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Exactly, a good answer from Ryan there. Best to avoid doing this type of SEO in any shape or form.

Hi Brian

As tempting as it may be, this would run a high risk of being classed as Domain Spamming, by creating Doorway Pages that link through to the real website for the purposes of trying to manipulate natural search rankings.

At best there would be some short-term SEO benefits, it's not considered to be ethical SEO though and chances are it would end up back-firing in the medium term, doesn't take that long these days for the main search engines to notice this kind of practice and to apply penalities.

Best bet is to spend the time creating valuable unique content and to distribute it well & obtain high quality natural links that way.

Hope that helps,

Regards

Simon

Hi Matias

Yes, indeed.  You have 2 versions of your website live there, the non-www version and the www version.

Both will differ in terms of Domain Authority, Page Authority etc as they will have different authority attributes, different link profiles, different visitor levels etc.

One of these sites is duplicate and potentially harming. I'd absolutely recommend 301 Redirecting (or the equivalent) one to the other. When you have done, use Google Webmaster Tools to inform Google which version you'd prefer to have included in its search results.

Up to you which one, doesn't matter at face value. Though do check which one is currently appearing in search results for brand and non-brand search terms the most and which has the highest quality links pointing to it, then 301 the weaker site to the stronger.

Regards

Simon

Hi Rodney

There are two ways to look into this, Correlation and Causation.

Some Correlation seems to be there from what you've said, with the widget being added about the same time as your rankings dropped (though would likely need longer for the pages concerned to get re-crawled and any effect to be seen in the SERPS).

However I'd be extremely surprised if there was any Causation.  I've never experienced or heard of this particular AddThis widget or a similar social sharing widget to cause a websites' rankings to drop.

Likely nothing more than coincidence with the timing.

Have a look for any other correlations, check back over the past two or three weeks and if you've made any other changes or acquired any suspect links, look into those to see if they may have caused a drop in your rankings.

Hope that helps,

Regards

Simon

Hi Adam

Your best bet is to contact the Helpdesk with this one, via http://seomoz.zendesk.com/requests/new when logged into your SEOmoz account, or send an email to **sitesupport@seomoz.org **

It could be that 'rogerbot' hasn't been requested to crawl your website for a long time, or is being prevented from doing so.  The Helpdesk will help you out I'm sure.

Regards

Simon

Hi David

Your frustrations are certainly understandable and the temptation to follow suit is obviously there.

You question yourself as to whether follow suit as per your competitor, or to continue down the route of quality content creation and ethical link building.

It has to be the later, always, don't sell yourself short. SEO isn't a quick win, those such as your competitor that engage in unethical practices such as link farming (which is what they are doing from your description) usually loose out in the end.

Be in it for the long term, keep creating high quality relevant topical useful content for your visitors and distribute it properly, as you have been doing by the sounds of it.

• If you're after some guidance or fresh ideas to consider with your SEO strategy, have a read of a useful SEO Guide here on SEOmoz and study the Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors which are a really useful resource.
• Also, watch a 9 minute video that was today's White Board Friday video, which is here on SEOmoz, entitled 'Mapping Keywords to Content for Maximum Impact'.

If you are after a quick win, consider PPC if not already and try some online & offline PR. As far as the SEO goes, don't give in to that temptation as you'll likely end up regretting it. It takes time however with focus, perseverance and the right ethical SEO strategy, you'll get there eventually.

With kind regards

Simon

Hi Zsolt

I don't believe there is a way to, not in a Windows environment anyway.

Robots.txt has to be hosted at website root level, as in  example.com/robots.txt which is where search engine bots look for it.  If a bot can find it (which they usually need to if one exists) then a person can too.

If there are pages or folders that you don't want anybody to know about, exclude them from robots.txt and edit the Meta Robots tag on each page concerned to e.g. NoIndex, Follow or whatever is appropriate.

Regards

Simon

Thanks Yannick, glad you agree

Hi There

A good question.  I can most confidently tell you that purchasing a domain name and redirecting it to another domain/website will have Zero SEO benefit. It's not even a good idea to market the domain that's being redirected as the links that will inevitably be acquired will be redirected also, loosing some of the link strength through the rediirect.

Plus for User Experience, it's usually not particularly good as visitors expect to land on the expected site rather than being redirected to another.

It's also the general consensus now that exact match domains do not have as much SEO weight as they used to, especially with Google. So exact match domains are not worth what they used to be.

• If you're purchasing a live website on the domain, that's different as you may be able to take advantage of that site's strength if it's a relevant website in a similar category.

If it's purely purchasing and redirecting it, then don't spend any more than the typical registration cost of a few $.  Spend that $10,000 investing in Content and distributing it well, which will lead to some relevant links too, or indeed on PPC as you suggest (though that's not an investment).

If the branded domain has some other value to the business, then paying a fair price is typical as you'd be buying an assett.

I hope that helps,

Regards

Simon

I agree with Alan.  Best to play it safe on this one and may not work anyway.

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

Hi Neal

All going well thank you, busy times as always!

Yep, that's right, to avoid having a page (from a search engine's perspective) that is for search and not for all users (a hidden page), place a NoIndex on the page, or link to it from another 'normal' page so that it can be navigated to.

The tag for a NoIndex would be:   so answering your other question, with that Follow attribute the links to other pages within your site would be followed and any page authority shared, even though the page is tagged as NoIndex.

All the best,

Simon

That's a good answer from Yannick.  I have another perspective for you to consider also: (always good to have options)

I'd like to add that if this landing page does not have any internal links pointing to it from other pages within your website, you'll effectively be saying that this page is not important, as it's rather hidden away.

That's a big enough factor to push the strength of that page down, even with some good inbound links to it, so may not much matter about linking to other pages from it to pass-on some of that page strength.

In my view, it's best to have this page as a NoIndex page as it's clearly not there for all users. You'll otherwise risk this page being classed as a doorway page purely there for link building and not for users, could risk a penalty in the worst case scenario. You could still link out to other Relevant pages from it then.

Regards

Simon

In which case go for it if that's all that matters. User experience may be affected, depends on the designs, though as SEO is your only concern here, you're all set to press ahead

It is indeed, I already answered that question though; you won't be penalised by Google purely for different designs.

Exactly, a good answer from James. For a positive user experience, 'Familiarity' is key, many visitors don't like surprises and will leave quickly if they feel lost or unsure of what they are looking at, so keep the Blog's design and style similar to that of your main website.

Doesn't have to be an exact copy of style and design, just easily recognisable that your blog and your website are Your blog and your website, that the two are related.

This isn't for search by the way, you won't be peanalized by Google if your blog and website have different designs (only if the designs are poor and crawling, speed etc are an issue, could you be peanalized).  User Experience is key here rather than Search.

Regards

Simon

Hi Shelly

If the pages are 'crappy' as you describe, then a good idea to delete them as poor quality pages can negatively affect the site overall.

If you are going to delete the pages, then yes, cisaz is right, ensure they are 301 redirected to a relevant page to retain some of the link benefits and to give direct visitors to those pages somewhere to go other than a 404 error page.

Also, request the removal of the URLs of the deleted pages within Google Webmaster Tools to speed up the de-indexing of them. (Will need a NoIndex robots tag on the pages, and/or a Disallow in the robots.txt file).

Regards

Simon

Ahha, all makes sense now, thanks for the clarification.

Seems like you're already on the right tracks, what will be tricky is getting your site known as a review site by Google, so that when searches such as 'ServiceMagic' are performed, your site's review page for ServiceMagic appears.

Once your site is classed as a reliable review site, you'll find the reviews starting to appear. Just need more reviews and to keep all the usuals such as on & off-page SEO going strong.

Seems like you're part way there as 'Click for Full Review >>: already appears.

Hi Steve

You're right, isn't a show-stopper, just an advisory message.

Ref. your reviews showing on Page 2 of Google;  for the search term 'Looking Glass Photography' (without the word review in), can currently see 2 reviews, one from www.freeindex.co.uk (33 reviews) and one from www.touchbristol.com (51 votes)

So your reviews on other sites are starting to appear in Google's natural results for your brand search.

You're welcome