Here are some excerpts from a thread at the Webmaster World:

“When the general webmaster/SEO community started to learn about 301 redirects, some went quite wild, throwing 301s around like confetti - and then getting smacked down hard. It was like a new toy on the market and it became “all the rage.”

The potential for 301 abuse is well beyond that offered by link manipulation - and so Google really gives 301 redirects a trust check-up. I’m sure that this is one of the reasons that changing to a new domain can be so difficult.

The webmaster knows when they are placing a 301 (or a chain of redirects) only because of trying to manipulate rankings - and when they are using it in an informative, intended fashion. Too much 301 action, especially placing them and then switching them around, or chaining them in with other kinds of redirection, can definitely cast a pall over a domain… or a network of domains.

Maybe some of these historical 301 penalties are part of those old penalties that are now being forgiven - I can’t say for sure. But I can say that the 301 redirect is a kind of power tool and it should be used only as the instruction manual intends - essentially, pointing to a new location for previously published material.

And given that “cool urls don’t change” I personally recommend limiting use of the 301 redirects. There are times it is exactly the right tool, but many times its use has become very casual and abusive.”

“Penalties for significant 301 abuse across several domains can be quite severe, including long-time or even “permanent” loss of trust. I’m talking a burnt domains, as in done, kaput, with no recourse.

An honest slip-up or technical confusion that accidentally fits a spammer footprint can be remedied, eventually, through a clean-up and re-inclusion request.”

“Interesting, i hadn’t realised the impact of the redirects insofar as penalties were concerned until the recent comments. I should have been attentive to it, because we saw sites behaving differently in various circumstances.

e.g.

Site A [ under penalty filter ] is redirected to Site B . Site B goes into a penalty situation. Non trust appears to have been transferred.

Site C [ trusted ] redirects to a new domain ranking inside 4 weeks. Trust transferred.

Site A [ under penalty filter ] redirects to new site E. Site E goes into sandbox for 1 year. Non trust transferrd to new domain.

Site D has had frequent redirects applied to it , say every 9-12 months. The site has never come out of a penalty filter situation since 2005.

…also some comments with regards to redirects , 404’s and potential problems over [url=http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3694988.htm] here[/url].Is it better to apply 404’s to old pages and create new ones on other domains when redirects have already been applied?”

“I can’t speak to that situation from any direct experience, but I’d say in a long standing penalty transfer situation it would be good to break the connections to the previous domain. However, since 301s were already in place - it’s still a crapshoot how Google would respond. It would be a sign of good faith, I’d say, to abandon attempts to hold on to any link juice the previous domain tried to transfer and let the new domain stand on its own.”

“Google is well aware of various types of abuse, and has slapped several well known people for such abuse in recent months.

I’m not mentioning those tricks here, except for the one that Matt Cutts blogged about. That was all to do with buying a domain name and existng site, and then redirecting it to another site, purely to try to enhance the PageRank of the site being redirected to.”

“This is interesting…you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. I have been recently trying to rememdy duplicate title/descriptions reported in WMT by blocking some of the urls in robot.txt. I won’t go into the technicalities but the crux of the issue is that my dynamic site produces two sets of urls pointing to the same page when people hop over to the online store. I figured the actual store’s url was more important so I nixed the dupe urls that seemed to serve no purpose.

Apparently those ‘transitional urls’ were worth something as blocking them has led to a fairly steep drop in traffic. Now I have had to go back and pull the blocked urls from robots.txt. The only other way to remedy this that I can see is to use a 301 redirect on all the store urls (oy vey!)…the first set of urls will never be removed though, they will stay in place. Is internal redirecting like that that risky?”

“Even when you’re passing the query string, it should only be a single redirect in Apache. I’m not sure how IIS/ISAPI_Rewrite handles these cases, but I don’t believe it’s very different.

As for the larger issue, I wonder if there’s a certain footprint that Google is looking for when applying these penalties. E.g. are they intentionally including/excluding sites from this penalty that are doing things like linkbaiting to a microsite, and 301ing that site to their main site after a certain point in time? Is there a certain number of 301ed domains (or certain aggregate PageRank) that you need to hit before you get penalized? Are they still penalizing you if the content on the old domain/URL is the same as the content on the new domain/URL?

The mass 301 is a legitimate (if buggy) tool when trying to consolidate old, poorly architected sites (yes, some single sites do have multiple domains for no good reason at all) into a modern CMS. This kind of penalty, while I see what they’re trying to prevent, really makes one pause before putting effort into major development projects that have the potential to really help users and search engines alike.”

“In the last 12 months, I’ve moved a block of content to a new domain from a long-established domain on at least two occasions. In each case, the content was transferred mostly intact, with some wording changes within the pages. Both of the new domains were newly registered. In both cases, the new site started ranking well (but not quite as well as the old site) for the same terms. In both cases, these rankings declined somewhat in the ensuing weeks. In one case, though, they stabilized, while in the other case the new site really fell from view.

While there wasn’t anything dicey about either site, I assume some non-obvious differences in the two situations caused the domain that tanked to look a bit more doubtful to Google than the other one. I don’t think any penalty was involved, but rather whatever credibility/link power might have been transferred to the new domain with the 301s wasn’t enough to overcome the lack of aging, lack of indendent links, etc.“

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Steps on How to Create a Great Title Tag:

Enrich your Title Tag with Keywords and Brands:

A search engine crawler is always on the lookout for keywords. Words or phrases that are unique and that also stand out in a title, giving the description of the product, service or the purpose & theme of your webpage. The crawler then identifies whether the text of the title is important enough to be returned as search result for a user’s query. Hence, it is imperative that you add keywords and important key-phrases to your page titles, so as to make them more attractive to the search engine crawlers. This in turn will ensure higher rankings with quicker and more frequent displays of your webpage. However, one very important point to remember is that, you should not go overboard and stuff your entire title with keywords. Another crucial point to remember is that, you should keep the character strength of your title at or below 65 characters. A maximum of three keywords is more than satisfactory and enough for the crawlers to index and publish your website in the search results at respectable positions.

Place the Keywords at the start of the Title:

While you might have understood the importance of keywords in your title, but what you also need to remember is that you should always try to place your keywords at the beginning of the title. This allows the search crawlers to identify the keyword almost as soon as they begin crawling your page.

Example:

ABCD Auto parts (Company name) —————-> MPFI systems (keyword)

In the above mentioned scenario, ABCD Auto Parts is the company name and MPFI Systems is the keyword. Now, while writing a title, this is what the arrangement should look like.

MPFI systems (keyword) —————–> ABCD Auto parts (Company name).

As far as a crawler is concerned, the second arrangement is considered to be the most optimal for search engines as the keyword appears at the start of the title. Also, it would be a good move on your part, if you add the name of your website or the company name at the end of the title, thus feeding the crawler with all the relevant information it needs to index your website.

Unique Title Tags are the Way to Go:

Every website on the web has been designed for the sole purpose of attracting visitors. Whether it is a commercially oriented website such as Ebay or a non-profit informative site such as Wikipedia, the goal remains the same, to attract and bring in as much traffic as possible. As far as site visitors or ‘users’ are concerned, unique and innovative titles are descriptive in nature and make navigation of your page easier for the user as well. It also helps the crawlers to display your pages more frequently and prominently, as they know what they have to serve as search results for the user queries.

Create Suitable ‘Dividers’:

While writing a title tag, it would be a great idea, if you use spaces, dashes (-) or bars (|), that would help you in creating distance between the keyword and the company name. This would further enable you to rank your page for both the keywords.

Keyword should Occur in the Title as well as the Content:

The H1 tag is the headline of your web page. Therefore, you should use the same keywords in your headline that you used in the title tag. You should also spread the keywords optimally throughout your webpage, so that the search engine crawlers can understand the theme of your site and rank it accordingly.

Irregularities that should be Avoided while Creating a Title Tag:

1. You should never leave the title tag of your web page empty. Doing so is the shortest way for your web page to be completely ignored by a search engine crawler.
2. Often while creating title tags with web page editing applications, some ‘default text’ is left behind and many Webmasters tend to ignore it. This is a strict no-no and you need to double check for such default text for your title tags.
3. One thing you need to remember is that, search engine crawlers not only read the title tag, but they also compare the title tag with the rest of the content on the page to help establish relevancy. Hence, you should always avoid using irrelevant text in a title tag, so as to avoid being ranked low in the SERPs (search engine result pages).
4. As I mentioned before, you should not repeat or create your title entirely out of keywords, as almost all search engine these days, consider such a practice as an act of spamming. Well, we all know how the search engines feel about spammers.  They hate them!

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There are some very effective ways of transforming the usual ‘good content’ into ‘targeted content’. Informative tables and lists comprise two great content tools that propels this transformation.
Having said that information lists and tables are great content tools, it is very necessary to ensure that these tables and lists are developed with information that is valuable and easily accessible by web users. Why is key-word rich, targeted, informative, relevant and user-friendly content so vital in determining the success of your website in terms of search engines indexing them appropriately and generating desired visitor traffic? The following will tell you why.

• Well-written and informative content will naturally attract search engine crawlers and visitors alike to your website.
• Targeted content gives your website a winning edge simply because it will allow you to specifically reach out to your targeted audience in the market.
• There is a better chance of user-friendly content being search engine friendly too, as keyword rich content will attract both users and search engine spiders.

As has been already mentioned earlier, incorporating information lists and tables within the content enhances its relevance and ‘crawlability’ even more. The advantages of incorporating the same are:

• Tables and lists that are constructed in a user-friendly format and are perforated with optimized keywords, valuable information are very popular sources among users and search engine spiders.
• These additional sources provide relevant information about the products, services or ideas offered by your company / online business / industry. These tables are enriched with industry relevant keywords and key phrases, which makes your website even more search engine friendly.
• These tables and list include industry-specific scoop that is being hunted by industry users. Once they come across your website and find all the valuable information they need presented in the form of systematized tables and lists, they will keep coming back again. Thus, you will automatically generate and preserve visitor traffic.
• Ensure that these tables, lists, etc. are updated with the most recent information regularly.

One of the golden keys to online success is by persistently developing targeted content by feeding it with the kind of tables, lists and other such informative features that will make your website one of the most visited one in your industry. If you ensure that the content on your website incorporates all the above-mentioned features, there is no escaping success.

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Inclusion of sitemaps has always been mandatory for professional web designers and more so because they not only guide human visitors but also search engine crawlers to the relevant places on your website. The format of the sitemaps, however, are different in both cases. The standard html format can be used while formulating a sitemap for human web users. Although a more specialized XML format must be incorporated while building sitemaps for the search engines.

The Importance of Sitemaps
The importance of incorporating sitemaps within a website can never be overestimated. The following illustrates this assertion.

• Sitemaps play a pivotal role, not only in terms of improving site visibility and navigation, but, also immediately inform search engines about recent changes on the website. Consequently, the reformed pages are indexed faster than usual.
• A sitemap reduces the need to depend upon external links to direct search engines towards the website. Also, in case an internal link is accidentally broken, the sitemap can be of immense help in reaching linkless pages.
• The importance of incorporating a sitemap is even more when the website is in its infancy. A sitemap plays an instrumental role in categorizing the content of a website.

Constructing and Handing over the Sitemap

A simple and systematic procedure for generating, uploading and submitting a sitemap to the search engines has been devised in order to avoid any pitfalls and ensure that your website benefits optimally from this endeavor. Read along to know how.

• There are two ways of downloading a sitemap - downloading and installing a sitemap generator, or, utilizing an online sitemap generating tool. The first option is technically more challenging, but, having said so, it also ensures a better grip over the outcome. Using the Google sitemap generator could be a great option.
• The second method of downloading a sitemap is comparatively simpler. There is a host of free online tools to help you execute this task. These tools include, links to online generators, downloadable sitemap generators, content-management systems, etc., making your job as easy as it could get.

Once the sitemap has been created, the next step is naturally to upload the website and make the same known to the search engines in order for it to be crawled upon and indexed accordingly. User-submitted sitemaps are SEO tools that hold immense meaning and relevance and, thus cannot be ignored. To say that sitemaps will soon become the regulatory way to submit a website to search engines is definitely not too far-fetched a claim.

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However, not every sale that you make is completed online. Such as, in the case of electronic goods. If a consumer wishes to buy a television set, then he might visit your website, browse through your catalog and even leave his contact details with you. But, only in rare circumstances, would a visitor every purchase a product online, without thoroughly inspecting it and laying all his doubts at rest. Hence, a lot many conversions these days are accomplished offline, i.e either through telephone conversations or when a consumer visits your store or showroom. This makes it extremely hard to maintain a record of online as well offline sales.

Hence, I would like to take this opportunity to suggest some critical steps that would help you in establishing or at least in estimating your offline conversions. But, there is a degree of difference in the setup costs of these steps. So, it is entirely up to you to choose, as to what methods suit your campaigns and your budget at the same time.

Maintain Balance between Online & Offline Campaigns:

One of the most effective way of estimating your offline conversion rate is to follow the classic On/Off strategy. This is what you do. If your are running an online paid campaign, for instance in Google AdWords, all you need to do is to turn off the online campaign for about one to four weeks. This should give you all the time required to evaluate and collect all the necessary information to estimate the offline conversion figures by contemplating both phone leads and visits to your store or showrooms. The best possible factor involved in the offline conversions that you receive is your paid online campaign.

Display Unique Phone Numbers in Your Website:

Instead of providing your regular contact numbers, to get a fair idea of your offline conversions, you should acquire and put unique telephone numbers that a visitor can use to contact you. These numbers should only be displayed on your website and nowhere else. Thus, whenever a potential lead gives you a call on that specific number, you’ll instantly know that the person has visited your website, thereby adding to your offline conversion rate.

Understand How Visitors Located you Online:

While handling incoming calls, it would be a great idea, if you can dig out as to how the caller found you on the Internet. In a subtle manner, try to find out whether you were referred to him, whether he found you by fluke or did he particularly search for you. This could provide you with a fair estimate about the visitors that have contacted you offline, after going through your website.

Categorize & Tag Customers:

This process is primarily used by websites that have a dedicated or frequent buyer programs. In this process, you assign unique IDs to your customers, so they can be identified individually and uniquely when they arrive at your website. This is accomplished by providing them with a log in, a customer ID or an order ID. This way after completing the formalities, the customer calls at your store or personally visits you and completes the transaction. Thus, with the unique customer ID, you can compile the data for your offline conversion figures.

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As far as e-commerce is concerned, online success would either mean profitable online marketing and good traffic or specific rankings. The SEO experts across the globe have somewhat leaned towards the former over the years. They aver that craving for only high rankings on search engines is by no means a reflection of the success of your online business. Most SEO firms see no point in guaranteeing only a specific position or ranking on search engine listings as they see it as an impractical approach towards success. They have cited several valid reasons in support of their argument. These reasons have been laid down in the following:

1. SEO firms play a pivotal role when it comes to the workings of various search engines. They have, over the years developed mechanisms to assess what search engines consider when they crawl and rank pages. An SEO examines trends that have been followed consistently to achieve high rankings and help online businesses mold their product or service in the most marketable way. However, when a search engine suddenly decides to transform its ways of ranking pages, that is when the SEO firms face the real challenge. An expert SEO firm is prepared to face such unforeseen circumstances so that the client site faces minimal repercussions.
2. A guaranteed ranking on the top ten listings of a search engine is really no guarantee for the success of the online business. A top ranking will not turn out to be half as lucrative if the website or online business is not able to optimize its Return On Investment (ROI). Specific online rankings in no way mean profitable online marketing. Increased customer inquiries and profitable sales form the real objective of expert SEO firms, which they strive to achieve for their client sites.
3. Expert SEO firms consider rankings as a yardstick with focus on first page results. They then go on to analyzing the increasing number of genuine visitors that they have brought to their client site and most importantly, they consistently strive to track conversions to get the real measure of success as good conversions result in guaranteed client satisfaction. This is due to the fact that spot on conversion tracking flawlessly enlists the frequency of the times that a search engine ranking or a pay per click listing results in an inquiry.
4. What’s there in just a high rank guarantee? What you must rather expect from your SEO consultant is that it only uses white hat practices to ensure positive long term results and a consistent recognition by search engines. A genuine SEO firm must also abide by non-ambiguity, 100% transparency, clear cut proposal and project plan with a strict time line, granting access to other clients to find out if the promises being made are genuine and most importantly, expertise and experience.

It is absolutely vital for both the client and the SEO firm to be in the same plain before talking business. Only when clear objectives will be set and both parties will comprehensively understand each other’s needs and aspirations can some positive results be expected for both. Dreams that seem too far fetched should not be considered as they might divulge you from your real objectives. Attain the right vision and your success and satisfaction will both be soon guaranteed.

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Keyword or key phrase optimization facilitates your website to rise up to the occasion, meaning that when a search engine ‘crawls’ or simply searches the web, the right keywords on your website help it to get picked and duly positioned by the engine. It revolutionizes a rather usual site into a powerful and dynamic one that attracts a pool of new customers and consequently revs up sales.

You should not be disappointed if you are being consistently ignored by search engines despite incorporating Meta Tags on your pages. These Meta Tags will neither help you get good rankings on search result pages nor will they direct the desired amount of traffic to your website. Solid search optimization is a much more critical task that entails specialized expertise and a comprehensive understanding about the particular keywords and key phrases that people use to search particular information. This understanding and expertise naturally comes with extensive and rounded keyword research and study. Proper keyword selection and placement are the only ways to improve search engine marketing Return On Investment (ROI). Now, as daunting and as frightening as this task sounds, adopting a systematic and common sense approach to go about the same will reduce half the trouble. So, here it goes:

• Despite the fact that the crawling phase of search engine marketing results produce only long term results, you will have to make sure that you target the right keywords and key phrases to get good traffic along with conversions. Remember, target the terms that best describe your business, not the ones that are high up there on the bidding charts.
• Among the numerous keyword bidding tools, websites and keyword research services, choose the one that will provide you with the most promising results. Exercise your patience to let the keyword research service give you the best results possible, even if that means waiting for a week or more. Doing so will lead to the following:
  • Your best business assets and services are identified.
  • Your biggest competitions’ keywords across search engines are identified.
  • Keywords and key phrases located on the keyword tracking service will track a pool of other related and relevant keywords and key phrases.
  • Comprehensive research and understanding will lead to the selection of at least 200 most relevant keywords and key phrases.
  • Top paying keywords that attract traffic will, thus, be formulated for your website.

The above mentioned points are reasons enough for you to hire professionals with years of experience in the field of detailed keyword and key phrase research and analysis. This is purely due to the fact that they will be able to swiftly get into the nuances of keyword research with their professional tools and expertise to dig out the set of most optimized keywords and key phrases describing your business and will in turn ensure you a stunning Return On Investment (ROI) along with terrific traffic lining up to embrace your website. Go the professional way because you and your website are worth it.

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Images, Videos & Flash always Need Text:

First things first. Any search engine that you use, fundamentally follows the practice of crawling. It means that, the search engine goes through your web pages and then indexes them so they can be displayed in its search results. However, the one factor that many Webmasters either aren’t aware of or they simply ignore is that the search engines are used to reading text. This text is in regards to the content that is spread all over a webpage and not only dedicated to images, videos or flash files. Although recently, Google has begun indexing flash files, yet there is no search engine, including Google that can view an image file or video right off the bat, without any text attached to those files.

Hence, it is imperative that you should add content or text with the non-contextual items such as images, videos and flash files so as to provide the search engine crawlers with description of those files. This will help them better understand and index these non-text files.

Double Check your HTML Codes:

When we talk about checking the HTML codes for errors, it doesn’t essentially refer to grammatical or spelling errors. It’s the main HTML script that you should be worried about, as it is the language a web browser understands and then interprets while formatting your web page according to your instructions. It is recommended that after you’ve written your HTML codes, whether manually or through a web editor such as Dreamweaver, Nvu or Mozilla Composer, to run them by HTML and CSS validators, so as to minimize any risk of an error.

Title Tags:

HTML <TITLE> tag is perhaps one of the most important codes on which your entire website relies upon. This is the space, where you give the name or title to your website. One main point to remember about the title tag is that, you should always incorporate your main keyword or phrase in the title and that too as early as possible. However, exercise extreme caution while using keywords in title tag and make sure you do not repeat them, as that would lead to low ranking scores. Create short, relevant and keyword rich titles.

Leave No Room For Duplicate Content:

Duplicate content is the biggest dilemma for a Webmaster, as even unintentionally, duplicate content might surface on his website and search engines like Google really hate this phenomenon. This leads to harsh penalties and much headache for a Webmaster. Here are a few important points that can help you in effectively dropping duplicate content:

1. Guide the Crawlers: It would be in your best interest, if you would guide the crawlers to the pages that you would like the crawlers, to crawl and index. By blocking the non-preferred pages using a robots.txt file, you can prohibit the crawlers from indexing those pages.
2. Redirect 301: The ‘RedirectPermanent’ or more commonly known as 301 redirects should always be used in the event that you have moved your website, or a webpage to a different location. This will effectively redirect the crawlers to the new destination, thus leading to crawling and indexing of your new webpage or website.
3. Utilize CMS Effectively: You should be absolutely thorough about your CMS or content management system. Especially, if you are operating a website that features blogs or forums, then you need to be very much aware of where and how the content is displayed on your website, so as to avoid the chances of duplicate content.

• Google Webmaster Central Blog:
• Ezine Articles:

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Find out how Pear Logic SEO can you help you today!

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Honestly speaking, even the most skillfully made and immensely informative and genuine web pages and websites are sometimes missed by the search engines. There is no one reason for going wrong and of course there is no one simple solution to the problem of not being indexed. However, if a few significant details are kept in mind while going about the ‘get noticed’ exercise, chances are that you will receive due recognition in the web world.

IT experts over the years have conducted comprehensive research on the same issue and have come up with vital explanations of the core causes that are responsible for things going terribly wrong for people who aspire to get noticed on the Internet. Fortunately they have not stopped at detecting the virus and have gone on to discover antidotes to wipe out the ‘not being indexed’ phenomena.

• The first mantra is to call forth your virtue to patience and allow enough time for your page to be indexed before getting those ruthless panic attacks. WebPosition’s Submitter report and WebPosition’s URL Verification report will both make known to you the appropriate amount of time you should allow for your page to be properly indexed.
• Also, keep in mind that sometimes search engines fail to notify you about the  fact that you have already been indexed on the same. So, keep your senses at their best and throughly check all the search engines before starting to mourn your failure.
• Moving on to the second mantra in order to be indexed, please be certain about having uploaded the pages of your site before submitting them. This seems quite pointless to some, but, we also know that callousness sometimes dawns upon the best of us. In case you’re using WebPosition’s Submitter, you will find a checkbox on tab 2 labeled “Verify that each page exists on Web site before submitting.” Kindly feel free to use the same even if it hurts your ego a little.
• You may also want to consider submitting your home page that links either directly or indirectly to your doorway pages as speculations are that some search engines drop pages, which cannot be reached via the home page.
• The third mantra is to establish valid links with other websites before submitting your website to a search engine (google and HotBot in particular). This is so because some search engines refuse to index websites that do not have any other websites linking to them.
• Search engine spiders cannot index sites that demand for any sort of registration or password. The way out of this road block would be to create static pages that search engines will be able to scan without conducting any kind of special action on your website. This will be your fourth mantra.

Once you are assured of having followed the above-mentioned mantras, the technical nuances of indexation from your front will be taken care of. Thereafter, you can only call forth the considerate side of search engines and hope for the best.

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