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I am not 100% sure about this, but this is the normal way of consideration. Normally, Google also looks at which data center the user has been querying and based on that it decided the location. It tries its best to give you the location accurately, but sometimes, the mechanism fails, therefore the not set comes in.
Domain name change is a very tough decision and changing domain name to accommodate keywords wouldnt work to bump up rankings.
I would do a deep analysis of the website and do some better interlinking coupled with great inbound marketing. Maybe a viral video or something as well...
Changing domain solve your problem. Remember what happened to meta keywords?
There are some instances when Google is unable to decipher the country/tld for a visitor. Eg. Opening Google.com in Australia. Thats why the Google (not set)
Mass comments on blogs is a spam technique- big time. Although, blog commenting should not be a SEO exercise- SEO is an added benefit of it. It should be more of an engagement activity than anything else.
I found matt cutts video which says that keyword rich domains are being devalued.
I would recommend doing more brand awareness exercises rather than switching domain names for a more keyword rich domain.
Great Insight Alan. Awesome observation! Ecommerce websites are faced with faceted navigation, duplicate content and canonical URL issues. Thats why ecommerce websites are more prone to relegation on Google updates.
Something has to change drastically on the way ecommerce websites exist. Otherwise, Google may end up delisting or relegating a huge number of such websites.
I am also looking for something on those lines...I am 100% sure about the SERP ranking algorithms, but I am not that sure whether users like the top of the screen more or not.
a heatmap would be helpful indeed
My question maybe too broad, but I think this is the right forum to ask the question:
What is the user behavior in terms of search engine results when browsing on a tablet (ipad and others).
Is it the same as for desktops and laptops or its different? Any infographics would be helpful as well.
Subdomains do not work very well. I would go in with a folder within the domain itself. I would further name the folder something intuitive which would lead more people finding information about your client's niche to the website. The architecture is very important for the KB as it can be very effective in terms of cross selling as well.
Go to your GA account. Then, click on traffic sources>search engines.
This will give you a report containing Google, Bing and other search engines. If you have visitors from multiple countries, you would be seeing Google mentioned multiple times in your report.
If you see carefully, you will the table header (just above the listing and this would normally say:
Source (a dropdown), None (another dropdown) followed by visits, page/visits, time on site, bounce rates etc etc.
click on the none dropdown and select country/territory from the menu that appears. You should be able to see different country visits from Google.
Hope that helps.
On the tags and category pages, you should have a rel=noindex, follow tags. That would ensure that crawlers (seomoz custom crawl or Googlebot) dont have duplicate content issues.
This was a problem with wordpress blogs as well, which has been handled nicely now.
You should not be overly worried about your rankings, especially in the short term. Just write great content which users will love and you will see the website come up on searches again. All said, keep an eye on your Google webmaster tools. If your website has been penalized for some reason, Google execs maybe kind enough to let you know about that.
SEOmoz tools should give you a good idea on crawl errors and on page metrics so that you can keep a close look at them.
Google removal requests take a while to get answered (considering the volumes they have to handle). Its best to wait out for sometime. In the meatime, you could add a 301 to your IP to your root domain name from your .htaccess file.
I agree to the benefits of having a sitemap on any website. Search for Google webmaster help on youtube. You can get to see a lot of supporting tutorials.
Read Rand's post on the blog about diversity in traffic source
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/traffic-source-diversity-is-essential-for-successful-seo.
I would be very interested to know from mozzers, how their experience has been with traffic share.
While you answer, please be kind enough to share the following:
1. The niche of the website you wish to quote in your answer.
2. The means of promotion you use (SEO, Social Media, PPC, Display, Affiliate)
3. The reason you think you cited this example and do you think it has been a success or a failure or somewhere in the middle?
Appreciate your time, thanks.
Reblogging with reference to the primary source is one way of getting good backlinks, but I would suggest writing a fresh piece on tumblr with excerpts and discussions on the company blog's post. That would add more value.
Its still a good technique, provided you do it right. If you have a website that publishes news, you cant have all links in the footer. You must cycle intelligently. Like for Auto section you can have automobile related links in the footer.
You should think more on lines of content creation and better interlinking between your pages and all. Social media is a big power today.
You would be better off removing these low quality backlinks, but that would not reflect in rankings right away. Maybe over a period of time with targeted content and engaging people with social media and obtaining good contextual links would help in repairing your link profile.
Sounds fishy to me. Its not possible to get links the white hat way. There are some possibilities that I can think of. Paying for inclusions, getting majority of links based on press release product announcements or some viral element on the website which has been covered by reputable media sources.
It would be interesting to explore the full set of links.
To extract URLs, you can use Xenu Link Sleuth. Then you msut make a hiearchy of sitemaps so that all sitemaps are efficiently crawled by Google.
doesnt matter if site A sends 100 links to site B. Its just 1 domain thats sending links. So, it hardly matters on how many links does A send to B.
This is a classical case with websites where same content is found on 2 different URLs of the website.
1st of all, ask your webmaster to do a 301 of your 2nd url to your homepage. Tell him that since the content is duplicate, it makes no sense to ask Google to crawl 2 pages with the same content.
If you cannot do a redirect, you can add a rel=canonical tag to your meta to tell Google that the 2 URLs have same content.
I think that you should look at the following factors while deciding website authority:
1. Nature of backlinks to the website
2. Mozrank
3. Compete Rank
4. Alexa traffic rank
5. Website index in Google
6. Page Rank.
If site A is penalized by Google, then there is a very very slim chance that site B will also get a similar penalty. Google takes into account the overall site links and not just 1 link. If there is only 1 backlink from A to B then it is possible that site B can also take a hit.
I think that its an issue. Although the link juice passed is not that high, it makes complete sense to get the images on the same server as the website.
As an immediate step, you can add a nofollow tag to the links just to make sure that no link juice is passed.
A link farm is one that gives any website a link for free. Its also called a FFA or free for all. No creteris is needed to list a website in such websites.
Link farms are considered a black hat technique in terms of Google.
Yes, facebook pages do get indexed due to the social integration and real time index at Google. There is no guarantee of ranking, but yes, it does get indexed.
Its already there on any linux server. You just need to download that flie and open it on notepad and upload it back to the server with the updated code as Barry pointed.
You would need to put a 301 redirect using your htaccess. This is a duplicate page issue and just not a duplicate title issue.
I dont think that you should have a problem if you place the links in a
container, you should not have a problem. You can fight it out with your colleague on this. Its not a banned technique on Google.
Totally agree to Barry's reply here. Its totally on Google whether to show up sitelinks or not.
Keyword difficulty tool
http://www.seomoz.org/keyword-difficulty
Its a very good tool for your objective.
facebook ads dont always work. Thats what I have found out with my experiment. facebook ads are not meant for revenue (atleast as the 1st target). If you want to promote something thats engagng, you would have a good chance of success, but on the other hand, if you are trying to drive ecommerce through facebook ads, it may not work that well.
Shailendra,
Its a common thing when a bad link causes a devaluation. But, Google doesnt penalize for just 1 bad link, its a bad neighbourhood that it mostly targets. There is very little that you can do at this point of time. It maybe a good idea to keep a lookout for your GWT messages.
Well, A strict No No there on that practice. Your competitor would have issues in the long run. It seems quite easy to get folks to comment and it is aimed at "gaming" the google ranking algorithms. That practice would surely fall prey to Google webspam team one day. Its best not to tread that path at all. (by the way, Mattcutts- head of Google webspam, is one of seomoz's users...hope he gets to read this post and suggest algorithmic changes)
Its worth checking this thread as well:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/what-rank-checking-solution-do-people-use
Well, havent used Aaron wall's keyword tracking tool. Maybe should try that as well. I am reasonably happy with webCEO though although it hogs a lot of internet resources.
I got an interesting post from one of the bloggers: SEJ shared this on facebook.
http://explicitly.me/manipulating-google-suggest-results-–-an-alternative-theory. Worth a read
You can try a mod_rewrite on apache or if its not a big website URL based redierction on .htaccess.
Therefore, you can actually layer the architecture in such a way to actually write something like a vanity URL.
That would solve your URL problem.
SEOMOZ rank tracker,
Web CEO
Google webmaster tools (this gives you an average rank and not an accurate rank)
Nichebot is also a ok kinda tool.
add a mobile sitemap to your GWT.
Here is a link that will help you.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34648
Sean,
Here are some resources that I have for you
http://www.webforgers.net/mod-rewrite/mod-rewrite-syntax.php
http://roshanbh.com.np/2008/03/url-rewriting-examples-htaccess.html
Hope they help you in understanding how to go about .htaccess.
As far as I understand, you are facing the issue since you pointed yourinterlinking URLs to your .index.html page rather than your absolute URLs.
Shailendra, Its not accessible from my end as well. I am using firefox & chrome and they do not seem to work. Please post a URL that we can have a look at.
The only thing after redirect (301) is that you should tell Google which URL is relevant for it to crawl and rank. Eg, for marketing purposes, you may have the URL, www.company.com/productname-cityname on your website and have a URL www.company.com/london on your brochures, but you must tell Google which URL you want to promote. People use Google to recall URLs as well (thats the reason why facebook is one of the most searched terms on Google). Therefore, it might be wise to do a 301 from the time it goes live or put a rel=canonical from the start so that if Google indexes the new URLs by chance, it knows which URL it should consider for ranking.
Chain redirects happening at page level hurts if you have had the URL in the past and Google had indexed. I think that when you consider the situation that not all juice is transferred from the redirected page to the landing page, chain redirects makes you lose page authority.
If you have an architecture (server architecture), webcache in place, maybe (although not very sure), you can work with chain redirects to interface between your internal website architecture and your user interface.