similarly capable and eligible pages competing for the same keyword, the one that has better loading times will be favored. By the way,  can you let me know the reason behind serving the entire site in https?

Your linking profile is not at all consistent. You build links to http://www.peprismine.com and https://www.peprismine.com

Please beware that http://www.peprismine.com, though it takes you to https://www.peprismine.com, it does not give an http header status 301 instead it gives a status 200 message. This should be fixed immediately. If you get this fixed, I think you should be fine technically but be careful with pages being served over SSL as this tends to screw the page loading times sometimes. You might want to look in to this. Don't blindly go by the page speed test scores instead, look at the actual page loading times. You can do a test here: http://www.urivalet.com and also go ahead and perform a test at webpagetest.org and check out the performance review section.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi there,

Straight into the meat:

1. My pages were indexed by google few days back. How long does google take to display the URL in SERP once the pages get indexed ?

A. Once the pages are in the index they become eligible to appear in the SERPs but, where they appear, on which page and in which position will they appear depends on lot of factors like the competition for the search term, your content, the back links that you have and the list goes on.

2. Does google give more preference to websites with more number of pages than those with lesser number of pages to display results in SERP (I have just 50 pages). Does the NUMBER of pages really matter ?

A. To a little extent and in some cases yes, but this again depends on the quality (in terms of relevance, uniqueness, originality etc, etc, ) of the content on a website, the quality of its link popularity and all the other 200+ factors that Google considers before positioning a website in the SERPs. To put it straight, you do not need to worry about the number of pages if your content is of pristine quality and highly relevant as per Google.

3. Does removal / change of URLs have any negative effect on ranking ? (Many of these URLs were not shown on the 1st page)

A. If the URLs being removed had duplicate content then in this case you will not have any negative effect.

Over a period of time, gradually, on an as and when required basis, keep adding pages that target one search term per page with relevant, unique and up-to-date content. This will result in a positive change in your organic traffic numbers. And very importantly, do not build links desperately from all the places. Earn links, that is what I would say, you have to earn links by giving a reason for your visitors to visit your website.

1. Try to earn links from authority sites in your niche. Links like this fall in the tier 1 category.

2. Get links from generic authority websites (like Wikipedia) by posting quality content. This would be your tier 2.

3. Get links from similar theme (sites that operate in your niche) websites. These links can be your tier 3.

4. Finally, earn links from generic web properties like forums, blogs, social networking sites, social bookmarking sites etc. These would be your tier 4 links.

A very important thing to keep in mind while doing the above is, "the quality of the content being posted". Be specific and try to address an issue or provide a solution in your posts. Never engage in low quality link exchanges and bulk link building. Above all, keep asking yourself all the time, "why should anyone visit my website?", "what can I do to make a visitor's visit to my website worthwhile" and " what should I do to make my website to give a better user experience or a better advantage than that of my competitors?"

With questions like the above, you will be able to secure a  good longstanding and enduring position in the SERPs for your website.

Also be an active participant in social sites to attract good social buzz. Social signals are very good for your search engine optimization efforts and they can give a boost to your SEO efforts.

Wish you good luck.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

No problem my friend. Your re-direction setup works perfectly with an HTTP header status 301. It might take anywhere from 2 to 5 weeks for you to be able to see the effect. Please keep posting the updates in here. I wish you all the very best for all your endeavors.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Ayaz,

As you say that the sub-domains have their own original content, then please go ahead and put a 301 re-direction to the respective sub-directories on the main domain. Everything should be back to normal as per my personal experience goes. IMO, sub-domains can never be considered sub-directories by any search engine as for Google, sub-domains should be created only when the purpose of their creation is thoroughly justified with much needed diversity like a blog or a forum and/or a topic that deserves branching from that of the main domain's.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Thanks a lot Matt for those encouraging words.

Hi there,

straight answer would be, diversity in the anchor text makes your links look natural and they can have an in-direct positive impact on your SEO efforts overall.

Anchor text diversity will not have a direct impact (positive) for your SEO efforts as the search engines will not be able to relate the text in the anchor with that of the landing page's content.

But anchor text diversity will have an in-direct positive impact because of the fact that the search engines will see or feel your links growing naturally with varied anchor text which is the case with super authority big websites on the Internet. Hope this helps.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Hitesh,

There are hell lot of signals that can be picked up by the search engines and find which bunch of websites belong to a person or organization. Let us not get in to those but if you are hell bent on how to fly safe under the radar and still be able to do cross linking you can look at changing the information with your domain name registrar (if both websites were registered using common name, address and stuff). Try changing the Admin, tech contact info and registrant info. You can definitely go in for a different IP and preferably a different class C IP. Look at the website architectural traces, design traces and anything in common like addresses etc. Despite doing all these, we can resist ourselves accessing both websites at the same time from the same machine and from same IP. The list continues... but if you have good content on both the sites and if you are not doing too much linking, you should be fine as there is nothing to worry about. Moreover, there is nothing wrong about linking all my websites with an intention to introduce my other websites to a visitor on one of my websites.

The conclusion is, if you are not doing a heavy cross linking, you don't need to worry about it. Above all, the domains' authority plays a big role in cases like this.

Good luck.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hey Ayaz,

I can put myself in your shoes as I faced the exact issue few years back and this worked like a charm. I am not sure that the following will work for you too but can be looked at along with other good suggestions that you will get here at SEOMoz.

The only thing that I did was, I re-directed all the sub-domains via 301 to their respective sub-directories on the same domain. For example: abc.example.com 301 to example.com/abc/

Within 3 weeks, I was jumping with joy as I not only re-gained what I lost in organic visits but also the numbers got better by little over 9%.

I had unique and original content on the sub-domains. But, these sub-domains were not attracting much traffic and moreover the traffic to main domain dwindled but when these sub-domains were re-directed via 301 to their respective sub-directories (I created those sub-directories just for this purpose), everything was back to normal with additional traffic. Since then, I have been an advocate of sub-directories over sub-domains for obvious SEO benefits.

By the way, did you move any of your main domain's content to the sub-domains?

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Chitra,

If you have used the disavow links tool correctly then you should not worry much about the low quality links. Once you have uploaded the list of bad links, it might take few weeks for Google to stop considering those links pointing to your site. But you must be damn sure that those low quality links are actually causing your website rank low or affecting it in anyway. Disavow links tool is very powerful and should be used with utmost caution.

The best thing is to try and check with the webmaster to have those removed. Other than this there is not much that anyone can do. If you are losing too much in revenue and stuff like that then you might consider to take legal actions against those.

Good luck.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Dear Mark,

The answer lies in your question and depends on your decision as whom you would like to promote or build reputation for. So, if you want to build the rank for your brand, you go ahead and do so and if you want to build the author rank for a person (he is your brand in this case), you go for it. Let us take a look at a scenario. Suppose, I own multiple brands, I would build author rank for my name so that I would be recognized as the one behind all these brands. I am the brand here. Coming to your case, if I were you, if this brand is going to be my biggest investment or a dream project, I would stick to building the author rank for my brand as going forward, I can leverage the brand name and use it to my advantage.  Suppose, I am likely to come up with multiple web properties or brands in future, I would rather build the author rank for my name as I am the one standing behind all these brands or web properties and I want all the recognition and all my current and future brands can leverage my recognition.

Please note that the above opinion is personal.

Best,

Rafi

You are most welcome my friend.

Best regards,

Rafi.

Hi Harvey,

Domain name registrar in no way can affect SEO but the server location may a little bit in some cases. Here you go for more information:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.es/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html

However, if your website serves the global audience, then you should not worry about your hosting server location.

So the answer to your question is, Domain Registrar cannot and will not affect SEO of a web property.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Dear Chris, to the best of my knowledge and experience, an expired SSL certificate does not result in lowered impressions especially when you say that you checked the index for https URLs being indexed and did not find any. Have you looked at the Google Webmaster Tools account for the website if one exists? You might get good insight in to the issue at hand from there.

Guys, if anyone of you have a different experience, please share it with us.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi there, if you have setup the canonicalization correctly, you do not need to worry about the duplicate page title errors. However, please make sure that all the pages on your website have unique page titles and descriptions except for those you have canonicalization in place.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

No problem my friend. You are most welcome.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Dear Nigel,

When you want your old domain to be partially moved on to a new a domain, you don't need to make changes in the Change of address section of webmaster tools account. You do a page-to-page (or 1:1) 301 re-direction for all the pages that you want to move from old domain to the respective pages on the new domain and perform all the steps out-lined at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-guide-how-to-properly-move-domains

Good luck.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi there,

Nothing makes a difference from an SEO standpoint unless you have good content in it. So, if you host a blog on your domain with good and relevant content that complements or goes hand-in-hand with your domain's theme or line of business, it would definitely add up to the strength of your domain overall going forward. Though its a sub-domain, treat it such that it is an entirely different domain, optimize it the way you would do any other domain. Personally, I would host the blog on my domain itself so that I don't run in to the weird world of cross linking problems especially when its hosted on the same IP address that my domain is hosted on. So if its a business need to have your blog separately, its better to go with a dedicated IP and also make sure it belongs to a different class C IP. We faced issues related to cross linking no matter how clean we tried to maintain them both. Please note that this is purely out of my experience.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Yes my friend. It happens with Google as they are trying hard and working towards their ultimate goal that is as follows:

"We would like to give the user what he wants and not what he types in the search bar"

So all that one can do is to just stick to the best practices, put in diligent and sincere efforts to make our websites provide a good if not the best user experience. I would also like to suggest you that if you can make the title, description and the content go hand-in-hand tightly, then you will not have to worry about Google picking up a title on its own. Yet, no one can guarantee even if you do so will make Google will pick-up the meta information that you mentioned.

No problem friend. If you remember the same happened with XML sitemaps standard. In the beginning there would be little resistance but going forward, the standards will be accepted and respected!!

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Also make sure that there is sizeable content in the top fold, keeping in mind the page layout algo update from Google.

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.

Don't worry my friend. Its been just 3 days. Wait for sometime and check for the issue. You should be doing good. There is one more thing in here. Google does not always show the same title in the SERPs that you specified on your website. It can pick anything that it feels relevant for the page. The possible places to pick would be, content of the page, your site's DMOZ listing and also the title can differ depending on the search term.

For more about this issue: https://productforums.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/webmasters/uuLNmyB0AlY

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

You are most welcome my friend. Your point is true to some extent as they want to bring in an uniformity in this case and they may tend to be biased towards the new standard a little bit so as to push it hard towards being widely accepted. So if you can, please switch over to the markup by schema.org or if lot of work has already been put in to this, you can just leave it as it is. Personally, I would switch over to the new standard by all possible means if there were a chance.

Good luck.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Tony,

How long has it been since you did a 301. Normally, it would take 3 to 5 weeks for the new changes to reflect in the SERPS.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi there,

There is nothing that you will be losing if you use the markup by microformats.org. However, to the possible extent, try to use schema.org as it is the standard that the 3 biggies in Search Engine landscape (Google, Microsoft and Yahoo) have come-up with. For more,

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1211158

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

By entering the URL of a website in the Website box in Google keywords tool, you are instructing Google to go and get the keywords hints from the URL to come up with the list of related keywords and phrases. So as Wikipedia pages cover any topic comprehensively, there is a good chance that the keyword list prepared this way will give you a solid head start for your current job at hand.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Sure my friend. Please go ahead and you will get this done for sure!!

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

No problem my friend and thanks for the explanation. If you are going to repeat the event then there is no point in creating a new page for it. You can just add the new event to the same page mentioned under a different year. So the point is, the URL should not change but the page gets updated with the new event's info. This is very good from SEO standpoint also as the page will be constantly updated with new content and you will still enjoy all the link love that it accumulated over a period of time.

Hope this helps.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Martin, you can do one thing. Just go to Google AdWords keywords tool and make sure you are logged in to your Google account.

Once inside the tool, set the settings to All Locations and All Languages, type the following in the Website box: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welding

Hit Search. Export all the keywords and repeat the process for the following URL typed in the Website box:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_fabrication

Try to look for other related topic on Wikipedia and repeat the process till you have good list.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Ruud,

Straight into the meat. If you start adding all the events to the same page, then it would dilute the page's ranking capability as it would have to rank for multiple events (event names) and this is not recommended. So, the best thing for you to do would be, come up with individual even pages and let them rank for the specific event name. Doing this, you will not only be ranking well with even specific pages but also, the size of the website will also grow which is very good for your website going forward as the search engines like big websites with lot of unique content and there are better chances for big sites to become authoritative in the niche when compared to their smaller peers. Hope you got the point.

Good luck.

Regards,

Devanur Rafi.

No problem my friend and thanks for the info. Wordpress plugins, especially the re-direction ones are not at all dependable in IIS environment. Let me cut the crap and send you straight to the solution. Here you go...

http://www.make-awesome.com/2010/03/301-redirects-with-iis7-rewrite-module/

I wish you good luck.

Regards,

Devanur Rafi and yes, you can call me Rafi.

Hi, first of all we need more info about the method you used to set the 301 re-directs. Coming to your question regarding 301 re-directs in Wordpress, you can use any of the 301 re-direct plugins like, 'Simple 301 Redirects' etc.

If your website is hosted on Apache server (Linux hosting), you can use the .htaccess file to do the page-to-page 301 re-directs. I am not sure if you have already done that.

If you have used the re-direction plugin named, "Redirection", then there seems to be an issue. However, make sure that you use the accurate tools to check the HTTP header status messages like the following one:

http://www.webconfs.com/http-header-check.php

Regards,

Devanur.

Hi there, URLs with a trailing slash or without a trailing slash..this has been very much discussed and debated in the SEO circles for quite a long time. The fact is you can go with either of these but be consistent with what you go with through out your website. Personally, I would prefer all the URLs ending with a folder name go with a trailing slash and all the URLs that end with file names should end with proper file extension. And for me if anything ends without a trailing slash, it would be a file and not a folder (don't you think I am biased towards static websites?). This issue is very common with dynamic websites and to conclude, as your SEO guy rightly mentioned, there is absolutely nothing to worry about and Google will take care of this issue (rather a common practice or should I call it a mistake?) pretty well. Good luck.

Regards,

Devanur.

Hi Martin, you can take the steps outlined by SEO5 and also you can visit Amazon.com, search for the keywords, 'welding' and 'fabrication', take a note of the items that come up in the search, visit the product page of each of these products and also note the itemsthat Amazon mentions under the heading, 'people who bought also bought'. Put all these terms in Google AdWords keywords tool and bingo, you will have a very good list of related terms. Put your brain in to this a bit deep and add your creativity to further enhance the list. Sometimes, the shopping sites and specialized online portals for a particular product or niche can give you more than you can ever imagine while doing keyword research analysis and I do it all the time and the results will be outstanding as per my experience. Good luck.

Regards,

Devanur.

Hi there, looking at the very purpose behind hosting the blog on the domain itself, it is good that the blog matches the theme of the domain not going completely off the track. As you said, if you make screwdrivers and your blog talks about home improvement, its perfectly alright as you are discussing about the topic that your product is intended for or can be used for and also you are discussing about a problem or an issue that your product can address or solve.

To conclude, you do not need to worry about anything regarding the blog till you don't get distracted from the theme of your domain. Having a forum or a blog hosted on the same domain is to talk about topics that are directly or indirectly related to the theme of your domain.

Regards,

Devanur.

Hi Rich,

Here you are not hiding anything for the fact. Hiding text is something else that would involve matching the color of the text with that of the background etc. Here you are just tying to make a better UX by having the Read More button that will reveal the content. The content is very much there on the same page and your intention is very clear here. Believe me my friend, Google has mastered the art of finding out the intentions of Webmasters by looking at the page and you will not have to bother about anything in this case.

Regards,

Devanur.