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Hi,

Have your pages been crawled and indexed since you changed them?  We will need more information to learn more about the problem.

Hi,

I don't think it is possible to crawl any password protectec pages.  Password protected pages are usually blocked and bots are unable access those pages.

And yes it is true that only sites that are publicly and live can be crawled.

Hi Michael,

Yahoo Answers is a good way to build traffic to your site if you provide informative answers to the questions and not just spam your link even if it is not related.  If you provide an informative answer, you can also include an URL to further answer the question.

However, I believe all links from Yahoo! Answers are no-follow.  Therefore, posting links on the answers won't give you the backlink benefit in SEO.  But still good for traffic.

Furthermore, if you want your link to be clickable, you will need to become a level 2 user in Yahoo! Answers.

Hi,

Instead of blocking it, you can 301 redirect the pages on your costumesupercenter.com site to the partysupercenter.com site once it is up.  You can start building up your links, traffic and get it index it first and once your site is up, 301 will transfer everything to the new site.

This may be a short answer, but hope it helps.  Please let me know if you want me to elaborate.

Hi,

It is good to know that your site is indexed and you did on page optimization and have a good amount of unique articles.  However, did you conduct keyword research on what other people are searching for?

You may have a lot of articles but if you don't know what your audience is searching for then you couldnt have included keywords in your articles and on page seo.

Make sure to include keywords (since you just started, target easy long tail keywords) in your article and on-page seo.  Try to build some backlinks and that will definitely help.

Hi Laurence,

What do you mean the crawl still hasn't be completed?  Do you mean not all your sites are indexed?

I suggest you checking up on your Google Webmaster Tools and see how your site is doing.  Once you log in, click on your website then click on  the Health tab on the left hand side.  You can see all your crawl stats and errors there.  Furthermore, you can use the "Fetch as Google" tool and ask Google to crawl your pages again.

Another thing is that if you have a lot of pages and your pages are not interlinking correctly, it may take weeks for Google to crawl all your pages.  There is not set time limit on how long it takes.  Maybe submit a sitemap to speed up the process of finding all your pages?

Hi,

I don't believe having toooooooo many pages will hurt crawling and ranking.  Actually having a lot of pages will give crawl bots more pages to crawl and when someone searches for keywords related to your pages, your pages might show up.

The only 2 problems I see from having too many pages are

1. With all these pages, are they all unique?  With a lot of pages, it will be hard to manager and to keep track if all of them are unique.  If you don't have unique pages and have a lot of duplicate, that will hurt your ranking.

2. The second problem is are you inter-linking all your pages?  Can the bot crawl all your pages?  You will need to have a good linking system and direct bots to different pages for them to crawl.  Having a lot of pages will be difficult to manage as I mentioned above.  Can you interlink all of them so the bots can crawl all of them?  One solution I see to this is submitting a Sitemap but I am not sure if they will index everything since I had a problem with Google only indexing 4% of my sitemap and still can't find solution.

Hope this helps!

Hi All Smart SEOmozers!

I have another dumb question =]

I have almost no knowledge on how DNS works and all the website background work.  I understand that DNS is the server that translates a domain name to the IP address.  Furthermore, I also know that IP Address location or web host location plays a small factor in international SEO.  Webhosts usually provide the DNS service as well but for this case ABC Company uses a different domain service, diferent DNS service and different webhost service so things get complicated.

So the question, does the location of DNS service we use affect International SEO like how the location of the webhost does.

Thank you in advance for your help!

Hi,

All the answers are just amazing!  I just want to share my 2 cents on this topic.

If both sites have the same link juice, age, content quality, location and citations and only the load speed is different, I believe the site that loads faster will rank better.

In one of Google Webmasters Blog article, they mentioned that they are obsessed with load speed and do use Site Load Speed as a signal in their search ranking algorithms.  It may not weight heavily compared to other signals but for 2 virtual identical sites, the one that loads faster wins.

Furthermore, as Darin mentioned, if your site loads faster then Google will also be able to crawl more of your pages, if more pages are crawled, then more of your pages will have the chance of appearing on the search engine result page.

Also quoting from Google Webmaster Blog: "We encourage you to start looking at your site's speed (the tools above provide a great starting point) — not only to improve your ranking in search engines, but also to improve everyone's experience on the Internet."

Meta Descriptions and Meta Keywords both don't affect SEO ranking on BIG search engines but meta descriptions plays the role in getting people to click on your link so what you said is true in having meta keywords repeated is not as serious as repeated meta descriptions.  Meta descriptions may not affect your ranking but it is still **important!

I suggest making both meta keywords and description unique. ** Work on the meta descriptions first then if you have time, work on the keywords.  No rush in keywords though.  If you have other more important SEO related issue to take care of, do those first.

Hi, Thanks for the answer.

I believe the sitemap was submitted via Google Webmaster Tools by the previous webmaster.  Redoing it might be a possible solution.  However, I checked the links submitted and I do noticed a few broken but majority of them are still valid/works so I still don't understand why only 4 were crawled.  As you've mentioned, i tested the sitemap.xml but there weren't any errors found by Google.

Do you have any idea on the other 2 questions?  Thank you!

Hi,

I believe your suggestion or what you have in mind is good.  Your Alt Text includes keyword and describes the image.  It is ok to have similarity in title and alt text as long as it is not exact similar.  Just make sure all your alt text and titles are different and be as descriptive as possible.

Hi,

The answer is YES! All your meta description should be unique and to attract users to click on your website on the search engine result page.  Each meta description should be used to summarize each page and use CTA to attract searchers to click.  Furthermore, meta descriptions should include keywords related to that page so that it will be bold in the search engine result page when someone searches for that keyword.

Although meta keywords don't play a role in SEO for big search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask but they should be unique as well because there are a lot of smaller engines that are still using it and of course, there are some people using smaller engines as well.  SO you want to optimize your website for all engines out there.  Just a side note, baidu still uses keywords.

Hi Smart SEOmozers!

I actually have three questions and they all kind of related.  Thanks in advance!

1. Since March 2012 and up to today, January 2013, I checked Webmasters and it showed that 100 webpages have been submitted and only 4 crawled.  Why is that?  I don't have 50000 pages like other websites and it had been 10 Months but still only 4 web pages crawled?  I didn't block any URLs or have any no crawl meta tags.  hmmmmm Why this happened?

2. Another related question, I then checked Health >>> Index Status, it showed 198 indexed.  SO if it had 198 pages indexed why in the sitemap report it only showed 4 web pages crawled out of 100?  What happened to that 96?

3. While I'm on the Index Status, it showed that I have some webpages as Not Selected and that is due to 301 redirects.  I've recently did 301 redirects to majority of the pages.  I am wondering will this affect our ranking?  Any idea how long it will take them to drop the old links and reindex the new links?

Thank you all!

Hi Chris,

I believe Twitter links are "nofollow" links so even if you have thousands of link from Twitter, those links won't give you link juice.  However, Search Engines do look like whether people are sharing your links on Social Media; therefore, it does play a role in SEO.

For Twitter best practices, you should shortened the link.  It saves character space for your tweet and give you more characters to share what you want to say.

Hi,

http://myblogguest.com/ is a good site for you to find blogs that are willing to accept guest blogs.  You have to sign up for an account and it is a community where people request for blogs to post on or request for posts for their blog.  It is 100% free and join the comunity to find a blog that you think fits your niche and message the blog owners to see if they want to post your article.

hope this helps!

Yea, 3000 pages will take a while.

The title tags and meta descriptions are all new, does that mean it is different from the old pages?  If it is, then it shouldn't be duplicate.

Hi Kashif,

In order for your websie to even appear on the search engine result page, your website must be crawled and indexed by the search engine.  Furthermore, in order for search engines to crawl your site, you will need contents and pages for them to crawl.  Usually when you have a site up, sooner or later it will be crawl.

\However, to fasten the speed for Google to crawl your site, you can request them to crawl by submitting your URL to Google.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1352276

Once you are indexed, you should optimize your website with on-page SEO (such as page title, URL, create contents, anchor text, h1 header) and earn back links from authority site.  If your site is well optimized, your website will then appear on search engine when someone search for keywords you are targeting.  Furthermore, you should also optimize meta description to attract searchers to click on your webiste on the search result page thus you get traffic from search engine.

In conclusion, there is no set time.  Optimize your website for SEO and you will get traffic soon.

Hope this helps

Hi,

I had a similar problem but i found duplicate title tags through another tool but very similar to Google Webmasters.  Although you did 301 redirects to new pages and thats the right thing to do but I believe from that tool, they are still picking up the title tag and meta descriptions from the old pages.  I also don't know why.  There are two ways to approach this.

1. Go to your old pages and simply remove all the title tags and meta descriptions

2. Go to your new pages and change the title tag and meta description.  Optimize it even more than what you used to have on your old pages.  Add secondary keywords to the title tag? Change up the meta description with CTA?

Maybe you should also check to make sure that all of them are 301 redirects and not 302.  Furthermore, do you have www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com?  These are considered two different sites and might be the reason.

Hope this helps.

Hi Diane,

If I understood your question correctly, the website ranking is dropping because there are no updates on the website and Google loves frequent updates; therefore, you are asking if there is any ways or methods to avoid the "Freshness" factor.

If that is true, as you have suggested, creating a blog and constantly writing useful articles will help you solve this dilemma.  A blog is part of your website and if you post frequently, then it is considered as your website being updated frequently.  So in conclusion, what you suggested in the last paragraph should work. (Make sure to include keywords in your articles)

Furthermore, as Keri and Logan had suggested in the answers, fixing up your page layout will also benefit your ranking.  It will reduce bounce rate and by breaking down the page to many different pages or sections, it will have more pages for google to crawl and easier to read.

Other than update frequently, there are many other factors and reason why your ranking drop.  Try building more qulaity backlinks and BLOG (have more pages to crawl).

Hope this answers your question.