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Once I popped on the page, I saw the www.syn.... link. After that I just hovered my mouse near it and saw the URL and where your 404 error was. What I usually do is view page source if I get a 404 error, since it tells you what the error is.

this issue was solved after constantly re-submitting URLs. I really don't know what happened.. sigh; strange world. uhUZ.png

Totally agree with Ryan, you should redirect https to http Trivial maybe, but can see no reason not to do it as it takes no effort and makes your site even more accessible to users who mis-type, key your address directly into the url bar while on a https site etc *This was in response to Ryans post which started "Perhaps i am being too picky..." I accidentally clicked the wrong reply button!!

Hi Darren The reason for this is most likely that you have internal links within your site pointing to these pages. Most likely within the web app you have set up www.exampledomain.com as the campaign address, within the site you have a link to the homepage using and another using /index.html [If easily done I would change your internal links all to point to the same place from a housekeeping point of view. However, I would you should either 301 or rel=canonical the homepage to point to http://www.exampledomain.com/ making sure you add the trailing slash to the domain as this gets added anyway. This will stop the page reporting as duplicates, also Google will only see one version of your pages so it definitely won't jeopardise SERPS, in fact it should pack some rankings bonus' for you.](/) The following article covers the rel=canonical solution http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/c... This one covers 301s http://www.seomoz.org/blog/url-re... Hope that helps Justin

Rand wrote a whole post a couple of years ago about when to go domain vs subdomain vs folder.  It covers things pretty well from a technical SEO point of view: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites When I read your question, it really seems more of a business strategy question, rather than a technical SEO question.  The one consideration is that - would franchisee's take a stronger ownership in their business and their territory if their business was represented by an individual domain name, rather than a sub-folder on a main website. If you could see people going out and networking, and putting a domain name on a business card, they could probably acquire a lot of local business links in this way (Chamber of Commerce, etc) that would in the long run boost the brand awareness of the main franchise. Giving each franchisee their own domain name might also help with local rankings, if you can get a domain name that includes both the business function and location in the name (for example PittsburghRugCleaning.com) - since exact match domains still get a boost over other domains that don't. On the other hand, putting everything as a subfolder or subdirectory would be much less work from a hosting side of things.

Carla - the answer is .... it depends! There are various different strategies for buying domains, and attempting to use them for SEO purposes. The best case would be to negotiate privately with the owner of an existing website, and purchasing the domain and all of the contents of the domain from them.  Businesses merge all the time,  This is regular thing, and Google won't punish or look down on anyone for doing this.  It will be clear that the domain changed hands, probably by updates to the name servers, and whois information, but since the website never expired or dropped from the registry, Google would probably assume this was a merger. Also, if you do this, one of the best strategies for dealing with the domain would be to redirect individual pages to the most analogous page on your site, to take greatest advantage of the merged site. It's also possible to buy up expired or expiring domains.  There are different stages in the life cycle of domain name expiration where you can buy names.  If you buy them in what's called 'pre-release' status, the domains will be transferred to your own account before the name dropped out of the registry, so it will maintain it's original creation date.  You won't get the content with the domain, but this kind of domain purchase 'might' have some more life to it. Finally, there are domains that have completely dropped out of the registry.  The links from these won't have much more life to them. But in general, if you can buy the domain and website content directly from the original owner, it should show up as a business merger (or even as 'rebranding' in your case, since your website is new), and should be a relatively safe tactic.

If they are under one domain you could use some external sitemap generator and generate a single sitemap for both no?

Oh, that's great, Scott. Linda is terrific. Please, say hi to her from Miriam. Good luck! Miriam

Yes, I have it all. Not sure about incoming spammy links. I did almost everything to my site (datafeeds, lots of ads, duplicate content, etc.) but never engaged in spammy links. I will try to find some other way to show ads and see what happens. Thanks!

Hey Tracy, Yes i think it would be a good idea to start from scratch if the bad links cannot be removed, because they are only going to effect your site more and more with every Google update. You should check If the 1500 visitors a month are returning users then they can be made aware of the domain change and you can keep that user base, however 1500 unique visitors a month would suggest that you have some good rankings somewhere so i would check to see where there being referred from and if its a particular link on a website perhaps contact them to get it changed for your new one. Also make sure you get your old site De-indexed so there are not any duplicate content issues if you wish to keep the content you already have. Hope i helped!

You can also use the "Fetch as google" in Webmaster tool, submit your sitemap for index,, it takes a day to get the results back brom the crawler. The number of submissions are limited to 10/month.

Hi there. Thanks for ur tips here. What's my next step from here? It's obvious that photobooklaos.com redirected to photobookworldwide.com , but how can that influence the search results? Why does google shows photobooklaos.com since i'm optimizing for photobookworldwide.com? Is there any solution for me to fix now? Cheers Gerald

Parked domains usually 301 to another domain. I guess they do it because they think it is the best thing to do. These days the general public are used to typing in a domain and clicking it and it redirects to another site. If you have two separate product types I think you should have 2 totally separate websites.

Thanks, this is what I would say under normal circumstances but when these websites require a feed to tell them exactly when a villa is booked or not, so as you don't get double bookings don't you think Google may consider this slightly different?

Hmmm.I'm not sure I'm following what you are doing (or vis versa) You can check out my site if you'd like, and you can see I have big buckets for things (like therapy.) But I have so many posts under that, I need to make them into child categories. But if I do I can't use the url for the main 'landing' page. (If that makes sense.) I checked out the link you posted and it looks like when I click on one of your category names I'm taken to a page that has a different url. Is there a reason for that? From what I understand it's best to let users know where they are going when they click on a link. Was there a reason you didn't have the url the same as the catagory they clicked on in your menu? (I'm still learning so forgive me in advance if I'm missing something.)

Unfortunately, to maintain the integrity of the historical data, it requires you to start a new campaign. You can run multiple campaigns simultaneously, or delete or pause any non-essential campaigns.

First off, the biggest concern will be spammers. Use a good captcha system like reCaptcha or OpenCaptcha to control who signs up, although charging money is the best way to keep them out. Second, don't manipulate the anchor text at the bottom of the user generated stores, just use your brand name. Third, I wouldn't be hugely concerned about it being a subdomain. Think about all the spam on blogspot and wordpress.com. You won't enjoy the authority status at the beginning that lends them some buffer against the spam, but if you control it at the beginning you should build up your site enough that you can weather some crap making it's way through.

Thank you Mark. Wow, what a comprehensive response. I appreciate it. I have also found some more info doing further research. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/should-i-change-my-urls-for-seo I will continue to post info here as I find it.