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Nakul didn't specify, but the code he gave you is if your site is running on an apache server. Make sure to work with your developers to deal with these issues, and don't try changing your htaccess file on your own - you make major problems for your site very easily.
Ideally, it's best not to have the index.html showing up as well - could be a problem of duplicate content. So I would recommend correcting your internal links to point to www.website.com without the index.html. Generally, you should set up the server so that it strips out the index.html and 301 redirects to the clean domain. However, if you need to keep the index.html live and can't redirect it, at the very least I'd make sure to use a canonical tag on the page pointing to the clean version of the page, www.website.com.
Let me know if you need me to elaborate further.
Mark
Hi Nakul,
I agree that broad match can help you with keyword discovery, but the Adwords tool will also give you other suggestions when you search just with exact match. And It's important to know what you're looking at - with excel downloads, people sometimes get a bit mixed up at the source and nature of the data.
For KW discovery, there are lots of other great resources - I'd start with the engines themselves, with the related searches, with tools that mash up that data, like soovle or ubersuggest, and then branch out from there.
Hi James,
Your question makes complete sense :). This is why we often talk about using ppc data to test search volumes. If you're interested in checking the search volume for the term, depending on the type of query matching you're running on the keywords, you can check the impressions of the term in AdWords and get a better picture of the search volume for the query. If you're running exact match on the query, you'll get a much reliable picture of search volume by looking at impressions for the term. The metrics you mentioned give you a picture of the value of the term, and impressions will give you the search volume.
I'd also check out webmaster tools, both Google and Bing, for other search volume numbers. Bing's new tool was built specifically for KW research for organic search.
Hope this helps,
Mark
Whenever I do KW research, I also use exact match. For SEO purposes, you're trying to gauge search volumes for specific terms. (Of course, these numbers are way off in the AdWords tool, and certainly can't be trusted as precise numbers.) You want to know how many times people searched for buy batman comics in a month. When looking at the data for this term, or any term, broad match numbers will be drastically higher than exact match, because they'll include search volume for many other terms and not just the one term you are looking for.
Remember, it's important to always have in the back of your mind not to trust the numbers. And don't think you'll get 1000 visits a month for a term if you rank #1 and that's the search volume. According to the latest CTR studies (most recent one was published by Slingshot SEO and there was a post about it here on the Moz blog as well as their own detailed writeup), the top organic spot gets 18.2% of search volume.
You can also check out Bing's new Keyword research tool, built specifically in their webmaster tools suite to provide you with information about organic searches. Granted that Bing's user base is much smaller, it can still be a good additional resource to have in your KW research arsenal.
I'd also build the links to point to an inner page. If you run into an algorithmic issue with them, you can always 404 the page, lose the problematic links, and then hopefully you can solve some of the algorithmic issues.
For a site ranking on page 1 in Google Shopping Results for multiple products, they're thinking of changing their store name to rebrand themselves and their website. They currently have items appearing on page 1 from their stores on ebay, Amazon, buy.com, sears, etc. Does anybody know if changing their brand name on these stores will impact their results on Google Shopping?
Thanks,
Mark
Google has a program called first click free - basically, you need to allow google bot, along with users, to view the first full article they land on. So if you have multiple page articles, you need to give them access to the entire article. After that though, the rest of the content can be behind a paywall.
You can read more about it here - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=74536
And here are the technical guidelines for implementation - http://support.google.com/news/publisher/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40543
Hope this helps,
Mark
After removing the plugin, you should configure a 301 redirect sitewide to strip out the .html and redirect to the version without the file extension. This way, both internal and external links won't lead to error pages, and you won't lose any link juice.
You'll also want to make sure your canonical tags are configured to link to the non .html version of each page, if they're hand coded.
Hi David,
When did the drop in rankings take place? After the blog network deindexation? After the latest Panda release? After Penguin?
From the way you've phrased your question, it sounds like you know the answer already. You have a lot of spammy content, lots of problematic links, and want to do things, as you phrased it, for a bit more longevity.
It sounds to me it'll be more cost efficient to start from scratch, do it properly this time, building with long term goals and strategy regarding site design, content creation, and link building, than to clean up everything and work from there.
Hope this helps,
Mark
A few tips
This is just a few of the issues I picked up on. Hope it helps