Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You are most welcome David. You can use Yoast for Wordpress for handling rel=canonial.

Here for more: https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/#canonical

Here you go for implementing 301 permanent redirection using .htaccess file on Apache server(Linux hosting):

http://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/website/redirects/setting-up-a-301-permanent-redirect-via-htaccess

If you are on a Windows server, here are the steps for 301 redirection:

http://www.iis.net/configreference/system.webserver/httpredirect

301 redirection is definitely faster than rel=canonical and almost same when it comes to passing on the SEO goodies to the canonical page. With 301 in place, in this case with the URLs mentioned by you for example(suppose, the author page is redirected to the homepage via 301), no one will be able to see the author page as it would take you to the homepage but with rel=canonical in place, everyone will be able to see the author page and its just that the search engines like Google will not index the author page as the cononical or the preferred page would be the homepage. So, ideally, you should be going with the rel=canonical implementation here. Hope it helps.

Good Luck my friend.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi David,

I will be very quick here. 'rel=canonial' can come to your rescue.

Here you go for more: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

Here is another article from Moz regarding duplicate content and how to go about it:

http://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi, ideally only one version of the URL should throw an HTTP header status code 200 and rest all can be redirected to the preferred version via 301.

Suppose, http://www.abc.com is your preferred version (the www version), all others like,

http://abc.com, http://abc.com/index.html, http://www.abc.com/index.php etc., can be redirected to the www version via 301. It is highly recommended to maintain this consistency through out your website. You can use a tool like the following to check if you have multiple versions of your homepage return status 200.

http://www.ragepank.com/redirect-check/

Hope it helps. Good Luck.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi friend, you can display the disclaimer using a JavaScript overlay and this would be absolutely fine. The bots won't have any trouble crawling the website behind the JS overlay as they won't see it. This is a very common practice among the websites that display age gate verification page like porn sites and sites that talk or sell liquor etc..

This technique is not considered cloaking as the intention is not malicious or deceptive and Google handles these normally. Hope it helps and Good Luck.

I addressed a similar question here on Moz:

http://moz.com/community/q/different-user-experience-with-javascript-on-off

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi, there is no added advantage or disadvantage with www in the URL. You can go either way, with or without www but be consistent throughout the website. You also set your preferred version in Google Webmaster Tools account. Make sure only one version, either www or without www returns an HTTP header status code 200 and not both. If suppose, http://www.abc.com is your preferred version, then only http://www.abc.com should return 200 and not both (http://abc.com). In this case, http://abc.com should be redirected to http://www.abc.com via a server-side 301 permanent redirection. This way, you can take care of your URL canonicalization issues.

One more thing, while doing any link building/earning activities, please make sure to use the preferred version for backlinking purposes. Please feel free to post any queries that you may have in this regard.

Good luck.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Thanks for the info. The page in discussion is as good or even better than many other pages trying to rank for the term, 'sage erp x3' from your website. I can clearly see an issue with too many pages from your website trying to rank for the term. My honest suggestion would be to please have the page titles and descriptions written optimally. Here is a general rule, one One page (internal page) should be optimized for one keyword/phrase.

Moreover if you look at the page titles of your website in Google results, Google actually modified the titles. This is a clear hint that its time to optimize your titles.

Here you go for more: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2342232/Why-Google-Changes-Your-Titles-in-Search-Results

Its actually very confusing for a search engine line Google about which page from your website should rank high for the term, 'sage erp x3' as there are a many pages competing for the same term leading to keyword cannibalization.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

As mentioned earlier, you can create a comprehensive Sitemap.xml file and resubmit to Google. Give me your email address, I will create one for you and send it

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Nevermind, there are about 497 pages on your website. So, I would ask you to use a comprehensive sitemap.xml file and submit it to Google. You can use a tool like GSite crawler to generate one.

Thanks for the info Susanta. After a quick check, I see the sitemap.xml that you submitted has only 130 URLs in it and there are 230 pages (omitted after 182) indexed in Google from your website. So, can you tell me how many pages are there in total in your website?

Hi, have you seen a drop in the overall organic traffic from Google during the past year? However, if you are using Google Analytics for your site, you can try the following tool to check if there has been a hit due to the Panda updates:

http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/

Without knowing the exact domain or the URLs, its hard to assess the exact issues. If you can share those details, we will be able to comment better.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Andrew,

Honestly, I don't think you should be looking at links if they are 'follow' or 'nofollow'. Instead of building links desperately, you should be investing your quality time and effort in developing high quality content which would be a natural link magnet. The link profile should look natural and you should not be even thinking along those lines where you intend to build so many 'follow' links and so many 'nofollow' links.

Content based promotional methods like blog commenting and forum posting still work good provided, your comments or posts are worthy enough.

Here is a very good article that can be handy:

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/50-ways-to-increase-the-domain-authority-of-your-site-infographic/77281/

Good luck my friend.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Susanta,

If you can share the URL of your domain, we will be able to answer better as the rate of indexing differs from site to site and also depends on lot of things like the website internal linking structure, website architecture, your backlinks and the list goes on..

Sitemap.xml is definitely a good way to give the indexing rate of your website a boost. But the story does not end there as there are lot of things that come in to play.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Prashant, have a fligth to catch..so will be quick..

What is DA:

http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority

Nice infographic that shows different ways to increase DA:

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/50-ways-to-increase-the-domain-authority-of-your-site-infographic/77281/

And a nice one from Neil Patel:

http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/05/19/5-practical-steps-to-improving-your-websites-domain-authority/

Domain authority is directly related to the quantity and quality of your backlinks. If you increase your DA by backlinks that have good Google PR, then yes, you are likely to get your PR a boost. Good luck.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Chris,

Frankly, don't have a perfect answer to the situation but, its just not the purpose that pagination exists for.

You go in for pagination under the following scenarios if you wish all your paginated content to appear in the search results: (Taken from Google): https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en

1. News and/or publishing sites often divide a long article into several shorter pages.
2. Retail sites may divide the list of items in a large product category into multiple pages.
3. Discussion forums often break threads into sequential URLs.

Moreover, the pagination mark-up provides a strong hint to Google that you would like them to treat these pages as a logical sequence, thus consolidating their linking properties and usually sending searchers to the first page. This would not be the desired outcome in your client's case Chris. So, you can convince them not to implement the pagination mark-up for generic top-level navigation pages as these pages should rank individually for respective search terms if any and they are definitely not the part of any logical sequence and this defies the very purpose behind paginated content. Those were my two cents friend. Good luck.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Andrew,

The best practice would be to come up with search engine/user friendly new URLs each corresponding to the month/year blog posts and then redirect them via 301. Essentially, you will be implementing a one-to-one or page-to-page 301. Redirecting a whole bunch of old pages to the homepage via 301 is not recommended especially if these old pages have some organic or referral traffic coming in. This would have a negative impact from your user experience perspective as well as from an SEO standpoint. A blanket 301 approach (bunch of pages being redirected to a single page, in this case the homepage) is the last resort that you should think about.

Please do not even think of letting those old pages giving up an HTTP head status code 404. This is a big NO, NO.

If I were you, I would have come up with new pages (URLs) for each of those old pages and redirected those via 301 to the corresponding new ones.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Oh yes Andrew. You should invest some serious time to clean the link profile so that it looks natural and organic. We have seen dramatic improvements with clean link profiles.

IMHO, no link audit software can give you the whole picture of your link profile but a combination of all those can. We use almost all of them while carrying out a major backlinks check especially when dealing with penguin recovery.

Hi Andrew,

I meant, the competitor's website is much bigger and is driving loads of organic traffic for high search volume keywords/phrases.

"I thought that the more pages a website had, the more the link juice had to be distributed. "

This theory is not a correct perspective. Even with more pages, the link juice will be still within the website unless you have a ton of out-bound links pointing to external websites.

There are  a lot of other ranking factors that make the competitor rank ahead of you. If you look at organic search competition for your website in SEMRush, the competitor website is number one competitor for your website and if you look at the organic search competition for your competitor website, your website stands at 9th position. Please have a look at the ranking factors list provided in my previous post. Moreover, no matter how good a website is, it cannot rank for all the keywords/phrases in the niche. When I looked further down in the organic keywords data for both of your domains, its very evident that your competitor ranks excellently well for search queries with the term, 'envelopes' in them. Infact, they are the number one site in Google for almost all the envelopes related search queries. Their domain name must be playing a bit role in this along with other ranking factors.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Moosa got it spot on. Just by looking at few parameters, we can't say that a website can rank high in Google. Here is something that can be handy while doing a comprehensive SEO audit. Though the list in there is not an official ranking parameters list, it can give you a fair idea about how and what things come in to play when it comes to search engine rankings. Hope it helps:

http://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Just another addition to the above. When I checked the backlinks using AHREFs for the jampaper page, most of the links come from Chinese domains. This might not be good if your target market is not China. You might want to look in to this.