I am designing a pretty big website that will target it's industry on a global level. The site is detecting IP address countries in order to serve content relative to the visitor's country. Basically alot of content will be restricted to visitors in a given country.
The concern I have is that Google doesn't seem to pay too much attention to IP based content, as I read here. They seem to think Google might implement better support for crawling IP based content but aren't sure when and the article is dated Nov 2011.
As a result, I have been considering ways to have Google crawl the site's IP content by country codes like us.site.com or site.com/us still detecting the visitor's country by IP and redirecting to the appropriate location. Im not sure if it's just because I am a little strange at times, but I seem to feel that the subdomain us.site.com seems tidier.
Considering that Google spider ALSO seems to ignore subdomains when there is considerable duplicate content (which may be the case because alot of the content is internationally available), what would you guys recommend?
Should I
Stop being so darn OCD about us.site.com and use site.com/us?
Use subdomains because perhaps while the spider ignores duplicate
content on sub-domains, it won't if there are more unique results?
What about lists of results on my site? Like a category page?
Take a gamble and stick to IP detection only, not using country
codes in the URL and hope for the best that Google will recognise
different content being served on different IP ranges
Thanks in advance
Ok, so i found this which is so far the best explanation I have found, any pointers please feel free to comment
So, we're trying to up our application in the rankings in the search engines, and one way our SEO guy told us to do that was to register similar domains...for example we have something like
http://www.myapplication.com/parks.html
so..we acquired the domain parks.com (again just an example).
Now when people go to http://www.parks.com ...we want it to display the content of http://www.myapplication.com/parks.html.
I could just put a forwarding page there, but from what i've been told that makes us look bad because it's technically a permanent redirect..and we're trying to get higher in the search engine rankings, not lower.
Is this a situation where we would use the Server.Transfer method of ASP.net?
How are situations like this handled, because I've defiantly seen this done by many websites.
We also don't want to cheat the system, we are showing relevant content and not spam or tricking customers in anyway, so the proper way to do achieve what i'm looking for would be great.
Thanks
Use your "similar" domain names to host individual and targetted landing pages that will point to your master content.
It's easier to manage and you will get a higher conversion rate.
Having to create individual page will force you to write relevent content and will increase the popularity of the page.
I also suggest you to not only build landing pages, but mini sites (of few pages).
SEO is sa very high demanding task.
Regarding technical aspects: Server.Transfer is what you should use. Never use Response.Redirect, Google and other search engines will drop your ranking.
I used permanent URL rewrite in the past. I changed my website and since lots of traffic was coming from others website linking mine, I wanted to have a permanent solution.
Read more about URL rewriting : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms972974.aspx
So for example, my domain is www.companyname.com. But our company name doesn't make it obvious what we actually do. Is it worth making the root of the site something like www.companyname.com/ancient-antiques/ , with a 301 redirect from the domain root? I'm thinking not just for SEO purposes (would we need to change anything in Webmaster Tools for this btw), but so that people who see us on the SERP immediately know what we do from behind our undescriptive domain name.
It will have little to no difference on your placement in search engines. The only thing that really matters is how your website is linked to. Google will know what your site is about, and external anchor text will gauge what keywords your site will qualify for. Outside of that, the keywords in your URI is irrelevent, so just build the best website you can and people will link to it.
Natural link building is the way to go.
This will require a little setup. Trust me that this is for a good cause.
The Background
A friend of mine has run a non-profit public interest website for two years. The site is designed to counteract misinformation about a certain public person. Of course, over the last two years those of us who support what he is doing have relentlessly linked to the site in order to boost it in Google so that it appears very highly when you search for this public person's name. (In fact it is the #2 result, right below the public person's own site). He does not have the support of this public person, but what he is doing is in the public interest and good.
The friend had a stroke recently. Coincidentally, the domain name came up for renewal right when he was in the hospital and his wife missed the email about it. A domain squatter snapped up the domain, and put up content diametrically opposed to his intent. This squatter is now benefitting from his Google placement and page rank.
Fortunately there were other domains he owned which were aliased to point to this domain, i.e. they used a DNS mapping or HTTP 301 redirect (I'm not sure which) to send people to the right site. We reconfigured one of the alias domains to point directly to the original content.
We have publicized this new name for the site and the community has now created thousands of links to the new domain, and is fixing all the old links. We can see from the cache that Google has in fact crawled the original site at the new address, and has re-crawled the imposter site.
The Problem
Even though Google has crawled both sites, you can't get the site to appear in relevant searches under the new URL!
It appears to me that Google remembers the old redirect between the two names (probably because someone linked to the new domain back when it was an alias). It is treating the two sites as if they are the same site in all results. The results for the site name, and using the "link:" operator to find sites that link to this site, are entirely consistent with Google being convinced they are the same site.
Keep in mind that we do not have control of the content of the old domain, and we do not have the cooperation of the person that these sites relate to.
How can we convince the Googlebot that domain "a" and domain "b" are now two different sites and should be treated as such in results?
EDIT: Forward was probably DNS, not HTTP based.
Google will detect the decrease in links to the old domain and that will hurt it.
Include some new interesting content on the new domain. This will encourage Google to crawl this domain.
The 301 redirects will be forgotten, in time. Perhaps several months. Note that they redirected one set of URLs to another set, not from one domain to another. Get some links to some new pages within the site, not just the homepage, as these URLs will not be in the old redirected set.
Set up Google Webmaster Tools and submit an XML sitemap. Thoroughly check everything in Webmaster Tools about once per week.
Good luck.
Time heals all wounds...
Losing control of the domain is a big blow, and it will take time to recover. It sounds like you're following all the correct procedures (getting people to change links, using 301s, etc.)
Has the content of the original site changed since being put up again? If not, you should probably make some changes. If Google re-crawls the page and finds it substantially identical to the one previously indexed, it might consider it a copy and that's why it's using the original URL.
Also, I believe that Google has a resolution process for just such situations. I'm not sure what the form to fill out is or who to contact, but surely some other SO citizens could help.
Good luck!
I have my main application site https://drchrono.com, and I have a blog sub-domain under http://blog.drchrono.com. I was told by some bloggers that the blog sub-domain of your site helps the pagerank of your main site. Does traffic to your blog sub-domain help the Google Pagerank of your site and count as traffic to your main site?
I don't think Google gives any special treatment to sub domains named "blog". If they did, that would be a wide open door for abuse, and they're smart enough to realize that.
At one time, I think there were advantages to putting your blog on a separate subdomain though. Links from your blog to your main site could help with your main site's page rank if your blog has a decent page rank.
However, it seems like that has changed. Here's an interesting post about setting up blog subdomains vs. folders. It seems like they are actually treated the same by Google now, although nobody but Google really knows for sure how they treat them.
With regard to traffic, your Google ranking is only incidentally related to the amount of traffic your site gets. Google rankings are based primarily on content and number & quality of incoming links, not on how much traffic you get. Which makes sense since Google really has no way of knowing how much traffic you get to your site other than perhaps the traffic they send there via Google searches.
Not directly, but...
I do not know if "blog" specifically helps the pagerank of your site in some special way - google guards its pagerank secrets fairly well. If you really wanted to find out, you would create two sites roughly the same content but one with blog in the domain name and one without. Index them and see if the pagerank settings are different. My gut instinct is - no.
It is known that google indexes the name of the site and it improves your chances of getting listed on the search results if the site name corresponds to the search terms. So, it would be reasonable to assume that (unless google specifically removed indexing of the word blog) that when someone searched for a main search term and "blog" the chances of your site showing up would be slightly higher.
For example, it should help searches for: drchrono blog.
By the way, google changes its algorithms all the time, so this is just speculation.
according to an article on hubspot.com
The search engines are treating subdomains more and more as just portions of the main website, so the SEO value for your blog is going to add to your main website domain. If you want your blog to be seen as part of your company, you should it this way (or the next way).
however they go on to say there isn't a big difference between blog.domain.com and domain.com/blog
you can read the full article here: hubspot article on blog domains
One thing using a sub-domain will help is your sites Alexa rank.
Alexa give rank to all pages using your main domain. If you use the Alexa Toolbar you I see all subdomains have the same rank as your main page. So hit's to your sub's will count toward your sites Alexa.
I don't think the subdomain will anything to the pagerank, but however, it might make content easier to find than in a folder.
Let's say you search for something on google, from your page, I could search for
domain:blog.drchrono.com someTopic or articleImLookingFor
Since it is a subdomain, I would guess it counts as traffic to the main site.
Personally, if I was to setup a blog, I would go for the subdomain and would probably set up a redirect from
http://drchrono.com/blog to
http://blog.drchrono.com
blog.domain.tld and www.domain.tld are not treated as unrelated sites, assuming they're handled by the same final ns authority. It has never been clear to me if pages are ranked entirely independently or if a reputation for a domain and hence it's subdomains figures into it beyond just being linked to.
But if I read your question differently, I'd say there's no difference in doing either:
I've tried setting up pages at both photos.domain.tld/stuffAboutPhotos and www.domain.tld/photos/stuffAboutPhotos for a month at a time. I found no noticeable difference between the search engine referral rates.
But then it's actually hard to do this independently of other factors.
Therefore I conclude that despite the human logic indicating that the domain is more important, there is no advantage to putting a keyword in the domain as opposed to the rest of the url, except to be sure it's clearly delimited (use slash, dash, or underscore in the rest of the url).
If Google has a shortlist of keywords that do rank better in a domain name than in the rest of the url, they're definitely not sharing it with anyone not wearing a Google campus dampened exploding collar.
Google treat a subdomain as a domain. If this wasn't true, then all those blogspot blogs would have had a higher SERPS.
With subdomains it is a bit easier as Google "knows" it is a "separate" site. With sub-directories it is tricky. Though, with sub-domains it is the same. Google would rank these ones anything between PR0 and PR3 in the past year, currently:
PR1: of-cour.se
Cheers!
Not really. Blogs do do some nice things to the SEO for your sites, but if they're inside the site it doesn't work the same.
A better option is have a completely separate domain that contains the blog (something like drchronoblog.com), and have lots of links from the blog site to the main site.
That way search engines see the links but do not make the connection between the blog and the main site, and thus it makes your page rank better.
It wont give your site higher priority just because you have a blog. subdomain.
But im sure more people will find your site if they search for blogs..´
And therefore more traffic´, more traffic, more visits though the search engines and so on..
So id say yes :)
Since PageRank is dealing with the rank on search engine. Let's make a little test:
https://www.google.com/search?q=blog
you may see that
example.com/blog
rank higher than
blog.example.com
This almost in the same figure for whatever domains.
However when it were possible, I will fight more to get blog.wordpress.com as it treated on any search engine as my own profile than a folder named wordpress.com/blog that for sure still belong to wordpress.com.
The only way a blog can help you as far as SEO depends on the content in your blog. Just having a blog isn't enough.