Louise SEO Website Tips

Is it safe to buy an old domain and redirect it to my main site for the link popularity?

Buying a site with good links and redirecting it to your own is actually a pretty effective advanced Search Engine Optimization technique, but it's not without risk.

The site you're redirecting needs to be fairly on-topic to your own, otherwise you can end up with a lot of weird off-topic links that look strange to the search engines—not to mention confusing them as to what your site is actually about. For instance, if your home mortgage site has an unusually high number of fly-fishing related links as the result of a redirect, you might be asking for trouble.

Also, if the site you're redirecting has an extremely large number of links compared to your own site, that can also cause problems. That's because if your site has been building links slowly and then you suddenly add thousands of links overnight due to a redirect, it can raise red flags for the engines.

The third potential pitfall is to repeat again and again the strategy of buying sites and redirecting them to your main site for link building purposes. Search engines will probably let you get away with it once, possibly even twice. After all, many websites need to consolidate domains at some point, so such redirection is not uncommon.

However, if it becomes obvious that you are clearly exploiting a strategic Search Engine Optimization loophole to build links via redirecting other sites to your own, then at some point you can probably expect a human review and possibly a penalty.

But if you redirect a site that's similar in topic to your own, has roughly the same number or fewer links than you do, and you don't repeat the process more than once every year or so, you should generally be in good shape. You'll need some tolerance for risk, however, since it's not foolproof (we have seen sites banned for overdoing it) but practiced in moderation this is a highly effective SEO strategy.

Also note that a typical redirect in which you copy every page on the old site to its matching page on your main site won't work in this case, since your main site will obviously have a different directory structure than the site you've bought. Instead, you'll need to redirect every page on the site you've bought to the homepage of your main site. To do that, use the following code:

Append that code to the .htaccess file in the root directory of the site you're redirecting. Replace yourdomain.com with your main site's actual domain name.

If you'd prefer to keep the risk to a minimum, you can just buy a site and link it over to your main site, rather than redirecting it. You don't get the full benefit of all their links that way, but you still get a great link from the site itself.

How many keywords should I optimize each of my pages for?

Ideally you should focus on one main keyword per page. Occasionally you might go for two, but it's best to place your main keyword near the front of your title tag which can be difficult to do if you're optimizing for more than one term.

When optimizing for your main keyword we recommend you place it near the front of your title tag and near the top of your site in an h1 header tag. If you've got good content and good links, that's often all the optimization you really need.

Also bear in mind there are typically many modifiers—related terms, synonyms and plurals—that you can target. These will often bring in high-quality traffic from very specific searches, all the while related to your one main keyword. By sprinkling in such related keywords throughout your text sparingly, while focusing on keep the natural flow of the text in tact, this will reinforce your main terms and still help you bring in traffic for a larger variety of keywords.

In regards to keyword density, there really isn't any hard and fast rule. Now that Google and the other engines place so much weight on elements such as inbound links, anchor text, site age and authority, any ideal percentage attributed to keyword density would be overshadowed by the combined importance of the off-page factors being measured.

Therefore, it's enough to remember that, in order to rank decently for any given keyword, you should place it within the title tag and h1 headers—and, of course, be sure it's mentioned a few times within the page text itself.

Should I use subdomains or subdirectories when adding new sections to my site?

Subdomains are far less useful today than they were a while back ago when they were being used to dominate the rankings for many keyword categories in Google.

While it's true that some big sites (like eBay) still rank well while using them (they often occupy most of the top results for many product searches using subdomain spam —6 out of the top 10 for preowned tennis racquets, for example), Google has really throttled back the ranking dial relative to small sites that use subdomains.

No surprise, really, because smaller sites have a much harder time getting away with such shenanigans. Besides, to Google, using a subdomain with only a small number of pages often looks like an effort to manipulate their search results.

Of course, as i've learned before, subdomains are typically treated by Google like a separate domain—except that Google understands there's a common ownership involved. But in terms of link popularity, links to the main domain don't benefit the subdomain the way they would if a subdirectory was used instead. This is undesirable in most cases because the typical site would like to have all of their incoming links credited toward the site's popularity. In the case of subdomains, this so-called link juice is diluted by splitting the popularity between what Google 'sees' as different sites.

I can go in more detail if I had the time but the simple rule is this: Go with a subdirectory whenever possible in order to consolidate your link popularity into a single domain.

If you have existing subdomains you'd like to consolidate into subdirectories, place the following code in the .htaccess file of the subdomain:


In this example replace http://example.com/subdirectory with the domain name and the subdirectory you're actually redirecting to. So if you currently have a subdomain like:


...then the code above will redirect the contents of that subdomain to the following subdirectory:

However, note that any redirect will most likely result in lost rankings for at least a few weeks, so don't do this unless you can afford the traffic hit. This is especially true if there's a lot of content on the subdomain. In most cases, the benefit of the redirection is not worth the loss in traffic you'll experience while Google figures things out. That's why I generally recommend sticking with the subdomain whenever there is already significant traffic and decent rankings, even though it's not the optimal structure. Besides, who knows when Google might spin the dial back in the opposite direction?

How long does it take a search engine to index a 301 redirect properly?

The amount of time it's taking for the engines to pick up the redirects and reflect those changes in their search results is typically related to your site's PageRank and how frequently your content has historically changed; and not necessarily in that order. Then, on top of the indexing delay, there's typically another 90 days or so before the 'PageRank' displayed in the Google toolbar is updated.

You'll know for certain the engines have everything up-to-date when the redirected URL itself disappears from their search results.

Currently I've noticed it's taking a lot longer for Google to pick up the redirects. And, although most pages have been successfully redirected within a few weeks—with the new URLs replacing the old ones in the search results—some pages have taken as long as 3 months! This is likely due to the fact that these old URLs were infrequently crawled. The good news is that, once the pages were successfully crawled and the redirect found, the old URLs were replaced with the new ones and rankings remained the same.

Considering the likelihood of a several weeks to 3 months scenario, I'd recommend you wait till after the holiday season to implement the changes. In light of the big shopping season starting now, even if you do everything exactly right, you're taking a big chance that all of the engines will cooperate smoothly with your redirect project in time for the end-of-the-year retail rush.

Or go watch the SEO training video from Lynda.com

worked great for every project ive been on