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Thanks..just mailed em..lets C !

Some fluctuations (between PR 3 and PR 2 in your case) do not mean anything bad. That's just natural. As for the traffic, you didn't mention how huge was the drop in traffic and position? Chances are, that's another normal fluctuation

This is a warning in our system that often confuses people, and we're actually looking to rewrite it. In many cases, a canonical tag SHOULD point to a different URL. By their very nature, many canonical tags are on the non-canonical version of the URL. We just warn people in case they made a mistake and created a mis-match they didn't intend to. Since this is more of a support question, feel free to contact me through the Private Message system with the URL(s) in question, and I'll take a look.

You might want to check that the linking root domain isn't just the domain the page is hosted on. If it is then it's probably worth just removing the extra page altogether. The best solution if not would probably be a rel=canonical tag rather than a 301. This means you won't be increasing page load times and it's fairly easy to implement too.

I'm not entirely clear what the nature of the non-paginated pages is, but the canonical tag is probably a decent solution here. You may actually want to leave the crawl paths to those URLs open for a bit - Google won't process the canonicals unless they crawl the URLs. See my recent post on that subject: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/logic-meet-google-crawling-to-deindex Pagination is a bit tougher. You've got a few options: (1) META NOINDEX pages 2+ (tends to be pretty effective, but depends on the nature of the pages) (2) Use Rel=prev and Rel=next. This is tough to implement, but is recommended by Google. If the pagination isn't massive-scale, it works reasonably well. (3) If the pagination is controlled by URL parameters, indicate them in Google Webmaster Tools. I've had mixed luck with this, and your examples wouldn't work ("/P6" isn't going to come up as a traditional URL variable).

Just had a eureka moment with the issue as above! All that was needed was a .htaccess on the old site like this: Redirect 301 / http://www.newsite.com/ This attempts to pass a user/crawler to the equivalent page on the new site (which doesn't exist), so this is then handled with a .htaccess on the new site which then redirects to the new versions of those pages: Redirect 301 /about.asp http://www.newwebsite.com/about (specific redirect 1) Redirect 301 /latest.asp http://www.newwebsite.com/news (specific redirect 1) Simples!

Andrew while I agree with what you say, is there not a greater risk if your blog is hacked and then a hacker may gain access to the server where as on a sub-domain the blog can be on a different server?

Sometimes you just have to upgrade your platform. When this happens, it's also sometimes a good time to change your URL structure - especially if your old URLs were long, ugly, full of parameters, and in general bad for click-throughs. As Ben said, if it makes sense to keep your old URL structure (and it's technically possible) this is your best bet. Barring that, moving everything via 301 redirects is not unsimilar to an entire site migration across domains, although it is simpler. Keep in mind there is some lose of "link juice" through a 301 redirect. I can't give you a precise number, but most SEOs believe it's about 80%. With this in mind, it's important to build new links after a large URL structural change, and make sure your internal link architecture is solid. One piece of advice. I would make sure to maintain 2 xml sitemaps. One containing the old URLs, and the second containing the new URLs. Submit both to Google via Webmaster Tools. This way, Google will still try to crawl the old URLs and process the 301, dropping the old page from the index faster. Without this step, Google may keep both pages in its index and ding you for duplicate content. The process may take a couple of months for Google to index all the new URLs and deindex all the old ones. When this happens, make sure to remove the old sitemap. For more tips, you might find some value in these site migration guides. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos https://seogadget.co.uk/domain-migration/ Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

What if there isn't any content on the redirected domain? Would there be any reason to, or reason not to, forward a blank domain that is only relevant because of that actual domain name? Still using shoes: I have 2 domains, SHOES.COM and DESIGNER.COM. Shoes.com is where I sell shoes. Designer.com is the name of the shoe designer. There isn't any content on Designer.com, but it's the name of my shoe designer...so it's relevant to shoes.com. Should I forward the domain to Shoes.com? How many times is it OK to do this before taking an SEO hit?

Thank you both! So sorry on the delay to respond. Makes sense!

Hi Highland! I know that relative URLs is anything but good, especially when you also use URL rewrite. The only question is how Google will react to this? Thanks for your answer!

So if I do a 301 redirect with the new host do I have to take all the files from Intuit and host them with the new host or can I just transfer the domain name and do a 301 without transferring the files? Never had to deal with this before. Both sites are on the first page for most of my keywords so I am good there.

Thank goodness it no longer works now, Penguin and Panda are crushing these schemes. These are quite common with auto submission/ Link building software organizations as well. Run!

Hey Ben, Thanks for your input. To answer your question: Why refresh from .com to .com/index.aspx? That is just one of the major hosting limitations. I was floored by how restricting the hosting package was. There are multiple areas of the site, such as support, a store, and an active forum to name a few, which is the reason for staying thusfar.

You should use the Yoast Robots extension to fix almost all the duplicate content. http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/yoast-metarobots.html When using 2.0 Magento connect: http://connect20.magentocommerce.com/community/Yoast_MetaRobots for 1.0 use: magento-community/Yoast_MetaRobots Also use canonical URL. You can find this at the admin panel: System - Configuration - Catalog - Canonical links for catagories System - Configuration - Catalog - Canonical links for products

Chris-        Hoping I can help you avoid the sack!!! I will divide my feedback into four areas: Website layout CMS Analytics Creating unique content focused on your keywords Website layout is average....the fact that you have used so much of your home page real estate for navigation doesnt make sense. you have multiple options for home, about us, custom cable and links.....the red is overhwleming....the choices are overwhelming. Way too busy..... Take a step back and think about why is someone coming to the page? what are the top three things they might want to accomplish?  then get rid of everything else and focus on those three things....you cna remove all of your other headings and subheadings that are not call to action items, down to the footer or condensed into one heading..... If your goal is to get them to order cable now then there should be a box "Order cable now" or "check out our prices now"... If your goal is to get their email information to follow up market to them, then there should be a call to action box that says"save money with our cable now" or "Sign up for special weekly deals" and then you would have an email box they could fill in and submit. If your goal is to get them to see why your cable is unique....then post that information with a call to action. CMS.  Im not sure what CMS you are using, but hopefully you are being indexed correctly and the sitemap is being generated that is solid and provides guidance to the search engines. We recommend wordpress because we have seen that when we convert the same exact content from another site to wordpress, we not only upgrade the user experience but it gets better SEO value instantly because of the architecture and ease of use with plugins. Whatever you are using, make sure you have a solid foundation. Analytics. You need to install google analytics on your pages so you can track the activity on your site. You need to find out where people are going on the site, how long they are spending on each page and where they are abansdoining. Just install the code on every page in the footer and then set up some basic reporting to get you vital information related to what you are talking about above. You dont know what you dont know....get the data and you then will have some clarity on what is happening. Creating unique content with keywords. Let me offer you a few suggestions.... Pick one primary or money keyword on each page. And then pick 2-3 sub keywords that are important and relevant. Just focus on those....don't pick 10 keywords a page.... When writing content make sure you include the main keyword in the title, in the first sentence and the last sentence. Make sure you mention the other sub keywords at least 2-3 times in the main article/content. Make sure you use bold, italics and underlines at least once in the content. Don't stuff the keywords in the content......use the keywords only if it makes sense in the context of what you are writing about..... Lastly, it sounds like you might not be maximizing your seo value for alt tags and meta tags.....make sure your meta descriptions and picture alt tags are seo optimized with your keywords for that page.  Again, with wordpress this is a simple process of filling in the required fields for one of the wordpress plugins. Good luck. Hope this helps. Please show me the three thumbs up! Mark

I think one hyphen in a domain is not too bad, especially if its a .com...it only looks really bad whens its buy-cheap-viagra-online.info. It's very unlikely to affect ranking.

That sounds unnatural and that it would not be like that if it wasnt for search engines, so yes.