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I'd had good results doing page level redirects i.e. map each page on the old site to its closest corresponding counterpart on the new site. Just coming up with the redirect map can take many, many hours of work. For a Subject Matter Expert, I had to read hundreds of articles on both the old and new sites.  Thankfully, I was interested in the subject!

You can actually do both A & B and hopefully get the best of both worlds. Make subdomains.  http://location1.hotelname.com, http://location2.hotelname.com A) You will pay less yearly because you're really just using hotelname.com B) Each site will have an opportunity to raise its own ranks because subdomains are mainly treated as separate sites (think me.wordpress.com and you.wordpress.com) So that would be my suggestion.  Subdomains give you both answers, which I think removes your dilemma.

Well I am just a pest control guy.... But I don't think I am the only one that has had this happen to them.. http://www.seomoz.org/q/one-keyword-rank-inexplicably-blasted-into-oblivion

That's an interesting question: have you created and published a page and then run it through the Rich Snippet / Structured Data Testing tool? http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets (Also, see: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/10/rich-snippets-guidelines.html ) Seems to me that the tool would show you which snippet Google is likely to showcase. If you've created a blog post with an embedded video, I think it is  likely that the Author snippet will be visible in Web SERPs; the byline + author avatar. The Video snippet would appear in Video SERPs without that byline.

Thanks so much, I think I got it working now!

Hi Jeff, I've taken a look. It seems like your problem is coming from the fact that you seem to be running some sort of plugin that redirects your links. Every link on your site seems to have this structure: http://www.crmsoftwareblog.com/flow/post_click.php?OtherVariablesHere If you insist on using this redirection/tracking (I'm really not sure what it is) then I would argue that you need to exclude that link from the process. Google is not picking up the link as going to your Author profile on Google+ as it is redirected through another link. You pretty much need a naked link straight to your Google+ profile with the rel="author" tag attached in order for it to work. The good news is that your Google+ profile seems to be set up correctly. Come back to me about that URL redirection and we'll see if we can get you sorted. Regards Mark

Wordpress always does this. I haven't used it myself, but have a look at this plugin that may help you: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/duplicate-posts-remover/ Andy

Hi James, I want to add to what Marcus has said. You should note that Google will throw drastic swings in SERP rankings from time to time. This is usually Google doing some test, it never last long but if you ping the server while something like this is going on, you can see these odd results. I've seen it many times in the years I've been watching our keywords. We have found it best to watch our keyword rankings over time, and validate any thing that seems off internally.

Hi Robert, Thanks and sorry for my slow reply. Loads of good points you've raised here. You're quite right to challenge my presumption that the new domain is ranking poorly due to the 301 since there could be many other reasons. It's difficult to describe all the circumstances in a short question, so I guess I was going on my gut feel to some extent. Not ranking in the top 100 for a non-competitive term. I don't think the question of correlation arises here since there are no data sets to relate but I understand the point you make about cause and effect. For me a 302 doesn't really feel like that's what it's intended for so is not ideal. I think when Matt Cutts said 'start again', he meant really start again' i.e. no 301 so removing the 301 and having no other kind of redirect seems intuitively like the best option to me. Cheers.

Hi, I think number 2 is the best option. 301 Redirects offer you the possibility to reorder all your blogs without losing relevance given (or gained) by the link juice and also all old URLs will still be useful. Be patient and find those keywords that can work best for each blog. Hope to be useful. Sergio.

You may have been hit by the Oct 5 Penguin update: http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change Is it possible that you were hit by the 9/27 exact match domain update, but didn't notice the drop until 10/7? It is also possible that the drop in rankings was not linked to a specific Google update.

Hi Your site is all over the place. I'm not even sure what is the main objective of your site. The Initial visible (above the fold) part seems to have job advertisements and below that there seems to be three feeds from three different blogs with one about sports. Google is now intelligent enough to bring up a good sites in search engine results. So until your site has a clear focus with good quality information it will not improve in the search engine results. And if you're not on the first page you won't get many clicks

Totally agree Dan. As of last week all the previous author microformats that worked suddenly disappeared from the SERP pages after working from their implementation

Thanks so much

Yes I suppose it would check everytime. That said, i have written files with several hundred lines of code and the sites still load really fast even on shared servers which are not the best...

Fair enough and thanks for the answer. I'll just refer to one of them Web reporting to customers. Good day to you

Sorry, for some reason the formatting on my comment got removed. Hopefully you can still follow.