Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi there,

First things first, Google does not guarantee to use the mark up to display rich snippets in its search results for any website. The time taken to display rich snippets may vary from website to website depending on lot of factors and if you have trouble with Google not displaying the rich snippets for your website, you can check out the following URL:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1093493

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 there,

There are no thumb rules about the repetition of your targeted term in the description or for that matter any where on the website. Titles and Descriptions can be used to optimize and maximize the click through rates for your website from the search engine results pages.

Try to come up with enticing and compelling titles and descriptions that will literally force the visitor to click through. Just make sure to capture the crux of the title within the first 65 characters including spaces as Google strips beyond that and for descriptions, its 150 characters including spaces.

Descriptions are concise summary of what the page is all about and they should go hand-in-hand with content of the page that they belong to. They should complement the titles in some form. Titles and Descriptions can be descriptive and at the same time can also have a strong call to action if possible.

Having said the above, make sure you include the target term in the description and if possible a call to action to maximize the click through rate. As it is not always possible to include a call to action in the description, you can follow the guidelines given by Google at the following URL:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35624

Hope that helps.

Best regards,

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.

Yes my friend, it is true that there will be a small amount of link decay with 301 but as you know, this is the best solution out there for the purpose.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Yes, with a correctly implemented 301 re-direction mechanism in place, your new domain will get all the link love inherited from the old domain within few weeks.

Here you go for more info:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83105

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi there,

If you are bothered about Google indexing multiple URLs that lead to the same page, you can try using the parameter handling tool in Google Webmaster Tools account. For more info:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1235687

Hope this helps.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Scott,

If you want that page to rank for that particular long tail term, you should by all means create that page and make sure to link (if this term is very important) to it from the homepage from within the content or by a text link from somewhere on the homepage with the exact anchor text. You should ideally link to that page with the exact anchor from other pages of your website also.

Best regards,

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.

Hi Luis,

You can do a change address in Google webmaster tools account once the 301 re-direction is in place.

Here you go for more info:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83106

For more about moving your website:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83105

Best regards,

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 Pete,

While going for a listing in free directories (except handful of good ones with DMoz being at the top) is quite futile, the paid ones with editorial control will be beneficial. Top paid directories like, Yahoo directory, botw.org, business.com etc are still good to go for.

You can refer to this video by Matt Cutts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rKUlVquEImc

It all boils down to how much editorial control is exercised over the listings compared to automated listings.

Hope it helps.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Great post Matt. You nailed it.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

No problem my friend. You are most welcome. If you wanted to go for HTTPS intentionally then it is ok. However, it seems Google does not treat HTTPS the way it should as of now. Probably at some point later this may change and who know if they have already rolled it out and it is just under way. Bigger changes like this take time to propagate fully through out. Till that time, all that we can do is sit tight and have our fingers crossed

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi there,

Though as per Google, it is ok (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeFo4ytOk8M) to go for https for your entire website, personally, I saw in many instances where https URLs find it very difficult competing with http URLs in Google.

Normally, I do not see a need to go in for https for plain pages that do not need to be served over https. Only the secure pages that might need a login to access them may be served over https. Hope our friends over here will jump in with their views.

Let me conclude by saying, I would go for http for all the pages that I desire to rank high in Google and this view is based solely on my personal experience.

Hope it helps.

Best regards,

Devanur 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.

Excellent answer by Gil. Thanks for the great post. The purpose behind the search engines' very own existence is to provide and present the visitors with, the most relevant and comprehensive information about the search term and as long as your pages provide this to the visitors, they will rank high in the search engine results pages and can possibly withstand the future algorithm changes.

Hi Carla,

Thanks for stopping by and asking a question. While there are many great websites that implemented parallax scrolling, only few of them were able to strike a balance between both, SEO and UX. Please accept my sincere apology for not being able to name them here for many obvious reasons. However, let me tell you few things about your project at hand. If your website is not in to creative niches like, design (can be website design also), art, e-commerce (catalogue websites), studio etc..

1. you should be giving more emphasis to the quality of the content and its size on the homepage especially if you want to rank for any keyword /phrase using with your homepage.

2. Good content of about 600 words should be great with a keyword density of around 1% (this is excluding the keyword presence in other indexable content on the page like the meta information, heading tags, image alt text, image titles).

3. Good code to text ratio, though this is not a hard and fast rule. Personally, I like it to be around 25%.

4. Sizeable content in the first fold and this does not mean to dump all your content in the first fold.

5. Other on-page SEO factors.

If you are into the creative niche, you can lean a bit more towards the UX side.

Hope the above help and again please accept my apology if my response has not lived up to your expectation.

I wish you all the very best for your up-coming project.

Best regards,

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

Oh, Ok got that. In this case you can go ahead and have domain.com/sony/tv

if you are targeting Sony TVs and domain.com/sony/dvd-player/ ideally to target Sony DVD players.

Regards,

Devanur Rafi.