Tag: Matt Cutts

There is a lot of chitter-chatter about whether or not to include the “www” portion of web addresses. Since sub-domains are becoming increasingly popular and recognizable, the use of the www in domain names has come under a little bit of scrutiny over the past year or so.

There are people that passionately believe that the www is a waste. Why use a www subdomain when you don’t have to? After hearing a lot of differing opinions, we decided to take a look at why you would (or wouldn’t) use the subdomain www in your urls.

Since we are an SEO company, we looked first at what Google says about it. Matt Cutts described it best when he demonstrated that every instance of a domain is treated differently. In the example, he cited http://www.example.com, http://example.com, http://www.example.com/index.php, etc. are all treated as separate “pages” and attract links and PageRank individually. Most people tend to link to the www version of an address because it has been that way for so long. Taking this into consideration, you might argue that you want to keep the www in the domain. Matt Cutts addressed this as well, and noted that if you decide to choose not to use the www, then you should do a 301 redirect from the www version (http://www.example.com) of your domain to the root domain (http://example.com) in order to get credit for links and PageRank that go to the www domain.

Since you can control which version shows up, and which version accumulates links and PageRank, then logically, you can choose which one to use. Be careful to set up your 301 redirects (permanent redirects) and to set the preferred domain in your Google Webmaster Tools though. As long as you pick one and stay with it, everything will work correctly.

Our official stance – we decided this year to keep the www in our domain, and the domains we build. We set up the appropriate measures in Webmaster Tools and with our 301s to cover our bases. This makes it a little less confusing when we build multiple subdomains such as http://mail.example.com, http://blog.example.com, or http://calendar.example.com. There is a lot of flexibility around this issue, as long as you make sure to funnel traffic, links, and PageRank to the domain instance that you are using. I would advise against going from one version to the other since the www version of your site and the non-www version will be treated as completely different. And, considering most links do have the www in them, we think it is worthwhile to use the instance of our domain people will be most familiar with.

If you are building a new domain or are thinking about redeveloping your existing one, be sure to think about the impact that a major change will have on your domains authority and rank with the search engines. It takes a lot of effort and link building to get results, so be sure to take the right steps and ensure that your domain’s value is protected.

When you are choosing SEO hosting services for your websites, there are many factors that you will take into consideration that will have an impact on the search engine optimization of your websites. The geographic location of a hosting companys servers is just one of those factors.

The Importance of Geographic Location of Servers

Since Google happens to be the biggest search engine by far, when you are talking about SEO, you are really talking about doing what it takes to make Google happy and rank your sites high and send you a flood of organic search engine traffic. Google tends to see your websites location according to its IP address rather than strictly referring to the top level domain.

Some search engine results are filtered by the geographic location of the host, so it is important to know the location of all of the IP addresses that you are using for your websites.

For instance, if you are creating a website that caters to the local search needs for small business people in North Dakota, but according to your IP address your server is located in Florida, it might be quite challenging for you to rank well and get good organic traffic for geo-targeted search terms if the search engines think that the website is located in Florida.

If it turns out that some of your IP addresses happen to be a mismatch for the geographic focus of your content, you can visit Googles Webmaster Central and adjust your geographic targeting there.

The Role of Content Relevance

In a couple of videos about the relevance of geographic location with regard to both SEO and rankings, Googles own Matt Cutts said, If your Web server is located in Germany, search engines are more likely to think that its useful for German users. With regard to whether the geographic location has an impact on rankings, Cutts says that it can affect rankings because Google is concerned about returning the most relevant results to each user, and the location of the website can be a factor in deciding which content is the most relevant.

You want to make sure that your content is relevant to the geographic location suggested by the IP address, or you could run into some challenges when it comes to search engine optimization efforts.

What is the Benefit of Dedicated Class C IP Addresses?

The benefit of having dedicated class C IP addresses is that they will all be absolutely separate and independent websites in the eyes of the search engine bots. This will allow webmasters to create a broad network of sites that can be interlinked in such a way that can send search engine link juice throughout the network and towards the websites these sites point to. It can be extremely challenging to find a keyword relevant site with authority and page rank that are willing to give a one-way link to your site. When you own a fleet of completely autonomous websites, it becomes as easy as building out the network with quality, relevant content that will attract organic traffic and ascend in page rank on the merit of their value.

In the past, webmasters constructed so-called web-farms, creating elaborate, interlinked network of sites. However, as the search engines became more sophisticated, they were able to ascertain that all of the sites, in fact, were associated with a single owner, and this did not pass along the link value among the sites in the network.

SEO hosting seeks to give webmasters a leg up and allows them to gain access to as many as 500 distinct websites but also allows them to control them all through a single cPanel interface, removing several layers of complexity that would have prevented this plan from being at all practical. Having all of those dedicated IPs with the same SEO hosting company also helps to make it far more affordable than it would be if a client tried to put together a similar package on their own.