Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi there, blocking the HTTPS version of your pages from being crawled by the search engines is a bit tricky. You might need to come up with a separate robots.txt file to handle the HTTPS requests.

Here you go to know more about the process:

http://www.seoworkers.com/seo-articles-tutorials/robots-and-https.html

Hope it helps.

Best,

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,

there is no fixed time after which or under which an indexed page starts appearing in the SERPs.

I just checked your sitemap.xml file and it has only the https version of the URLs. In the index, I saw non https version is URLs are also listed. So there is no consistency. You have decided to serve the entire site in https and parts of it are still non-https. Serving the pages in https puts an overhead on your server. This might result in poor page loading times. If you have good resources on the server side, then this should not be a problem.

Though guys at Google say they don't care if the URLs are https or http when in comes to ranking but here I would like to mention as site loading time is an official ranking factor, when Google comes across two similarly capable and eligible pages competing for the same keyword, the one that has better loading times will be favored. By the way,  can you let me know the reason behind serving the entire site in https?

Your linking profile is not at all consistent. You build links to http://www.peprismine.com and https://www.peprismine.com

Please beware that http://www.peprismine.com, though it takes you to https://www.peprismine.com, it does not give an http header status 301 instead it gives a status 200 message. This should be fixed immediately. If you get this fixed, I think you should be fine technically but be careful with pages being served over SSL as this tends to screw the page loading times sometimes. You might want to look in to this. Don't blindly go by the page speed test scores instead, look at the actual page loading times. You can do a test here: http://www.urivalet.com and also go ahead and perform a test at webpagetest.org and check out the performance review section.

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

Hi Allan,

This is a typical issue with most of the forums out there and there is nothing that you should be worried about and leave it to the search engines to handle it. Moreover, the duplicate content itself cannot harm you or fetch you a penalty from a search engine like Google. Its the intent behind that causes the actual harm and potentially more dangerous.

Having that said, it does not mean you should engage in content duplication and think you are safe. You should stay away from any or all the deliberate or intentional content duplication with an intent to manipulate rankings. Content duplication when it comes to forums is very common thing and search engines are sensible enough in this regard.

Here is what Google has to say in this regard:

"Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results."

For more: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en

Hope that helps.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi, when you have the rel=canonical implementation in place, you don't need to bother about noindex or nofollow for those pages as they will not be indexed. When you have noindex with nofollow in place, you don't need the rel=canonical implemented as it does not make any sense. Hope that helps my friend.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi,

Especially since the Penguin update, sitewide links like footer links, blogrolls, links from a network of sites or blogs built with only one intention i.e. to manipulate search rankings etc are a big NO, NO and we should stay away from them by all means. Though even if you have 100 links from a single website, Google might count only one of them and does not care about the rest, if there's a manual check or audit which they do randomly, this might not look good and can invite a penalty. Here you go for more: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTjN9x-by-I

Also, as you mentioned that those sites were built only to provide back links to the main site, please have those links removed with immediate effect. As you know, Google is an accredited ICANN registrar, they can find the relation between those sites and the main site by looking that the WHOIS info and if those are being hosted on a shared hosting (sharing a single IP), the relation would be much more evident.

Hope it helps.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

Dear Nigel,

When you want your old domain to be partially moved on to a new a domain, you don't need to make changes in the Change of address section of webmaster tools account. You do a page-to-page (or 1:1) 301 re-direction for all the pages that you want to move from old domain to the respective pages on the new domain and perform all the steps out-lined at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-guide-how-to-properly-move-domains

Good luck.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Alex,

If the underscores constitute only 4% of the total URLs, then this can be safely kept aside in purview of the current issue.

Same goes with the keyword repetition in the page titles and URLs. However, if it is possible for you to revisit your URL structure and have it like the following, you should go for it:

www.wheretobuybeauty.com.au/<brand< a=""> name>/<product name="">, e.g.</product></brand<>

http://www.wheretobuybeauty.com.au/floris/royal-arms-diamond-edition-eau-de-parfum-spray-100ml-34oz

Same thing with the Page titles also.

Now we are left with two things, the page performance and URL canonicalization. Please have them fixed as early as possible.

Also, I checked your IP address and you have gone for a shared hosting. This is not at all recommended if you are a serious online business owner. Your IP, 103.9.170.75 is being shared by at least 250 other domains that include some bad websites.

Though there are different views about IP bad neighborhood and its impact on SEO, I have always been an advocate of clean IP and recommended it to all my clients always. You can go in for a dedicated IP which is very cheap these days and better yet if you go for a VPS.

For more about this, please check out the "Oops, your IP is either dirty or virtual" section on the following page:

http://www.bruceclay.com/in/seo-tech-tips/techtips.htm

And also, this section, "A Strong Foundation for Your Site to Operate On" on the following page:

http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/2011/04/the-seo-bucket-list-3-things-to-do-before-your-site-dies/

Lastly, I checked your domain's DNS health and here you go for the results:

http://intodns.com/wheretobuybeauty.com.au

Though these might not be causing the current issue, its good to sort everything as we should not leave any stone unturned in making our website a better one out there.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi friend, the Google cache date is from 28th October and at that time, you had this in the source code:

# Forside

So now that you have changed the source code, you need to wait for Google's next crawl update for the page and you won't see those things in the cache.

Hope it helps.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Agree with Chris. Redirecting low traffic pages to their high traffic counterparts is not a solution here for all the reasons mentioned by Chris. First of all, please do a thorough keyword research to find out if there is sizeable search volume for the keywords/phrases that are being targeted by the low traffic pages. It is quite possible that the phrase, 'black shoes' has higher search volume than any other colored shoes and that is the reason for that page to attract and drive good traffic.

Let me quote a situation here that we faced in the past. We had two products, one with a healthy search volume from local geography and the other had very low search volume. Except in few ways, the second product was as good as the first one. So we decided to create market for it as it lacked one here. We threw some freebies and ran a contest on our website and on social media platforms. This not only created awareness about the second product but also increased sales dramatically. Slowly, over a period of time, the search volumes for this product shot up which made us jumping with joy. Though this situation does not directly relate to your issue at hand, but just wanted to convey that, because something does not convert well, we should not drop our efforts to create more and more awareness about the product. Sometimes, adding in few extras with it might change the game for you. Just my two cents.

Wish you good luck my friend.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi,

There is nothing like so many links must be built per day to be effective from an SEO standpoint. Links from high domain or page authority that are acquired naturally through quality content can be very powerful. Aim to add high quality, uinique, fresh and highly relevant content to your website. Content of this sort is a natural link magnet. You will see good, volutary backlinks heading your way over a period of time. Also try to do content marketing with again good quality content to acquire desired results in search engines. Never use automated tools to build your link profile. Use tools to find the sources for your link building campaigns but never use tools to automate the link building process itself.If you want to divide the backlinks based on their importance, here you go:

Pristine quality links: Links from authority websites in your niche

High to Pristine quality links: Links from generic authority websites like Wikipedia

Medium to High quality links: Links from websites in your niche that are not so authoritative

Low to Medium quality links: Links from generic websites that are not so authoritative. For example, forums, blogs,

Low quality and Spammy links, the ones you should avoid: Links from completely unrelated web properties, link farms, sitewide links like footer links etc, blogrolls, excessive link exchanges, cross linking,  think affiliate sites that have no substantial content, porn or gambling (unless you operate in those niches), web properties operating in illegal trades  etc.

Build or rather acquire links gradually and never indulge in desperate or hasty link building tactics.Your link profile should have a natural and steady growth more or less with good diversity in anchor texts.

Hope that helps.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi, let us take a scenario. test.html has been blocked using robots.txt file. In this scenario, the bots that respect the robots exclusion protocol will not crawl the page to encounter the page level robots noindex attribute. So does not make any sense to use both the page level robots exclusion method and server side robots.txt file.

Here you go for more:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93708

And here:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93710

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

Just my two cents friend..

4 days back, Google released Panda 4.0. You can check if that caused the drop.

Here is a tool that can help you find if any of the Google penalties are behind the drop:

http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/

Once on the page, click on the 'Log-in to Analytics' button and allow the tool to access your Google Analytics account and check if the recent Panda caused the drop. Hope this helps.

Good luck. By the way, thin content is of no use these days and you should be investing all your quality time in producing quality content.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Shabbir,

Without digging deeper, I would like to say that your website is relatively new and please have a look at your competitors' websites and the time they have been online. You can use archive.org for the purpose. New websites can take time to gain the traction and 6 months is very little that too when you say, its an e-commerce website hence, cut throat competition. Its good that you have been getting 100 -120 organic visits per day. If you continue the way you have been doing, you should be in a good shape soon.

As you know, content that is unique, highly relevant, useful to the visitor and serves the purpose of their visit will do the magic for you. Please don't worry about websites that use low quality or scrapped content ranking at the top. Its not going to work for long (but can greatly depends on the kind of authority they have like DA and PA). In general, search engines have higher tolerance levels for highly authoritative websites.

I would like to conclude by saying, please do not worry as your website is very young and concentrate your efforts to improve the quality of your content, you can try to include some small videos and images (on the product pages) related to the products' functionality, features, USPs etc..improve the stickiness of your website (make your visitors hang out for reasonable amount of time on your site), earn links rather than building them desperately (I am sure, you will never do this as I read your blog). Try to build citations to your site from good websites and you know the rest.

All the best to you.

Devanur Rafi

Hi Ramesh,

Being able to access your website using the IP address is very common and there is nothing that you should be worried about in this regard. It happens when you are hosting your site on a dedicated IP. This won't be the case if you go for a shared hosting where the IP address would be shared among other websites.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi,

Before digging deep, the striking difference is the URL structure. Your competitor has a clean URL structure with hyphen as a word separator. Looking at your URL, it has no word separators and looks sub-optimal with too many words held together without word separators.

Coming to the duplication issues. Just because a site has duplicate content, its not bound to be penalized. The intention matters here than the duplication itself. If you look at the size of the websites. The competitor has about 6 times more pages in Google index and drives much more organic traffic.I looked at SEMRush data for both the sites and the competitor is a clear winner.

Moreover, the search query also matters a lot in this case and the competitor has it in the domain name. This also plays an important role. Those were my two cents and the first thing that I would do is to make the URL structure a little better.

Good luck friend.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi friend,

If a page has been blocked using Robots.txt file, then Google will not crawl and index the page from within the website but what if a reference of that page is found on a third-party website? In cases like this, link discovery will happen and the page will be indexed without a Description snippet and such pages will have the following text in the place of a description in the search results pages:

"A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more"

So inorder to completely stop Google from crawling and indexing a page, you should should block the page by implementing, page-level meta robots tag.

Here you go for more: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156449?hl=en

Please feel free to post back if you have any other queries in this regards.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi there,

As you know, there are tons of websites that publish IP blacklists and not everyone of them are authentic. It is no uncommon that IP that belong to legit companies get blacklisted. While these are false positives, there is nothing to worry if you find your IP blacklisted in one or two places. However, you might want to investigate if your IP has been blacklisted in many places.

You can use the following tool to check the same:

http://whatismyipaddress.com/blacklist-check

For barracuda removal request, here is the URL:

http://www.barracudacentral.org/rbl/removal-request

1. Does your ranking get affected if you are associated with a website who is linked to you and is on the blacklist for spam only on Barracuda?

• No, not at all

2. If a website has a bad rating on WOT or WEBUTATION. Does that also hurt your ranking?

• Not directly and moreover, WOT and Webutation scores/ratings can be easily inflated and manipulated. As long as your website stands upto the expectations of your visitors and serves the purpose of its existence, you should be good.

Those were my two cents. All the best to you my friend.

Regards,

Rafi Devanur