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Hi Ryan Thanks for your response. I can assure you that pursuing black hat methods was never the intention. I don't think anyone on SEOmoz would want that label. But I can see why you'd see it that why. It was decided that both websites should offer the same products, focussing on their 2 key products but then saying "we also provide such and such through our sister brand". We are happy to have the association and for Google to know the 2 sites are related. The reason I asked the original question was due to the advice of an SEO company we used to use who said that we needed to move one of the sites to a different server if we wanted them to rank for their own keywords. I guess they weren't telling us the whole story? From what you say, a new content strategy is probably the answer.

Cheers - that we me just there - A new SEO plugin killed it which I quickly deleted (it wastn even active but screwed things up).  Site back to 'normal' now Thanks for checking.

Hi, sure, what I meant was - if you're going to re-target, meaning maybe a page on the old site was optimized for "blue widgets" and you're re-optimizing it for "red widgets". I was just curious if you were trying to change what you're hoping to rank for? Which brings me back to my point, if you're redoing everything from the ground up, you really want to do keyword research to know exactly what terms you're going to optimize the pages for.

You need to encode it. [komimoda@home ~]$ php echo urlencode('http://www.geographics.com/Graduation-Stationery,-35%-OFF-Printable-Certificates-Blank-Gift-Certificates/c1353_1354_1359/index.html'); ?> http%3A%2F%2Fwww.geographics.com%2FGraduation-Stationery%2C-35%25-OFF-Printable-Certificates-Blank-Gift-Certificates%2Fc1353_1354_1359%2Findex.html[komimoda@home ~]$ It's bombing on the %-  that isn't a number after it. If you want to shoot me a email I can get it done for you for free? joseph@michael-chambers.com Without db hashing, it's nearly impossible to get those from htaccess into a rewrite table lookup. %20 for sure. apache turns the char back to a space before passing it on for comparison. and text based of course, uses the space as a separater between match, and replacement. It probably also turns %25 back into a % before hash tables too. sorry tmi. Oh look at this: http://www.geographics.com/Graduation-Stationery%2C-35%25-OFF-Printable-Certificates-Blank-Gift-Certificates/c1353_1354_1359/index.html

Brilliant, thanks guys - much appreciated Simon

Thanks for you reply Alan.

I use the google shortener all the time because it does pass value. I would say yes.

Hi Robert - Yes we did it on the URL level, but the client is using IIS as opposed to Apache, so we had to figure out a way to use a global 301 that trickled down to the page level. Each page is redirecting to it's new home on the server side (www.oldsite-innerpage.com to www.newsite-innerpage.com). We actually ended up with a global re-write rule that still allowed it to be a page-level redirect. Eventually we will be going into IIS and writing in server-side 301's for each individual page. It's been 2 weeks so I'm hoping to see return of rank here in 2 weeks time or so. Thanks for your input.

Powermapper is very cool: http://www.powermapper.com/download/mapper/index.htm It will give you a visual representation of the site and has a free trial so you have a go. I have not used for a site with over 1000 pages but it is certainly good for sites with hundreds of pages. It allows you to output to HTML, PDF etc so really can help give you an idea of site structure. Hope it helps. Marcus

Yes, I would fix every thing that is or could be a problem, it is hard to rank, and you dont weant anything working aginst you.

I see what you mean, so you have a bit of a unique situation. Have you done keyword research? Do you have an idea of what you really want to rank for based upon search volume etc? Do people search for these specific product names and variations?

Mark No problem From what I have heard, there is a period of time where you can get a really good rise in rankings from fast backlinking, which might last 30-90 days. But then it will start to regress if a more natural and diverse backlink portfolio is not developed. I believe they allow this window of time to discourage a competitor sabotaging you with a bunch of bad links. Just my own theory though. -Dan

Based on my real estate site experience this has not worked in that arena. There is a large MLS (Central) site in a top ten metro area which allows brokerages and agents to pull in MLS and other demo data from their site. Having installed multiple I Frames to pull this data into (only allowed option from MLS site) our sites we have never seen even a micro bump. The site we pull from with the IFrame is a DA of 65. I have put their Iframe on as many as 20 pages on a new site and never pulled a bit of juice. Best of luck