Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Owh well... now it is like a puzzle inside my head. LOL It's not as simple as I think I guess. Thanks once again Chris. YEappppp,.. I am not give up!!!! gooo gooo gooo...

So it doesn't look like Google is penalizing them, and are actually rewarding them. I agree. I think that most of the time, Google will filter pages like these.  Some of the time the entire website will be reduced in rankings. But, sometimes stuff like this will get good rankings, and those good rankings might persist for a long time. If a person decides to place that type of content on his website, he should know that it will probably have a short life in Google's search results and might cause his site to be penalized.

Two great answers here already. Basically, you may have a strong resource to work with but Google is also keen on not allowing brand new site owners from benefitting too much from the authority of newly-purchased websites. Google is a domain registrar for the sole purpose of accessing comprehensive whois information and understanding when websites / domains change hands. If a domain's registration information, hosting and content changes drastically, there is nothing stopping Google from removing the authority that domain once had. Again, this is not to say that the domain won't be useful, but you will probably need to build a useful site on that domain that reflects the quality of the links that have helped it achieve a PR6 in the past. Simply redirecting it to a new location will probably not be of much use - I seem to remember that Google started stamping out that practice's usefulness five or six years ago. $100 also seems quite cheap for a PR6 domain, but maybe you lucked out!

Thanks a million for the help guys.

Sweet! If anything else comes up again definitely let us know

Thanks a lot for the answer SMG. I really appreciate it. The one thing that is special about our case is that we actually only need organic traffic on the individual apps not on the root domain. Therefore we mostly care about the strength of the individual apps. I simply assume that a lot of people will link the landing page (rootdomain.com). So, with a subfolder system I hope to get more juice from the root domain to the apps and also that app1 for example can better support app2 with a better distribution of the root domain strength. Well, I guess there might be no other way than to try it. If anyone else has another opinion I would love to hear it before I make the changes tomorrow.

I like your idea of regrouping on information on one page. My only concern is that the race page has already tabs and that it will lower the number of page vues for the site. As the site revenues come from advertisement  ... Thanks

Hi Prashant, If these URLs are only created when a user searches for a term, but are not linked to anywhere in HTML either on your site or elsewhere on the Internet, this is a very good reason why they are not indexed. Google does not usually perform queries on a site (e.g. fill in forms) to "discover" what content might be displayed when those forms are filled in. It's tried and tested method of crawling is just that - crawling links and text in HTML. It has become more adventurous with different technology and sometimes finds things that it wouldn't have previously, but linking is still the primary way to ensure something gets crawled. In many cases, you wouldn't want Google finding content that it has to perform queries / fill in forms or searches to get to: this is how some sites create massive amounts of duplicate content by accident. So in a way, Google is doing everyone a favour by not indexing URLs like this. We have submitted these urls on google webmaster using a "sitemap" for indexing still none of them are indexed. I tend to think of sitemaps like road maps: they're a guide. The site itself is the road. If a map tells me that I can drive across a river but when I get there, this is no bridge, I'm not going to drive across the river. Maybe I will if I have a huge four-wheel-drive car with a snorkel, but possibly not. Maybe Google will index URLs it can't find on the web itself, but possibly not. If you want the URLs to be found, link to them Cheers, Jane

Thanks for the heads-up Dan. Its much appreciated. Best regards, Devanur Rafi

There are a couple of thoughts that I have regarding this question and the reference you made to Neil's post, so I will try to organize my thoughts here for you: First, unless you are the food network... recognize that you probably don't have the DA or authority that the food network has. In his post, the Food Network did not attempt to rank both of those posts for the term "cooking". Google has gained an understanding of both of those pages with a relation to the term "cooking". Some of that would have been through on-site SEO, but a large portion of that would have been through links, social signals, DA, PA, etc... It isn't simply about optimizing 2 pages for the term "cooking". If you attempt to optimize two or more pages for the exact same keyword around the same keyword, you run the risk of self-canibalization. Read/watch more here: http://moz.com/blog/keyword-targeting-density-and-cannibalization-whiteboard-friday What I would suggest is that either your website, or a category should represent the broad keyword/phrase/theme, and then let it's subcategories target other variations of that theme and how others may search it. For example, lets say I wanted to create a campaign around Rubics Cubes (I'm on a mission to solve one right now), perhaps I could create supporting pages that target supporting themes such as "how to solve a rubics cube", and "where to buy a rubics cube", or "Amazing rubics cube videos"...etc. The point is that you become a resource for Rubics Cubes, not just a page that ranks for that term. Be the end all be all for people looking for rubics cubes, and have your site hierarchically organized to help point all of those rubics cube related resources point to the main rubics cube page. Now, back to neil's point, if you created a fascinating resource for rubics cubes that developed shares, links, and buzz, it is very possible that you could gain 2 listings on the first page of google, but they have to be amazing. Hope this helps ! (I'm going to solve my rubics cube)

Hi Ruben, How people use your site (like traffic to your blog posts) can contribute to your 'authority', and thereby, your rankings, yes, but you would want to be blogging with your keywords in mind. If you are a wedding photographer with a local business website and you're starting this blog as a vehicle for publishing additional, on-going content, then consider viewing the blog as a showcase of the client projects you take on locally. So, let's say you're operating out of your physical location in Taos, New Mexico, but you frequently get jobs in neighboring cities like Santa Fe, Mora and Albuquerque. Lacking a physical location in these 3 towns, you are very unlikely to earn Google local pack rankings for them, because that's just the way Google works. But, by steadily blogging about the weddings you've photographed in these other cities (writing about the projects, the venues, showing your photos) you will begin to develop a body of content that relates to your service keywords + these cities. The hope here is to gain visibility in the ORGANIC SERPS, rather than the local ones. If your work is impressive and your writing engaging, this additional organic visibility can help you to start getting phone calls from these additional cities. That's basically how it works. If you are blogging regularly about your work in these other cities, and your competitors aren't as motivated in their marketing as you are, you have a chance to get into the organic SERPs with the kinds of blog posts that excite new potential customers and encourage them to pick you for their event. Hope this helps!

It's likely that your competition is going to be a mix of large book sellers, online outlets, the author's or publishing house's pages or sites, review sites (after the book is released - and this can include major newspapers and magazines). You can get a good idea of who these are actually going to be by looking at the author and publishing house and searching for books they've published in the past. What do those SERPs look like? Getting in first with a landing page on a good website is a good piece of the battle, so definitely create your pages about the book early. If there are press releases or interest from readers in the lead-up to the release, your site should be one of the only resources ranking early if you get in before the big retailers and newspapers. Amazon is particularly strong for some book queries, but Google would ideally prefer to rank diverse websites (not three or four Amazon URLs on the first page, which I have seen happen for book names).

Gotcha. With a "normal" WordPress install it should be pretty easy to make a change to the tags. You just go into the editor and find the right .php file(s). Are you by chance running Thesis or Genesis? I know it can be trickier with those platforms. If not, it sounds like an issue with how this specific theme or customization was done. Because normally it should be pretty straightforward.

Thanks Travis!  

Thanks that's good to know!

Marie is correct - this is unlikely to work unless you are VERY careful to not let Google know that the websites are connected, as they're partial to transferring penalties from one site to another if you try to get rid of a penalty by starting a new, identical website. Simply redirecting a penalised site is a trick that used to work back in 2009, 2010 (you don't mention redirection, but it's worth noting that this used to work, so if you see it mentioned online it's probably old information). Even if you do not redirect the old site, Google may still recognise that the content is identical to a website it previously penalised, especially if all the new site's registration information, hosting, template, etc. is the same as the old site. That's not for sure - you may get away with doing this if there are no ties between the old, penalised site and the new site, but using identical content is a big give-away. Assuming that your penalty was links-related, the safest way to do this is to remove the old site's content, wait until Google cache the old site with the content gone (so the content is completely out of the index), take the site down and re-publish on the new domain. That said, Google's ability to remember what it has seen before could result in the scenario Marie describes.

Hi Saad, As you've noticed, right now our plans only include the ability to run 100 full SERP reports a month. There is considerable cost in generating these reports, and we've found that 100 fits the needs of the vast majority of our users. That said, we're happy you are getting use out of it and would like to run more. Unfortunately we don't have a mechanism in place to allow you to order more without signing up for another account. If we get enough demand for the feature, our Product team may work to add that in. You can make feature requests here: https://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums/293194-Moz-Feature-Requests Thanks again for the feedback.

Unless there is a specific reason to keep the areas separate (e.g. you don't want people to be confused about the brand, or one activity is very inappropriate when paired with the other), it's usually best to keep the content on the same domain. brand.com/activity also usually looks more professional than exact-match-keyword.com. Furthermore, you often gain more trust when people see that the site's offering is well-rounded and includes a variety of activities. You can also benefit from accumulating good reviews from happy customers to just one website, rather than accumulating surfing holiday reviews for one of your travel sites, wedding holiday reviews for another and so on. Again, if you feel that the subjects clash badly and will create a weird user experience, you might look at developing different websites, but if you have a range of different activities / holidays that involve one location, I'd be 99% confident that these should all site on the same domain.