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Thanks for the info my friend. Going in for a CCTLD to target new country is a great idea and is the most recommended way forward in your case. Yes, you are absolutely on the right track as you want to redirect the pages on the old domain to the corresponding ones on the new domain via a 301 permanent redirection. Please do not forget to set the correct geo-target for the new domain in Google webmaster tools account. Also, if possible, you can opt for a server located in the new country as this is also one of the hints that Google looks for while geo-targeting. Here you go for more information in this regard:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html

Hope the above help. Good luck to you my friend and please feel free to post any queries that you might have in this regard.

Best,

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 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 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 there, for an e-commerce website like yours, you can come up with unique product descriptions, you can include the user reviews, you can also include some content explaining the usage, features and functionality of the product. You can also come up with small videos about the product to be included on the product page. To put it simple, you can study sites like Amazon.com.

Only page titles and meta descriptions will not help here. You will need unique and useful content to be able to rank high in the search engines and it is not different for e-commerce websites. Hope that helps.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

I second to Egol's opinion here. Its great to have the sub-domain's PR equal to that of the root domain. You should move the sub-domain to sub-directory to leverage the link popularity of the sub-domain along with all SEO goodies that will further bolster the authority of the root domain. Previously, we faced an issue with sub-domain strategy despite unique content on all those sub-domains. We then moved the content from all the sub-domains to their respective sub-directories, deployed a 301 redirection pointing all the sub-domains' content to their corresponding pages on the sub-directories. The results were amazing. We not only regained the traffic loss but also had an increase in the organic traffic. Since then, I have been a keen advocate of sub-directory/folder structure.

Best of luck to you.

Devanur Rafi

You are most welcome Mark. At some point or the other, we all (at least people who come up with original content) would have faced the content scraping or stealing issue. Its all the part of the game. Being the rightful owners of the content, we should not leave any stone unturned while trying to protect our rights for our content. Personally, I have seen the copyright notice work well with manual content stealers but, for those who use automated tools to scrape and publish content, there is no definite method to stop them. Wish you all the very best for all your endeavors.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Mark,

Your concerns are very much true and unfortunately there is no absolute solution for this issue.However, the following might help you face and handle the issue:

1. Use Google authorship.

This will help the search engines recognize the correct or the rightful owner of the content. Here you go for more:

http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/authorship/index.html

2. Have the copyright notices published along with the content. Give clear syndication guidelines like, an attribution in the form of a link pointing to your webpage (that the content resides on) if someone wants to publish on their website.

3. You can always file DMCA complaints right from the Google webmaster tools account.

4. You can use Google Alerts to watch out for any of your content being stolen and published elsewhere.

Here you go for more in this regard:

http://blog.kissmetrics.com/find-remove-stolen-content/

Hope the above help.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Shailendra,

Here you go for a solution right from the horse's mouth:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Hope it helps my friend.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi there,

It would not be good to compare the search volume figures of Google and Bing. Looking at the difference in the market share of these two search engines, the search volumes will definitely vary by a large scale. Coming to the accuracy, my experience has been good with both Bing and Google. The search volume numbers that they churn out are based on the queries that they each get respectively and obviously, Google will have a higher number because of its market share. Hope it helps.

Best,

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.

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 Ben,

No doubt, Wordpress can be a great platform from an SEO standpoint. With so many good plugins and other customization options available, you should be able to build a very web property that will not only look great but also aids in better SEO. For all SEO purposes and many other reasons, Wordpress has been my personal choice for many years when it comes to building a simple website or a complex ecommerce site. I never had to regret with the choice.

Those were my two cents.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi there, the "change of address" option in Google webmaster tools account is for domain or site level change where a domain has moved to new address. This is not intended for page-level redirection. However, if you can give us more details about the issue at hand, we will be able to suggest you better.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Zoltan,

If done properly, you can carve a niche for yourself and create a never-existed market. If you look the key phrase you quoted,  'Jules Verne t-shirts', its a combination of two highly searched keywords. Both of them individually have great search volume, the issue is no one till now has been searching for this combination and here you have a great opportunity to 'create' the market. Few years back, I used a product from the USA that was immensely popular there. I wanted to sell it in a different country where people hardly heard about the product. I felt its going to be a huge hit in the new market (as I used it personally and felt great about it) but, there was no awareness or demand for the product there. So, as a determined marketer, I wanted to create the market first by spreading the awareness of what the product was and how it can change lives of its users so on and so forth. The second step was of-course, selling the product in the newly created market. That endeavor of mine was not so successful that I thought it would be in the new geography but thought me many lessons that proved to be invaluable later on.

Coming to your situation. Firstly, you should ideally spread the word about your products, bring in an awareness. You can leverage the power of social media, niche forums related to both, the author or the book and product related.

For the keywords list, you should be ideally using the combination of your (product) and (author and/or book). You can also look at generic phrases like, 'custom t-shirts', 't-shirt printing'(exact match global search volume of 74,000), 'design your own t-shirt' (this has an exact global search volume of 33,100).

To conclude,

Create the market if it does not exist (as in this case) then sell the product.

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, before doing anything, I would recommend you to please wait for 2 to 3 weeks if you have not already done so. After any update, it is quite common to see a fluctuation in positions. If you have already waited for more than 3 weeks and still see heading South, the first thing (if there were no changes made to the website recently) to check would be the link profile of your website to make sure there are no spammy links in there.

The link evaluation flow chart from Bruceclay can be of great help in this regard:

http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/2012/06/link-removal-flowchart/

You can go ahead accordingly. Assuming that the drop in rankings is because of recent Penguin update, you will have to initiate the process of getting rid of all those bad links, document them properly and submit them to Google and request for reconsideration. Here you go for more in this regard:

http://moz.com/ugc/googles-disavow-tool-works-penalty-removal

Please go through the article as it has links to everything that you might need in this regard.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Bill here you...

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html

and here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en

Hope those help.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

You are most welcome my friend and couldn't agree more with your comment

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi, this is against Google's double serving policy. Here you go for more:

https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/2600168?hl=en

and here: www.interactually.com/blurry-lines-of-adwords-double-serving/

Hope that helps.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.