Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Your robots.txt is actually the issue in this case, Sainath. (The giveaway is that No information is available for this page text, which is the standard response on Google for a page that is blocked by robots.txt.)

The problem is that your robots.txt is blocking all URLs that contain UTM parameters . Since the shortened URL is redirecting to a site page URL which contains UTM parameters (https://in.musafir.com/Visa/Singapore-Visa.aspx?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=youtube_channel&utm_campaign=Singapore_visa_video) and is therefore blocked from crawling, Google can't properly crawl/discover the actual destination page and its real URL and meta-description via this link, so it continues to return the only info it has available - the shortened URL and the blocked-description warning.

Your site is already protected from issues with UTM parameter URLs because it has properly implemented self-referential canonical tags, which is the correct way to deal with them. You should remove the robots.txt blocks for all those parameters (especially including the gclid - I suspect that's causing issues with our Adwords Quality Score). This way, the search engine will be able to properly understand each stage of the redirect you've created and index the proper URL and meta-description

In short - those parameter blocks in your robots.txt file are causing multiple issues for your site, without doing anything beneficial.

Does that make sense?

Paul

There's nothing intrinsic about a blog that would cause links from it to have any less value than from a "regular" web page, Kristian. In fact, there's no way for a search engine to devalue a "blog" page because there's no definition of such a thing.

However... in the example you gave above, the blog would be considered a completely separate site from the primary domain site. This means that it is quite possible the blog site doesn't have as much domain authority as the primary domain, so links from it also wouldn't provide as much "juice." (Depends entirely on the specific situation and the difference between blog (subdomain) & main domain authority must be assessed on a case by case basis)

So it's not that the blog's links might carry less weight because it's a blog, but because it's pretty much a standalone site and must earn its own authority separate from the main site . The same is true for any subdomain-based sites, not just blogs.

Make sense?

Paul

You're actually in the reverse position of most people dealing with URL parameters, Martin. By default, the Search Engines consider different parameters to be different pages and most users are struggling with how to make the SEs understand they're all one page to avoid duplicate content issues.

In your case, you want the SEs to treat those pages according to the way the SEs normally do, which means you "shouldn't" need to do anything extra to get them indexed separately. That's what's naturally going to happen.

I'm with you on the hinting in Google Webmaster Tools though. May as well use that capability to confirm for Google that you do want those parameters indexed. You should do the same thing in Bing Webmaster Tools as well. Kind of a "belt & suspenders" approach.

Paul

The reality is that the newspaper's website is almost certainly going to outrank you for your own articles, Luke. It's not "supposed" to work this way, but in actual fact, that's usually what happens.

If they'll actually give you the rel=canonical for each of your submissions, great, but I'd be very surprised if they'll actually do this.

Another tactic might be to see if they have implemented rel=author, since this is actually designed for the situation you're talking about. You would set up your own Authorship profile on your own Google Plus profile, then add the newspaper as one of the sites to which you contribute. In addition, if the newspaper had rel=author properly implemented on their article pages, you would begin to build author influence from the articles.

Paul

No, well-presented, user-friendly popups like exit-intent popups won't have anything to do with the ad blocking that's going to happen.

You definitely need to change the 302 to a 301 redirect, Niners. Typically, you check which version has the most incoming links already (since it's an existing site) and make that the primary address. Then you use the 301 redirect to point the other URL to the primary one.

Even though many people may directly type in the URL without the www, most people who are writing it as a link on a webpage will do it including the www. Having those incoming links avoid needing a redirect is more important than the folks typing in direct (since even 301s don't pass absolutely all the link authority.)

Make sense?

Paul

Sorry for the misunderstanding, Martin. I was misled by this statement:

... the parameter will change the information and layout of the page

If the content of the page will truly be different depending on the parameter, the search engines are probably going to consider them separate URLs no matter what you do.. That's their whole definition of separate pages.

If the parameter simply rearranges a page's content (e.g. creates a different sort order for the same products) then combining the pages can usually work.

If you want to try to combine these pages for ranking purposes anyway, the tool to use is the rel=canonical tag. You insert it into the header of the custom parameter pages pointing back to the primary page.

Google is clear though that canonical tags are taken as suggestions only, and if it thinks your pages should actually be indexed separately, it will ignore the canonical.

You could then back this process up by using Bing & Google WMT to specify that the ?state= and city= parameters are to be ignored. But the above caveat still applies.

Paul

Should have also mentioned - you want to try to get some sort of link back from their page that publishes the article to your own site. Even if it's just something like a link in a bio box at the end of the article.

Second-best situation is to have your site's page with the article ranking just under theirs, but that's pretty tough with Google coming down so hard on duplicate content.

So the only other benefit to being syndicated (unless you can get the rel=author link) is to have a link in the article that could actually drive some new eyeballs to your site.

Good luck & let us know what happens.

Paul

Direct traffic isn't a ranking factor, VT. There's no way it can be, as it would far to easy a signal to fake and abuse.

Paul

Sorry, Niners, I wasn't clear you were talking about two different spellings of the domain as well as the www and non www versions. I had assumed that was just a typo. Sorry 'bout that.

So... if you own iamcool.com and i-am-cool-com, you essentially have four variations for the domain URL you need to address. The Search Engines consider each of these to be different sites:

• www.i-am-cool-com
• i-am-cool.com
• www.iamcool.com
• iamcool.com

Out of all of these, you're going to pick the one that is your primary site address. This will become what's known as your FQDN - Fully Qualified Domain Name. This will be the URL you use for EVERYTHING you control. All links will use this full version, it's what you'll put on business cards, in bio links on guest posts, everything.

Since you say that the version with the hyphens has been in existence the longest, I would recommend that become your primary. And further, I suspect that the www version of it probably has the most incoming links.

So,,, www.i-am-cool.com will become your primary site address - your FQDN. (Assuming you agree with what's stated above.)

Once that's decided, you now need to 301-redirect each of the other versions directly to that www.i-am-cool.com URL. (For example, you specifically want to avoid a situation where iamcoolcom redirects to www.iamcool,com, which then redirects again to the final www.i-am-cool.com.)

Once you've done the redirects, you'll want to keep a close eye on your Webmaster Tools and Analytics to make sure you're not getting 404s from pages not being caught by the redirects correctly. In addition, you can use the hostnames report in Analytics to make sure that only your FQDN is showing up, indicating all the other versions are redirecting correctly.

Hope that clears things up a little more.

Paul

In this situation, using a canonical to point to the primary is a workaround, but the correct way to handle it is with a 301 redirect. Canonicals are to be used when both versions of the page need to be indexed, but all the influence is to be directed to a single URL.

In this case, there is no functional reason why you would want both URLs to remain in the index and be reachable by the two different addresses because they are the exact same page. Therefore the correct solution is to 301 redirect the /index.html URL to the primary URL. (This will also be cleanest to maintain, will pass maximum amount of authority, and is best for usability)

ASP sites are hosted on Microsoft IIS servers. IIS does not use or recognize .htaccess files. Instead, you will need to use the URL Rewrite Module. It should be preinstalled on most IIS servers, or you can request that your host/server admin add it. (If the server's older than IIS 7, you'll need a 3rd part ISAPI Rewrite module instead of Microsoft's own module)

Here's a TechRepublic article on using the Rewrite Module to perform the same sorts of functions as .htaccess on Apache servers. http://ow.ly/fXSAB In many ways, its basics are easier than .htaccess.

Note you should also be redirecting the non-www version of the site to the fully qualified domain name as well if you haven't already

Hope this helps?

Paul

Given that WP 'o Matic was updated less than a month ago and is getting over 1500 downloads a week, I'd say it's still a viable plugin, Tim.

Setting up a system to import one site's feed as posts in another site is going to take very careful setup and coding of both the outgoing feed and the import process - not a trivial undertaking by any means. (As I implied in my original answer)

Simply having a widget pull in and display an RSS feed is definitely a vastly simpler process and there are many plugins out there for that.

Good luck!

Paul

The quickest way to check this, Niners52, is to use a server header checking tool like the one at SEO Book
http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/

Run a test on each domain name, including the variations with and without the www. Four tests in all. Each one of those that returns a server 200 header response, is being seen as a separate site by the search engines.

If the system has been set up correctly, instead you will see one of those four variations return a 200 response, and the other three will return 301 redirect responses pointing to the one version you wish to be the primary.

Make sense?

Paul

There are certain very specific circumstances where Google treats subdomains as part of the main domain for reporting purposes, Ayaz, but as far as SEO is concerned, subdomains pretty much always have to stand alone as separate sites.

Paul

Migrating a Blogspot site to a WordPress self-hosted one while retaining SEO value is a serious heap of work, Karen, and it's quite finicky. You'll really want to seriously consider (after doing some analysis of the existing blog's value) whether the time and effort is worth it if, as you say, you don't get many visitors (indicating the site doesn't have much ranking value in Google.)

Because, as Branagan points out, you can't simply add redirects to an .htaccess file (Blogspot doesn't give you access to one), you have to build a custom template for Blogspot site which matches up to your specially-configured new blog.

Here's by far the best tutorial on this process I've found. The author has also created a plugin to help with the process. It even includes a method for managing the download & re upload of the blog's images. It's been a couple years since I've done one, but it is doable if you have a lot of time and patience.

Really make sure the value of the old blog is worth it before you invest the time, but if you decide to go for it, good luck!

Paul

Have to agree with Takeshi. In my experience, even still in 2013, having a blog on a subdomain gives you all of the disadvantages of it being a separate site while achieving none of the advantages.

If the blog's topics are directly related to the primary topics of the website itself, put it in a subdirectory - save yourself all kinds of hassle while letting your main site authority help your blog, and vice versa.

Paul

[Updated to note:  those two articles you mention are referring to very specific elements of subdomains and subdirectories. Namely that geo-targeting is equally effective whether you're using a subdomain or subdirectory, that specifically within Webmaster Tools, links between subdomains and primary domains will be considered internal for reporting purposes, and that subdomains are no longer considered "seperate" sites when it comes to trying to get your site/subdomain to show multiple times in a SERP.. These should in no way be considered general claims that subdomains and subdirectories perform similarly in all other aspects]

You product pages (and other pages, though haven't dug through the rest of the site) have rel=canonical tags in their headers, Lorraine. These are likely being created automatically by your shopping cart software.

This is a very good thing. Including the canonical tag in the head of each page is considered best practice.

Unfortunately, SEOMoz's Crawl Report Page doesn't' do a good job of explaining that the Notices section doesn't mean those items have problems, it's just advising that those features are present on your webpages so that you can confirm that you actually want them and that they've been implemented correctly.

In your case, the canonical tags are desirable and have been implemented correctly. The thing the notice is telling you that I would check on though is that the tags aren't appearing on each page (For example, your home page doesn't have a canonical tag) I would check with your site software/developer to see if it's possible to implement it on all your pages.

Make sense?

Gonna be blunt... a travel writing contest that doesn't allow first-person stories is simply ridiculous. (Disclosure: I work predominantly in tourism/travel too)

Travel is an incredibly personal experience. A travel guide that lists attractions of a city is one thing, but an inspiring, exciting, or moving storing of how one person experienced that city is far more likely to actually inspire others to start thinking about visiting there as well. It's the personal stories that allow a reader to start to visualize themselves doing and enjoying the things the writer is talking about.

Travel is aspirational and emotional - people don't do it because they have to but because something inspires them to do it. That inspiration doesn't come from a logic-based laundry list of places and events (facts), but the ability of the visitor to imagine themselves in and enjoying the destination (emotions). And that comes in large part from reading others' experiences. Even most travel fiction is based on first-person narrative for that reason.

Sure, once you've captured their attention in the dreaming phase, you need solid guidebook-like info for followup. But even then, people are looking for personal connections to assess the validity of the guidebook recommendations. One need only to look at the explosion of TripAdvisor over the last couple of years to see that even guidebook info is more effective when accompanied by personal stories (reviews).

The writing contest is a great idea for generating interesting  real content. Don't  neuter it by removing the emotional connection to the stories.

There's more than my $.02

Paul

I don't really think there's an issue with "too many redirects" on one site, Quilbur, as long as they're implemented cleanly. 156 redirects on a medium-sized site that has been redesigned and so needs url redirects isn't unreasonable.

The more redirects there are, the harder the server has to work to process them, so can lead to a slight slowing down of the website and increase in server load. This is especially true if the redirects are being done inside a WordPress plugin, for example.

Best case is to have the redirects implemented directly in .htaccess (Apache) or in IIS Rewrites( Windows). Wherever possible, use clean, strong regex to combine as many redirects into one rule as possible. It's often possible to combine a whole group of redirects into one line using careful regex variables and wildcards.

All that said - my opinion would be that 156 redirects isn't something to worry about.

Hope that helps;

Paul

I'm with  David that the dates in the URL structure aren't really beneficial and could actually be harmful unless you're a news site of some sort.

I always include the publish date in the post itself because little frustrates me more than not being able to tell whether an article's recommendations are current or not, but don't see any reason to emphasise the date in the URL.

According to top WordPress SEO Joost deValk, the presence of the dates in URLs can hurt clickthrough rates from the SERPs as well.

Because you're on WordPress, it would be quite difficult to change URLs only for new posts .Because it's templated, making the URL structure change is going to affect all posts. Which means it's imperative that you implement a redirect for all the old posts when you update to the new URLs.

Fortunately, this is a snap to do as Yoast has written a little web-app to help you create the redirect automatically without needing to know anything about the code.

He's written a post about the why's which further answer your question, and includes a link to the tool he built to create the necessary redirect. http://yoast.com/change-wordpress-permalink-structure/

Hope that helps?

Paul