SEO Tutorial

Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination. Whether deployed across many domains or established within one domain, doorway pages tend to frustrate users. Therefore, Google frowns on practices that are designed to manipulate search engines and deceive users by directing them to sites other than the one they selected, and that provide content solely for the benefit of search engines. Google may take action on doorway sites and other sites making use of these deceptive practices, including removing these sites from Google’s index. Some examples of doorways include: Having multiple domain names targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page Templated pages made solely for affiliate linking Multiple pages on your site with similar content designed to ran...

Recently I came across a client who had <meta name=”robots” content=”NOYDIR” /> and <meta name=”robots” content=”NOODP” /> tags in their meta data and I feel there is need to go in depth on the purpose of these two tags and how they can affect SEO.   A while back we wrote on this topic when the new canonical tag came out. But it’s been a few months and I feel it’s important to highlight the two tags individually. Let’s talk about NOODP first. According to Matt Cutts blog, in some cases, if someone types in a keyword into the search, Google may use descriptions from the open directory project as the page title and meta description for you organic listing.  The NOODP tag allows you to essentially opt out of the open directory project title and description override.  Just in case you weren’t aware, the open directory project is DMOZ.  Matt mentions that it may take 3 to 4 days for your NOODP meta tag to update after your page was re-craw...

Canonicalization Many sites make the same HTML content or files available via different URLs. Say you have a clothing site and one of your top items is a green dress. The product page for the dress may be accessible through several different URLs, especially if you use session IDs or other parameters: http://www.example.com/products/women/dresses http://www.example.com/products?category=dresses&color=green&cruel=no http://example.com/shop/index.php?product_id=32&highlight=green+dress&cat_id=1&sessionid=123&affid=431 http://example.com/dresses/cocktail?gclid=ABCD http://www.example.com/dresses/greendress.html To gain more control over how your URLs appear in search results, and to consolidate properties, such as link popularity, we recommend that you pick a canonical (preferred) URL as the preferred version of the page. You can indicate your preference to Google in a number of ways. We recommend them all, though none of them is required (if you d...

"Nofollow" provides a way for webmasters to tell search engines "Don't follow links on this page" or "Don't follow this specific link." Originally, the nofollow attribute appeared in the page-level meta tag, and instructed search engines not to follow (i.e., crawl) any outgoing links on the page. For example: <meta name="robots" content="nofollow" /> Before nofollow was used on individual links, preventing robots from following individual links on a page required a great deal of effort (for example, redirecting the link to a URL blocked in robots.txt). That's why the nofollow attribute value of the rel attribute was created. This gives webmasters more granular control: instead of telling search engines and bots not to follow any links on the page, it lets you easily instruct robots not to crawl a specific link. For example: <a href="signin.php" rel="nofollow">sign in</a...

Tell me something about Google. Ans: Google is the world’s largest and renowned search engine incorporating about 66.8% of market share. It was introduced in 1998 by students of Stanford University students Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The unique algorithmic ranking system is considered as its key of success. Apart of Google Mail services there are various worthy and useful tools are being offered absolutely free which include Blogger, Feedburner, YouTube, Google Plus, Adsense, Webmaster Tools, Adword, Analytics and many more. What is SEO? SEO is search engine optimization or optimizer is a collection of techniques applied to optimize our site so that it ranks well in SERPs (Search engine result pages) like Google, yahoo, bing and another major search engines. What is the difference between on page seo and off page seo? On page seo means optimizing your website and making changes on title, meta tags, site structure, site content, solving canonicalization problem, man...

What is 301 redirect? A 301 redirect tells search engine spiders that a page of content has permanently been moved to another location. This ensures that there are no ‘dead’ or non-working, active links on a page within your site. What is 302 redirect?  – It is a temporary redirect. Read more here http://www.internetofficer.com/seo/302-redirect/ What are 404? – It is a server error code which is returned by the server what a particular webpage or the file is missing from the webhost server. What are the criteria for removing a webpage from Google search index?  – It should return a 404 not found error or it should be 301 permanently redirected.  I want to change the domain name of well ranked website in SERP. Is it possible to retain the same keyword positions? Yes, definitely we can. Just 301 redirecting the corresponding old URLs to the new URLs. In initial after we did this, we may experience a drop in rankings. Once our new URLs got indexed, we can e...

        Google has a new search algorithm, the system it uses to sort through all the information it has when you search and come back with answers. It’s called “Hummingbird” and below, what we know about it so far. What’s a “Google search algorithm?” That is a technical term for what you can think of as a recipe that Google uses to sort through the more than of web pages and other information it has, in order to return what it believes are the best answers. What’s “Hummingbird Algorithm?” It’s the name of the Google search algorithm, one that Google says should return better search results. So that “Page Rank” algorithm is dead? No. Page Rank is one of over 200 major “ingredients” that go into the Hummingbird Algorithm recipe. Hummingbird looks at Page Rank — how important links to a page are deemed to be — along with other factors like whether Google believes a page is of good quality, the words used on it and many ot...