Welcome to the Q&A Forum

No problem my friend. You are most welcome. Yes, you just need to give the location of your sitemap.xml file as given below:

Sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap_location.xml

Here you go for more:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183669?hl=en

Hi there, robots.txt file is one of the initial things that search engine spiders look at when they visit your website and a reference to the Sitemap.xml file in there will aid the search engine spider to quickly access to important URLs on your website then and there.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi there,

Please try again by removing the trailing slash at the end of the URL. It should be good.

So the URL should be:

http://lensoutloud.com/san-antonio-real-estate-photography

Hope that helps my friend.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Thanks for the response my friend. The problem without an index sitemap file is, when you have to resubmit multiple sitemap.xml files in webmaster tools account, you will have to resubmit each of them at a time. With an index sitemap file, you just need to submit the index file and it would take care of the job.

Here you go for more: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/71453?hl=en

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi there, though a single Sitemap.xml file can accommodate upto 50K URLs, it is not uncommon to go for multiple Sitemap.xml files for many purposes even with few hundreds on each.

You need to come up with a total of 4 Sitemap files and one among these would be an index sitemap that lists the other 3 Sitemap.xml files with URLs.

Here you go for more: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Andrew,

Let me start off with folkd.com. Its a very reputed social bookmarking website and there is no harm in having a link from there pointing to your website. Coming to how to evaluate a link, here you go:

http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/2012/06/link-removal-flowchart/

Its very useful and extremely helpful to perform link evaluation.

In general, the intent behind the link matters and it can be determined by looking at the factors like, number of outbound links on the page (pointing to different not so useful or credible websites), the relevancy of the page to you, Moz stats of the domain etc..

Links from websites like linkdirect.info, backlinks8.com, tolinkup.com, findyourlink.info, searchengineurl.com, websubmissionfree.com should be avoided like plague as their intent and sole purpose is to manipulate search results by providing a back link which would be absolutely of no use and can do more harm than good.

Hope those help.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi there, I assume, you want to generate an XML sitemap. If that's the case, you can try GSitecrawler? Its free. Here you go: http://gsitecrawler.com/

It has many options to include and exclude certain file types and all other features that you would need for the purpose and much more.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Chris got it exactly correct. Buying thousands of links from a place like fiverr can get you more troubles than doing any good to your website. Please stay away from any and all fast paced link building stuff on a place like fiverr as most of the times, they will be automated and as you know automated link building does not do any good to your website and moreover, it invites lot of troubles and penalties.

One more thing about Hummingbird update. Its not a penalty update.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi there, blocking the HTTPS version of your pages from being crawled by the search engines is a bit tricky. You might need to come up with a separate robots.txt file to handle the HTTPS requests.

Here you go to know more about the process:

http://www.seoworkers.com/seo-articles-tutorials/robots-and-https.html

Hope it helps.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi there, since 24th of September (though started on 23rd), Google Webmaster tools account does not show anything in the Search Queries section. There is absolutely no data in there

Definitely not a time to press the panic button as there is nothing that we can change from Google's end, we SEOs, now need to look at other SEO KPIs. Just another nightmare...and the journey goes on.....

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Sawan, as David suggested, you need to consolidate the data from different tools as no one tool gives you a comprehensive list of backlinks. You can check out Google webmaster tools account for your website as it gives you very good list.

Just because you have backlinks, you will not be able to drive traffic. It depends on what kind of websites have your link. If you look at your link profile, you can see directories forming the major part. This is 2013 my friend. Generic web directory submissions will take you no where. You need to promote your website on niche directories. You operate in a very narrow, B2B
niche and you should ideally be getting listed on directories like, indiamart.com, indianindsustry.com, tradeindia.com, infobanc.com etc.

You should also target websites or blogs or forums where people are talking about your niche who might be interested in your product line. You need a lot to be done on your website regarding on-page optimization also. You should perform a comprehensive keyword research and analysis to come up with the most searched keywords/phrases of your niche, optimize the content of your website for these keywords and so on. Essentially, you will be trying to make your website rank high in the search engines for good keywords in your niche.

Best of luck to you my friend.

Devanur Rafi

Agree with Martijn. A non-existing resource on your website should ideally pull up your custom 404 error file throwing an HTTP header status 404 and you should give an option to the visitor regarding what wants to do like showing him a link to the homepage. You can also include some links to other important pages of your website. But you should not redirect him to anywhere automatically.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Ben,

You should be using a 301, permanent redirection to redirect the non-preferred version of your website to the preferred version. This is the best way you can pass on most of the link juice to the preferred version of your website.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi,

I just checked the backlinks to www.apollopowersystems.com using Moz OSE and it says, 161 total links and 58 root domains linking to it. When checked with MajeticSE OSE, I got 858 total links and 148 domains.

Just wanted to let you know that different tools have different data update intervals and frequencies and no two tools will show you the same data. For more info about the backlinks, you can check the Google Webmaster Tools account for the website in discussion. Hope that help. Please feel free to post all your queries you might have in this regard.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Brad, my take on this would be to remove the site-wides, leave the link only on homepages and no-follow them. In the past and recently I have seen few instances where a web design firm left its link on the websites built by them. Later, some of those websites were never developed and left as it is with very thin content providing no value to the visitors and the Internet. In cases like these, you will be left with a low quality link pointing to your site. The other case would be what if those websites built by you will never get good content and moreover turn out to other shady businesses, you will have a big problem here too. Just not to take a chance, I would always recommend to no-follow your link on the homepages of websites that you build unless you are very sure about the credibility of the website or its owners. But as far as site-wides are concerned, big NO.NO.

Hope that help my friend

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Hi, I would stay away from any and all kinds of site-wide links for obvious reasons in this post Penguin update era. If I were you, I would have left the link only on the home pages of my clients' websites and of course no-follow them. As you know, more than the bad links themselves, its the intention behind those links harms you in the long run and Google is very good at finding the intention behind a link profile. So why take a chance my friend?

Here is a similar discussion about the topic recently:

http://moz.com/community/q/are-these-links-to-my-site-bad

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Keri got it right. With multiple websites all your SEO efforts are scattered and with all other operational overheads. Here is my take on this. One website, very stable, high and wide that will become an authority in the niche going forward. Let that one website  target all those keywords/phrases. There is really no need to come up with new keyword specific domains. There might be some level of keyword cannibalization with multiple domains targeting the same niche.

If at all you want to cross-link the domains you own, you should ideally make those links no-follow.

I conclude by saying, one big website with loads of quality content will always win over multiple small websites in many respects. Those were my two cents.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

Thank you Karl and you are absolutely correct, if at all we go for cross linking, we should ideally no-follow those links just like we no-follow all the out-bound links pointing to websites that we think will be useful for our visitors. For example, a link to Wikipedia from a page on our website.

Best,

Devanur Rafi

I totally agree with Robert as having those against your website listing in SERPs can have a dramatic effect on the CTR.

No matter what, site-wide links are not recommended in the post penguin era. Other than the number of links, the intention behind having site-wide links matters which quite doesn't go down Google's throat easily. So better stay away from site-wides and blogrolls.

Best,

Devanur Rafi