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Thanks Brandan! I change the link as recommended to nofollow and anchor text to holidayshuahin.com But what do you think about the 308 links i send from Dreamestaethuahin.com menu to Holidayshuahin.com if HOLIDAYSHUAHIN somehow recieved a penelty than it might be best not to link at all from menu. Instead i could link from menu to a page on Dreamestatehuahin.com that will be the only page pointing out to Holidayshuahin.com

http://www.optimizesmart.com/google-analytics-wrong-why/

I experienced a similar issue recently. Upon closer inspection I noticed there were duplicate canonical tags on the pages. Google actually ignores ALL if there are more than one. So I would certainly double check that.

Hi there, IMO the two pages are near duplicates and I have seen pages that have been indexed in such cases (on one of our own projects). Then we have taken in consideration the canonical, and issue was solved. This is why I have recommended it, but I am opened to other solutions also. Gr., Keszi

Hi Daniel, Having a friendly/readable url structure will surely help you in several ways. You can read more about it here: http://moz.com/learn/seo/url http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/basics-of-search-engine-friendly-design-and-development In the second article check the "Url construction guidelines" part. But before you start implementation on such a development, try to check how you could avoid an url structure redesign failure. (Such as forgetting about 301 redirects from the old structure to the new one). I hope it helped. Gr. Keszi

I don't know of any rule that says the content has to be close to or resemble the original content. I've used both url to url and many to one url methods of redirecting pages, depending on what I'm trying to accomplish. If you CAN go url to url, I would, simply from a usability standpoint. If I am clicking on a link in the SERPS for "old link", I am expecting the content on "new link" to at resemble the content I'm expecting. If not, you will get higher bounce rates etc. I'd go for url to url for this reason alone. In the circumstances where you can't do this, such as limitations WIX has on url to url 301 redirects, then you would go to the main page or section page. Remember, the intent of the redirect is to tell Google the content moved and that it has a new home. Again, no rule that I can cite on this, but we all know Google likes what people like.

There are a lot of these "little things" that must be put in line to make a domain successful. Because this is such an important domain, with the success of a group of professionals at stake, I would hire an experienced SEO to give it a top to bottom review and get it into fighting shape.  This person should be able to help you get the site move straight, optimize it for organic search, get you better set-up for local search.      I would do this sooner than later. All of the pages have the same title tag and a lot of code that is not needed.   A good SEO could expand the keyword reach of the domain and make it more competitive. Getting the 301 working correctly will eventually pass the DA/PA to your new domain, but there are more important things that need to be done. (I am not posting this because I am looking for work.  I only work on my own sites.)

Thanks - I should have specified that both sites are exactly the same, so products will be redirected accordingly. My only concern was losing any traction with Google since the "cool widgets" keyword will no longer be in the actual URL.

There also seem to be url's which are duplicated: /new-york-city-tickets/elektra-theatre-tickets/50-shades-the-musical-mar-21-2015-1283412.html /new-york-city-tickets/elektra-theatre-tickets/50-shades-the-musical-mar-25-2015-1283241.html /new-york-city-tickets/elektra-theatre-tickets/50-shades-the-musical-mar-27-2015-1283246.html => 3 different url's - but the content seems to be identical on these pages. You could try to do a full crawl with Screamingfrog - and check the semi-duplicates on your site (identical H1, metadescription,... and so on)

People do both.  They will search for particular sizes as well as general broad searches and then once on the site, drill down to their particular size.

There's another trap that I've seen people fall into, and that is not looking at the pages you're competing with in the search results. If you look at the SERPS for your target term, are their any insights there? How competitive is it? Are there lots of ads? Are the pages that are ranking  optimised/targeted to the search term? Do the competitors have a reputation/brand associated with this particular search term? Based on the pages being returned, can you establish the searchers intent? (Is this a navigational/transactional/informational query? What is the searchers level of awareness of this product/service? You mention local - for this term, is there a local intent? How localised as the search results for this term? What else apart from the authority of the page is helping the top ranking do so well for this keyword? What about related searches? Are their opportunities to target this term more broadly by building content around the questions subtopics related to this term?

We have a client in this niche who also had this exact issue, surprisingly. She had been doing wedding cupcakes and then started picking up other events from word of mouth. We suggested she decide where she wants to be, not where she is, and organise that way. The most important thing we told her was to not overdo the URLs by including cupcake in each one.  So somecupcakedomain.com.au/weddings somecupcakedomain.com.au/corporate-events somecupcakedomain.com.au/sports Instead of: somecupcakedomain.com.au/wedding-cupcakes/chocolate-wedding-cupcakes somecupcakedomain.com.au/corporate-cupcakes/christmas-party-cupcakes somecupcakedomain.com.au/sports-cupcakes/baseball-cupcakes It's a lot less spammy, easy to read and we've found that clean URLs perform better in pretty much every way (SEO, conversions, etc.)

Thank you

When I make decisions on links like this I base my decisions on overall intent and scale.  If you've got a small handful of links like these and they're not keyword anchored then I'd leave them.  But, if this is your main way of getting links then I'd be more concerned. From my experience in dealing with manual penalties, the majority of the time when Google gives us an example from a forum, it's really obvious that it's an unnatural link.  It'll usually have a keyword anchor or really not make sense to be there other than for the SEO value.  I would think that the same logic goes in to Penguin decisions. The other factor that may weigh in to my decision making is what other types of links come from those forum posts.  If there were links to casino and porn, etc then I'd be worried Google would not like the quality of links in those forums.  That doesn't sound like it applies to you. No one knows for sure, when it comes to Penguin, but that's what I'd do.

Are you able to determine the date(s) on which your decline started?  Often correlating that with the dates from the Moz algorithm guide can help: http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change A quick look at your backlink profile definitely has me concerned for Penguin. SEMRush.com shows a big drop in traffic that coincides with May 2013.  Given that Penguin updated May 22, 2013, then this makes me think even more that Penguin is the problem. There could be other issues though too.  I see a lot of sites that work hard to clean up backlink profiles but they can have other problems as well. My main concern is that I'm not sure if you have good links in your profile. I'm not saying that you don't, but when I look at your links sorted by anchor text, they all seem to be self made links that are only there so that Google rankings can be manipulated.  If Penguin has hit you then it means that those links are discounted.  (It also means that a filter has been placed on your site so it can't have a chance to rank well again until you clean up your links and Penguin reruns.)  I see a lot sites that clean up their backlinks and then wonder why they didn't recover from Penguin, when really the issue is that there is nothing left once the cleanup is done.  Hopefully that is not the case with you!

Most of us SEO practitioners have had clients come to us with that kinda "hack" on their site....poor security or using just plain bad SEO wanna-bes might be the cause...so yes as Matt said here, tighten up your site!!!

There is no "penalty" per say for duplicate content. But, if you have the same page in two places they will be competing for a spot in the SERPs. The best way to handle that is a cross domain canonical tag. I agree with Doug however. I think that there is more value having this information on your current site. Is there a particular reason you want them separate?

Thanks for your reply Monica. The blog is a landing page where the separate blog posts were listed, which is what I think you are suggesting so I'll go ahead and recommend that we do the re-directs to the corresponding page. Thank you all for your replies - it's helped to get my thinking right

Hey there Don thanks for the answer. No i am not referring to the domain on my profile thanks for searching though. You are right i am having some server issues that are causing many many problems. Anyway I will probably come back with another question soon enough! Thanks again !

Thanks Matt, Joey, Joseph and Keszi for your feedback. I will investigate and see what I can come up with. I will update any progress. Cheers M