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Yes. Using OSE you can research the link profile of the URL and see if it has ALL followed links (which would appear unnatural) or if it has a good mix of both followed and no-follow links (appearing a bit more natural). You can always look further into the inbound links of course (using OSE) to see just how "natural" they are (or aren't). But you will have to use your judgement on that end. We use linkdetox.com to dive further into link value but I'm sure there are other great tools out there too.

Oh that is pretty great! Do you know if there is any impact from using either? They don't directly answer that in the article. The site I am working with is offering video which would be behind a paywall. My thought is lock down the video, but make the text free, especially since google can't read videos anyway!

Honestly, there could be a very real world impact on your SERPs without you understanding it. I suggest not blocking all traffic from foreign countries. Let's take this scenario as an example: I have an ecommerce website that only sells to the United States. I really only care about the US traffic, since that is where my sales can come from. However, many of my inbound site links seem to be coming from Outside US traffic. This outside US traffic cannot buy from me, in fact, they cannot buy many of the products I sell because they are not available in their country. Even so, when investigating my link profile, I notice that some users are getting the products I sell from somewhere and then blogging about how they love the product. They include a link back to my site since they know I sell the product. Now, it's true that most traffic from that referral source will not convert to paid users. But, the links they provide are helping me in the SERPs, which brings in the qualified traffic that converts to sales. In regards to the bounce rate =: You're not actually decreasing the bounce rate. Instead, you've identified the accurate segment of users to be measuring bounce rate from. In your Google Analytics, you should filter out the foreign traffic so that you're only measuring the correct segment of traffic that is important to you. Now you have the best of both worlds - your reports show the accurate target segment and its metrics, as well as, any benefit that comes from the foreign traffic and link building.

Thanks!  We will probably test this solution.

Thank you guys! This was just what I needed. Extra thumbs up for your article Amelia!

We have a similar problem, but in reverse. It's a UK website that needs to rank in Asia but not UK. We've tried a few things - shifting the server made no difference (nor the speed benefits) and geo locating on webmaster tools was pointless as we have a 5 country target market. Targeting cities again didn't help because the number of location targeted searches was sub 1% for the relevant keywords. So there were two things that we did that seemed to have some benefit. First we targeted some non valuable but relevant keywords with high search volumes (2 orders of magnitude more than our real targets) and got a high ranking for that. Then put our effort into getting this traffic to convert to the non-ranking pages. Secondly because there was non substantial difference in EU and Asian ranking for our keywords we focused on ranking well in Europe and then just filtered out the EU and US traffic and we saw benefits. What I'd do here in your case is focus on the Indian market to get lots of relevant back links. It should be easier than the US in someways and take advantage of the size of the market and it's lack of sophistication to increase the volume of keywords. If websites are anything like they are in Asia there is a lot of crap design and zero optimisation. So it should be possible to put together an outreach package that generates lots of low DA links that are very relevant for lower costs than in the US. So for example if you were looking at outsourced accounting I'd build link bait that appeals to Indian accounting firms to get the links to your key pages - but optimise them for US consumption. Of course all this depends on your market and keywords but I hope it's given some ideas.

Not really a big deal but their tool is pretty useful. If you dont have to spend more than 2 minutes, just do it.

Hey there Alex! Just wanted to make sure you were aware of this article from The Moz Blog. It helps quite a bit and serves as a checklist for keeping SEO elements in order. A checklist if you will http://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos Hope it helps you as much as its helped me over the years! These migration projects are always a ton of fun  = |

Well that is irritating.

A second opinion, Agreed with SEOVP , this is 100% redirect no need to have both pages if you can avoid this, 301 Redirect , James

I got it... managed to change as you've suggested, let's see next Moz crawl how we will behave... thank you so very much and the others for the help, a nice weekend for all!

It depends on a lot of factors, but in general, I don't like to put category subdirectories in unless they are necessary. For example, if a category page is useful to your audience, then it might be a good idea, but in this case it doesn't sound like one would be. Also, consider how your audience will react to the URL: domain.com/attorneys looks a lot better to people, I think, than domain.com/industries/attorneys, which implies you're marketing to a bunch of different industries and may lead them to believe this is solely a marketing play and you don't actually understand their needs. A page right off the root seems more exclusive and like you care more about their industry. These are just my opinions. From a strictly SEO perspective, you're fine either way, but I'd still go right off the root.

Just asking.

EGOL, I am once again surprised and thankful for your common sense and words of experience. I will take all of your advice. Thank you.

Finding a UK based SEO firm will help immensely....Dave's great - but a google for same shows there's thousands who will come up...just pick your shortlist with some degree of expertise...and DO inisist on getting references you can check!!!

Thanks both - I wasn't expecting that answer. I suppose you learn something every day. I have now submitted the reconsideration request so hopefully that will go through fine!

Highly unlikely to get you penalized. Google understands the nature of ecommerce sites and that products go out of stock regularly, hence the need for proper merchandising.

How long ago did you make the changes, it sometimes takes a little time for the meta data to be recrawled, resubmitted and indexed, I often don't see a change for a few days. I am going to presume if the meta was automated you are using a CMS of some sorts. Might be an idea to check your installation and settings to make sure you have cleared and reset them, upgraded them and also possibly reset your cache. Google sometimes reallocates meta description to something that is more appropriate, but I have not seen it in titles. I would imagine someone will probably have a better answer. But you can at least tick these of the list on the way to your solution.

And do you think that Google always knows who the original site is? Do they always check history? On top of more aged content, we are the only one with tens of thousands of FB Likes (wish they were G+, but our users do not use that), and thousands of comments. All real.

In the light of this article (http://searchengineland.com/google-can-now-execute-ajax-javascript-for-indexing-99518), I can say that Google can crawl the content in Javascript (few of it, if not all). Hope this helps!!