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You are ranking on the 3rd page of Google results for the term "doktor" which means "doctor".

There are so many issues it's hard to pick a starting point.

1. The term "doktor" is very generic. Frankly, your current rank at the top of page 3 for such a generic term is higher then expected. You are competing with every doktor related site in Turkey. Some examples: Dr. Who ( a popular tv series), medical doctor, non-medical doktors, descriptions of the degree, etc. There are over 100 million results for the term. How did you conclude there is no competition for the term?

2. Your title is not optimized for such a term as doktor. Your page title is "En Hızlı Doktor Sitesi | CevapSepeti.com" which translates to "The Fastest Doctor Sites | CevapSepeti.com". You rank on the first page of Google for "En Hızlı Doktor Sitesi" which is the keyword your title is optimized for.

3. Your header is not optimized for the term "doktor". The current tag is "DOKTOR BULMAK ARTIK ÇOK KOLAY"

If you wish to see a web page optimized for the term "Doctor", here is one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor

Based on your question and the information you shared, the problem is not Google but your understanding of how search engines work. The goal of a search engine is to provide the search results desired by users. Based on Google's results, most of the people on the planet agree Google does a better job then anyone else. If people disagreed, they are free to use another search engine.

Have you checked Bing? Bing.com.tr does not even show your site on page 3.

There is nothing wrong with allowing a page to 404. It is a perfectly natural part of the internet. With that said, a 301 vs 404 depends on your site.

If you offer a page on "2010 Best Websites" and you decide to remove the page due to it not being current, you may wish to consider a redirect to your "2011 Best Websites" page. Your role is to review your site and determine the page which is most likely to satisfy the user's need. By implementing a 301, you are helping your site retain the backlinks and helping users find the content they seek.

If you no longer carry a relevant page, then go ahead and let it 404. Ensure your 404 page is helpful. It should contain your site's normal navigation bar along with a search box.

Michael, initially you assumed the problem is Google, which is a mistake. Now you are assuming the problem is me, which I humbly suggest is another mistake. Neither I nor anyone else is likely going to be able to offer you any assistance unless you open up to two possibilities:

1. The Google search engine is working just fine and your site is ranking where it should.

2. The advice shared with you is accurate.

I am human and fully capable of error. After reviewing the concern you expressed I stand by the response shared above.

I looked at Google.com.tr, Google Turkey. The evidence is everywhere:

a. The first words of my response is that you rank on the 3rd page of search results. Do you find yourself on the 3rd page of results for Google.com for the term "doktor"? I found your site on the 3rd page of Google.com.tr

b. I specifically mentioned "You are competing with every doktor related site in Turkey."

c. I even mentioned checking Bing.com.tr

The sole reference to Google.com made was specifically called out as such. I shared the #1 result for the term "doctor" in Google.com with you as an example of an optimized page.

Once again, the term "doktor" in Turkey is highly competitive. Your assessment was incorrect. Your page is also not well optimized for the term "doktor".

Good luck.

301 redirects can easily be reversed as needed. Think of it as call forwarding. You can cancel call forwarding or even re-forward a number.

Depending on the importance (i.e. PR) of the particular page which is being redirected, search engines may update their records in 1 hour or it may take several weeks. Sometimes the redirect goes smoothly, and other times there could be some bounce experienced, but things should settle in after a month.

301 redirects are a very natural part of the internet. Search engines are designed to handle them well.

Hi Seth,

How exactly are you determining your backlinks are decreasing?

If you are using crawl reports from Moz, Google or other sources, understand most crawlers dump their data and perform fresh crawls of the web periodically. Often adjustments are made to the crawling algorithms, or other links on the internet change, which may impact the visibility of some backlinks.

You can use various tools such as Raven's Link Manager to track links. Simply add your current backlinks to the tool and you will receive an update if any link is removed.

Have you actually checked the links which have been removed? Or are you simply viewing reports and seeing numbers decrease? The only way to really know what is happening is to track each link. You can then understand if the link was really removed, or if it is an issue with the crawl report.

I want a sure way to know this ...person....did what they are telling their client they did.

Perhaps someone has more creativity then myself but I do not know any means by which you can be 100% certain a sitewide 301 is implemented without seeing the file on the server. The "file" varies based on the server type. As you know, for Apache servers the .htaccess file is the right one.

Even if you saw the .htaccess file, it is possible for another file to overwrite the command. The way I always have verified is by looking at the site itself. Check the home page and a few other pages. If they are all 301'd properly, then I presume the developer performed their job correctly. It would actually be a lot more work for the developer to attempt to fool you by 301'ing part of the site but not all.

I also suggest ensuring your site's www or non-www standard appears correctly in your crawl report.

Is my assumption that if a 301 was done in .htaccess, there should be no www showing in Google Site:?

That is not necessarily true. If you have a site which shows mixed URL results, then overtime the results from a site: search will be standardized, but it will take time as Google needs to crawl each and every page of the site and see the 301. Also if any page is blocked by robots.txt for example, then Google may not see the 301 for that page and still list the old url.

If you changed the Google WMT preferred domain setting, then it is true you will only see one version of the URL. I would specifically advise you NOT to change that setting in this case as it may cover up the developer's issue which you are trying to locate. As for now, you can wait 30 days and perform a site: search. Investigate any bad URLs you find.

All things being equal, your SEO would not be be affected at all purely because of a host change. Let me clarify the "all things being equal" part:

• will your new server offer the same performance as the old server? As Cody suggests, if the new server offers better overall performance that would be good, and if it is worse that would be bad.

• will there be any downtime during the change? Ideally your should be able to make the move with zero downtime. Any downtime would obviously not be good.

• is your new server physically located in a significantly different location? If your current server is located in England, it can offer better local results for visitors located in England. If you then move your server to the US, your local SERP can be affected.

• there are many server settings which can impact SEO and performance. These can easily be taken for granted. If you use any form of shared hosting, you should try to thoroughly understand your current settings and ensure you are aware of your new host's settings. Webmasters are often surprised to learn about changes after they have moved.

Hi Anthony.

Your first question asks how to inform your site's readers about a blog article you created on another site, without negatively impacting the link juice you are receiving from the article (i.e. creating a reciprocal link).

One possibility is mentioning the article without linking to it. "Check out my article on Grey Hat SEO at the SEOmoz site". Another method along the same lines is to use this same practice and specifically mention the article without linking to it: http://www.seomoz.org/grey-hat-seo (fictitious link). Since there is no actual link, you do not need to add nofollow and no link juice is lost.

You can also tweet the link or post it on facebook or another social sharing site. If you show your tweets on your site, this tactic would not be as productive due to the reciprocal link which you were trying to avoid being created.

You can also get creative: "Check out my new article on Grey Hat SEO tactics. It ranks #1 in Google! Click here to see" and then you provide a link to Google which shows the search results. Your reader would presumably click that result and you not only send the user to your article, but also send some positive signals to Google at the same time.

As for your second question, "How can I backstab my linking partners and get away with it?", blocking the page with robots.txt would work, but it disrupts the flow of link juice throughout your site. Adding the noindex tag to the page is preferable but also more obvious to your linking partners. Adding the nofollow tag to all the links will cost you a lot of link juice. Another method would be to present the links in a properly constructed iframe which Google does not crawl. May I just add I hate strongly dislike this type of question?

You should not use the nofollow tag on internal links. That would be a bad idea. The nofollow tag sends a signal that you don't endorse or trust the link, which is certainly not the case for internal links. Also, it is still viewed as a link so it doesn't help lower your link count. Instead it stops the link juice from flowing to those pages.

You have 260 links which is high but not necessarily a problem. The old guideline of 100 links is no longer in place and I have heard others specifically mention successful sites with 250+ links on a page. With that said, you should take an opportunity to review your site and evaluate the helpfulness of each link.

You header, navigation bar, side bar and footer each offer a lot of links. You may want to decide which links are most popular or most important, and let some of the other links go. As for your suggestion on the category landing page, that can help.

Before making any change I would suggest you forget about search engines and focus entirely on the user experience. Ask yourself how you can adjust your site to improve things for your customers. A good test would be grabbing anyone you can find who has never been to your site and ask them to use it. Watch carefully as they make selections. Which pages were easy for them to find? Which pages did they struggle on? Which pages did you want to grab the mouse and say "it's right here!". What's intuitive for you may not be intuitive for your customers.

Once you are done, then take a fresh look at the number of links. I think you can cut down the number, but if you truly felt it was best to have 250 links, than know that is not "too many" in Google's eyes, but you could better optimize your page for improved SEO by reducing the number.

Hi Alison.

Your issue is common and no, there should not be any problems IF you properly configure both sites as follows:

1. Set your geographic target for the .com site to US and the .com.au site to Australia. This is inferred but it is best to specify in your case.

2. Use the language meta codes in your headers. EN-US for the US site and EN-AU for the Australian site.

3. You already mentioned using the correct currency on the Australian site. You also should ensure all other units of measurement are adjusted. For example, miles vs kilometres, etc.

4. Spelling should be changed as appropriate. For example, center vs centre.

5. Word choices should be adjusted for Australian culture. Australians might say "Prices are much dearer" where an American wont understand what that means. In the US one would say "Prices are much higher".

Your hosting is fine from a SEO standpoint as long as the pages load quickly. I have worked with people from Australia before and there is a noticeable difference in page load speeds, especially when working with detailed images such as large images of smiles and teeth. I would recommend using YSlow, PageSpeed or other tools and determining your page load speed from Australia. If it is slow, consider hosting in Australia.

In my experience age of a domain is NOT a ranking factor. Not even slightly.

The correlation is that the older a domain is, the more time it has had to earn links and get exposure. So if you do a study, then you will find that older domains rank better then newer domains. But the reason isn't the domain's age itself.

If you have a choice between "oldsite.com" and "newsite.com", and the oldsite url was purchased 10 years ago but just existed as an unused site, then you will find newsite.com will rank just as well without any advantage nor disadvantage.

Studies show information shared in social networks is valued by friends and others in the sharer's network. Whether you are sharing your experience about a cool new device, a restaurant or a great tax preparer, your friends and others in your network are likely to consider your personal share much higher then most other sources of information.

The REAL value is any link is not whether Google will see the link and give your site a 0.01 bump in rankings for the relevant search term. Instead the true value of a quality link is the direct, quality traffic your site would receive from the link.

Put the needs and wants of your site visitor's above all else. Then determine how you can benefit them and earn a profit from doing such. This business model is what makes Google so successful, and if you follow that model your company can climb to greatness as well. [If you are an anti-Google person, you probably don't love this analogy but you cannot argue Google is the most dominate player in their market].

Google offers a description they feel would be the most beneficial for users. They can use information from any of several sources which include:

• text (hidden or not) from anywhere on the page

• your meta description

• your directory descriptions

If you can share the keyworld, URL and Google type (.com, .co.uk, etc) you used so we can duplicate the result, I can locate the source of description.

I have never seen a case where Google generates a description based on data that is not presently available. I believe the information is currently on or associated with your page, but perhaps you are not seeing it.

Hi Denis.

When you refer to "canonical" most everyone will believe you are referring to the canonical meta tag.

With respect to the .htaccess "fix" you are referring to, it is a 301 redirect. When you purchase a domain such as "myexample.com", you are buying rights to a combination of a Top Level Domain (such as .com) plus a domain. You can add "www" or almost any prefix to the domain, but that is referred to as a sub-domain.

The confusion: when the internet began most site names used the "www" subdomain to represent themselves. It became a standard. Later some site owners wanted to shorten their URL and dropped the subdomain. To help this process most hosts set a default to where the www subdomain mirrors the root domain. This mirroring is NOT required and does not occur on all servers. Any site could should to show completely different content on their www subdomain from their root domain. Simply put, www.myexample.com <> myexample.com. They are two different URLs which could show completely different content.

Search engines understand the above information and therefore if your site does not contain a proper 301 redirect or other adjustment for your www vs non-www URL format, your website will be duplicated. When users search for your web pages, some will appear in the search engines index with the www prefix, and others without. The real issue is when users link to your website, they will link to both formats of the URL and thereby split your backlink authority. This is a major SEO issue.

To fix the problem a 301 redirect needs to be placed using a Regex expression. Regex is a replacement computing language. The statement basically will say "if anyone tries to access a web page on my site that does not show a sub-domain, redirect the user to the same page on the www subdomain".

This process is still highly relevant to SEO, and will continue to be relevant for years. The only way for it to realistically stop being relevant is for servers to stop mirroring the www and non-www URLs. This process is relevant to WordPress and every website regardless of what software is chosen to produce the site.

The HTACESS code is below. I do not work with IIS so perhaps someone else can assist you with that code. Either way, you likely have managed hosting in which case I highly advise you asking your web service provider to make the change. The .htaccess file controls all access to your site. The slightest error of any nature can instantly bring your site offline, or cause major SEO or security issues. Even using the correct code in the wrong order can cause issues. It is simply not a place for anyone other then a trained web server tech to be working.

Redirect www to non-www:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Redirect non-www to www:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

For the most part, SEO does not care whether you are hosted in a shared environment, VPS or dedicated server.

There are a few issues that can arise from a shared environment.

Issue 1 - shared IP. Many shared hosting environments have 200+ sites on a server. Often there are porn sites and other sites which may get blocked by various filters. The problem this causes for you is the blocking is often IP based. If you get a VPS or dedicated server, you will usually have a unique IP. You can also obtain a unique IP in a shared hosting environment.

Issue 2 - speed. In a shared environment any one site owner can perform an action which causes issues for the server. The server can become very slow, and stay that way until you contact your host and they investigate the problem, then stop the task which is causing the issue. Some shared environments work out well. They hosting companies have alarms and processes to prevent or quickly identify issues. In my experience, most hosts do not take enough preventative measures and sites suffer.

Issue 3 - customization. When you first create a site, your needs are often small and generic. Over time your site grows and you desire to add additional software. The latest and greatest software packages for a CMS, for example, may require more updated versions of the supporting software. You may also require a server setting to be changed. Shared hosts are almost never willing to make these changes as they affect all users on the server. In a VPS or dedicated hosting environment, you can make these changes any time you want.

In summary, if you don't have any significant issues, you can stay with your shared environment.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternalYour friend is able to "dominate the first pages of the web very quickly and effectively" because he is ranking for longtail, non-competitive terms. You or anyone else can create a page for such terms and rank #1. There is no skill or special tactics involved. Pick a phrase that no one else on the planet is using, create a page and presto! You will be dominate the first page of search results.

Take a look at the following tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

This tool allows you to view the monthly traffic for a given search term. There is absolutely no traffic at all for the phrase "chicago christmas light installer". Search results are about one thing...competition. Period. If no one is competing for a given term and you want it, the ranking is yours. If someone is willing to spend a million dollars on quality SEO, then you likely can't beat them unless you are either willing to spend more money or spend almost as much but do a better job of managing the money.

Your friend's site also ranks as #2 for "christmas light installer" which is actually not good since he has an exact match domain name. The site doesn't have any incredible SEO secrets applied. There are an estimated 9900 searches a month for "christmas light installer". He has a domain name which includes that phrase, he has optimized the home page for that phrase, and there isn't a lot of competition.

When you try the Keyword Tool search for "Xbox 360 repair" notice how there are 200k+ monthly searches. That's over 20x the search volume. Another issue is the nature of your business. With christmas light installation, clearly a local company is required to visit the home or business. With Xbox 360 and other repairs, it is likely you can service customers from anywhere in the country simply through the mail. Accordingly the competition will be higher.

If there was any magic to SEO, everyone would be doing it. Ignore all the various hyped websites and YouTube videos offering instant results. Understand quality SEO is a package. Ranking #1 on various terms is not impressive. You want to do keyword research to learn which terms will drive the most convertible traffic to your site, then rank for those terms. Once you rank well, the next step is to ensure a high Click Through Rate where users click on your search result. The final step is turning those visitors to your site into customers. All of these steps work together in a quality SEO plan.

The best suggestion I can offer is examine the Beginner's Guide to SEO. It offers the right information and will get you heading in the proper direction.

404s are a natural part of the internet. At times, content is moved and deleted on any site. Your site is not penalized from Google because you have 404 pages.

The primary issue for 404 pages is if any site has linked to the page, the link's value is lost. Also landing on a 404 page is a bad user experience.

If you can look at your known 404 links and redirect each one to the most appropriate page on your site, that would be the best all around. If you redirect the pages to your home page, that is certainly the easy way out for you, but it is not the best user experience. Also you will lose the value of relevancy from anchor text along with link juice leakage.

Hi Lowell.

My main concern is your on-page presentation. The site seems a bit spammy to me. I recognize this site represents a lot of work on your end so I will share specific opportunities for improvement.

I used the following page for analysis: http://www.shopforexhibits.com/displays/display-rentals

The "Tradeshows" sidebar item seems fine. It is located at the top, offers images and I can see it being helpful to users. The "Recent Blogs" sidebar block is lower on the page but may be helpful. The "Trade Show Definitions" and "Exhibit Systems" seem like two extra blocks of links stuffed on the page. The "Getting Started" block might be helpful, but at the bottom of the page it probably is not getting seen nor used. Try checking your Google Analytics to see if anyone is using these last three blocks. If not, I recommend you strongly consider removing them.

Your footer also contains a lot of links, most of which are duplicated elsewhere on the page and are likely not used. Once again, check your GA to confirm these links are not being used and if so, remove them. They are not helping your users nor manage your PR flow to the more important pages of your site. For example "Banner Stands" is offered as a link in the "Tradeshows" block which is fine. But then it is offered in another sidebar block and again in the footer which seems excessive.

Your page text is black but then your internal links in content are silver. Many people might have difficulty reading the text due to the contrast. Also I will point out internal links are great, but it seems way overused on your page. You have 4 extra links in content which link back to the same page which is being displayed. This offers no benefit to users. You are also linking to the same pages repeatedly in your content. The first time anchor text is helpful. It doesn't need to appear every time you repeat the phrase.

Your LinkedIn page url ends in a number instead of your company name. I suggest you use your named URL. For example my company URL is http://www.linkedin.com/company/vitopian. The same idea with your YouTube account.

Add trust badges to your site. Verisign, TRUSTe, BBB, etc would all be helpful.

The above items are a start in the right direction. The goal is to treat each and every page on your site as a world-class web page worthy of a top ranking in Google. Presently I see a lot of quality issues with your site which can be improved.

Good luck.

Use the trailing slash.

More about robots.txt can be learned at this site: http://www.robotstxt.org/

The trailing slash indicates you are blocking a folder. Without the slash the object would be considered a file (i.e. page). I am not sure what the result would be if you tried to block a folder without the trailing slash. Even if it worked it would not be the correct code and may lead to various bots treating it differently.

There is normally not any negative impact. The items to consider are:

• how is the new server's speed? If a site loads too slowly it can be penalized.

• what other sites are hosted on the new server? If you are in a very bad neighborhood (i.e. porn sites, hacking sites, etc) it can impact your site.

The only other assumptions are the site is configured correctly and the DNS change is made properly. Generally speaking, changing servers is a common practice which goes smoothly, although there have been some stories of rough moves.

Good luck.