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Hi, here you go.....

RewriteRule ^(.)/(?.)?$ $1$2 [R=301,L]

Please note that the thing which looks like a capital V in the above rule is actually the backward slash and forward slash together.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Prashanth, don't be obsessed with Alexa Rank as its highly volatile with lot of factors that are out of a webmaster's control. A growing Alexa Rank does not necessarily mean that your website is doing bad, it might also be because of other websites out there doing well.

However, if you want to lower the Alexa Rank for your website, you can ask all your people to install Alexa toolbar on their systems and access your website. Within no time, you will see a drastic improvement in your Alexa Rank.

You would be doing good on all fronts if you work towards improving the quality of the content on your website and making the user experience better there by making the site sticky that will result in better site engagement times. This will eventually bring all the SEO goodies to your website and ultimately to you.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi there,

PR is one of the most effective ways to gain traction within minimum amount of time if done properly and a PR with unique content is the way you should go otherwise, the purpose behind gets a hit. Having said how powerful a PR can be, utmost care should be taken not to abuse it. We should be coming up with a PR only when we have a newsworthy article or some interesting stuff about something like a product launch etc. Over doing or releasing PRs too frequently will do more harm than good.

Hope that helps.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

You are most welcome my friend. Your point is true to some extent as they want to bring in an uniformity in this case and they may tend to be biased towards the new standard a little bit so as to push it hard towards being widely accepted. So if you can, please switch over to the markup by schema.org or if lot of work has already been put in to this, you can just leave it as it is. Personally, I would switch over to the new standard by all possible means if there were a chance.

Good luck.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Alex,

Thanks for the info. Here are few issues that I observed with the website and I am very confident that if you can address and fix these, you should come out of the issue with flying colors:

1. URL canonicalization issue: Both the www and non-www versions of your website URLs return an HTTP header status code 200. You should ideally make all the non-www URLs to be redirected to their respective www versions via a 301 permanent redirection immediately.

2. Inconsistent URL structure: Your website is still using 'underscrores (_) in the URLs as word separators. There are underscores along with the recommended hyphens (-). This inconsistent usage can sometimes lead to issues. So please replace all the underscores with hyphens.

3. Google PageSpeed check: When I ran Google PageSpeed test on some of the URLs from your website along with the ones that you gave, I found the score varying between, 28 and 60. Please look at the recommendations that the PageSpeed tool gives and try to address the issues (especially the ones like, "Reduce blocking resources". For more: https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/best-practices/rtt#PreferAsyncResources)

I suggest you to please run Google PageSpeed check for some of the URLs.

Note: The URLs from your website that are present in the Google's index may also give similar issues when run through PageSpeed test. This should not make you not addressing these issues.

4. Heavy pages leading to higher page loading times and response times:

Many of the pages that I checked are more than 1.3 MB in size which is very huge.This can be a really big problem most of the times that not only impacts your website from search engines' perspective but also leads to bad user experience which ultimately affects the SEO of your website. You can use tools like gtmetrix.com and fix the issues shown by them.

5. Repetition of keywords or phrases in page titles and URLs:

This issue might look like an over optimization effort and should be fixed as early as possible.

For example: www.wheretobuybeauty.com.au/acqua-di-parma/acqua-di-parma-acqua-di-parma-collezione-barbiere-shaving-cream-75ml_25oz

It could have been like: www.wheretobuybeauty.com.au/acqua-di-parma/collezione-barbiere-shaving-cream-75ml-25oz

If you look at the above page, the phrase,  'acqua-di-parma' is present twice in both the URL and page title. This is something that you need to review seriously as it looks like keyword repetition that is not good from an SEO stand point.

By the way, your robots.txt file is clean and it should not be causing these issues.

Please have the issues mentioned above as soon as possible and you should be out of the woods soon after that.

I wish you good luck Alex.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Andrew,

The server on which your website is hosted is throwing a 500 server-side error. You better contact the hosting provider and get the issue fixed. You can use the HTTP header status checkers online like, web-sniffer.net and put the URL, http://www.interconnect.org.uk

All the other tools like W3C validator, http://builtwith.com/interconnect.org.uk etc gave the same result:

500 Internal Server Error

Best,

Devanur Rafi

There is no second thought about it and it should be 'slow-cooker' and not slowcooker for lot of obvious reasons both from users' and search engines' perspectives. Try typing 'slowcooker' in Google search and look for suggestions, you won't find 'slowcooker' and more over, slow and cooker are both different words and a hyphen should be placed between them. Even if you search with 'slowcooker', in the results, its no where to be seen. This is for URL structure but coming to domain names, slowcooker.com is recommended and slow-cooker is not for many SEO reasons especially since Google's exact domain match algo update, I would think 10 times before going in for domain names with hyphen(s).  Hope that helps.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

Thank you Karl and you are absolutely correct, if at all we go for cross linking, we should ideally no-follow those links just like we no-follow all the out-bound links pointing to websites that we think will be useful for our visitors. For example, a link to Wikipedia from a page on our website.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

No problem friend. If you remember the same happened with XML sitemaps standard. In the beginning there would be little resistance but going forward, the standards will be accepted and respected!!

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Alex,

I did a code validation check for the following URL:

http://www.wheretobuybeauty.com.au/abercrombie-fitch/abercrombie-fitch-1892-cobalt-eau-de-cologne-spray-50ml_17oz

It gave 238 Errors and 538 Warnings!!

Search engines like Google favor pages with cleaner code. So, I strongly recommend to have the code cleaned on the website.

Here you go for validation check:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wheretobuybeauty.com.au%2Fabercrombie-fitch%2Fabercrombie-fitch-1892-cobalt-eau-de-cologne-spray-50ml_17oz&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0&user-agent=W3C_Validator%2F1.3+http%3A%2F%2Fvalidator.w3.org%2Fservices

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

It should have been something like this: RewriteRule ^(.)/(?.)?$ $1$2 [R=301,L]

But no where to be seen. So no idea.

Hi Paul,

I recently came across an article in this regard. Though its a bit old content, but provides good insights to breadcrumbs implementation. Hope it helps you. Here you go:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/03/17/breadcrumbs-in-web-design-examples-and-best-practices-2/

and here:

http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/breadcrumb-navigation-examined-best-practices-examples/

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi,

I just checked the backlinks to www.apollopowersystems.com using Moz OSE and it says, 161 total links and 58 root domains linking to it. When checked with MajeticSE OSE, I got 858 total links and 148 domains.

Just wanted to let you know that different tools have different data update intervals and frequencies and no two tools will show you the same data. For more info about the backlinks, you can check the Google Webmaster Tools account for the website in discussion. Hope that help. Please feel free to post all your queries you might have in this regard.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hey Ayaz,

I can put myself in your shoes as I faced the exact issue few years back and this worked like a charm. I am not sure that the following will work for you too but can be looked at along with other good suggestions that you will get here at SEOMoz.

The only thing that I did was, I re-directed all the sub-domains via 301 to their respective sub-directories on the same domain. For example: abc.example.com 301 to example.com/abc/

Within 3 weeks, I was jumping with joy as I not only re-gained what I lost in organic visits but also the numbers got better by little over 9%.

I had unique and original content on the sub-domains. But, these sub-domains were not attracting much traffic and moreover the traffic to main domain dwindled but when these sub-domains were re-directed via 301 to their respective sub-directories (I created those sub-directories just for this purpose), everything was back to normal with additional traffic. Since then, I have been an advocate of sub-directories over sub-domains for obvious SEO benefits.

By the way, did you move any of your main domain's content to the sub-domains?

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Alex,

Sorry, if I were not clear in my previous post. I meant that in general pages with cleaner code will have an edge over similar pages with bad code when it comes to SEO.

Just an example: Page A has cleaner code compared to page B with all other SEO factors being equal. In a scenario like this, page B might not be favored by Google because of issues arising from bad code like page loading performance, poor rendering in browsers etc,.

The issue at hand might not be because your pages do not pass W3 Validation but its not a bad idea to have a cleaner code on your website

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

I am sorry my friend. Somehow I missed your response.

It should have been: RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ /$1 [R,L]

So, you missed the /

And it is also used to remove the trailing slash from URLs just like the one that I gave you earlier.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi there, the length/depth of the URL structure is very important. The deeper it is, the harder it would be to rank high in the search engines. This also depends on how authoritative the domain is and other factors like the page authority itself.

It is highly recommended to place the resources as close as possible to the root by eliminating unnecessary folders.

If possible, I personally would recommend you to go with a shorter URL structure and as you mentioned, you can deploy a 301 permanent redirection mechanism to pass on the SEO goodies to the new URLs. You can expect a temporary loss in rankings but everything should be fine within 3 to 6 weeks. Also while restructuring the URLs, please take enough care not to include anything that does not convey a clear hierarchy. The URLs should be as short as possible and contain the target keywords/phrases with word separators like hyphens (these are recommended over others like an underscore). Those were my two cents. Good luck my friend.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Sawan, as David suggested, you need to consolidate the data from different tools as no one tool gives you a comprehensive list of backlinks. You can check out Google webmaster tools account for your website as it gives you very good list.

Just because you have backlinks, you will not be able to drive traffic. It depends on what kind of websites have your link. If you look at your link profile, you can see directories forming the major part. This is 2013 my friend. Generic web directory submissions will take you no where. You need to promote your website on niche directories. You operate in a very narrow, B2B
niche and you should ideally be getting listed on directories like, indiamart.com, indianindsustry.com, tradeindia.com, infobanc.com etc.

You should also target websites or blogs or forums where people are talking about your niche who might be interested in your product line. You need a lot to be done on your website regarding on-page optimization also. You should perform a comprehensive keyword research and analysis to come up with the most searched keywords/phrases of your niche, optimize the content of your website for these keywords and so on. Essentially, you will be trying to make your website rank high in the search engines for good keywords in your niche.

Best of luck to you my friend.

Devanur Rafi

Thanks a lot Matt for those encouraging words.

Hi Sorina,

This is a common thing and it all depends on a site's crawlability (how easy is it to crawl for the bot) and crawl frequency for that site. Google would have picked up that post first on the bad site and then from the good site. However, just because one or two posts were picked up late does not mean that the good site is not crawler friendly. It also depends on how far the resource is from the root. Let us take an example:

A page on a good site: abc.com/folder1/folder2/folder3/page.html

Now a bad site copies that page: xyz.com/page.html

In this case, Google might first pickup the copied page from the bad site as it is just a click away from the root which is not the case with the good site where the page is nested deep inside multiple folders.

You can also give the way back machine (archive.org) a try to find which website published the post first. Sometimes this might work out pretty well. You can also try to look at the cache dates of the posts on both the sites in Google to get some info in this regard.

Hope those help. I wish you good luck.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.