Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Yes my friend. It happens with Google as they are trying hard and working towards their ultimate goal that is as follows:

"We would like to give the user what he wants and not what he types in the search bar"

So all that one can do is to just stick to the best practices, put in diligent and sincere efforts to make our websites provide a good if not the best user experience. I would also like to suggest you that if you can make the title, description and the content go hand-in-hand tightly, then you will not have to worry about Google picking up a title on its own. Yet, no one can guarantee even if you do so will make Google will pick-up the meta information that you mentioned.

No problem friend. If you remember the same happened with XML sitemaps standard. In the beginning there would be little resistance but going forward, the standards will be accepted and respected!!

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Also make sure that there is sizeable content in the top fold, keeping in mind the page layout algo update from Google.

Hi Marcel, it is perfectly alright to display your affiliate offer that way as long as you have the relevant content supporting the offer on the page. Personally, I would go with much bigger content like around 650 words so as to please Google especially after the Panda and Penguins. Please make sure that the iframe is reasonable in size and it does not overwhelm the page by being a huge one.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Don't worry my friend. Its been just 3 days. Wait for sometime and check for the issue. You should be doing good. There is one more thing in here. Google does not always show the same title in the SERPs that you specified on your website. It can pick anything that it feels relevant for the page. The possible places to pick would be, content of the page, your site's DMOZ listing and also the title can differ depending on the search term.

For more about this issue: https://productforums.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/webmasters/uuLNmyB0AlY

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

You are most welcome my friend. Your point is true to some extent as they want to bring in an uniformity in this case and they may tend to be biased towards the new standard a little bit so as to push it hard towards being widely accepted. So if you can, please switch over to the markup by schema.org or if lot of work has already been put in to this, you can just leave it as it is. Personally, I would switch over to the new standard by all possible means if there were a chance.

Good luck.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Tony,

How long has it been since you did a 301. Normally, it would take 3 to 5 weeks for the new changes to reflect in the SERPS.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi there,

There is nothing that you will be losing if you use the markup by microformats.org. However, to the possible extent, try to use schema.org as it is the standard that the 3 biggies in Search Engine landscape (Google, Microsoft and Yahoo) have come-up with. For more,

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1211158

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

By entering the URL of a website in the Website box in Google keywords tool, you are instructing Google to go and get the keywords hints from the URL to come up with the list of related keywords and phrases. So as Wikipedia pages cover any topic comprehensively, there is a good chance that the keyword list prepared this way will give you a solid head start for your current job at hand.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Sure my friend. Please go ahead and you will get this done for sure!!

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

No problem my friend and thanks for the explanation. If you are going to repeat the event then there is no point in creating a new page for it. You can just add the new event to the same page mentioned under a different year. So the point is, the URL should not change but the page gets updated with the new event's info. This is very good from SEO standpoint also as the page will be constantly updated with new content and you will still enjoy all the link love that it accumulated over a period of time.

Hope this helps.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Martin, you can do one thing. Just go to Google AdWords keywords tool and make sure you are logged in to your Google account.

Once inside the tool, set the settings to All Locations and All Languages, type the following in the Website box: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welding

Hit Search. Export all the keywords and repeat the process for the following URL typed in the Website box:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_fabrication

Try to look for other related topic on Wikipedia and repeat the process till you have good list.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Ruud,

Straight into the meat. If you start adding all the events to the same page, then it would dilute the page's ranking capability as it would have to rank for multiple events (event names) and this is not recommended. So, the best thing for you to do would be, come up with individual even pages and let them rank for the specific event name. Doing this, you will not only be ranking well with even specific pages but also, the size of the website will also grow which is very good for your website going forward as the search engines like big websites with lot of unique content and there are better chances for big sites to become authoritative in the niche when compared to their smaller peers. Hope you got the point.

Good luck.

Regards,

Devanur Rafi.

No problem my friend and thanks for the info. Wordpress plugins, especially the re-direction ones are not at all dependable in IIS environment. Let me cut the crap and send you straight to the solution. Here you go...

http://www.make-awesome.com/2010/03/301-redirects-with-iis7-rewrite-module/

I wish you good luck.

Regards,

Devanur Rafi and yes, you can call me Rafi.

Hi, first of all we need more info about the method you used to set the 301 re-directs. Coming to your question regarding 301 re-directs in Wordpress, you can use any of the 301 re-direct plugins like, 'Simple 301 Redirects' etc.

If your website is hosted on Apache server (Linux hosting), you can use the .htaccess file to do the page-to-page 301 re-directs. I am not sure if you have already done that.

If you have used the re-direction plugin named, "Redirection", then there seems to be an issue. However, make sure that you use the accurate tools to check the HTTP header status messages like the following one:

http://www.webconfs.com/http-header-check.php

Regards,

Devanur.

Hi there, URLs with a trailing slash or without a trailing slash..this has been very much discussed and debated in the SEO circles for quite a long time. The fact is you can go with either of these but be consistent with what you go with through out your website. Personally, I would prefer all the URLs ending with a folder name go with a trailing slash and all the URLs that end with file names should end with proper file extension. And for me if anything ends without a trailing slash, it would be a file and not a folder (don't you think I am biased towards static websites?). This issue is very common with dynamic websites and to conclude, as your SEO guy rightly mentioned, there is absolutely nothing to worry about and Google will take care of this issue (rather a common practice or should I call it a mistake?) pretty well. Good luck.

Regards,

Devanur.

Hi Martin, you can take the steps outlined by SEO5 and also you can visit Amazon.com, search for the keywords, 'welding' and 'fabrication', take a note of the items that come up in the search, visit the product page of each of these products and also note the itemsthat Amazon mentions under the heading, 'people who bought also bought'. Put all these terms in Google AdWords keywords tool and bingo, you will have a very good list of related terms. Put your brain in to this a bit deep and add your creativity to further enhance the list. Sometimes, the shopping sites and specialized online portals for a particular product or niche can give you more than you can ever imagine while doing keyword research analysis and I do it all the time and the results will be outstanding as per my experience. Good luck.

Regards,

Devanur.

Hi there, looking at the very purpose behind hosting the blog on the domain itself, it is good that the blog matches the theme of the domain not going completely off the track. As you said, if you make screwdrivers and your blog talks about home improvement, its perfectly alright as you are discussing about the topic that your product is intended for or can be used for and also you are discussing about a problem or an issue that your product can address or solve.

To conclude, you do not need to worry about anything regarding the blog till you don't get distracted from the theme of your domain. Having a forum or a blog hosted on the same domain is to talk about topics that are directly or indirectly related to the theme of your domain.

Regards,

Devanur.

Hi Rich,

Here you are not hiding anything for the fact. Hiding text is something else that would involve matching the color of the text with that of the background etc. Here you are just tying to make a better UX by having the Read More button that will reveal the content. The content is very much there on the same page and your intention is very clear here. Believe me my friend, Google has mastered the art of finding out the intentions of Webmasters by looking at the page and you will not have to bother about anything in this case.

Regards,

Devanur.