Comments on: Explaining Natural SEO: Search engine ranking vs indexing

By: Anup Shah

Anup Shah — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 20:35:10 +0000

@Carol: From what I have read and experienced, internal cross linking helps; it helps search engines realize some relationships between pages. However, from what I have seen, it seems external links (good quality ones) are more important. But they also go hand in hand; internal cross linking can help highlight other articles deeper within the site; this in turn can help build in-bound links from external sites.

By: Carol Shansky

Carol Shansky — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 15:52:04 +0000

Hello Anup.

Much is written about external linking and its value. Does internal linking have any value? How does it measure up to external linking?

Thanks,

Carol

By: Mike R

Mike R — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 14:10:39 +0000

Thanks Anup - most helpful.

By: Luqman

Luqman — Thu, 22 May 2008 17:34:36 +0000

The perfect web design, and the unique content is Your first step towards success in the search engines. Finish with these tasks, You will rank better

By: Max

Max — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 16:31:23 +0000

I have not tried (or had time!) to really push it out anywhere or gather any interest so generally of course it doesn’t currently rank anywhere. That being said a few articles are already ranking reasonably well due to the niche topic (I think some of my posts on HTML 5, for example).

By: Anup Shah

Anup Shah — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 11:13:11 +0000

@martin: Natural search helps, but I don’t think you can ever guarantee a first position in search results.

By: martin

martin — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 19:23:41 +0000

Good business needs a site that must appear on the first page of a search query. Natural SEO help to promote web site to be placed in the first position in search.

By: Anup Shah

Anup Shah — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 13:51:34 +0000

Bill,

Unfortunately this is not really a forum for SEO advice, but I’ll try to give some quick hints/thought:

If your old domain has a lot of weighting and value already, it may be worth trying to keep using that same domain rather than changing it.

You should also 301 all your old pages to the new corresponding pages, not just to the home page of the new site. If you are using Apache, then you can use 301 permanent redirects in your apache configuration file (e.g. httpd.conf if you control the server, or .htaccess if you are on a shared host, for example).

In your config file you can then do things like this for permanent redirects:

Redirect permanent /old http://www.newdomain.com/new

Where “old” and “new” can be paths to files or directories.

Your two URL structures on each site look different so you may end up having to write quite a lot of these but the URL rewriting capabilities in Apache are quite sophisticated. It would be worth having a look at the Apache documentation or googling for examples of what you may need to help reduce all the URL translation efforts.

Here are a couple of links which might be useful:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_alias.html
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html
http://www.mcanerin.com/EN/articles/301-redirect-apache.asp

Good luck!

By: Bill Strait

Bill Strait — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 13:03:01 +0000

I am stuck with maintaining two sites. My http://www.verylightjetmagazine.com enjoys hard-won page one on Google but it needed to be redesigned. I chose open-source Joomla for the new site http://www.vljmag.com

New site has no ranking, old site has incredibly valuable ranking which I depend on for my 8000-10000 visitors per month.

I need a redirect strategy- perhaps 301s- in a way that I don’t lose that ranking..

You guys are the experts- any suggestions?

Sincerely,
Bill Strait

By: Anup Shah

Anup Shah — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 15:49:31 +0000

Thanks for your comment Palcom. I would suggest that some activities such as link exchange may not be valuable — search engines are catching on to, and penalizing link exchanges that are just for search engine promotion and not for exchanging valuable content for readers to benefit from. Your general points are good though.