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Yes I have recently done something similar 2 times. One time for a local company which had a SEO targeting an geographically unsuitable service area for my client. It is a traffic school operating in a large city situated next to an even larger city. The SEO took a new domein xxxcity.nl and focused the keyword strategy on this as well. But how do the instructors pickup and drop off students in city A north and city B south within a hour or 90 minutes. Never going to happen 8 times a day on time. And it doesnt convert well either because people now this when the see an offer. But I undid the city in the url part by copying the website enterely and placed a simple php script in the WordPress index.php file in the root. This replaces the domain for all request and redirects with a 301. The destination domain is the domain the client previously used. // Permanent redirect of all PR from A > B // Get http request headers for requests on old page   $uri = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; // Get the path after the old domain to redirect to corresponding page on new   $url_path = parse_url($uri, PHP_URL_PATH); // drop the city from the url and go to new location   $location_new = 'http://www.xxxrijschool.nl' . $url_path; // send 301 and load destination url   header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");   header("Location: $location_new"); exit(); ?> The above script I place on the old domain A but only after copying the whole website to the new domain B. If it's a 1-on-1 copy then this script is places on A. Thats all. It will cost some PageRank to move 2 times for 1 page but the transfer starts in a few days and will be noticeable in 2 weeks or so. After 6-8 weeks it will mostly be moved and normalize from there on. If in between we optimize on-page and aquire good backlinks then it will turn the decline of rank and can outperform the old site in a matter of 8 weeks. For larger and large site it's recommended that the time to live for DNS records is set to 5 minutes at least a week in advanced, This is recommended by google somewhere in the guide for transfering domains in webmaster tools I believe. Hope this helps/ Gr Daniel

This made me say "What!" With some other words following. http://moz.com/community/q/https-sitewide-move-has-resulted-in-huge-rankings-drop Not specifically SEO, but when comments nowadays suggest link farming, also makes me go "What". What makes you say 'what', White?

Hi Louie, It seems unlikely to me (which doesn't mean it's impossible) that they have a city-specific penalty. Can't say I have ever heard of that before either, and I would say it would be hard for Google to decide on something like that, manually or algorithmically. The idea that it could be a large number of links from the Sydney region honestly seems like a stretch: that should really just result in a link-based penalty that affects the site nation-wide. Where this could have happened, however, is if someone abused directory links with way too many links using "sydney" in anchor text but I'm sure you'd have seen something like that already. Even then, I haven't heard of that hurting all rankings in that region alone, but rather just for queries including "sydney". Have you tested this searching from IPs in each region, i.e. I just wanted to make sure it's 100% confirmed that the site does rank well and receives traffic from Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth etc. and that you are not seeing personalised results in those locations and not in Sydney. I know it seems like grasping at straws but it's a really weird case for a non-geo-specific query.

I don't see that much differences in the URL structure of Hollywood Life and TMZ, their editors just chose the short or shorter variant for their news story (in most cases they don't have to worry about SEO). The Washington post is a pity as they have to add a couple of extra directories in their URL structure.

Thanks Rick. I guess I was trying to avoid popups as most people find them annoying. I ended up coming up with a solution: added javascript to redirect for aussie and NZ visitors from .com to .com/au the reason for js is that most google bots are from usa, So if I was to 301 redirect they would never been able to crawl my /au sub directory. since google bots don't read js then they will ignore these redirects and instead crawl my au directory even though they are from US.I didn't end up using rel alternate because my research showed that they are meant to be used when your language changes. In my case the language is the same.

I figured out a solution.

Thank you for the really good answer. This is very useful.

If you are paying a company to build links for you, and they refuse to show you the links they have built I would be very weary. Tell them you can't pay them if you cannot see that the work has been completed.

I see you as #18. My guess is that you have lots of backlinks from sites that are in Europe but not so much from US based sites. I would run competitor link audits of our site vs top ranking sites for those terms in US. www.arcas.co.uk www.tigerchick.com www.webdesignsedinburgh.co.uk www.prettyklicks.com/web-design-edinburgh/ www.webwisecreative.co.uk www.70two.co.uk 11beats.co.uk www.mercurytide.co.uk www.clooti.co.uk www.dialogue-web-design-edinburgh.co.uk

Have you done a back link analysis of the domain to see if the previous domain owner created an unnatural back link profile that still exists? Maybe the back links from the previous owner are about terms not related to your content and it is throwing off the site categorization. Sometimes it just takes time to get back up and running after a big change like that.  I see your old site still has 2,200 pages indexed in google - https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS503US504&ion=1&espv=2&es_th=1&ie=UTF-8#q=site%3Aaaholidays.co.za Did you add the new site to webmaster tools and submit a sitemap?

Thanks. I may take that approach with Arman Jeans Coat - Red set up. As I go into next 6 months I really want to push the on-site seo and get product meta titles and descriptions bang on the money.

They don't have a specific algorithm for it, but best practice is to keep them as short as possible.  When you build your slugs ask yourself if a searcher could guess what this page is about based on the shorter slug.  If they probably couldn't, then you would probably want add as little as possible so they could guess it. The title should effectively communicate it, and the slug should reflect it.  Also, remember that the rules for titles is even shorter with one of Google's recent updates with larger titles in the SERPs.

We try to make sure that we have a different link profile for each of our cllients and that we have the Google Plus page in the clients name.  We have not seen a issue with having all the google plus accounts and google WMT in our email. copyscape.com is a great tool to double check duplicate content and find out what is getting flagged.

Looks like the konelux.ee is being redirected to konelux.fi have you checked the htaccess file on konelux.ee for a redirection?

I would just set the rel=canonical to the main categories. It would reduce duplicate content, send more strength to the main categories and as you said, people would probably prefer to see the full product list as opposed to just new arrivals on your site (so you don't need that to appear in search).

No I do not need to type in /default.asp on the end to bring up the homepage.  So having this setting enabled would cause SEO problems correct? Right now we have versions of our hompage as follows: www.domain.com http://www.domain.com resoves to www.domain.com http://domain.com resolves to http://www.domain.com/Default.asp If you click on the home button on our site you get www.domain.com/default.asp

What is the purpose of the 2nd site? The age of the domain a ranking factor, but one of many. If he wants to change the domain your client can tell Google about a change of address in GWT and do a 301 redirect from the old site to the new site. If the purpose is to have two sites ranking on the first page, a quicker and easier tactic would be to do some barnacle SEO (see http://moz.com/blog/barnacle-seo-whiteboard-friday) and get some of their citation / profile pages ranking on the 1st page for their mold related keywords. With the recent updates and focus on quality it has become more difficult to try and operate multiple sub-niche sites, and will be much better to focus attention on creating one quality site which is seen as an authority.

I am not positive, but I think you are confused about GWT and url parameters. GWT lets you specify parameters to ignore, is that where you put them in? Google Analytics on the other hand allows you to put parameters in to monitor click through rate and all of the other things it does.