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Hi there,

Google or for that matter any legit organization should be very cautious with their privacy policies and stuff like that. Its part of their legal requirements. They try to implement these with whom ever they work for or with. From an individual's stand point these may sound silly but its a best practice to have a privacy policy statement, an About US page and a page of Terms and Conditions for all your web properties. These pages can instill the much needed trust factor among your visitors.Hope this helps.

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.

Sam, you can definitely use the list on SEOMoz. However you can also have a look at the directories' PageRank, Alexa Rank (yes this helps sometimes), number of indexed pages related to your subject from the directory in Google and the list can go on..

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Sam,

To be frank, you do not need to do deliberate link building activities to be able to rank in SERPs. However, the above statement greatly depends on the quality of the content that a page has and other on-page SEO factors. Pages with great content acquire links in a natural way as good content will be syndicated by active bloggers and webmasters all over the Internet.

So to answer your question, you can try to earn links by giving out (posting) quality content in the form of articles.. You can post these articles to the top article directories. Stick to top 5 and you should be good. Please be careful not to submit the same article to multiple article directories. This is how to can squeeze the most out of your article marketing effort.

You can also submit unique articles to top document sharing sites. Another method to expedite the process of acquiring links by contributing some quality work is, to join forums that operate in your niche and actively participate in them by doing some legit postings. Though most of the forums incorporate nofollow on the external links, this should not stop you in anyway from doing forum posting. Please never look at if a link is followed or not followed as long as you are adding some real value. Legit, highly relevant and informative content automatically becomes a links magnet.

There are other legit ways of acquiring legit links but the above should keep you busy enough. Hope these help.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Brian,

In short, the answer is No. I may have an administrative office in one location but my target market is in another location. This is absolutely fine and there will be no harm for your organic ranking for city1. We have had such scenarios in the past and we did not see these situations doing any harm to our organic ranks.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Vikas,

To host a blog on your website there are numerous approaches. You can have Wordpress installed on a domain in its root folder or you can install Wordpress in a sub-directory (domain.com/WP/, you can re-name WP to blog so that it becomes domain.com/blog/ ) or you can install Wordpress on a sub-domain (blog.domain.com) etc. Personally I have had great success with installing Wordpress on a sub-directory. This way, I am not separating my blog content from its root and moreover adding strength to the root domain in terms of all SEO goodies. Hope this helps.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hello friend,

If you are serious about ranking for the brand 'Sony' then you should be at least for the first one year or two targeting the very long tail versions of the brand. Even after one or two years I will not be able to rank for a short branded term like 'sony tv' in the top 10 results looking at such a big brand and lot of top online stores competing. Even if someone work their whole life optimizing a page for a generic branded term, it is not possible to be able to out rank the brand's website for the term. Example would be, I cannot take away Microsoft's rank in SERPs for the term 'windows' no matter how hard or how long I try optimizing a page for it.

Coming to your question, if your page consists only Sony TVs and your targeted term is 'sony tv', it would make sense to name your URL, domain.com/sony-tv

Ranking in the top 10 or even top 5 in SERPs for long tail branded terms is possible even today with exceptionally well written content with all the SEO elements in place. For example, you can try to rank for a term like this: 'samsung smart led tv d7000'

Best 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 Ali,

Your ranking is directly related to your content, on-page optimization and off-page optimization (link popularity). So if you want your pages start ranking for different variations of a keyword, you should be adding content related to these variations (each page targeting one keyword / phrase), you should be doing the on-page optimization keeping the emphasis on the targeted term for that page and placing it in places like title, description, H1 and other heading tags (H1 is recommended and others are optional), page's content (along with few tightly related variations to the targeted term. The keyword density can be around 1% in the article content of the page i.e. excluding to the term present in the other crawlable content like, the meta information, image attributes etc), in the anchor text of your internal links, in the image names, image titles, image alt text, bolding, italicizing the term in text etc and in your link building activity with approximates 20 to 25 % with exact term as an anchor.

For your second question, you can submit a sitemap through Bing webmaster tools account.

Hope these help.

By the way, any particular reason whey you used the term, "buy cocks" as an anchor in majority of your backlinks??

Best regards,

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,

To reduce the bounce rate of your landing pages, you can have some teasers on them that lead to other pages. For one of my clients, I did the same. I added product related textual and graphical teasers to the landing pages with high bounce rate. When the visitors clicked on those teasers they are taken to another page on the same website that will have some how to videos and / or slides. This strategy worked pretty well for my client. One thing that you have to remember is that when including teasers on these high bounce pages, these should be tightly related or belong to the same subject matter of these host pages they reside in.

Coming to the question related to if high bounce rate is good or bad, it all depends on the purpose behind the existence of these pages. Take for example, a visitor lands on a Wikipedia page in search of a topic. He reads the article and leaves Wikipedia. In this case, the page on Wikipedia served the purpose behind its existence and the visitor got what he wanted. Bounce rate on Wikipedia is good in this regard.

Hope that helps.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

I strongly agree with David's response. You will never be penalized to have a BBB logo linking out to their site. Infact, its good for your website's trust factor among your visitors. However, you can nofollow your BBB logo link though this will have little to no effect. So the conclusion is there is absolutely nothing to worry about this issue and all that you have to worry about are the link building techniques or methods that you employ to grow your website's link popularity. Make sure you earn links by good content that automatically earns links from good neighborhood rather than being an active and deliberate link builder.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Kollin,

No matter what, for me a blog has always been synonymous with Wordpress because of unmatched options to customize, very easy on-page SEO opportunity with very nice plugins and the list can go on...

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Vikas,

As you know the country specific TLD is a strong hint to Google about the target audience for the site, personally I do not recommend this approach of having a different place in the domain name with an entirely different geo-specific TLD ext. Its confusing for both the visitors and the search engines. Here we have to also look at how important is the user experience factor from search engines point of view and I strongly feel that UX can be a very important factor while ranking a page in Google going forward if its not already one today.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi,

For people to care or not to care about the Google places listings in the SERPs may largely depend on the search term and the intention. If they are doing a search to find a Dentist in so and so location, then the Google places listings can serve the purpose of search and if the search is intended to find out information or to check out a product or prices, then these Google places listings will be skipped by the searcher. Despite of all these, wherever or whenever possible, we have to get our website optimized for Google places also.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

No problem friend. You are most welcome.

That's true Ayaz. 301 does not serve the purpose in this case. As you have stopped this, sit tight and let us see how the 301 from the sub-domains to the sub-directories setup works. As far as my experience goes, adding new, unique, original and fresh content will speed up the process to come out of a penalty if there has been applied any.

Wish you all the best.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Ayaz, by now you should have asked those guys to stop this thing. If you have not, please do so quickly. Coming to undoing these, even I don't have a clue. Most of these would be some fake accounts or accounts created for only this purpose. The best thing you can do as of now is to stop this from growing further. Moreover, we are not sure about if these inflated social signals are the cause for the drop in the rankings. Gut feeling says, there is nothing that you should be worried about and these are not the ones responsible for the loss. Having that said, please stop this immediately and consult your SEO guy who did this and find out what he has to say about this.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Ayaz,

Though I cannot tie a knot with a proof between the drop in your rankings and the artificially inflated social signals in this case, I can definitely say one thing that Google can sniff things like these very easily and it would be too late before you even realize the axe coming down on you. As we know that social signals have strong impact on the search engine rankings in certain niches, we should not try to play with these with an intention to get a boost in SERPs. Next time when you hire an SEO or SMO please make sure to get a list of deliverables from them. Black hat or acts of cheating search engines might work temporarily but you should run away from them by all means if you want to be safe.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Bob,

If you are new and trying to build the brand online, you can include the brand at the beginning of the title along with doing some value based link building with branded anchors. So this would be your brand building phase and then comes your ranking phase for certain keywords/ phrases. This is when you push your brand name to the end of the title and this can be beyond the 65 character limit. Google strips the text after this limit in the SERPs but this does not mean that Google cannot read or will not consider text beyond this limit for ranking. So, I always say, try to include the essence or vital SEO info in the first 65 characters but come up with good titles that read natural and at the same time very enticing.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.