We know for sure that domain names are very important for branding and business. But most of the people would expect http://www.example.com and http://example.com to be the same sites, right? But theoretically it’s not so. They are different even practically for some cases. But for most mere mortals like me, they will be same, and most people would want search engines to understand that. But some search engines consider them as two separate sites and as a result, the link juice, rank and crawling resources are split between them.

Here are my learnings so far from this -

1. Do use 301 permenent redirect as soon as possible on your site. The later you do it, the more traffic you lose.

Here is how you can do it on Apache or IIS.

What is 301 permenent redirection?

2. Get into a habit of typing your URL the same way every time on web.

3. Google handles them well, because it has a preference setting in the Google Webmasters Tool. Even not using redirection doesn’t seem to cause any issues.

4. Live/MSN is the worst in this case, and it has several problems even with 301 redirects. See here and here. For them, you should probably use hard-coded URL’s, i.e. you should point to www pages even from non-www site (or vice versa), so that the link juice is correctly flowing to only one site. In Zamanzar’s case, as of now, I find several pages from both the sites indexed separately (www and non-www).

5. Guruji.com also has problems in this regard, and seem to index both kinds of pages separately. Not sure how much traffic they generate any way.

6. Which one is better, www or non-www? Well, I would say the www version simply because of convention. Now, I myself haven’t followed this advice for this blog’s domain. Should do it now…

We all want Google crawler to crawl our site or blog more often, and update the changes that we make as soon as possible in its index…Here are some ways I found to make this happen.

1. Update content frequently
Now this is something you can’t do just for the sake of making Google visit you often, can you? But generally speaking, the sites or blogs that get updated more often would get visited by crawlers more often in the long run.

2. If you have a blog, ping Google automatically
There are several things you can do if you have a blog. Use feedburner, WordPress does the pinging work for you by default, so don’t need to worry a lot…If you have a site, you can always consider accompanying it with a blog, and create backlinks from the blog to new content.

3. Maintain the server in a highly available healthy state
Nothing surprising in this one of course…how can Google crawler index your pages if it finds a 404 error…the Google webmasters tool gives updates on errors encountered while crawling…so keep an eye on it. Googlebot is a busy man you know… …so if he is giving you 1 hour to talk what you can, you should try to fit in a large amount of content in that one hour…that is to say, your site should have a decent download speed.

4. Put backlinks to updated content on forums (like Yahoo! answers)
Actually, I am myself not sure how practical this will be…you can of course link to some important pages like this manually…but surely this is not a scalable approach.

5. Create a dynamically generated XML sitemap
This one is pretty crucial I believe. There are some sitemap generators in the market…but I don’t think they will be good enough to replace a well thought out script written by you, which understands your DB schema and page structure very well. The Sitemap protocol is followed by all the crawlers, so no need to worry separately for Yahoo! and Live :). Having a decent HTML sitemap would also help, though I am not so sure if it should link to all of your pages…may be just the most important 100 pages of your site. You can also consider making them hierarchical.

6. Make site pages available as RSS feeds and distribute them
Making your content available as RSS has a lot of benefits. Several tools that help optimizing blogs, like feedburner can be used for your site as well, if the content is available as RSS.

7. Use social bookmarking sites like Digg
Again, nothing extraordinary about this. This is a good old tactic that has worked very well for people, but again it’s more applicable to blogs than sites.

8. Pagerank and authority of the site
Now this is something you need to improve over a longer period of time…can’t happen in a day or two!

9. Create a decent internal linking structure
Important point to note while creating the internal linking structure is to promote important pages by linking to them from several pages of the site. For example, you could link to “featured products” on the home page, and have these links dynamic so that they change every week.

The Google webmasters tool has a crawl rate option, but that will be useful only when the “Faster” option is available to you, which would not happen unless yours is a high authority site.

If you know some more interesting tricks for this, please add them in comments…

When I read about this issue…my first reaction was “what nonsense!”. I mean why would my PR suffer when I am giving some contextual links to my visitors, to read some references?

I found very contradictory opinions on this. Here are my learnings.

1. If you are providing only links, but no useful content of your own, then regardless of PR leak, you will certainly have visitor leak. This makes a lot of sense. If you don’t have anything to offer other than links, why should visitors visit that page? But again, if you have classified links, with some comments about every reference you are citing, that might be very useful to a reader, and your page might be worth bookmarking for him! an may be Google considers bookmarking as a factor.

2. If your site, as a whole has no outbound links, then crawler can’t proceed to some other interesting place from your site. This is not so good! This is called link sink. Flowing water to good to drink…once it’s still…it becomes undrinkable.

3. It is true that a link “donates” pagerank, rather than just “voting”…but still you are better of by giving out at least a few links to good quality sites. Google penalizes the sites that hoard pagerank like this.

4. If you give out some links, you can get back some links. Now, this is a very general rule. As with a normal social interaction, it might not result into reprocation. For example, frankly, I haven’t received any backlinks to this blog so far from the links that I put in my previous posts. Now, here is a contradiction…if you give out a link to an “authority” site, it might be good for you, but it’s unlikely that they’ll reciprocate and donate PR to you. So may be an ideal strategy would be to donate links to an “upcoming” site, than an “authority” one, who is more likely to have the manners and time to return the favor. Isn’t this eerily similar to real world social interaction?

5. Linking out helps in establishing context. My friend Saptarshi performed an experiment in which he proves that outbound links help Google to put the page in SERP for that particular context.

6. There are a lot of (over 100?) ranking factors in the ranking algorithm. Even though outbound links do reduce PR, they might have positive effect in some other parameters.

7. There might be different rule based on class of the site. Directories have huge number of outbound links, many of them not reciprocal.

8. You can use nofollow links to prevent leakage of PageRank.

The golden rule is always, as they say, content is king! If you have great content, and a decent site strcture, you will not need to worry too much about technicalities of PR.

I’ll keep posting more information as I find it…

A little technical tip for people who use Symfony framework…

The <?php include_metas() ?> call in Symfony includes META tags…there is a tag <META name=”title” in it…which is not the real Title tag…

From SEO perspective, this META tag might be dangerous, and is certainly useless…Google might think of your site as it’s repeating keywords too much…though I am not sure about this…may be I’ll post an update on this based on my experience…

There is no straightforward way to remove it…but I found a great way with the help of some great hackers on Symfony google group…

Basically, you need to write a class overriding the default sfWebResponse class…and unset the META name=title tag in it…like this:

class myWebResponse extends sfWebResponse
{
public function getMetas()
{
$meta_tags = $this->getParameterHolder()->getAll(’helper/asset/auto/meta’);
//find mata title tag and if find then reset to blank.
if (array_key_exists(’title’, $meta_tags))
{
unset($meta_tags['title']);
}
return $meta_tags;
}
}?>

Now, you just need to modify your factories.yml file to use this class instead of default sfWebResponse class, and you are done!

I thought this problem would be faced by other people…so posted quickly…

A google query for custom t-shirts gives me some interesting new startups in this space. Let us try to review their SEO efforts.

Note that this the data below is very dynamic, and note that this post is written in July 2008. Also, the search ranking position in Google is dynamic and personal. So it varies a little for every search. I’ve used Google.co.in with “search only Indian sites” setting.

———————————————————————————-

1. DilseBol:

• Pages indexed on Google = 128 (That’s clearly too less guys!)
• Pages indexed on Yahoo = 241 (this doesn’t happen usually, Google is way faster in crawling!)
• Pagerank = 4
• Back-links given by Google = 10
• Back-links given by Yahoo! = 122
• Google Position for “buy custom t-shirts” = 1-2
• Google Position for “t-shirts online” = Not on first page
• Google Position for “custom tshirts” = Not on first page
• Alexa rank = 495,102

———————————————————————————-

2. Myntra:

• Pages indexed on Google = 44,600
• Pages indexed on Yahoo = 16,178
• Pagerank = 4
• Back-links given by Google = 27
• Back-links given by Yahoo! = 8,816
• Google Position for “buy custom t-shirts” = 3-4
• Google Position for “t-shirts online” = Not on first page
• Google Position for “custom tshirts” = 1-2
• Alexa rank = 29,709 (Wow! that’s really great!)

———————————————————————————-

3. Pringoo: They are a relatively new entrant, from my lovely home Pune…

• Pages indexed on Google = 14,400
• Pages indexed on Yahoo = 968
• Pagerank = 4
• Back-links given by Google = 20
• Back-links given by Yahoo! = 1179
• Google Position for “buy custom t-shirts” = 2-3
• Google Position for “t-shirts online” = Not on first page
• Google Position for “custom tshirts” = Not on first page
• Alexa rank = 142,758

———————————————————————————-

So with my very preliminary research, it looks like Myntra is leading, and Pringoo is fast catching up! Here is the Alexa comparison. Yeah, yeah, I know Alexa is not a great tool for Indian traffic… …but in this case, it should be a fair comparison as all these sites belong to India and target pretty much the same consumers.

Alexa comparison for online tshirts sites

I thought guys from Dilsebol need to do some catching up in terms of getting more pages indexed by search engines. This helps a lot in attracting long-tail traffic.

For example, search for Diwali t-shirt designs yields Myntra and Pringoo on first page, but not Dilsebol!

Here is a features based comparison review on desistartups blog (a little dated).

I looked at some of their inner pages…and dilsebol clearly has a long way to go in making the site use friendly in terms of navigation! The other two also can improve on their Title tags…(putting t-shirt category in the title might help significantly!) For example, the cricket t-shirts page on myntra, does not have the word cricket in the title tag at all! It is a generic title text…of course the amount of work these guys have done to create a community, create tie-ups and get more and more designs online, is tremendous!

I must have missed a few startups in the same space here…may be you can put some more stats in the comments…

Do you buy custom printed t-shirts online? which site you like the most? By the way, you can buy a tshirt of Puneri patya, from myntra… …a little shameless sales is not so bad!

Disclaimer: Business is lot more than how many pages are indexed on Google…so this comparison is not necessarily translating into proportionate profits! I am not associated with any of these companies, and am not getting any money for telling you one is better than others :). I did this out of sheer curiosity.

If a search engine did understand English completely, it would not need to run those complicated algorithms! But yes, especially with English, they do understand quite a lot about words and linguistics.

Does a search engine understand plurals?

I did a basic experiment. First I searched for “New Delhi Properties“.

Google SERP for "New Delhi Properties"

Now here, you can see that the word ‘Property’ is also given in bold by Google, so presumably taken as a keyword from the search term.

Nothing wrong, right?

But, the real surprise came afterwards, when I searched for “New Delhi Property“.

Google SERP for "New Delhi Property"

Here, as you can see, the word ‘Properties’ is not bold! So, a simplistic conclusion would be that Google converts plurals to singulars, but doesn’t convert singulars to plurals!

Is this true? Should we always use singular nouns on our sites and META tags because of this reason?

Actually, this is not that simple. People searching for ‘Property’ and ‘Properties’ would expect similar results, but people searching for apple and apples would probably mean different (apple as a company and apple as a fruit). Also, even if Google does not show ‘Properties’ highlighted in the second example, it might not necessarily mean that the keyword wasn’t given any importance…

I found various conflicting guidances in this regard

1. Try to use both forms on the page and tags, as it is natural, and people do use both forms to search.

2. If you need to choose, always choose plural form, as generally it contains the singular word with an ’s’ in the end. (But as we saw above, the example for word ‘property’ goes against this logic.)

One important aspect here is of course traffic conversion. If singular and plural forms of a word actually means something pretty different (apple and apples), you must use whatever is appropriate for you, so that you get right kind of visitors.

Honestly, I didn’t find any great article that proves anything conclusively on this. If you find one, please let me know.

My conclusion would be this -

1. Yes. Search engines certainly do understand that property and properties are different forms of a single word. So if your site is about ‘Property’, you will get hits for ‘Properties’.

2. But still, the exact match is better than inter-form match. So, if all other factors are exactly the same, a site about ‘Properties’ will get better ranking for keyword ‘Properties’ and vice versa.

So, normally speaking, a safe strategy would be to use both the forms, as you see ‘natural’ in English language, and hope that Google will understand more and more English with every passing day!

Links at have rel=nofollow attributes are a significant issue from search engines and SEO perspective. It is a mechanism to tell a crawler not to follow a link. In simple words, a link with nofollow has no “juice” from SEO perspective.

All external links on the Wikipedia are nofollow links. Blog comments are generally nofollow links. Yahoo answers links are nofollow links. A lot of the social bookmarking sites use nofollow. (Here are some that don’t).

Of course, a lot of people don’t like nofollow. To quote this article, Nofollow tag is like “reaching to shake someone’s hand, but stopping to put on a pair of latex gloves.” His argument is that No-follow is a poor search engine’s solution to conceal its own failure to rank websites appropriately. Well, that’s somewhat true! For example, some blog comments that actually add good value to the content do deserve some link juice…but they are not getting due credit because of some spammers. There is definitely a backlash going on against this. For example, this WordPress plugin allows you to add a nofollow attribute to all the links going to sites like wikipedia, which use nofollow attribute themselves. Some people say that this anti-nofollow campaign is all bull shit and nofollow is fair enough! In the end, it’s a fact we need to accept that putting comments on blogs and linking back would not be so useful nowadays as it was once.

But interesting part is that a lot of people say that search engines do follow these links! It’s just that they don’t give them as much importance, which actually makes a lot of sense. This post shows that the target page is certainly spidered, but might not count it as a vote. Also, there are a few differences among search engines on this.

Nofollow links can surely be used to optimize internal link structure though. If a few links on your sites are getting repeated (say in the footer) and they are not so important, you can use nofollow to reduce their overall weight in the site. A typical example would be the “Disclaimer”, or the “Jobs” links in the footer. Also the links that create some javascript popup DIV’s, or open a feedback popup would be good candidates to use nofollow, so that Google doesn’t show weird errors in your webmasters account.

One more aspect of the nofollow link is that it saves your “PR juice” (I really like the analogy of link-condom :P) from leaking out. But again, whether “normal” links leak pagerank is a topic of debate and discussion.

They should…shouldn’t they? If a site has a high CTR (Click Through Rate) and a high traffic in general (possibly tracked through Google Toolbar), it’s reasonable to assume that they’ll have quality content. Google has all the insights it needs about the sites that use google analytics for analyzing their traffic.

Apparently, not a lot of information is available about this. It is being discussed by SEO experts, but it is still seen as a future trend, currently in experimentation phase.

Of course, the problem with this approach might be that it can be pretty difficult to compare user experience and user intent with just parameters like CTR and avg. time on page.

The normalization needed for a fair comparison is extremely difficult…if you use a very catchy title and description…(Think “Top 10 ways to write a-b-c-d!”), you’ll surely get more traffic…but what if a user gets frustrated after looking at the page? Even for time-on-site (to be tracked through Google toolbar), normalization is very difficult…if your site is very easy to use, you’ll quickly find something and exit…so, higher time on page might not always be sign of a better site!

As Bradley says here, what we can do any way, is create interesting titles and descriptions, with a balance between keywords and making them unique. Easier said than done of course!

Here is a podcast that discusses the same issue. May be Google might do something like a Digg button on organic search results to leverage power of community more than they currently do. That might be a better measure than just a CTR. Of course, there would be spam in this too…this feature is currently in experimental stage…what do you think about it? Digg, Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon and other social bookmarking sites have created a whole new genre of finding interesting stuff on internet. One thing is certain…if Google does implement this feature full fledged, that will be a whole new segment in the SEO world!

They say wine tastes best when it’s old…

Even Google thinks so!

Why should it matter? If I think I just started afresh and I am god damn better than the old hacks using the same boring methods for 10 years, why shouldn’t Google rank me higher…sadly, Google doesn’t care about the beauty of your website…it is as blind as justice!

Statistically, a site that is up and running for a lot of time, would be better than an average newbie…

There are several related factors here -

1. Domain Registration Period - If you are serious about your business, you will register the domain for 5 years…and not let-us-try-out-for-an-year…
2. Domain Age - Google puts new websites in a sandbox (This is not stated officially by Google…but this is true about a lot of things ), so older domains might be better if you want to ramp up traffic quickly. Of course, buying second hand domains would not be as cheap.
3. Website Age - What’s the difference? The website is defined by it’s content. A lot of domains are parked by the likes of GoDaddy…that is not really content, and Google clearly figures that out (I have NEVER seen a parked page appear on Google’s first SERP. It only happens on spelling mistakes).

Now…the most important question is, How important is it? And honestly, I don’t know exact answer…

Logically, it should be important only if the domain has lived some good active life so far… …If you are getting a second hand domain, that has been barred by Google a couple of times for Black Hat techniques…why risk with it? Why not start with a clean slate? If you can build quality backlinks in 3 months flat using your great industry contacts, you don’t need borrowed goodwill!

Honestly, I am no SEO expert. But certainly getting interested in the field…

So, I’ll try to find out whatever questions I face as I learn more and more about SEO while working on SEO of my real estate startup, and post them.

So, one of the first question on anyone’s mind, who is contemplating an internet venture, is the domain name. He wants it to be unique…but he would also want people to find it out easily…and if people are to find it out easily, Google needs to be able to find it easily.

Does Google give a lot of importance to Domain name having keywords? Apparently, YES!

As an example, let us search for Gurgaon Properties on Google Do you see? gurgaonproperties.net, gurgaon-properties.com, gurgaonproperties.org, hotpropertiesgurgaon.com…

Have you seen any of these sites? Do you think they contain more property listings, or more traffic, or more backlinks than say 99acres, or even Zamanzar? God damn No! …The secret must be the domain name.
..

Another point…as you know backlink’s anchor text is very important for a search engine…that makes the context lot clearer for it…so obviously, having keywords in your domain name will make sure that most of your backlinks also have that keyword!

Now what is the flip side? IMHO -

1. The sites would not be ranked so high for other keywords…Let us search Real Estate in Gurgaon on Google. This search doesn’t include any of the above domains on first page. Now even a dumbo would know that these 2 terms are very similar, and someone looking for properties in Gurgaon wouldn’t really mind to look at Real Estate in Gurgaon…but sadly, search engines are not so intelligent yet…they still heavily believe in keyword matching, than overall semantics.

So the point is, domain name can win a battle…but not war !

2. It looks cheap. “MagicBricks” or “99acres” sound like a brand. The names have uniqueness. They have relevance to the vertical they operate in. For a consumer, it is a lot easier to remember these names and come back…Would you buy your laptop on dell.com or ebay.com, or from some unknown brand with a domain of cheap laptops?

Brand Matters More. Period.