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Hi Mackenzie

That's a great question.

The main potential drawback with this is:

• If the short domain that's on a 301 redirect is used for marketing purposes, chances are this domain will acquire a lot of the inbound links. Some of that link juice will be lost through the redirects, it's better for Search if all the links go straight to the domain that's hosting the website (homepage and internal pages).

Also, it's not advisable for usability to market & promote a domain that's redirected, doesn't give a great first impression.

Exact** match domains**don't have the SEO weight that they used to (that's the general consensus, especially with regards to Google), so it's not a real must to have an exact match domain.

Suggestion: Perhaps the short domain would be suitable as the actual website address, or perhaps one in-between with a 'partial match' on the keywords, which is both short enough for Usability and short enough to market & promote effectively, whilst still incorporating the main single keyword or two for Search (mainly 'result to click conversion' from the search result snippet that is).

Hope that helps,

Regards

Simon

That pretty much covers it.

Matt, if you do decide to implement such a redirect as you describe, absolutely make sure that it's a 302 redirect, not a 301 Redirect.  301's are permanent (as in the message a 301 gives to search bots), 302's are temporary.

As Sebes says though, your best bet is to not redirect your homepage.  As you say it will take you a couple of days to fix the browser issue, maybe slightly longer, it won't make much difference from your current situation if you just leave the homepage as it is until it's resolved.  Better to be safe in the medium & long-term rather than the very short term and risk harming your site by redirecting your homepage.

Regards

Simon

I agree with PabloGV.

Don't sell your site short by engaging in these dubious link practices, Search is an unregulated industry and there are so many unethical agencies out there (such as many of the purely link building service companies) which can harm your site more than it may seem.

That said there are many ethical professional agencies that could help with your overall search strategy, including ethical link acquisition as a part of the mix.

Keep focusing on a variety of high quality, useful, interesting unique content and distribute it well, that will help to get those all important high quality relevant links.

Regards

Simon

Hi Jonathan

A topical and interesting question for sure.

I was at SearchLove London earlier this week, there was an excellent talk by Heather Healy of StickyEyes, entitled "Do Social Signals Actually Play a Part in Search Ranking?"

Have a view of it (halfway down the page linked-to above) as it helps to answer your question.

In summary, Search Rankings do not appear to be influenced by Social Signals, although there is some Correlation.

When content is shared (incl. socially) Links are often generated.  It's these links that can influence rankings, rather than the actual social signals.

It is recommended to partake in Social Networking for brand building, influencer outreach and content sharing, rather than as a method to increase search rankings. Do it for Social's sake rather than for Search.

Hope that helps,

Regards

Simon

Hi there, you'll be glad to know that it's a positive SEO attribute when a Meta Description matches some of the page content, if it ties together then that's considered good for SEO (so long as the said content is not spammy and is relevant to the rest of the page content).

Also, ensure that your Title tag and your H1 tag also reflect what your page is about, optimise those in a similar way to your Description and page content.

So don't worry about duplicate content here, from what you've said in your question, you're doing some good optimisation.

Regards, Simon

Hi Baptiste

A good question.

Check out an awesome blog post from Rand from back in May 2010, entitled "All Links are Not Created Equal: 10 Illustrations on Search Engines' Valuation of Links" you'll see that Topic Number 1 provides some great information specific to your question.

I believe that on the whole (as in more times than not, but not always) visitors are more likely to click on the first link as opposed to the second, third...

As the most important content is often towards the beginning of a page's content, generally speaking, it's logical that the first link would be deemed more important than the second, third...  Therefore the first link would pass on more of any available link juice.

Of course, relevance and context also play a part, there is no absolute answer one way or the other.

On a closely related topic of "multiple links", check out these two blog posts here on SEOmoz:

• Results of Google Experimentation - Only the First Anchor Text Counts
• 3 Ways to Avoid the First Link Counts Rule

In summary, "Google does not appear to count multiple links to the same target page from a single page", which I believe is still true today.

I hope that helps,

Regards

Simon

Hi Dan

There are potential pros and cons here:

Pro:  those blogs on blogspot.com (Blogger) will be different sub-domains, e.g.  example.blogspot.com  and  sample.blogspot.com  Each one is treated as a seperate website, so they are essentially not on the same domain.

Con:  a lot of blogs have NoFollow links by default, thus negating any link juice flowing out to your website.

So I wouldn't be concerned with a number of blogs all on blogspot pointing in to you.  Though I would suggest ensuring that you have a healthy mix of Relevant good and high quality websites pointing to you on a variety of anchor text, best achieved by creating great content and distributing it well.

Also, check out a blog post published today on HubSpot entitled "The 8 Best Link-Building Tactics to Boost Off-Page SEO"  questionable whether or not they are the best 8, though certainly some good ones there and it's worth a read.

Regards

Simon

I agree. If not exactly the same then the H1 should at least match the start of the page Title, they should both reflect the main theme/topic of the page.

Hi Vitaly

A good question.  There are usually 2 main considerations when it comes to cross-linking sites:

1. To benefit the visitor from pointing to a useful related site

2. To try and aid SEO/Search efforts.

Your goal of trying to improve rankings of the newer sites by linking your hotel booking sites together could be counter-productive. Cross-linking sites with the intention of trying to improve search rankings (through the passing of link juice through the said links) usually has a short-term gain, then either neutral or negative. It's a risky game in trying to 'manipulate' search rankings by linking a load of sites together, which being honest is just what this would be.

With regards to the other reason for doing so, providing links that visitors could find useful, that's a sound and credible reason to link the sites together, just play it safe and NoFollow the links as Ben suggests. This would be playing it by the rules and keep the search engines happy whilst also benefiting your visitors.

Have you considered migrating your websites into one large site to serve all cities? Done properly, always with the visitor experience & offering in mind, it can benefit everyone.  You'd only have the one website to create content for and get links into, whilst providing one more in-depth offering and experience to your visitors.  Worth considering anyway, local search can still be catered for with one large website.

Kind regards

Simon

Hi Ravi

As you mention SEO in your question, I am relating my answer to SEO.

Your suspicions are justified, as in there being no SEO value in doing anything like this. It adds absolutely no value to any User's Experience, no SEO value, I personally and professionally regard it as a pointless unethical practice.

If somebody has a domain for sale, then fair enough in putting a sales banner on the homepage, however doing so with the hope of gaining any SEO benefit and including all those links to other spammy domains is a game that can only be lost.

So I'd recommend to Not follow suit and to help keep the Web a better place by avoiding doing the same if SEO benefits are the main goal.

Regards,

Simon

Hi Gary

Yes you can, domain & nameserver settings are global, so you can have the same kind of configuration that you have in the UK in many different countries.

Some hosting providers may not like this though as they'd prefer everything to be hosted through and done with them.

Check out  http://www.godaddy.com/tlds/info.aspx?tld=info&ci=16860  and  http://help.godaddy.com/article/668?locale=en&app_hdr=0  which shows that with GoDaddy you can certainly do this.

Hope that helps,

Regards

Simon

Alan is most probably right, that's the most likely reason.

If your site hasn't been down as far as you know though, I have another possibility for you.

I just had a check of the cache of your homepage though and it showed the page as last being cached at "13 Nov 2011 12:45:47 GMT"

If you search on: site:www.bollywoodshaadis.com within Google, then hover over the preview arrow next to your homepage result, you'll see:

BollywoodShaadis.com - Connecting Soon-to-be-married with local ...

<cite>www.bollywoodshaadis.com/</cite> - CachedClick on that Cached link and you'll see (I hope) that it was last cached on November 13th.It seems like cache:www.bollywoodshaadis.com may actually bring up a real Error page rather than a cached version of the page.If you can see what I see then chances are all is fine with your site. If you still get that error page, then it's likely your site was down at the last Googlebot visit.RegardsSimon

I agree with Maxwell's comments.

Also, if your website is predominantly for UK visitors, may as well stick with .co.uk rather than changing to .com  Your website is UK hosted so sticking with the .co.uk ties in nicely.

If your website is international/global then certainly consider changing to .com

If you do, ensure you use Google Webmaster Tools when making the change from .co.uk to .com to notify Google of the change.

Hope that helps.

Regards

Simon

Hi There

It seems like your client is requesting something that is considered to be unethical in terms of search. Stripping it back, they are asking if it's Ok to deceive Google Places by creating fake addresses, plus indicating that they are happy to display fake addresses to searchers.

With a well optimized Google Places listing and a well optimized webpage for the listing, it should be possible to show up for more than 1 of those home services.

My advice would be to avoid doing what they are requesting, as not only is is bad practice, it does present a real risk of being caught out, possibly during the verification phase that Google do, bound to get flagged up.

Hope that helps.

Regards

Simon

You're welcome Gary.

If you'd like to provide your IT department with even more reassurance (via Rackspace US), check out the first paragraph of  http://www.rackspace.com/apps/support/portal/1164  which shows that in the US, you can have your domain(s) registered with one registrar and your website hosted with another.

Regards

Simon

Can't blame anybody for caring about their site and business That's a great thing.

Have another search tomorrow, clear out your browser cache first and chances are all will be back to normal as others can see your site ranking just fine

Hi Manoj

Chances are that it's the delay between the spider bot crawling the website and the index being updated.

When (most) bots crawl a page, they take a cache (spiders' copy) of the page and process that copy at a later time. Thus there is a delay between when a spider crawls a page and the search results being updated.

You may find at times that the meta description isn't the same as the one you've written anyhows, Google does sometimes create it's own description to display in the search results, based upon some of the actual page content.

I'd suggest resubmitting your updated sitemap.xml and waiting a while longer, chances are all will be sorted shortly.

Regards

Simon

Hi ConversionChamp

Any private link network created to aid SEO (Rankings) is shady by nature, even if that's not the intention, there is no avoiding the fact that's it's not an ethical practice.  Though granted that won't stop many from participating in it.

A far better, more beneficial and sustainable strategy (your white-hat alternative) would be to build up relationships with relevant site owners;  do some guest blogging and provide them with content, socially connect with them and distribute your content around their audience, which will lead towards some awesome links.  Building up your own contacts to engage with and hopefully get links from without exchanging links that go round & round the network, is the way to go.

Regards

Simon

Hi Shauna

Check out  http://www.seomoz.org/blog/introducing-social-analytics-in-seomoz-pro#jtc160624  for your answer.

The good chap himself, Rand, has confirmed that both LinkedIn and Google+ are on the agenda for inclusion in SEOmoz's Social Analytics within Pro tools, probably during early 2012.

Regards

Simon

Hi Joshua

These 50 domains that are on redirect won't hold any SEO value as they are, except if any are new redirects that recently hosted a reputable website themselves. If any were to host a new unique website with their own SEO quality attributes such as inbound links and then linked into the main website, it may only provide some temporary benefit as that would be likely be flagged up as link farming and would be more costly and time consuming than the following suggestion, so I really don't recommend doing anything such as this. Thought I'd mention it as something to avoid.

My suggestion is to not do anything with these domains other than continue to redirect them if they are desired to be kept. Instead, focus on improving the on-page and off-page SEO of the main website through investing in unique relevant interesting valuable content which in turn can form the basis of obtaining more good quality links.

Also consider some online and offline PR, plus further distribution of your content through channels such as Social. Hope that helps.

Regards

Simon