Hi,

You should not nofollow links to your social profiles. Your social profiles can benefit from your links.

This has been answered here on Moz:

http://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/community/q/is-it-better-nofollow-or-follow-links-to-external-social-pages

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi,

If this proxy website is a clone of the original website and if its not blocked thoroughly from being accessed and found by the search engines, we have a huge problem and this proxy website should be taken down ASAP as this might create issues because of duplicate content especially if the original website is fairly new and the proxy website has some strong SEO factors like domain age, domain authority or page authority etc. Please do write back in case you would like to give some more details about the issue or have queries in this regard.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

Hi Hitesh,

There are hell lot of signals that can be picked up by the search engines and find which bunch of websites belong to a person or organization. Let us not get in to those but if you are hell bent on how to fly safe under the radar and still be able to do cross linking you can look at changing the information with your domain name registrar (if both websites were registered using common name, address and stuff). Try changing the Admin, tech contact info and registrant info. You can definitely go in for a different IP and preferably a different class C IP. Look at the website architectural traces, design traces and anything in common like addresses etc. Despite doing all these, we can resist ourselves accessing both websites at the same time from the same machine and from same IP. The list continues... but if you have good content on both the sites and if you are not doing too much linking, you should be fine as there is nothing to worry about. Moreover, there is nothing wrong about linking all my websites with an intention to introduce my other websites to a visitor on one of my websites.

The conclusion is, if you are not doing a heavy cross linking, you don't need to worry about it. Above all, the domains' authority plays a big role in cases like this.

Good luck.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi there,

Straight into the meat:

1. My pages were indexed by google few days back. How long does google take to display the URL in SERP once the pages get indexed ?

A. Once the pages are in the index they become eligible to appear in the SERPs but, where they appear, on which page and in which position will they appear depends on lot of factors like the competition for the search term, your content, the back links that you have and the list goes on.

2. Does google give more preference to websites with more number of pages than those with lesser number of pages to display results in SERP (I have just 50 pages). Does the NUMBER of pages really matter ?

A. To a little extent and in some cases yes, but this again depends on the quality (in terms of relevance, uniqueness, originality etc, etc, ) of the content on a website, the quality of its link popularity and all the other 200+ factors that Google considers before positioning a website in the SERPs. To put it straight, you do not need to worry about the number of pages if your content is of pristine quality and highly relevant as per Google.

3. Does removal / change of URLs have any negative effect on ranking ? (Many of these URLs were not shown on the 1st page)

A. If the URLs being removed had duplicate content then in this case you will not have any negative effect.

Over a period of time, gradually, on an as and when required basis, keep adding pages that target one search term per page with relevant, unique and up-to-date content. This will result in a positive change in your organic traffic numbers. And very importantly, do not build links desperately from all the places. Earn links, that is what I would say, you have to earn links by giving a reason for your visitors to visit your website.

1. Try to earn links from authority sites in your niche. Links like this fall in the tier 1 category.

2. Get links from generic authority websites (like Wikipedia) by posting quality content. This would be your tier 2.

3. Get links from similar theme (sites that operate in your niche) websites. These links can be your tier 3.

4. Finally, earn links from generic web properties like forums, blogs, social networking sites, social bookmarking sites etc. These would be your tier 4 links.

A very important thing to keep in mind while doing the above is, "the quality of the content being posted". Be specific and try to address an issue or provide a solution in your posts. Never engage in low quality link exchanges and bulk link building. Above all, keep asking yourself all the time, "why should anyone visit my website?", "what can I do to make a visitor's visit to my website worthwhile" and " what should I do to make my website to give a better user experience or a better advantage than that of my competitors?"

With questions like the above, you will be able to secure a  good longstanding and enduring position in the SERPs for your website.

Also be an active participant in social sites to attract good social buzz. Social signals are very good for your search engine optimization efforts and they can give a boost to your SEO efforts.

Wish you good luck.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

No problem my friend. You are most welcome. As most of your site gets served through https, you need to have your http version of URLs re-directed to their https equivalents. I repeat, HTTP to HTTPS. Make sure that the re-direction gives an HTTP header status message 301 and not anything else. If you do so you do not loose any of your efforts put in to building links to the https version.

You can check the HTTP header status messages for your URLs by using any of the tools like the one found here: http://web-sniffer.net

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

Hi Sorina,

This is a common thing and it all depends on a site's crawlability (how easy is it to crawl for the bot) and crawl frequency for that site. Google would have picked up that post first on the bad site and then from the good site. However, just because one or two posts were picked up late does not mean that the good site is not crawler friendly. It also depends on how far the resource is from the root. Let us take an example:

A page on a good site: abc.com/folder1/folder2/folder3/page.html

Now a bad site copies that page: xyz.com/page.html

In this case, Google might first pickup the copied page from the bad site as it is just a click away from the root which is not the case with the good site where the page is nested deep inside multiple folders.

You can also give the way back machine (archive.org) a try to find which website published the post first. Sometimes this might work out pretty well. You can also try to look at the cache dates of the posts on both the sites in Google to get some info in this regard.

Hope those help. I wish you good luck.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.