Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi, My advice to you would be to link to the separate top level categories if it is useful to the website user. Build the website for the user, not for search engines, and the rankings will come. E.g on the green widgets page you could have a clear funnel to each type of green widget and then some text such as "Prefer red widgets? We've got a great range of red widgets available for purchase." Again, I would only use this if it was useful to the website user. Another example might be if green widget 2 is exactly the same as red widget 2 except for the colour. You'd obviously want to link these 2 as they are related items and the user might want to visit the other colour widget. Thanks

This should be obvious from your navigation. If it isn't then that could be an area that needs attention.  However it is also dependent on the structure of your site.  It is perfectly possible to build a site without a level based hierarchy.  It might just be confusing to use unless it was predominately used with an on site search. However it should be pretty obvious.

Not necessarily, one for example is an aggregation site that brings articles (or headers) from other sites and it shows as if he has 2000 links pointing to me. Some are directories (not that good ones) that also show 100-200 links pointing to me. These  are not links that I mind removing... but I wondered if they currently do extra damage showing that many links. Does google think these are types of site wide links?

Yes Devinia. .i would also like to go with you DA, and the any Page can earn their authority time by time in the market through how well that particular page is created for users !

Let me answer the question another way. To be honest, Google most likely doesn't look at Whois data - they don't need to (more on this below). The real question is... Does Google know what websites are associated with you? Do they care? And does this factor into ranking? The answer to the first question is most likely yes. For one, Google became an ICANN registrar (just like Godaddy) in 2006. This means they have first look access to all newly registered domain names. There are also a million other ways to determine relationships between websites, such as shared IPs, Analytic codes, link patterns and so on. But do they care? We don't have hard data on this, but Google reps have made comments in the past that links between sites that have an "administrative" relationship aren't as valuable. That's why you see SEOs measuring links from unique C-blocks. (This is one of the metrics in the SEOmoz Competitive Analysis Report). This is one of the ways Google is able to sniff out link networks. If you own a bunch of sites, and you engage in aggressive inter-linking between these sites, those links are likely not going to count for much, and could even hurt you. In the end, this means the value of the links from sites you own may not be as strong as links from outside your network. And aggressive interlinking between your sites - especially with aggressive anchor text, could get you in trouble. Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Awesome timing!  Thank you for referring me to that link. That definitely makes me a little more comfortable with my original intentions. At the end of the day, it seems that in our case, the subdomain will ultimately produce the best user experience and in the end, that is probably what I should be focused on anyway.

Hi Sara, The most important thing you need to ad the GA code is: _setDomainName and you reference the root domain for example hope it helps

Pbhatt Think about crawl budget allocation that google gave to your website. by blocking search pages from your robots.txt, your saving alot of budget to crawl and recrawl your important pages. and on the other hand, some instances where search pages might provide indexable URLs with Thin content and your site might be a Panda candidate. So there is no potential you did a good job.

Thank you for both responses... Nakul-- I have been following everything exactly as you have described. In general the goal during the development was to keep changes to an absolute minimum. This has not always been possible. The majority of external links have been 301 redirected or in cases where the new server responds to two differnet URLs for the same content a canonical tag has been added. I have noticed that 99% of the reported URLs are former internal links.  The reported 404s are completely out of proportion (194k vs less than 5k pages in the new xml sitemap). I am really worried. Is there anything else I can do beside monitoring and hopping? How long does it  typically take to for "Things have to work their way out of its system."? Is it possible that Google is somehow accessing the old IP address (although the DNS records for the domain have changed)? We left the old server alive and planning to shut it down after the second site has been moved away from it. Thanks, Adam

Thanks for your comments Bryan. It seems the Exact-Match Domains update on the 27 Sept exactly coincides with my drop. I'm not sure why I would be affected as my domain name is my brand not keyword. The other update on this day was Panda #20 but I don't what to take from the details of that update. I would say it's more likely Panda #20 and not the EMD update. Do you know what this means? "Abandoning the 3.9.X naming scheme"

Cornel I suggest adding the rel=canonical tag on your page to the version you'd like index. That way both the http and https version of the same page, will display the same "http" canonical and avoid the duplicate content issue and also act as a 301 from your https to http for the bots. The user's would still be able to get to the https homepage if they are logged into your website and or browsing on https, so that they don't toggle back and forth between https and http.

Transcriptions definitely have impact on your rankings in Youtube. The purpose of the search is to deliver the closest options to the viewer as possible so if they find a match in the actual content of the video, it will be ranked better than a video that doesn't have the content matched. The transcribing function offered by Youtube is not perfect - it does a poor enough job at the moment that transcribing them yourself and uploading the file is worth the time.

The simple answer: example.com/glasses will rank. If you build high-quality links to that page, and optimize it for glasses that page will probably out-rank your homepage for the phrase glasses. Obviously, if your home page is optimized for the same phrase, that page might rank as well. Sometimes when there are two pages on a site that rank for the same phrase, Google will show both pages in the SERPS next to each other.

Hi goodlegaladvice, Thanks for your comment but as I've mentioned the site is not in any CMS, its is in flat html files. Any further help will be appreciated.

Thank you John!   I'll remember to edit the links.  

This is a HUGE question, and honestly you should probably get some SEO consultation from someone who is familiar with ecommerce URL architecture. Having said that, you can look at some other sites that are doing a good job. Take a look at REI and Zappos. Keep in mind that you should design for humans first and search engines second. If having a site-wide navigation link for your categories is going to help you sell more shoes, and help your customers find what they are looking for than you should do it. It's easier to make a website that was built for UX more SEO friendly.

Almost every website has ads.  So if you have house ads for your own products that are not slapping the visitor's face then it should not be a huge turn-off for visitors.  At least you don't have the same stinky ads that you see on other sites.

Hi Anthony, Thanks for your reply. I need to do structured data for web design company so kindly tell me which type I do. I checked this plugin but when I published my company department page I saw all the information that I fill with this plugin showing at the end of the article. After these all step page looking unprofessional.

I don't have any experience with Cloudflare so I can't offer an opinion on their services.  And without a proper audit of your site and link profile, there is no honest way to know exactly what the core issues are on the site.  Short of a proper audit, it's all a guess.  That's the bigger concern. Maybe it's links. Maybe its duplicate content perception.  Maybe it's a dozen seemingly insignificant issues that accumulated to the breaking point with a trigger event like Penguin. Unfortunately that's the reality of SEO in 2012.