Welcome to the Q&A Forum

If you can then, by all means you should get a link from the homepage. This would be far more powerful back link compared links from internal pages. Higher the PR, higher the link juice passed. By the way, a back link from an internal page with PR 2 is not bad either as most of the time, your back links from an internal page would have a PR of 0.

Hi Marcel, it is perfectly alright to display your affiliate offer that way as long as you have the relevant content supporting the offer on the page. Personally, I would go with much bigger content like around 650 words so as to please Google especially after the Panda and Penguins. Please make sure that the iframe is reasonable in size and it does not overwhelm the page by being a huge one.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Prashant, have a fligth to catch..so will be quick..

What is DA:

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

Nice infographic that shows different ways to increase DA:

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/50-ways-to-increase-the-domain-authority-of-your-site-infographic/77281/

And a nice one from Neil Patel:

http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/05/19/5-practical-steps-to-improving-your-websites-domain-authority/

Domain authority is directly related to the quantity and quality of your backlinks. If you increase your DA by backlinks that have good Google PR, then yes, you are likely to get your PR a boost. Good luck.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi, first of all we need more info about the method you used to set the 301 re-directs. Coming to your question regarding 301 re-directs in Wordpress, you can use any of the 301 re-direct plugins like, 'Simple 301 Redirects' etc.

If your website is hosted on Apache server (Linux hosting), you can use the .htaccess file to do the page-to-page 301 re-directs. I am not sure if you have already done that.

If you have used the re-direction plugin named, "Redirection", then there seems to be an issue. However, make sure that you use the accurate tools to check the HTTP header status messages like the following one:

http://www.webconfs.com/http-header-check.php

Regards,

Devanur.

Hi Benny,

Here is a link removal flowchart from BruceClay that can be handy while you audit the link profile of a web property:

http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/link-removal-flowchart/

Hope it helps.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi there, this is definitely not a good idea from an SEO stand point. I strongly recommend to you to have the content written uniquely for each of those pages. I have seen methods like these making websites vanish from the index as well as making websites safely pass under the Google's radar. But, we should stick to the best practices and see to it that all the pages on our websites have substantially unique content so as to find and secure their place into the SERPs. Quality content that is unique, fresh, highly relevant, interesting, link and share worthy can literally spell magic for your SEO efforts. Just my two cents my friend.

Best of luck to you,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Bob,

If you are new and trying to build the brand online, you can include the brand at the beginning of the title along with doing some value based link building with branded anchors. So this would be your brand building phase and then comes your ranking phase for certain keywords/ phrases. This is when you push your brand name to the end of the title and this can be beyond the 65 character limit. Google strips the text after this limit in the SERPs but this does not mean that Google cannot read or will not consider text beyond this limit for ranking. So, I always say, try to include the essence or vital SEO info in the first 65 characters but come up with good titles that read natural and at the same time very enticing.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Brian,

In short, the answer is No. I may have an administrative office in one location but my target market is in another location. This is absolutely fine and there will be no harm for your organic ranking for city1. We have had such scenarios in the past and we did not see these situations doing any harm to our organic ranks.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

No problem my friend and thanks for the info. Wordpress plugins, especially the re-direction ones are not at all dependable in IIS environment. Let me cut the crap and send you straight to the solution. Here you go...

http://www.make-awesome.com/2010/03/301-redirects-with-iis7-rewrite-module/

I wish you good luck.

Regards,

Devanur Rafi and yes, you can call me Rafi.

Hi friend,

The link: command in Google does not show a complete or comprehensive list of links that a web property has. So, never rely on that and please do not worry about that number. You can get a good insight into back links from Google Webmaster Tools account. If you have not created this account, please go ahead and do it right away as this account will give you invaluable SEO info.

Here you go for more info:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2010/10/webmaster-tools-links-to-your-site.html

And here:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55281

Hope this helps.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Keri got it right. With multiple websites all your SEO efforts are scattered and with all other operational overheads. Here is my take on this. One website, very stable, high and wide that will become an authority in the niche going forward. Let that one website  target all those keywords/phrases. There is really no need to come up with new keyword specific domains. There might be some level of keyword cannibalization with multiple domains targeting the same niche.

If at all you want to cross-link the domains you own, you should ideally make those links no-follow.

I conclude by saying, one big website with loads of quality content will always win over multiple small websites in many respects. Those were my two cents.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Usama,

Google will not penalize for duplicate content in this case as it would treat the content unique. So, you don't need to worry in this regard.

Here you go for a video from Matt Cutts of Google on this topic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDg2AGRGjLQ&feature=player_embedded

Hope it helps.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi there, If I were you, I would have humbly told them that I currently do not offer SEO training but I offer SEO consulting. For learning SEO, you can check out online forums like Moz.com, try the SEO starter guides from Google and Moz.com. These will give a good head start for anyone who wants to start-off learning SEO.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

No problem my friend and thanks for the explanation. If you are going to repeat the event then there is no point in creating a new page for it. You can just add the new event to the same page mentioned under a different year. So the point is, the URL should not change but the page gets updated with the new event's info. This is very good from SEO standpoint also as the page will be constantly updated with new content and you will still enjoy all the link love that it accumulated over a period of time.

Hope this helps.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Jayneel,

In this case of yours, you should ideally go in for URL canonicalization as you are dealing with content duplication due to product category pages.

For more info : http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139066

Here is another one from Google regarding the duplicate content issues:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359

Hope these help and please feel free to post here if you have any queries in this regard.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Brad, my take on this would be to remove the site-wides, leave the link only on homepages and no-follow them. In the past and recently I have seen few instances where a web design firm left its link on the websites built by them. Later, some of those websites were never developed and left as it is with very thin content providing no value to the visitors and the Internet. In cases like these, you will be left with a low quality link pointing to your site. The other case would be what if those websites built by you will never get good content and moreover turn out to other shady businesses, you will have a big problem here too. Just not to take a chance, I would always recommend to no-follow your link on the homepages of websites that you build unless you are very sure about the credibility of the website or its owners. But as far as site-wides are concerned, big NO.NO.

Hope that help my friend

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Yes my friend, you should not use language translators for the purpose as these translators do a literal translation and mess up the grammar of the language. You can take help of a writer for the corresponding language and have the translation done. Please remember, bad spelling and grammar lead to bad user experience and search engines will not favor websites with bad spellings and grammar.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Agree with Martijn. A non-existing resource on your website should ideally pull up your custom 404 error file throwing an HTTP header status 404 and you should give an option to the visitor regarding what wants to do like showing him a link to the homepage. You can also include some links to other important pages of your website. But you should not redirect him to anywhere automatically.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi there,

There is nothing that you will be losing if you use the markup by microformats.org. However, to the possible extent, try to use schema.org as it is the standard that the 3 biggies in Search Engine landscape (Google, Microsoft and Yahoo) have come-up with. For more,

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1211158

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Alex,

Without diving in to the issue of increased number of 404 errors being reported by Webmaster tools account, let us first look at the core issue where, 404 pages (non-existing resources) that return an HTTP header status code 200. These are called, 'soft 404 errors'. Ideally all the non-existing resources on the website should return an HTTP header status code 404 or 410 as per the situation and not a status 200 which is very confusing for search engines and a bad practice. This should be fixed immediately. Please have all such pages return 404 and not 200 as soon as possible.

Here you go for more about the soft 404 errors:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/181708?hl=en

and here to know more about when to return a 404 status code:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2409439?hl=en

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.