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Hi friend,

Yes, the code you mentioned should work the way you expect without any issues.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Gary is absolutely correct. Google can alter your page Titles and Descriptions if they find are not appropriate and can even fetch descriptions from other prominent websites where your website is listed with a description. The best example of such prominent website is the Open Directory Project, Dmoz.org.

So its always recommended to come up with relevant page titles and descriptions that are unique for all your pages.

Most of the time, Google will take the titles and descriptions mentioned by the webmaster in the title tag and description meta tag, but there is no guarantee that this happens 100% of the time. If your website is listed on dmoz and you do not want Google to pickup the description from there, you can use the page level robots meta tag as follows:

Similarly if you do not want Google to pickup the description from Yahoo directory,

Use your page titles and descriptions in such a way that they force the visitor to click on your website in the search results. The title should contain your target term in it. See to it that the Titles and Descriptions have a strong compelling message. Using titles and descriptions optimally can have dramatic improvement in CTR from search results.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Sam, my friend...please never think along those lines like how and why someone doing spam or blackhat tactics and still be able to rank high in search engines. Even if someone from Google guarantees me in written that there won't be anything happening to my site  if I go the blackhat way, I will still stay away from those as I am here to stay forever and I never ever think of doing anything that the search engines frown upon. Please don't bother about those who do blackhat and still get away with it. Thinking along those lines itself is incorrect. Let them do and they will repent one fine day. Today, there are thousands if not lakhs of sites that do not follow the guidelines of search engines and are still ranking high. Just because they are doing good despite their shady tactics, we should not follow them or even bother or worry about them. Its obvious that they are not doing the right thing and we just have to laugh when we see them. They won't last long. Here is the deal, if you want to be here forever, then stay clean.Only quality content and quality links can secure you a lasting high rank in Google.

However, you can report those spammy websites here:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreportform?hl=en

and here:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport

You need to login to your Google webmaster tools account to be able to access the URLs above.

So don't worry my friend. I know how does it feel when you see worthless sites ranking high in search engines.

We are here to play a fair game and not to manipulate the search results to rank high in search engines and please do not even think about those who try to out-smart the search engines and their algorithms. Wish you all the very best.

Regards,

Devanur Rafi

No problem my friend. Your re-direction setup works perfectly with an HTTP header status 301. It might take anywhere from 2 to 5 weeks for you to be able to see the effect. Please keep posting the updates in here. I wish you all the very best for all your endeavors.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Sorina,

I can tell you that the index dates shown by Google are accurate but is not the case with the Cache date sometimes as the date shown in the Cache and the copy shown in the cache don't match many times but the index dates are accurate. Send me a private message with the actual URLs under discussion and I will be able to comment with more clarity.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi, while thousands of lines in the .htaccess file is not recommended, here you go for more info about the question at hand:

http://moz.com/community/q/thousands-of-301-redirections-htaccess-alternatives

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi, first of all, the list of soft 404 errors that Google shows in webmaster tools account is not comprehensive. It also depends on the pages that throw an HTTP header status 200 for non-existing resources on the website get noticed by Google. For example, if someone tries to search for 'gorillaglass', the resulting URL from your domain will be,

http://www.wearyouwant.com/search.html?product=gorillaglass

If Google comes across this page (from your website or from else where on the Internet, just like this URL, http://www.wearyouwant.com/en/brand-lime-crime.html being mentioned on few places on the Internet) then there is a great chance of the above URL being reported as a Soft 404 error in webmaster tools account.

To fix the Soft 404 errors, you need to make those URLs throw an HTTP header status code, 404 and not 200.

Here you go for more: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2010/06/crawl-errors-now-reports-soft-404s.html

Hope that helps my friend.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi,

If I were you, I would have thought about the user experience and the better logical site structure rather than thinking about my rank in SERPs. Its always good to go by a URL structure that is logical, simple, easy to comprehend. So having the product category (in this case tv) next to domain name followed by the brand is more logical URL structure. Coming to the rankability of a page, it depends on lot of parameters with the quality of content being at the top. Of course having a page as close as possible to the domain's root is good when it comes to crawlability factor but this cannot be a substitute to the quality of the content that the page has on it. Hope this helps.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Richard,

PageRank differs from page to page and it depends on the inbound links for a particular page.

So, if you see different PR for your homepage and any other page, there is nothing to worry and its not that Google treats them two different domains. Coming to your query regarding the sub-domain for your news section, please go through the discussion given below:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/multiple-subdomains-my-worst-seo-mistake-now-what-should-i-do

Good luck.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi,

I 100% agree with FedeEinhorn.

roofrackworld.com.au seems penalized somewhere around November 2013 to December 2013.

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

Give an offline access to the tool for your Google Analytics account. Select the date range from September 2013 till date. Look for any Google update related penalty.

Please post your observations here so that we can take it from there.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Bob,

Hope this tool will be of great help if you want to check whether the drop is because of Panda or Penguin or any other updates from Google:

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

Please use it and post back the findings so that we can take it from there.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

If a particular brand has no products currently, instead of showing a, 'product not found' message, you can have a description of the brand or something like, 'please checkout this space for products from xxx brand soon' etc. And also give an option for the visitor or some closely related product or category link on the same page. In this case, the HTTP header status can be a 200.

If you do not want the search engines or the visitors be confused with a brand shop that has no products and shows a, 'product not found' message, the HTTP header status code should be 404 and not 200 and at the same time should help the visitor by suggesting a close match so that he can further navigate the website.

Good luck friend.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

This depends on your target requirements. If you want to target Sony followed by generic terms then you go with domain.com/sony/abc-product or if you want to target generic terms then you go with domain.com/abc-product/sony

Keeping the targeted term close to the root domain will have slightly better chances to rank compared to being away from the root in some sub-directory. And again other factors like the link profile of that page also matters a lot. So you try to earn more quality links to which ever page you want to rank for.

So you first decide upon your targeting strategy that may depend on search volumes of the search terms and the commercial intent behind these terms etc.

Regards,

Devanur Rafi

Ali, my friend it seems someone is trying to do some negative SEO. First of all, by all means try and stop the guy/s from doing this. Next, try to contact the respective webmasters to have those rogue links removed. Then, use the Disavow tool in Google webmaster tools account and submit a request with proper documentation and details.

For more info about disavow: https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2648487

Good luck.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Amelia, while the link you mentioned covers it all, here you go for more insights while moving a domain:

http://moz.com/webinars/domain-migrations-lessons-from-the-moz-transition

and

http://moz.com/blog/domain-migration-lessons

Hope they help.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Moz does not provide backlink indexing service.

Hi David,

I will be very quick here. 'rel=canonial' can come to your rescue.

Here you go for more: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

Here is another article from Moz regarding duplicate content and how to go about it:

http://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi there,

Technically, with parallax scrolling, you are dealing with a single page. Ideally, from an SEO stand point, it is highly recommended to target one keyword /phrase per page. So if you are targeting one keyword with your parallax scrolling page, provided you have good content on it, then you are good. Especially after the page layout algorithm from Google, it is good to have sizeable content in the top fold. This holds good for any type of websites.

There is no doubt that with a technique like parallax scrolling you will definitely grab a lot of attention and love from your visitors, in fact this can heighten the site engagement times to a great extent. So the user experience is taken care of as long as the page serves the purpose of its visitors. So SEO is all about striking a balance between pleasing the visitors and search engines. You can take care of finicky search engine spiders by giving them what they love and that is great content with right keywords taking the right places on the page.

As far as SEO is concerned, targeting multiple keywords /phrases on a page leads to keyword dilution and we should ideally target a single keyword /phrase per page.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Dear Jonathan,

Moosa and Kane have given nice insights. Here are my two cents. No matter what, an original piece of content which is unique, fresh, relevant and link worthy, always gets great traction online and goes viral with little to no help. So all that we need is try and come up with such content. All the SEO goodies will follow it after...

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi, those are sitelinks and are currently automated. There is no way you can force them at Google.

Here you go for more:https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/47334?hl=en

Best,

Devanur Rafi