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You need to be careful when purchasing a dropped domain that appears to be too good (short name, no hyphens, competitive keyword phrase) a) take a look at what the site used to be in archive.org (the wayback machine) and take a look at if anything shady was going on b) if you are buying it as a regular domain and not paying a premium price, set up a dummy site and get it indexed then see if it ranks for it's domain name and also using the site command site:domainname.com. If it's not ranking it's penalized, if it's not getting indexed it's banned. c) If a site has been hit by Google it's done, at least until someone unwinds the penalty. Just dropping it and picking it up doesn't change the fact that it was penalized, otherwise everyone would be doing that to get out of penalties. So just be aware of that if planning on buying a premium domain so you don't get burnt. If links are pointing to a expired domain it's like they are 404'ing but once the site goes live again those links are passing PR to that site.

I would create a custom 404 error catcher page just for expired campaigns and 301 the expired pages to it, this way they know it's not a programming error and don't keep looking.

It would depend on whom you are using, usually a good agency is at least a few thousand per release based on my experience. It depends on either how beneficial their contacts are for your business or how wide their distribution. To get consistent coverage in quality publications you would need new angles and interesting pieces to keep journalists wanting content from you otherwise you'll only be getting links from the PR submission tools which may not be worth the investment of your time and money.

Hey James It looks to me like you are just disallowing access to any URLs that have more than the initial p= variable. So, you are reducing the impact of potential duplication through searches and the like. Good ?p=1 Bad ?p=1&q=search string I am no magento expert but this seems to be a simple attempt to reduce the myriad duplication that can happen with search pages and the like inside a complex CMS like Magento. The SEOMoz crawler tool should give you some good insight and to be sure, try removing the 'Disallow: /?p=&' and see if you get a buckletload of duplicate content warnings. Ultimately, the thing to remember here is that the & is part of the URL and not part of the regex. Hope that helps! Marcus

Hmm how did e.g. normal local newspaper then survive - most news articles are some 200-300 words of orginal text + 1-2 images. The rest are ads and excerpt of other relevant news etc. As far as I understand the article you send then it is about “above-the-fold” i.e. the only think you see when you land on a page are ads as the main source. On my site I only use the sidebar - in similar manner as newspapers - and the rest is simply information on various travelling arrangement possible. That is what a niche site this is all about - collecing all of this into one place and solving the travelers problems of finding it in various places. This creates value for the end-user.

shucks thanks Egol I can honestly say, that without a doubt, BowlerHat.co.uk is the most kickass awesome SEO company on the planet, but... it's my business, so I may be biased. I have been in the game for 12 years now one way or another and we do our very best to help. There are some areas where we have a lot of experience and others where we are not so well versed but certainly, fire over a question, I will do my best to guide you and if we work together, you will certainly get an experienced, committed and (often over) enthusiastic service. If we are not a good fit I can certainly help point you in the right direction so you can avoid the many perilous pitfalls and sharks in the SEO services world. We tend to focus on a content driven approach and I have a bit of a thing for diagnosis technical SEO issues so we can generally provide help with problems and help lay out a content driven strategy for doing well in the long term. We also provide some link building and social services as part of the big picture. Anyhow, happy to help so fire over a question to my email and I will get straight back to you. All the best! Marcus

A blanket 301 from all pages of the purchased domain to your domain will work without a problem. If the previous owners transfer GWMT and GA access of the domain, then it is worthwhile reviewing also search terms (optimize your landing pages and campaigns for them too). Look at the top landing pages of the purchased domain and the PR of the inbound links. In some cases it will be worthwhile to discredit links based on reputation and in others it is worthwhile to 301 to new landing pages directly.

I wanted to know if  my Google search results (my search) were affected by personal searches and you answered my question.  Thank you.  The changes I made are irrelevant and the time is irrelevant since just really wanted to know what was affecting my google search results. Thank you for the help.

Hi Luis, If you've got a lot of keywords to add at once, you can actually enter them in the Manage Keywords section. You can enter them separated by commas, tabs, or lines. That's the most efficient way to add keywords to your account. Of course you'll need to make sure you aren't going to exceed your keyword quota or it could error out on you. Thanks! Joel.

Hey, Yeah, I'd say those are nearly-duplicated enough where you might not get decent rankings/traffic of these pages. If you are already starting to see a decrease in performance as you add more, that is a pretty good indicator that you have a problem. Your idea of a master page might make sense and might give you a way to create more unique content. For example, maybe you have a page about airports in the New York area with unique content for that area and then provide the lists of transportation services based on an airport filter. Here are a couple of other ideas: Can you add in any unique content to these pages? Right now, you have the same sentence on each page: "Guide to all the Limo/Black Car services, taxis, airport service shuttles, shared ride vans and public transit to [airport name]." Could you make that more unique? Even something like testimonials or photos could help make this page noticeably different than the other airport pages. Can you get (good) links to these airport pages? I've seen some cases where having many good links to a duplicated (or near-duplicated) page still ensures the page ranks and gets traffic. I'm not sure if making a page unique or getting links is harder though. I hope that helps. Thanks, Matthew

Adam just gave you two great resources. Also as a disclaimer in no way does the use of SEOMoz's tools make your site rank better in search engines. These tools were created to give you reports to tell you if you site is ranking and the reasons why you are there. Then the blog, webinars, WBF, etc are created to give you strategies and tactics to increase your rankings.

Optimizing a flash website is like fighting a boxing match with one hand tied behind your back. You could do it, but why not go the easier route!?

Thank you for taking the time to respond, Billy. I did see that J May Photo has literally no inbound links to the "funky" URL, but hadn't checked ShanRenee's links yet. Appreciate your time.

Thanks. Thats exactly what i needed.

BTW: If you want to advertise with someone I would do the following: Get them to share key traffic and demographic figures (Google Analytics) Track their campaigns and click-throughs - use the Google URL Builder to build your destination campaigns, you will then be able to analyse in your GA account how your external campaigns perform. Generally websites accepting advertisers have inflated rate-cards and inflate their traffic. I would compare their CPM with for example running similar campaigns through Google Adwords (you might get more value from Adwords) I would also base your payment on performance - don't work on impressions or clicks, try and work on conversions - i.e. you pay nothing for impression/click but you pay a conversion rate - i.e. 10 USD for a user registration or xx % of revenue for any referred transaction. Be careful with paying for registrations (especially those not resulting in revenue), many sites will drive lots of signups to you but no actual revenue.

Yep, I've created subdomain.newdomain.com and that has the htaccess file. Added a cname to my zonefiles to point to the subdomain. Seem to work like a treat so far

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