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Hi,

So the news is that Google has started giving more importance to sites with HTTPS i.e. it is now a new ranking signal. It says that as of now it affects fewer than 1% of  global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high quality content but it may decide to strengthen it as they would like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.

In that case, what should we do? Switching from http:// to https:// means change in urls and low traffic. How to cope with it? Do we have to implement 'n' number of redirects?

Regards,

I suggest to go with the sub-folder option for simple reason - blog is the place for high quality content. It's better to have it within the sub-folder as it will attract links and will be delivered in the search results. It will help in building / promoting your website.

Having blog on a sub-domain or separate domain will require extra marketing efforts on your part.

If you are trying to build links via different IPs or proxies, it means you are doing something fishy.

Do it in an acceptable manner i.e. try writing original and quality content, don not submit the same piece of article at multiple sites and don't indulge in link schemes. If you can produce good content and attract natural links, it would be the best way to build long term profitable links.

I received this in my Private Messages section:

My name is Fatima,i saw your profile at/www.seomoz.org/today and became intrested in you,i will also like to know you the more,and i want you to send an email to my email address so i can give you my picture for you to know whom i am.Here is my email address (fatimababy06@yahoo.com) I believe we can move from here I am waiting for your mail to my email address above.Fatima(Remeber the distance or colour does not matter but love matters alot in life)

How can somebody spam like this on protected forum?

examlpe.html and example with the same content will be treated as duplicate pages. The best practice is to 301 redirect example.html to example.

Regards

Hi Peter,

It's better to have separate pages for blue widgets, red widgets etc. As far as backlinks are concerned, ask yourself - if I click this link and land on a page that doesn't answer my question, would it be a good user experience? There is no need to maintain any sort of proportion/distribution of links between the Home page and inner pages. Often, you may not get a chance to link the inner page. In that case you may vary the anchor text.

-Shailendra

My experience tells me that using hyphens (-) in domain names doesn't go well with the users. Even a single hyphen in the domain name is quite frustrating. Think as a user - would you like to type a lengthy domain name with multiple hyphens? Users might perceive it as a spammy domain.

It is better to use short domain names that are easy to remember. If you have run out of options and a long name is the only choice then avoid hyphens (-). Moreover, having a domain name same as the business name or kind of work is just one of the factors.

Regards

Hi,

Probably that page is having 100% bounce rate. This blog post may help you http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/standard-metrics-revisited-time-on-page-and-time-on-site/

Regards

If your motive is to support the main site with backlinks, I suggest you take it off. Google even penalized this arrangement in 2009 I suppose.

Regards

Hi Daniel,

These are known as Sitelinks. Please read this page: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/47334?hl=en

Point to note here is that you can demote up to 100 URLs, and demotions are effective for 90 days from your most recent visit to the Sitelinks page in Webmaster Tools.

Regards

I have read the blog posts by Rand and other community members at YouMoz but i still have a question on trageting and domains / sub-directories usage.

Suppose, my business is located in France but my prospects are in US and UK as well. The issue is, they are not English speakers but French.

• If i use ccTLD, i don't think it will rank well in US and UK.
• gTLD will not be a good option for prospects in France.

What should i do?

Regards,

Shailendra

I have used PR Web. This site has a good reputation when it comes to distributing local news in a single region. But more or less, both are same and difference in pricing could be a deciding factor

Why would you want to do it? Since you want to rank for the same term, it will only divide your resources as you will have to work on both of them.

Even if want to do this way, make sure not to go for illegitimate link building between the two domains. Moreover, Google is quite smart to identify SERP Hijacking methods.

My personal view is that directory listings don't help if they are not from very reputable and topical ones. Even if they are, their affect is very low. However, most of the paid listings are no-follow because in case Google detects link buying to affect PageRank, it penalize the buyer as well as the seller.

would recommend using a .com domain or a sub-folder like www.yousite/com/jp. The reason being that .asia domain name, although being regional top level domain (rTLD), Google treats it as generic top-level domain. You can verify it here https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1347922

Regards

Hi Bob,

Carla is right. Also, you can check the service provided by http://www.bloggerlinkup.com/. We have used this service with good success rate.

Regards

URL? But it would be a good thing if you place a nofollow tag on the affiliate's link or put the affiliate links in an iframe and make the border zero.

I would worry more about Google guidelines and best practices rather than wasting time on W3C validation.

I believe that the content on your landing page is not very convincing. When i landed on this page i was not very sure about your service but when i went to the Home page and browsed through the pages, i was bit comfortable. I find your Home page better than the landing page in question.

Hello Andy,

If you are gonna write the content for online users/reader, you would get the answer yourself. When you write a quality piece, you think of your users and not the search engines. If you make the users happy, search engines will be happy as well.

As far as targeting a single phrase or multiple phrase is concerned, if two terms are totally different altogether then having separate pages is a better idea and that is categorization. E.g. A site selling mobiles can have different categories based on brands and then further categorization based on OS.

To sum up, it is your call. If you think that all the 2 phrases should be on the same page as they offer real value when read together then you can put them in a single page. On the other hand, if they are inter-connected and quality content can be crafted for each of them then individual pages with good internal linking can be done.

Regards

Yes, the listing may lose the ranking if those 100 backlinks are from worthy sites.

Most ecommerce sites use the original manufacturer product descriptions in their content. The product features and specifications are the content made by the manufacturer. Sometimes manufacturers insist that the ecommerce sites should use their original content and it is impossible to change what available in the original content and rewrite it.

If you can work on open source technology then Wordpress is a good option

Eric, you are absolutely correct - "and" and "or" are stop words and are ignored by Google. While doing the keyword research you will come across key phrases consisting of stop words because they were searched for.

What Spencer has written is absolutely correct but i feel that here we are merging two different things.

You can definitely use "exercise and vitamins"

I am sure everyone around here is aware of Instant Pages that Google introduced at Inside Search Event. How does it affect Analytics?

Since the page is pre-loading, does that get recorded as a visitor? If the user doesn’t click on the link, will that impact the bounce rate?

Hi Circa,

Your focus should be on link building as well as on-page SEO.

The number of links don't matter but the quality or value matters. A page with 5 quality backlinks can rank better than a page with 100 low quality backlinks.

As far as on-page SEO is concerned, focus on keywords, internal linking and most importantly content! Go through the content of your competitors site, identify the gaps or disconnect between your content and the keyword you want to rank for. Write for the users and fill those gaps.

Regards

As the phrase goes, "there is not shortcut to succes". But if you are targeting keyword which has very low or no competition then you need not to worry much. Very less efforts can bring in the results. But make sure to see if there is any traffic on that keyword.

Make sure to add the most relevant keywords as your tags. Obviously they are the keywords used in the post or synonyms

Hi Garrettkite,

There are 2 things that I would answer:

• Firstly, don't use underscore (_) in the url. Instead, use hyphens (-). E.g. domain1.com/inner-page.aspx
• Secondly, whether to have a longer url or shorter version is totally your call. It is better to have a flat structure as much as possible. Never go for very long urls e.g. domain1.com/directory1/directory2/this-is-the-inner-page.aspx. On the other hand, focus on the structure of the website from user's point of view. Is it intuitive? Can a user reach to the inner page easily? But in some cases you may have to use longer urls which is again conditional.

Till date I have successfully worked on more than 100 sites by following the above standards.

Regards

Having multiple h1 tags throughout the website is fine but having repetitive h1 on a single page dilutes the importance of h1 tags. There is no penalty for such usage because in doing so, the person himself dilutes its importance.

Here you go http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35253

Hi Bill,

This tactic used to be a favorite one for the SEO guys but now it has faded. Matt Cutts, in one of the Google Webmaster Central videos said that doing such arrangement has no problem with Google but doing it on a very large scale may attract the attention of his team who continuously fight with spam.

I personally suggest that it should be done only:

1. if you are big business house and believe that name squatting could pose danger to your business.
2. Buying and redirecting the different generic TLD of your main domain is fine. E.g. I own mysite.com then it's okay for me to buy mysite.org also and redirect it to the .com version.

Simply buying number of business related domains and redirecting them to the main domain does not helps.

Regards,

Shailendra Sial

Hi,

I have to rename many pdf and docx files. How can I implement 301 redirect on them as they are linked from 'n' number of places?

Regards,

Shailendra Sial

It says, "Gateway aliases..." So you will still be on myblog.ABCD.com and therefore the situation remains same.

The best option is to purchase the domain and hosting service and continue with the blog.

Regards

Hi,

Our business spans across many countries and in order to maintain brand consistency, we were contemplating to create regional fan pages on Facebook. The structure would be like parent-child relation i.e. one main page and other regional pages. Is it possible? We searched for it but could't find something concrete except that in 2012 Facebook was testing similar concept.

Regards

The short answer - no issues. But make sure to properly geo-target it in Google Webmaster Tools.

Regards

Hi,

Yes, it is in Google interests to show different and relevant sites to users.

You said, "2 websites for the same company (very different domains) - both sites are targeting the same primary keyword phrase, however, the user journey should incorporate both websites, and therefore the sites are very heavily cross linked - so we can easily pass a user from one site to another."

I am assuming the by very different domains, you mean different site address because two sites on two different topics can't be heavily interlinked. In this case, I would recommend to have a single website that is performing well in the search engine and merge the other one in it. As you said that users journey should incorporate both the websites, this means they are closely linked. In this case, it would be better to have a single website that suffice users' needs.

Regards

John Barth is absolutely correct. Title attributes add no value to the SEO and acts only as a tool tip. But yes, it could be used for better user experience.

Content has no "direct" role to play in affecting the PageRank. PR is calculated via backlinks. Further, if you want your content to be crawled , indexed and rank in search engines - stay away from frames/iframes.

There is no set time for this process to be completed. It depends upon how fast Google comes across the old urls and visit the new page. Since the 301 redirect is working fine, you need not to worry about it.

Exactly! You are on the right path. Google states that you should submit the proof of your manual removal work along with the reconsideration request. It will help them understand that you are serious and are working for it and will also expedite the process.

Regards

No, don't remove the links coming from good authoritative sites.

For rest of the links, download links to your site report in Google Webmaster Tools and check if those low quality sites are in there. Start by removing the links that are in the report. You can disavow the links as well but you should be very careful in doing so. Sometimes, people get extra cautious and disavow good backlinks.

Regards

As you said blogs setup for different geo locations. Would it serve purpose if you redirect all of them to a single website/blog? I mean they must been for varied geographic targets.

I case you are contemplating to discontinue all of them and redirect them to one so that you can focus all your efforts at a single place then it can be a good idea but make sure you redirect (map) specific pages/posts to the corresponding new pages. Simply redirecting all the domains to a single domain will not help much. You should keep in mind the user comfort as well.

Regards

HTTPS is one of the ranking factors and is in testing phase. However, in the near future, it might become a vital factor. Since you are going for a re-branding, now is the time to take the decision.

Regards