Welcome to the Q&A Forum

No problem my friend. You are most welcome.

So if you are using 3rd party services to fill in the reviews content on the sub-domain, you can the following:

1. Stop using the sub-domain henceforth for the reviews content and use the new reviews sub-folder to get the reviews content filled in.

2. Redirect the old reviews content on the sub-domain to the new reviews sub-folder via 301.

This will make sure that you don't loose the SEO goodies that the sub-domain has acquired till date and also all (almost all) of those goodies will be passed on to the new sub-folder.

Please feel free to post any or all of your queries if you have any in this regard.

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 there,

Here are my two cents in this regard. Instead of showing 10 or 15 reviews on the root domain, show no more than 2 and for more reviews you can send the visitors to the reviews sub-domain (using a 'view more reviews' button as you currently have). This will mitigate duplicate content issues to a great extent if at all any. I do not recommend blocking the sub-domain from the search engines. However, you can move the content of the sub-domain to something like a reviews sub-folder as follows:

bannerbuzz.com/reviews

From an SEO stand point, sub-folder is a safe bet compared to a sub-domain. Here is what Rand Fishkin has to say in this regard (http://www.seomoz.org/q/subdomains-vs-subfolders

_ “All the testing, research and examples I've seen in the past few years (and even the past few months) strongly suggest that the same principles still hold true._

Subdomains SOMETIMES inherit and pass link/trust/quality/ranking metrics between one another.

Subfolders ALWAYS inherit and pass link/trust/quality/ranking metrics across the same subdomain.

Thus, having a single subdomain (even just domainname.tld with no subdomain extension) with all of your content is absolutely ideal from an SEO perspective. It's also more usable and brandable, too IMO.”

Here is an interesting discussion about the same here on Moz.com:

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

Hope these help.

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.

I use GsiteCrawler all the time. Its free and gives you lot of options. You can get it here:http://gsitecrawler.com/

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Whoa Tom! I am glad to have similar thoughts as yours in this regard.

Hi Ben,

Just because you have an exact match domain name or keyword in your domain name, Google will not penalize. Google penalizes or intends to penalize such websites if they don't have credible content or don't provide any value add or do not justify a visit to them or do not serve the purpose or intent behind the visit to them. For example, thin affiliate sites that have any or all of the above qualities.

In an attempt to pull down or weed out such thin affiliate websites from top positions in the SERPs, search engines like Google may sometime seem to do injustice to some legit websites but this is very rare and soon such websites may crawl back to their deserving ranking positions. The point here is, Google wants to stop websites that do not have quality content from leveraging the advantages of an exact match domain name. If your website has quality content, does not rely on shady techniques to rank high along with other SEO goodies like fast loading pages, clear navigational hierarchy, useful and informative content, provides good user experience etc., then Google will not have any problem with the exact match domain name.

Google will definitely frown upon websites that have exact match domain names, which are very young and do not provide a value add to its visitors with little to no credible or unique content. The intent behind coming up with exact match domain names should be clean and I think Google wants to discourage or change the perspective of webmasters who want to enjoy the undue advantages that an exact name domain name brings along.

Hope it helps and am sure other Mozers will add their valuable views in this regard.

Best regards,

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.

The very first thing that I would ask the traffic seller is about the referrer information of the traffic. Have seen many of the traffic sellers online and used many of them for SEO experiments. Almost all of the cheaper ones drive traffic from PTC or PPV ad networks, some of them spoof the referrer information to look like coming from organic searches.

To cut short the story, traffic like like will be of no use if not harmful (which it can be sometimes) from an SEO standpoint as this traffic will be almost all the time stale and is of no use. Would like to mention that the bounce rate of these types of traffic can be sometimes very impressive and looks very legit. This might be because of the ad networks' rules as to earn credit, they visitor should be on the page for so and so time and should browse at least so and so number of pages before exiting.

I have also seen that such traffic can be used to improve the Alexa Rank in many cases. Other than this, I have not seen any considerable advantages related to these kind of traffic sold by many so called traffic sellers online (the cheaper ones). Forgot to mention that most of these traffic will look either "direct" or some ad server's IP or host name in web analytics.

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.

Hi Andrew,

I saw this particular page being served over SSL. I don't see a reason that this page to be served over HTTPS. If you want Google to crawl and index it, put it outside the secured portion of your website. I have seen this issue many times in the past. It is as simple as this:

"If you want search engines to crawl and index any resource of your website, you better keep it out of the secured portion of it"

Hope this helps my friend.

BTW, Google does not index all of your pages served over SSL and ideally, the HTTPS portion of your website should be blocked from search engines otherwise, the purpose behind it is not served.

In Google search engine, you can check for HTTPS URLs in Google's index as follows:

site:invoicestudio.com inurl:https

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

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 Sameer,

Its very good that you managed to get a link from an internal page that has a Google PR 2 from a domain whose homepage has a PR 5. Without going in to stuff like the link relevance etc., I would like to tell you that a link from an internal page of a good PR 5 domain will always have a positive effect on your website's link profile, from an SEO stand point.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Carla,

Good to know about your project's completion. I would be happy to have a look at it.

Best regards,

Devanur

First things first, with 1500 daily visitors, its unlikely to lower the Alexa Rank to 1500 as your current rank (4,497) itself is far better than your website can ask for. As the other members mentioned, putting your effort to lower your Alexa Rank is absolutely useless, it would be great if you can let us know what is that you want to achieve with this. Does it in any way add value to your organization's bottom line? Or you want to do it just because someone has asked you to? If you can throw some light on these, we will be able to help you with your goals.

If you are hell bent on lowering your Alexa Rank, you can ask all your friends and family to install the Alexa Toolbar and ask them to visit your website.

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 there,

Its still a highly debated question whether or not if search engines like Google use WHOIS info while ranking a website. Even if you make your WHOIS info private, Google being an accredited ICANN registrar, they can access your WHOIS info.

Now coming back to the question at hand, if search engines use WHOIS info while ranking.

There was an instance in my experience where a client's websites were penalized because they had multiple domains that targeted the same set of keywords /phrases and were ranking in the first page. While the client took all the care to keep those websites look different in all possible respects  like the design, look and feel, navigation, content and even the link profiles of these domains, separate webmaster tools accounts and none of them were interlinked or cross-linked etc., the one obvious thing that was not changed was  the WHOIS info behind these domains which was same. So this incidence in particular made me believe that the search engines like Google might not leave any stone unturned in an effort to put a check on the quality of their search results and also to minimize the chance of any one individual or company trying to grab multiple positions in the first page of their results pages.

That was my experience but I would suggest you to be honest and complete while filling the WHOIS info.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi there,

While it is ok to have substantially similar content reachable from different URLs intended for different geo-located audience, taking few precautions will minimize the confusion for both the search engines and the visitors. Here is what Google has to say in this regard:

"If you have several alternate URLs targeted at users with the same language but in different locales, it's a good idea to provide a generic URL for geographically unspecified users. For example, you may have specific URLs for English speakers in Ireland (en-ie), Canada (en-ca), and Australia (en-au), but want all other English speakers to see your generic English (en) page, and everyone else to see the homepage. In this case you should specify the generic English-language (en) page for searchers in, say, the UK. You can annotate this cluster of pages using a Sitemap file or using HTML link tags like this:

For language/country selectors or auto-redirecting homepages, you should add an annotation for the hreflang value "x-default" as well:
"

For more info:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077&topic=2370587&ctx=topic

&

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2013/04/x-default-hreflang-for-international-pages.html

Hope the above help.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

The cache date and crawl date need not necessarily be the same. This was pretty evident till late 2006 but after that Google changed this to great extent but still there are lot of technical limitations where it is not possible or rather I must say not feasible or unnecessary (Google also uses the, 'if modified since' status to know if a page has been updated or not) to update the cache date every time they crawl a page.

Here are two URLs that will give you more info in this regard:

1. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/video-crawl-dates-in-the-google-cache/

2. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2006/09/better-details-about-when-googlebot.html

3. Most importantly: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-cache-update-12686.html

We see these cache date anomolies daily in our job and personally I have seen these for over a decade. Once you hit the main stream SEO where you start working for clients realtime, you will see these first hand.

Regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Nitin, thanks for stopping by and posting your reply. Just a word of caution regarding Google's cache date. Sometimes, even if the cache date shows an older date, Google might have already updated the changes done to the page recently and it would have included those changes in its index which can be seen in the search results.

Let us take an example:

some changes were made to abc.com/test.html on 7th of April and when we check the cache date on 9th of April, it still shows on older date prior to 7th when the changes were made to the page but, when we check the page in the search results of Google, the changes made would have been already updated  and can be seen in the search results.