Google has said that frequently updated pages get boosted in rankings (QDF), which favours blogs and news sites over company sites, which have less reason to be updated often. How important of a signal is 'freshness'? Actually, one has to understand the fact that if you are updating the page or...

With canonical tags, can you point that page to itself? Say for an instance, if www.google.com/webpage points to www.google.com/webpage , will this cause a loop?   The rel=canonical element is referred as "canonical link". It means, an HTML element that helps webmasters prevent duplicate...

What is Google's view on guest blogging for links? High quality guest blogging is worth in some cases. In some case, what if it gets extreme? Or what if someone take it too far? So for an instance, we shall take an easy case.  If you are a high quality writer, you give shout out to Lisa Barone...

If someone buys a text link from my website, I add the nofollow tag so it has become a paid link. Should one do the same for banner images too? Generally, speaking about banner ads, most of those are sold through d exchanges or several advertising networks, which will do block out bots.  They...

Search for a physical product ranks Amazon number one, in spite of not offering the best user experience. What they have done to prevent large corporations from dominating search engine results? Generally, one has to accept the fact that Amazon has relatively good user experience. Though, it is...

How can you quote correctly from different sources without getting penalized for duplicated content? Is it possible to quote and refer to the source? Let's take two instances. First one is that you are a normal blogger, and you want to quote an excerpt from some author you like or from some...

Is Google removing the page rank feature to avoid Link Trade that is very popular in the industry now? Google always recompute it using lot of machines. They could take page ranks in any given time and export it as a snapshot and they will show them in the Google toolbar. In order to help...

If a website has a 'Read More' dropdown window with the simplistic design elements. The box includes maximized content, keyword anchor text linking deeper into the site and a lot more. Will a site be penalized for this? Is there any alternatives? One must be aware of some issues regarding this...

If someone manage three websites which sell same products across three domains, but with a distinct selling approach, price structure, target audience, etc. Does Google take this as spammy or black hat? It is not so bad because the domains are distinguished by layout, selling approach and...

Does Google take action on those websites, which gives back keyword stuff every phone number in the world on its pages, when someone typed a phone number?  Actually, it's an 'yes'. Google, usually, gets lot of complaints regarding this. If one has a page, which has only phone numbers on it...

Should we have more or less content on a homepage? Certainly, difference in opinion happens depending on the situation. It is not recommended to have a homepage which has 20 megabytes, as it will take long time to load. The users who have a dial-up or a modem or slow connection, they will...

How does the meaning of underscores and dashes vary in URL? Whenever we see an underscore, Google joins that in URL, instead of separate using that. For an instance, if one say black dash love in a URL, Google considers dash as a separator. So, Google index the word black and Google index the...

On what basis, Google change the title, it shows in the search depending on the query? Usually, in case of choosing or deciding which title to show in the search result, Google searches for the concise description of the page, which must be related to the query. It is based on some aspects as...

Google changed the search engine market in the 90's by evaluating a website's backlinks instead of the content. Will backlinks lose their importance?  Actually, backlinks still have several years left in them. Inevitably, Google tries to find out how an expert user would say, this particular...

Does Google have a version of search engine that totally excludes any backlink relevance? In SEO terminology, a back-link is a hyperlink that links from a webpage back to your own Web page. It is otherwise known as an InBound Link (IBL). It helps in determining the popularity of a Web site...

Is it essential for every single page within my website to have unique metatag description? Meta tag description means 160 character snippet used to outline the content of a webpage. With the help of these snippets, Search engines help visitors to know what that page is all about. So the...

How does Google handle duplicate content and what negative effects it can have on rankings from SEO perspective? Duplicate content means considerable blocks of content within or across domains that either match other content fully or partially.  It is important to know by looking at the...

What is the best way to check your own site for keyword rankings? Keyword ranking means the position in the search result by searching particular keyword. Users will usually go for those web sites at first. Thus, it is vital important to handle your rankings and enhance them to fetch more...