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Please note that I suggested you to target 4 terms on your homepage because, the word scaffolding is common in 3 of them. Personally, I target 2 to 3 keywords/phrases (unique ones but tightly related to the seed word or the primary target word/phrase of my business)to the max on the homepage unless I am building a one-page website with loads of content.
Hi,
If you are about to start building your website then, you can target the following ones with your homepage as these are the ones with high search volume compared to the rest you mentioned:
scaffolding
scaffolding hire
scaffolding london
scaffolders
All the others can have their own corresponding inner page optimized for each of them. You can also go for cross linking between these pages from within the content.
Good Luck my friend.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
Hi, even if you use robots.txt file to block these pages, Google can still pick the references of these pages from third-party websites and can crawl from there. Such pages will not have the description snippet in the search results and instead will show text that reads:
A description of this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt.
So, to fully stop Google from crawling these pages, you can go in for the page-level meta robots tag along with the robots.txt method. The page-level robots meta tag complements robots.txt method.By the way, robots.txt file can definitely save you some crawl budget. I don't think you should be thinking much about crawl budget though, as long as your website is super-easy to crawl with simple text-based internal links and stuff like, super-fast servers etc.,
Those my my two cents my friend.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
Hi Surabhi,
Don't look at the meta data alone. Look at the content along with the keywords list and the keyword cloud. Compare this with your competition. The results are very obvious.
Here you go:
Keywords cloud
search career talk careers words browse tell psychometric assessment work student area meracareerguide.com counselling platform accessible online guidance india provide flexible services case study news guide counsellors selector queries
Keywords cloud
careers360 bschool engineering degree programmes medicine allied professional courses animation fashion arts humanities commerce computer applications education finance accounts hospitality tourism languages law media journalism pharmacy students science universities ranking explore b-school alumni colleges magazine 2013 study abroad products prep 360 medical aipmt test series jee main cmat prepmeter rank predictor pathfinder college course mapper target admission almanac report search content news forum register counselling notifications exam calendar best fit state wise b-schools india career
Keywords cloud
institutes india new study abroad mba courses test preparation shiksha career event management science engineering banking animation medicine health media mass communication design arts law view full time pgdm distance exam business institute medical entrance coaching government exams b.sc bachelors masters ph.d doctoral humanities bba b.tech bca college university delhi certifications diploma m.sc advanced mca game development designing sciences east zealand preference pradesh mumbai asked answers admission 2014 universities news articles ibsat admissions jee main
Let us now look at the keyword lists:
meracareerguide.com a career
accessible
area
assessment
browse
career
career assessment
career counselling
career counselling platform
career counsellors
career guidance
career guide
career selector
careers
case
case study
case study –
counselling
counselling platform
counsellors
flexible
guidance
guide
india
meracareerguide.com
news
online
online career
online career guidance
platform
provide
psychometric
psychometric assessment
queries
search
selector
services
student
study
study –
talk
talk to
tell
tell us
to career
to provide
words
work
careers360.com
360 law
360 medical
abroad
accounts
admission
admission 360
aipmt
all content
allied
almanac
alumni
animation
animation fashion
applications
articles
arts
arts humanities
best
best fit
bschool
b-school
bschool engineering
b-school engineering
bschool engineering degree
bschool engineering degree programmes
b-schools
calendar
calendar find
calendar find your
calendar find your best
career
careers360
cmat
college
colleges
commerce
commerce computer
computer
computer applications
content
counselling
course
course mapper
courses
courses animation
courses animation fashion
degree
degree programmes
degree programmes medicine
degree programmes medicine allied
ebooks
education
engineering
engineering colleges
engineering degree
engineering degree programmes
engineering degree programmes medicine
exam
exam calendar
exam calendar find
exam calendar find your
explore
explore b-school
explore b-school engineering
fashion
finance
finance accounts
find your
find your best
find your best fit
fit
forum
hospitality
hospitality tourism
hospitality tourism media
hospitality tourism media journalism
humanities
india
india s
jee
jee main
journalism
lacs
languages
law
magazine
main
mapper
media
media journalism
medical
medicine
medicine allied
medicine pharmacy
mycareers360
news
news notifications
news notifications exam
news notifications exam calendar
notifications
notifications exam
notifications exam calendar
notifications exam calendar find
pathfinder
pharmacy
predictor
prep
prep 360
prepmeter
products
professional
professional courses
professional courses animation
professional courses animation fashion
programmes
programmes medicine
programmes medicine allied
rank
rank predictor
ranking
register
report
science
search
series
sign
sign in
sign in with
state
state wise
students
study
study abroad
target
target 360
test
test series
today
tools
tourism
tourism media
tourism media journalism
universities
wise
your best
your best fit
shiksha.com
abroad
admission
admissions
advanced
aircraft
animation
answers
articles
arts
asked
aviation
b.com
b.e
b.sc
b.tech
bachelors
banking
bba
bca
beauty
best
business
café
call
canada
care
career
certification
certifications
clinical
cmat
coaching
college
colleges
commerce
communication
courses
dates
delhi
design
designing
development
diploma
distance
doctoral
east
engineering
entrance
event
exam
exams
executive
fashion
featured
films
finance
first
full
game
germany
government
health
hons
hotel
humanities
ibs
ibsat
india
institute
institutes
integrated
international
jee
languages
law
ll.b
m.e
m.sc
main
maintenance
management
marine
mass
masters
mba
mca
media
medical
medicine
mobile
mumbai
new
news
north
online
part-time
pgdm
ph.d
phd
pradesh
preference
preparation
public
real
science
sciences
sector
security
services
shiksha
social
south
stream
study
teaching
test
time
tourism
training
universities
university
vfx
view
zealand
Hi Surabhi,
What about the content? Content is the one that gives any software the greatest hint about the theme of your website. Here you go again,
1. Install SEOQuake plugin for firefox.
2. Open your homepage and your competitors' homepages in different tabs.
3. Right click on your homepage > SEOquake > Keywords density and look at the keywords on your homepage and do the same for your competitors' homepages. Compare them with that of yours. You will have your answer.
Good Luck.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
Hi,
while the generation of sitelinks is fully automated as of now, I tried to look at the global search volumes for the terms,
stackstreet and stack street using Google keyword planner. It showed that the term, 'stack street' has an avg monthly search volume of 30 while the term, 'stackstreet' has none. Even the Google suggest feature does not show anything while trying to type, stackstreet in the search bar but it does suggest when you try to type, stack street.
Though it may sound weird, you can do as follows:
For 3-4 weeks, ask all your staff, family and friends to type, 'stackstreet' in Google and click on your homepage from the search results. You can ask them to do this few times a day. This will make Google learn about and recognize the search term stackstreet and possibly start showing the sitelinks for it just like it does for, 'stack street'.
Good Luck.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
Hi, any plugin like sh404SEF will work and accomplish your goal without hurting your rankings as long as it redirects, the index.php URLs to their corresponding without index.php URLs via 301. By the way, you don't need to list all your URLs in .htaccess file to implement this. You can go with pattern match redirection.
Here you go for more:
http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/301-redirect-with-mod_rewrite-or-redirectmatch.html
and
http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/htaccess-redirect-rewrite-rules.html
By the way, having index.php in URLs does not affect your SEO efforts directly but by stripping index.php from all the URLs will make them look pretty, clean and a bit user friendly.
Hope it helps. Good Luck to you.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
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Hi, the suggestion was not to get the quality articles written that take an hour to write each but I meant to change the products descriptions that were copied and pasted with little variation so that they don't look like a copy, paste job.
Now, coming to the de-indexing part, let us look at a scenario:
Suppose I built a website to promote Amazon products through Amazon associates program. I populated its pages using Amazon API through a plugin like WProbot or Protozon. In this case, the content will be purely scraped from Amazon and other places. After a while, I realize that my site has not been performing well in the search engines because of the scraped content but haven't seen any penalty levied or manual action taken. As of now, I have about 3000 pages in Google's index. Now I want to tackle the duplicate content issue. This is what I would do to be on a safer side from a possible penalty in future like Panda:
1. First, will make the top pages unique.
2. Add, noindex to the rest of the duplicate content pages.
3. Keep on making the pages unique in phases, removing the noindex tag to the ones that were updated with unique content.
4. Would repeat the above step till I fix all the duplicate content pages on the website.
It greatly depends on the level of content duplication and few other things so, we will be able to suggest better if we can have a look at the website in question. You can send a private message if you want any of us to have a look at it.
Very true my friend. If you look at your top pages for last 30 days, there won't be more than 2000 approximately. So you can make the content unique on these over a period of six months or a bit more going at 300 per month. Trust me, this would be an effort well spent.
Hi,
While its not recommended to have duplicate content on your pages that is found else where, it is also not a good thing to de-index pages from Google. If I were you, I would have tried to beef-up these duplicate pages a little bit with unique content or at least rewritten the existing content so that it becomes unique.
Please go ahead and initiate the task of rewriting the product descriptions in phases starting with the ones that get the most traffic as per your web analytics data. Those were my two cents my friend.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
Hi,
You need to go in for server-side URL rewrites in this case. With URL rewrite in place, the URL in the address bar for the visitor will be your SEO and user-friendly, vanity URL and the same will be in search engines' indices there by accomplishing your mission. Then you might want to make sure that your old, ugly URL passes on all its SEO goodies to the vanity URL. For this, you can go in for a 301 redirection from the ugly URL to the vanity URL.
Here is a beautiful article from Moz: http://moz.com/blog/url-rewrites-and-301-redirects-how-does-it-all-work
Hope it helps. Good Luck.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
Hi Jane, thanks for stopping by and giving your inputs. You are right, no SEO tool is a one shop stop for carrying out an SEO audit. We use a myriad of tools to analyze the link profile, on-page elements with lot of manual scrutiny, Google penalty checks from GA and GWMT account perspective. The major tools that we use include but not limited to, Moz, MajesticSEO, ahrefs, SEMrush, Brightedge and Maven. Though there are many areas and features that these tools superimpose on each other, a consolidated audit data from these tools gives us a holistic picture of the issue at hand with lot of manual checks that go in to the process.
Recently, we saw a situation where page loading time was an issue with all the other stuff being superior to the competition. We use a set of tools we use for page loading performance test looking at Site speed data from GA. Sometimes, the historical indexing data can also have an impact on present ranking especially when the same website operated in a different niche (or even probably operated in an illegal niche) and now serving different content with no change in ownership (Whois data). In cases this these, we look at way back machine data and try to analyze things.The list of audit checkpoints goes on and on... :))
We try to leave no stone unturned when it comes to doing an SEO audit and as you know SEO forensics is a very time consuming tiresome process especially when we have a client with better SEO parameters over the competition and crying foul about Google.
Its a daily battle and the best thing about SEO is, we love it and Google is both our strength and weakness ; ))
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
Hi, just in case, login to your Google analytics account and please visit this URL:
http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/
Give read-only access to the application and check if this website has been hit by any of the Google updates like Panda or Penguin. Look from October 2012 till date. I see an issue between December 2012 to February 2013. Let us know what do you see and we shall take it from there.
By the way, no on-page SEO tool on this planet is comprehensive. A true SEO audit can be done by only a good SEO expert. Of course making use of best tools of the trade like Moz etc.,
Best regards,
Devanur
Forgot to include the disclaimer : ) ..With all things mentioned in that article from Google webmaster support, your chances to rank in .co.uk SERPs definitely become higher while there no guarantee though.
Hi Ben,
If coming up with a dedicated CCTLD (yourdomain.co.uk) is not possible in this case, you can go with a CC sub-domain like.. uk.yourdomain.com for the purpose. Personally, except for geo-targeting in a multi-regional setup, I stick to and prefer sub-directories to sub-domains.
Here you go for what Google has to say regarding this issue of yours:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en
If you look at the table, the sub-domain strategy has only one con compared to others.
Hope it helps. Good Luck my friend.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
Hi Somanathan,
Suppose:
Website = Car
Content = Engine
DA/PA = Turbocharger/Nitro booster
You need to have content that is unique, highly relevant, targeted, updated and useful to the visitors. With this in place, your website will get the boost from DA/PA and thereby can rank well in the search engines. You should do a thorough keyword research and analysis, come up with highly searched terms for your niche, add pages targeting each of these with highly relevant content targeting the main keyword/phrase. If you can let us know the website in question, we will be able to suggest you better. Good Luck.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
Hi,
Having multiple pages with similar or identical content confuses the search engines and the outcomes in SERPs will be undesirable. Here is the deal: No two unique URLs should serve substantially similar or identical content. If it is the case, you should decide the URL that you would like to rank in the search engines, make others point to it via rel=canonical attribute. In general, the page that targets the most search keyword/phrase can be made the canonical URL or the preferred URL.
If I were you, I would have added unique content to the existing pages targeting the main keyword for the page.
For example, if the page talks about, 'used cars', this would become my target term for the page:
I would also go ahead with a thorough keyword research & analysis to find which keywords/phrases are being searched more in your geo-location or target market, add corresponding pages with highly targeted content for each of these keywords/phrases (if not added already).
The key here is, content that is unique, up-to-date, highly relevant and useful to the visitors. Such content would bring in dramatic improvements to your overall SEO ROI and search engines like Google love such content and these pages will be awarded good positions in the SERPs going forward. As you know, high quality content is a natural link magnet.
Here is an action plan, if I were you:
1. Make these pages unique by adding unique content
2. Do a thorough keyword research & analysis to find new content opportunities in your niche
3. Add new pages with unique content based on the outcome of step 2.
4. Update the Sitemap.xml file and submit it to webmaster tools
5. Repeat steps from 2 to 4 once in 6 months based on the results or as and when required.
Those were my two cents my friend. Good Luck.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
Hi Sam,
Here are my two cents..if I feel my visitors will benefit from the page that I linked to, I don't mind following the link. For example, when I link to a page on Wikipedia, I won't add the nofollow attribute. This is a good gesture from a webmaster. Coming to the affiliate links (no matter how important are they to my visitors) as most of the time, my intention is to make some extra money in the form of commissions, I would definitely have the links nofollowed.
I want to be very, very cautious while linking out to external web properties and even more cautious and conservative when it comes to sharing my link juice with other domains. Unless the other domains are very authoritative and extremely useful, I go with nofollow.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
Hi, you can use Google Webmaster Tools account and see the total number of internal links for your website as follows:
While this can depend on the total number of pages from your website that are discovered by Google, this is the best way to achieve what you want.
The other tool that can show you internal links pointing to any page of your website, you can use Screamaing frog SEO Spider. This tool also gives you total number of out-bound links from a page of your website pointing to other internal pages of the same website as well as to the external websites. This tool is an indispensable weapon in any SEO's arsenal.
Hope it helps.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
Lesley is absolutely correct. I would never want to remove my pages from Google there by reducing the number of indexed pages (as the website has only about 600 pages), but would beef them up with unique and sizeable content of at least around 500 words each.