Google Question to the Gurus of SEO

[Loren]

Q1)I m puzzled...i added my url to google, like i always have done with new websites. But for some reason, instead of www.spiritmindbody.co.uk it comes up spiritmindbody.co.uk. I would like to change that but to the proper url as it looks like its a sub domain, and although technically it is on shared hosting space it's not a sub domain. Would i have to remove it and resubmitt risking the chance it will take months again to get on?

Q2)Another thing i noticed, i manage one site, which with in a few months got to a pagerank3, my own site i have had for 6 years, is only a 3 was 4 until i messed up by changing the index page :fool: and have 3 other websites apart from these, 2 with no pagerank been up also for years, and 1 with 3 pagerank and also only up for a few months. Now i do have links to linking to my other sites and the one i manage? Does this constitute as a link? Because they do not show in Google. They were listed for my own site but they seem to have disappeared now, when you do link:www.mysite.com in the search. I am perplexed what do you have to do to get your links to others registered?

Yahoo and MSN have no problems, i think they have everypage cached, and quite a few links logged to other sites including a few dodgy ones which i rather not be linked too, and have no idea how they came about.

I can't get my new directory site in DMOZ either which i find is bizarre, and worrying coz if i can't get it up on Google i will not be seen. Is there something i am unaware of? Are google ignoring my sites for some reason? Anyway of telling? Would love some advice (in plain english please, me thicky) would be nice...:good:

[Greg]

Hi Loren :)

See if this FAQ over at SitePoint might answer a few of your questions.
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=356031

[Loren]

Thanks Petal, although its went over the head a wee bit with a wooshing sound!:ooi:

and i still don't understand why my site in Google has been registered as "spiritmindbody.co.uk" when it's actually "www.spiritmindbody.co.uk" and that is how i submitted it manually.

During this article i was concerned by a reference about these differences and how it can hurt your page ranking and rewrite_mods being fiddled with, and did it apply to me? I will be honest i dont understand what it all means...oh heck..anybody able to give an idiots version i would appreciate it immensly! :)

[subseo]

Hi Laura, I don't have time to read the sitepoint article, so just my own opinions here (and I'm by no means a seo guru).

Q1] If i got it right, you would like to be listed with url having the www prefix?

Absolutely don't care about Google submit. IMHO it's there just by popular demand, so that old school webmasters are happy they have a place to submit.

Don't try to remove. Unlike the submission, it actually works and is there for a reason, but for a completely different reason(s) than you have. It would do no good, you would only waste weeks or months.

If you would get all incoming links to point to www version, it would be fixed in Google soon.

If you want to be 100% sure, there is a code to add to .htaccess file to take care of that. Something like this:


RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*$ http://www.example.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]


Q2] Link search in google doesn't work, probably for a reason (so that webmasters are not supported in their artificial linking efforts, etc.). I usually use a combination of msn and yahoo.
In other words, that google doesn't show a backlink, doesn't mean that it is not counted as backlink.

Your sites will get the higher pagerank, the higher pagerank has the page pointing to them. If you published here the ulr's of the pages, we might get more clue.

DMOZ is hard to get in. Depends on the category, on site quality, sometimes on having the right friend.

As for Google ignoring your sites - get links. Preferably quality links, from good websites in your niche. That's all. No links = no google.

I noticed one bad thing, and that's that the content of your sites is duplicated in subfolders on the bandschool site. Duplicate content is NO NO. Especially for Google. I advise you to get rid of it as soon as possible, either delete, or prevent the search engine bots from spidering it via meta tags or robots.txt.

[Loren]

Thank You Tom for your opinion, it was i must say a little bit more helpful... two things, the no links to a site is not always true. One of my sites, which is www.healinglostsouls.com, has been up since late last year, no links to or out and a pagerank of 3, prior to today whereby i put my spiritmindbody.co.uk button link to increase my chances of getting a rank. (vain hope)

Secondly, i know what you mean by the bandschool issue..pain in the bottom that is. Basically, i have 5 soon to be 8 domains on the one web space, and they all will fall under bandschool which was the one i signed up with. I don't know how to stop the duplication other than have separate hosting spaces for each domain..highly unlikely.

As for my sites here they are:

Bandschool.co.uk ~ one page site not being used. No rank (in 6 years)
Ipyramidia.com ~My main web designing site (Pagerank 3 was 4 until changed index)
Ipyramidia.net ~My Reiki Site (3 or more years no pagerank)
Ipyramidia.co.uk ~ My photography Site (3 or more years no pagerank)
Healinglostsouls.com ~ My Past Life Regression Site (one page site 8 months at the most pagerank 3)
Spiritmindbody.co.uk ~ My directory Site (beginning of year no pagerank)

Now the ones with no page rank bar the spiritmind body one, i haven't bothered to update metatags keywords etc, if at all but they are on google and that is enough for the moment.

The business ones i have spent sometime and effort to try and raise them, my ipyamidia.com was on page 1, 5 down, a few months ago, when you typed in holistic Web Designer, then i blew that one by changing the page! Now i am on page 5 <_<

The last one which i designed and still manage is www.academy-transtherapy.co.uk and this one has a pagerank of 3 and 4 on one of the newest pages :confused:. That's great but i put this wonderful pagerank down to paying for google adsense.

This maybe the way i have to go to get my directory site higher, and if you say that in a few months Google will make the transition to www. then i shall not bother implimenting the rewrite stuff.

Alas the duplication thing is another matter...

[subseo]

One of my sites, which is www.healinglostsouls.com, has been up since late last year, no links to or out and a pagerank of 3

It is linked from GHR, PR3. I would think it's too little to get PR3, but it isn't improbable.


Secondly, i know what you mean by the bandschool issue..pain in the bottom that is. Basically, i have 5 soon to be 8 domains on the one web space, and they all will fall under bandschool which was the one i signed up with. I don't know how to stop the duplication other than have separate hosting spaces for each domain..highly unlikely.

I'm not an expert, but I use one webhost and have plenty of sites on it, as addon domains. I don't know why subfolders of bandschool were indexed ( in MSN I think). Must have been some forgotten link???


The last one which i designed and still manage is www.academy-transtherapy.co.uk and this one has a pagerank of 3 and 4 on one of the newest pages :confused:. That's great but i put this wonderful pagerank down to paying for google adsense.

Connection with Adsense is highly improbable. BUt who knows. Years back I had Adwords paid for some site, and by some set of coincidences, the ads were counted as backlinks in Google. I still don't believe it but it happened. The site got PR4 and links from Amazon (Adwords displaying on Amazon) were the only pointers to the site. Though I still think it is improbable nowadays.

AS for the PR4 on inner page.... well Google toolbar PR is no hi-tech precision stuff. I have seen some strange things. Recently one site with hundreds of thousands of links, dropped from PR6 or PR7, down to PR4, though all the backlinks are still there.

Anyway.... I suggest forget about PR. IT's secondary. It's only good for webmasters who do link exchanges and think that not accepting anything less than PR3 or PR4, will do them any good. Primary is to get backlinks from good websites in the same field as your is, with the anchor text containing the keywords for which you would like to rank on search engines.

[OWG]

Although a little late to the show, I will chip in.

Firstly the modrewrite 301 you need to put in place is


Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^spiritmindbody\.co.uk
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.spiritmindbody.co.uk/$1 [R=permanent,L]

This will send any request for the nonwww. domain to the www.version. One of the problems with some scripts is that they link internally to the nonwww.version (this being the correct version although everyone uses the other). This problem is called canocalisation and google are trying to fix it, but it is proving a tough nut for them to crack as they rely so heavily on links power, and rewriting links use MASSES of prosessing power. So check your links, because if ANYONE links to you using the nonwww. version, it will affect you.

As an aside, you mention that you damaged your rankings because you ;changed your index page' did you mean content or extention (as in html to php). if the latter then you can 301 that as well.

Google does NOT spider its own code although it DOES spider others. As Google have brought in age of links value to its algo, many adverts will be wasted anyhow. They have as stated, broken the link:domain tool, and recently done the same to the site:domain command as well.

Internal links count just the same as external links and pagerank flows more frely within a domain. It is common to see internal site pages have a higher Pr, this can be as a result of the linking structure, and/or external links pointing to internal pages.

[Loren]

Thank you Guys for making it clearer!

Tom yes you are quite right,:ooi: i do link from the healinglostsouls one to GHR...totally forgot about that, tell you i don't know where my head is these days...Guess that would help my ranking quite considerably ^_^ and i think you are right i shouldn't worry about it, but i do because i want to get on the first page eventually and beat my competitors :) until then i just want to be found! Which at the moment is not been easy.

Regarding the rewrite coding thank you both, and OWG thanks hun for putting the code already for me to place..now i might try this...just to see what happens, as regards to anyone else using the non"www" no that is not possible, i don't use it and if i have given it out, it's been full"www" it blasted Google who has it as non"www" :confused:

As for the index change and ranking lowered...i changed the about page to the index page that is all. I had a flash intro which was on my index page, and it irritated me waiting for it, and was so excited with the 4 pagerank...so what i did was just rename my about.html to index.html page and obviously all the relevant pages to accomodate it...thats when it went down to a 3. No change from php to html both html pages.

One last thing...do i put this rewrite_mod in the root or the sub?

[OWG]

It needs to go in your main htaccess file (make sure you add it not replace it, as it looks like you are using mod rewrite already for the urls) Place it in all the htaccess folders on your domain. I would recommend everyone use this as a matter of course as it automatically prevents the wrog domain being spidered.

One other thing to not is how you link back to your site. As mad as this may seem it is fact. The search engines see the following pages as all being different

domain.com/
www.domain.com/
domain.com/index.htm
www.domain.com/index.htm

Now on its own you might be thinking 'so what', but here is the thing to note depending on how you link back, each of those pages might be given a different page rank. PR is not important in itself, but Matt Cutts (A senior Google Engineer) has stated on his blog that PR is one of the main drivers for spidering. no pr, no spider.

So when you link back to your home page ALWAYS link to www.domain.com/ (add the foreward slash, it is best protocol) of course if you use the nonwww then stick with that. if you link to www.domain.com/index.htm then you are splitting your page rank but MORE IMPORTANT, you are diluting your backlink benefit including all that nice anchor text. If some of your links go to www.domain.com/ and some go to www.domain.com/index.htm then you need to 301 one to the other to get the maximum link benefit.

[Simon Gooffin]

here are my 2 cents. I completely agree with OWG about URLs. I have had an example of the situation when exactly similar pages had different pageranks.
So one of the ways is to use one URL to the page in all the links. For say if you link to esyndicat home page - you should have the same URL in all the links http://www.esyndicat.com/ for example. Do not use index.php or index.html. Or if you use them then you should not link back to esyndicat.com/ only.
Besides I would advise to add a rule to redirect all your pages to www.mydo... instead of mydo... only. Here is the rule I use for esyndicat.com:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^esyndicat.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.esyndicat.com/$1 [R=301,L]

So even a visitor use esyndicat.com he/she will be redirected to www.esyndicat.com

P.S. Sorry I did not read all the posts. Now I see OWG has already published similar solution. Anyhow now you know it's useful at least ;)

[Stephen Young]

Just a heads up... if you have registered on google sitemaps and still have the www/non-www issue then there is an option to tell google what one you want to give it a nudge :dance2:

They should have paid attention to the htaccess but google can be a pain at times.

[neominds]

Why dont you use google sitemaps: www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ there is an option to choose your preferred domain. This means you can choose between yourdomain.com or www.yourdomain.com. Google will show in the search results than that preferred domain with or without www, depending on what you choose...


Richard

[otk567]

There is a tool available to change that data for you on http://www.google.com/webmasters

Andy.