Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Jennifer, Ranking factors remain valid - the remark of Matt was rather on the fact that for targeting a country better methods exist that just adding the country in the url. If you already have done that, and try to capture search queries of type 'bookkeeping Spain' - adding the keyword Spain to the url/title/H1 will help. Hope this clarifies, Dirk

Then why redirect at all? Why not just update the page with the new content / layout (whatever) and keep a record of when you changed it. If you keep the old layout / content you can always switch back if the test proves the old worked better than the new...

Hi George, Actually, I misspoke above. Sorry about that! The first result for the non-personalized search "site:minibusshuttle.com" ---- https://www.google.co.uk/#q=site:minibusshuttle.com&psw=0 --- in google.co.uk links to https://minibusshuttle.com, which shows content for Essex Digital Media. (See the attached screen cap, which shows page 1 search results for this query. I believe they will look very similar to yours, including the title and description for planet55.co.uk). Yes, I would definitely recommend pushing the hosting company to straighten this out immediately. I would also seriously consider migrating the site to a hosting company you can trust. Best of luck, and please us know how the hosting company responds. Christy 6npD2gl

SEO BOOK - Bloggers Guide to SEO (Highly recommend reading this) All the best.

Hi there, just checking in do see if you have an update for us. Christy

Hi Miguel Check out this link here. What I would do is create a call to action on the homepage that catches the user's eye and links them to an offer page. That way, you eliminate the need for this pop up (which shows lower engagement) and you can link to a static /offers page. I would just consider the usability aspect of it all before jumping in and sticking with it. Visual Website Optimizer and Optimizely can help you A/B test these sorts of things. That being said, read the Webmasters Help Full Specification guide. There are some technicalities here that you would want to discuss with your web development team. Hope this helps! Good luck!

I would do the proper 301s ... pass it to the most relevant page.

Hi Alan, To go down another route, you could instead set up URL parameters in WMT itself, that way you could set the URL that contains /page/ as the canonical without having to implement anything on the Wordpress side. Kind Regards Jimmy

Thanks Tom and Donford.. That helped a lot. We just posted a follow-up question to this over here - http://moz.com/community/q/is-it-possible-to-move-a-couple-of-posts-and-comments-from-one-wp-domain-to-another

Thanks Rick, you just answered my question on how long it will take to update!

Hi Marcy, If the sites are using your brand name and/or other brand terms, and your brand is copyrighted, you may be able to file a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown request with Google: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-notice?pli=1\. As they note in the description on the tool, be very clear about whether the other site's actions actually constitute a violation of your copyright before filing the request. I think it's unlikely that these new sites are impacting your site's performance in search - I was a little unclear about the JavaScript redirect, though (I'm at work and don't want to click on the links you posted on my work computer). Is it redirecting from their site to your site, or from their site to another site that is the porn/junk site? If it's the latter, that shouldn't be affecting your site at all. If it's the former, you may want to file disavow requests at the domain level for those sites just in case. If your drop in rankings was caused by these new sites, I would expect to see a drop in performance across the board, rather than for specific queries, so I recommend that you keep digging on other reasons for the drop. I would take a look at the sites that are ranking now for the terms you've lost rankings for. How are they different from your site? What sites are ranking now that weren't ranking when you were on top? It may be that Google has decided that your site doesn't fulfill the search intent for those keywords, so taking a look at the sites that rank now will give you some insight into the kinds of pages that Google wants to rank for these terms. Since these were highly-converting terms for you, consider investing in PPC ads for these terms while you work to regain your organic presence. Good luck!

Hi Charles There's actually a question that has a few answers and ideas to it located here. Check that out - there's some pretty good stuff there. Hope this helps out a bit!

Hi Patrick, Thanks for getting in. I beleive I see the SERP fluctuations on a daily basis, but that exact thing was surely off the loop. Possibly, Google took into consideration some penalizing factor that it hadn't  measured in right after the site was re-indexed. That's why I thought of some toxic links that were re-assessed.

Hi again In that case I would do this (just my opinion, again): Webinar page: "Photoship Webinars | Company Name" Individual webinar page: "Photoshop in the Cloud | Webinars | Company" Your doing a few things here - you're telling search engines - this is a page about Photoshop in the Cloud that is a webinar from this company. Users can read that title and quickly understand as well. I have always been a fan of the "Page Content | Category | Brand" title layout myself. That's just me. I would also check out Schema.org for opportunities to markup your content on those webinar and individual webinar pages to better assist crawlers. Here's a good discussion on ProWebmasters. Does this make sense?

Hey again! Please do - I would actually love to hear about the progress if you feel like keeping me in the loop! My email is in my profile! Good luck, sir!

Upon a basic inspection using Google and keywords, neither site appears to be ranking, except for Google local business page. And that is so far for only one specific keyword. Where one website shows and the others Google+ page does. From looking at the replies and doing more reading on this I have 2 options. 1. Make 1 site the only site and redirect the others to it. Create landing pages for each suburb serviced with unique content 2. Recreate each site with unique content with a link to the other sites. Essentially remove most if not all duplicate content (words and images) Am I correct? And if the group wishes to keep the individual business names option 2 would be best ? Cheers

If both pages are exactly the same, you should still 301 redirect the page.  There's no point in having two identical pages laying around and it isn't good for the search engines. The canonical tag is typically used if you need to keep those pages on the site or very similar content is posted in multiple places, then you can direct the search engines to the page you want them to count.

Short answer: create a custom 404 page, not just for these pages, but one that can show for everypage on your site. A few resources: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93641?hl=en Example: http://moz.com/sadfklfadsadfjs https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=custom+404&pws=0&gl=us&gws_rd=ssl#pws=0&gl=us&q=how+to+create+a+custom+404

The best sources on all things schema is great here from Built Visible &  learn  schema from Moz http://moz.com/learn/seo/schema-structured-data If The above is not true you are everything  Moz & This PDF will show you everything http://builtvisible.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Schema.org-Cheat-Sheets.pdf http://builtvisible.com/micro-data-schema-org-guide-generating-rich-snippets/ schema–creator.org is a fantastic tool to create your own schema but there's really no substitute for the PDF Sincerely, Thomas