Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Dear Chris,

Here are my two cents in a sentence: "One wide and stable website that caters to multiple niches"

I am assuming that you wanted to book individual domain names and then redirect/forward them to the corresponding vertical sub-directories on the main domain.

For me, it would be a single domain any day and corresponding sub-folders/sub-directories for each of the verticals. IMHO, there is no need for you to book individual domain names that point/forwarded to the respective locations on the main domain.Even the URL like, www.abc.com/vertical-name serves the purpose and there is no need to search for the exact sounding root domain name like www.vertical-name.com and then point it to www.abc.com/vertical-name.

Getting exact match keyword domain names can be very difficult these days but even if you can manage to get your hands on one, due to the 301 redirection in place from it to the corresponding sub-directory on the main domain, the vanity URL won't make it to the search engines' indices and won't appear in organic search.

With single domain approach, all your SEO efforts can be consolidated and highly beneficial for the main domain from an SEO standpoint. Going forward it can become an authority. Single domains are far easy to maintain and operate from both promotional as well as technical standpoints. Each sub-directory's homepage can serve as the homepage of the vertical/niche. Each of these sub-directories and their internal pages can then have some good quality content optimized to rank for different keywords/phrases with healthy search volumes.

High quality content that covers the topic in a comprehensive way can have dramatic results in organic search ranking. Good quality content coupled with good promotional strategies with an aim to get domain mentions, citations, one-way backlinks is the key to good organic search ranking. These will result in healthy domain and page authority numbers.

All the very best to you my friend.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Anirban,

Your code is absolutely fine and nothing wrong with it. Just adding the required code does not guarantee that Google will start showing the sitelinks search box for your website. Here is what Google has to say in this regard:

"Search box not displaying? The Sitelinks search box appears only for navigational queries and when relevant for users. Google algorithms use a variety of factors to determine when the search box appears, including the information on the site and different types of navigational queries from Search users."

While there is nothing to fret about, looking at the authoritativeness of the website in question, you should start seeing a sitelinks search box depending on the type of queries users use in Google. When Google finds your website eligible for a sitelinks search box, you will most likely get a message to your webmaster tools account. Chances are more for a website that received very high number of branded queries.

Here is a Moz article in this regard: https://moz.com/blog/sitelinks-search-box

Hope it helps my friend.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi,

You should avoid URL canonicalization chains just like you avoid redirect chains. If URL1, URL2, URL3 contain substantially similar or identical content and if you choose URL1 to be the canonical/preferred one then here is what you should ideally be doing:

URL 2 --> Canonicalized to URL1

URL 3 --> Canonicalized to URL1 and not to URL2

In this case, only URL1 will be in Google's index. Here you go for more:

http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions

Check out point 9.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi,

Here is my view:

All the websites no matter whom they belong to, should have substantially unique content. We need to keep in mind about the very purpose behind why Google exists and what does it take to be able find a place for your website in their index. If two pages serve identical content, why should a search engine like Google index both?

A good example would be, affiliate marketing setup where the affiliate website contains exactly the same content that the original product website. Even the affiliate websites should have their own unique version of content. They should also take up the effort to re-write the product descriptions so that they are not exact copies of the ones found on the original product website.

Coming to your case, by making the content on all the consultants' websites unique, they stand a better chance to rank for corresponding keywords/phrases in search engines. If I were you, I would have re-written the content so that it becomes unique. Hope that helps my friend.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Neil,

My personal favorite would be ScreamingFrog SEO Spider as recommended by Donna. Its highly recommended to go in for a yearly subscription and it worth every penny. It gives you a wealth of information that can be handy for a quick SEO audit. Used to use Gsite crawler earlier about till 3 years back but have been using ScreamingFrog SEO Spider and it has never let me down. You have a ton of options like being able to select User agents, regex for including or excluding certain sections or to crawl only certain sections of your website, list mode for finding HTTP header status codes for thousands of URLs along with many other options in no time. I use it daily.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi,

Making the content being loaded by AJAX crawlable by Google involves serving a static HTML snapshot of the content being loaded by AJAX to Google. We should make sure that the HTML snapshot is the exact copy that will be served to the visitors through AJAX.

Here you go for more information:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/174992?hl=en

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi friend,

Here is my take on this..

I would tag all the affiliate links with the 'nofollow' attribute no matter what the consequences might be as in the long run it would place you in the good books of Google as its a good gesture as a webmaster.

Here is an article from SEL in this regard:

http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-on-affiliate-links-we-handle-majority-of-them-125859

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Adding to the above responses. Just because of the fact that Google does not use the keywords meta tag for ranking purposes at this point in time, populating it with too many and irrelevant keywords/phrases can do more harm as doing so is nothing but abusing the tag and moreover it clearly conveys the intention of the webmaster which is none other than to manipulate the search results and there by to rank high for those keywords/phrases.

So you better leave this tag empty if your CMS generates the tag automatically.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi friend,

Before getting to the issue, I would like you to please head to Google, type, youtube in the search box and hit Enter. When you see the sitelinks search box for Youtube, type anything in it and hit Enter. You will see list of items from Youtube in the form of an SERP and it will not take you to Youtube directly. This is how sitelinks search box works and the sitelinks search box will not take the visitor directly to the website in question.

Another example would be, to type hayesandjarvis in Google and do a search in the sitelinks search box.

Please let me know if I am missing anything here. Please feel free to write back.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Adding to other responses...

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/

And

http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/

These give invaluable information right from the Horse's mouth..Google

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi,

There can be many on-page issues but here you go for few of those..

1. Content of at least around 500 words per page, the more the better. Care should be taken its unique, highly relevant, up-to-date, useful to your visitors. If substantially similar or identical content has to go in two pages with different URLs, considering going for rel=canonical implementation to avoid duplicate content issue. See to its the keyword density (though there are no thumbrules) is around 1% in the article body. This is apart from other indexable content on the page like, page title, description tag, image alt text, image titles etc.

2. Page Title - the essence should be captures in the first 55 characters including spaces with your target term for the page towards the beginning

3. Description meta tag - should be around 150 characters including spaces. Description tag, though its not one of the parameters for ranking, it can have dramatic impact on your CTR from the SERPs.

4. The H1 tag - Only one H1 tag should be there per page with the target term in it

5. Links from within the content pointing to other internal pages with relevant anchor text.

6. Make sure your servers are fast enough with no down times to the possible extent. As you know page loading time is an official ranking factor.

7. Make sure to keep your URLs short to around 75 characters. Shorter, crisp, URLs that convey clear hierarchy to both the search engines and users tend to out-rank lengthy ones. URLs should include your keywords/phrases and hyphens to be used as word separators.

8. Easy and clear website navigation - care should be taken that no graphics or images are used for internal navigation, especially in the top navigation menu. The internal navigation should be only through text and JavaScript based navigation should be avoided by all possible means. With Flash and JavaScript off, users should be able to navigate through the website without any issues. To the possible extent, all the pages should be reachable within 2 to 3 clicks from the root folder. If this is not possible, add the deep nested pages to the Sitemap.xml file so that they can be found by the search engines without any effort.

9. Frames and Tables - avoid the usage of Frames and tables. Div tags can be used instead of tables as Divs result in faster rendering and provide better mobile experience also.

10. Cleaner code - the code on the website should be free of errors to the possible extent. A website with clean code will have an edge over others with coding errors. bbc.co.uk can be your benchmark in this regard. You can use http://validator.w3.org for the purpose.

11. Consistent and optimal performance on all device platforms -  care should be taken so that the pages load and render well on all platforms like, Desktop, Smartphones and Tablets. You can consider responsive web design here.

12. Social media sharing - all the important pages on the website should have socialsharing buttons for the users to be able to share the pages on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus etc.,

13. 404 error-handling mechanism - for all the non-existing or unavailable resources in the website, a proper custom error document should be in place that enables the visitor to further navigate through the website. All 404 errors should throw a HTTP header status message 404 and not any other header status message.

14. Make sure that your website does not have any orphan pages. Every page on the website should be reachable by at least one text link.

Also, please make it a routine to perform keyword research & analysis at regular intervals to come up with a list of new or trending keywords/phrases in your niche so as to add corresponding new pages to your website.

Please keep a watchful eye on the Webmaster tools account for any error like 404, 500 series, manual actions etc.

So those were few items that you can look in to for making your website perform better in the search engines.

Hope it helps my friend.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi,

Hope these will explain about DA and PA along with the factors that influence them:

http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority

http://moz.com/learn/seo/page-authority

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi, by no means it worth $0.5 a word. That content was re-written from the articles shown here:

https://www.google.co.in/search?q=Is+Divya+Ashwagandha+Churna+Safe%3F&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-beta&channel=sb&gfe_rd=cr&ei=9cDQU5f7NKHM8gfkjICABA#channel=sb&q=%22Divya+Ashwagandha+Churna%22&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official

You can try iwriter.com and choose the premium writers. The quality is top-notch and far, far economical than what you mentioned above. You can tell me what is the niche that you are trying to get the content written for so that I can suggest you better.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

No matter what, site-wide links are not recommended in the post penguin era. Other than the number of links, the intention behind having site-wide links matters which quite doesn't go down Google's throat easily. So better stay away from site-wides and blogrolls.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Chris,

Though by dropping, 'product' slug from the URL might not have a great impact (positively) from an SEO standpoint and as the target page is moves a level closer to the root domain by doing so, and this can bring in a little positive effect if not none.

We did something similar in the past and this has been our experience:

We had a URL structure like: example.com/category/product-page

We did an experiment and dropped the category folder. After few weeks, there was a drop in traffic through searches like, 'category product name', but there was very little increase in the traffic that came through product name searches. Overall, we felt that the effort involved did no justify the change it brought in.

Those were my two cents. So its up to you to decide if you really want to go ahead considering the kind of effort involved. Hope our other friends here will add their valuable insights here.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Ben,

You should be using a 301, permanent redirection to redirect the non-preferred version of your website to the preferred version. This is the best way you can pass on most of the link juice to the preferred version of your website.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Mike, this is awesome but strangely, the only page on Wikipedia that gets returned for the following query,

"inurl:digitalization site:wikipedia.org" in Google is <cite class="_Zd">ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digitalization</cite> that too in Arabic language. So they do not have the exact match definition in English at this point in time as I write this. You can confirm this with the following query:

"inurl:digitalization site:en.wikipedia.org"

Out of the first 10 results in Google for the query, "inurl:digitalization", I tried to run the following query for each of these top 10 websites:

"inurl:digitalization site:<each 10="" of="" the="" top="" domain="" names="">",</each>

Only Gartner.com has 26 URLs (with "digitalization" in the URL) with only one exception, digitalization.nl which can be ruled out as the domain name itself contains, "digitalization". This case can be dug much,much deeper but let me stop here.

Without having dug deeper in to this case, at this point, the only thing I believe would replace Gartner's definition with the definition from Wikipedia is, if they come up with a page that contains the term, "digitalization" in the URL and in the title.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi, I don't think those are irrelevant links as the niche that the client operates in is somehow (the client's product is used or consumed by mining or construction industries) connected to these industries. Having that said, there is no clear line that can be drawn to define relevancy while doing link building. However, if you have a website about computer software and you fetch links from a porn website is something apparently irrelevant. Coming to the current case, I do not think there is anything that should be frowned upon and that you should be worried about. Just my two cents.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Mark,

You have a valid concern here. While we cannot control everyone who links to us, we can take good care that we do not exchange or plant links on web properties that can devalue our website's reputation online. Here I think, the intention is what matters the most. If you do not intentionally build low quality links to your website, you should be in a good shape most of the time.

Having that said, there have been few instances where websites were penalized for something that they never intended to do but, this is very rare. Google can recognize the link building patterns that are intended to manipulate the search rankings. The best thing that we can do is, do the good work by publishing quality content, never get involved in spammy techniques. We don't need to worry much about something that is out of our control. But if you feel that someone is linking to your website and which might have a negative impact on your rankings, you can approach the other party and try to have the link removed and may God forbid, if your site gets penalized for spammy links, you can use the disavow tool and take it from there.

Most of the time, out of my personal experience, if you do not do anything bad intentionally, you won't go down. Just my two cents.

Wish you good luck.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi, ideally only one version of the URL should throw an HTTP header status code 200 and rest all can be redirected to the preferred version via 301.

Suppose, http://www.abc.com is your preferred version (the www version), all others like,

http://abc.com, http://abc.com/index.html, http://www.abc.com/index.php etc., can be redirected to the www version via 301. It is highly recommended to maintain this consistency through out your website. You can use a tool like the following to check if you have multiple versions of your homepage return status 200.

http://www.ragepank.com/redirect-check/

Hope it helps. Good Luck.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi