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Do you think the previous owner of the domain butterfly.com could be affecting things? From a search on archive.org it appears it used to be a golf game console website. Obviously, the company was not named Butterfly. So do you think the previous history of this domain could be affecting the current rankings?

The two responses above are good - we advise not doing redirects unless they are truly necessary due to some people's experience with ranking problems that are hard to fix (i.e. redirection shouldn't be carried out "just because", for aesthetic purposes that aren't important, etc.). However, if the redirection is necessary and it is done properly (check out those resources TrentonM11 linked to) you should be able to complete it with very little problem, as Anirban says.

Hi there, If you have the potential to acquire movieguide.com, that's a great domain name. That said, you're right that this is a crazy competitive space and some of the competitors are giants like IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes! One option is to buy the .com and redirect it to the .org. If you engage in offline advertising (magazines, on the subway, etc.), you could use the .com because it does look more professional. You could have the .org continue to be the resolving website, after the .com is 301 redirected. We are always hesitant to recommend redirection (especially of an entire domain) if you don't have to due to the risk of lost rankings. The rankings are usually not too hard to get back, but it's never a sure thing.

Automated means that my my web developers has an algorithm in places that calculates changes in al those statistical fields on an ongoing basis so users always have new up to date data. From the URL I included you can on top bar change neighborhood etc and the statistics will change. Great insight for user but since writing "median price per year", "$ Volume of active listings" etc are same across all pages I wonder how I should expect search engines to treat it. Any articles or experience to back up ideas highly appreciated.

Yea I'd already blocked some duplicates from a BuddyPress issue, so I didn't want to just jump in and block straight away without some further investigation. Good to know that's the best solution to keep things clean. Cheers for answering Dan.

I personally get phone calls/emails claiming to be Google and to "confirm" business information for rankings.  [...] Likewise, if they receive a call/email from "Google" and choose not to respond because they are used to spammers, they would be unfairly dropped lower in rankings even if they have great CS. I get calls like this all of the time.  They make me angry because I believe that they are spammers calling.  But could they be from Google? ** If there was an official setup like that, the two could get confused and people taken advantage of.** Yes, how can Google discover who takes care of their customers and who does not?  The small company selling nationally often can't afford the feedback and ratings systems that google can monitor, or support for their website and Google Plus. I can't put myself out there to do tech support for all of the third party sellers on Amazon, WalMart, Sears, ebay and dozens of other big brand sites that sell my product.

Hi BobGW,    I actually have experience in doing exactly this for one of my sites.  I created a free academic archive - in the same niche as my site - as link bait.  My results were mixed. I got quite a few new links coming back to the resource, and still do.  The problem has been so far that the links are generally from low DA pages like blogs.  There are exceptions as I did get a .mil and a few .edu links from it as well.  Now, the traffic to the site definitely went up due to the new section as did social engagement.  So, just for this it may be said that it was worth it. But despite all of this, I have not seen any major changes in SERP (up or down) in the last 6 months since this section was released.  It just seems like the "link juice" is not transferring in any meaningful way despite a pretty simply site structure.  I have also not seen any marked increase in conversions on the site.  So, while Google does not seem to be punishing the site for this section, it also does not seem to be giving it credit for this either (even though it ranks well for its own keyword). In the end, it is as Andrew said, it depends on how much   time and money this section will cost you.  Based on the current success of this section on my site I would still say the 2 months to create it were worth it.  I just hope that the SERP benefits will propagate to the rest of the site in the long term Good luck.

Thanks Jane, very insightful. Much appreciated.

You're welcome, Anne.

Agreed that link building and therefore increasing the trust / authority of the website are the hardest or most time consuming parts of marketing a website in search right now. You may not see the results of good links immediately - it can take months for rankings to rise as a result of good link building, and the bar for "good link building" is very high right now.

Hi khi5 I analyzed your page. You are doing just fine. you are using CSS display none. You are not doing any cloaking. You are doing the right thing. 1. not fooling google 2.not fooling user 3.giving the user a better user experience. Don't worry you are not applying any "black hat" technique. You will not get penalized.

Perhaps this can help: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/schema-org-eight-tips-incorporate-rich-snippets-conform-google-hummingbird/75435/ You can also read all about schema here: http://schema.org/docs/gs.html

OK, so as I expected there would be nobody able to answer this question So I asked John Mueller at Google! I got a very precise answer. widget A div with an onclick is nofollow. so this would be a bad idea if you want internal pagerank to flow. Currently the only way to make your clickable areas functional and Google friendly is this way below: widget

Thanks Miriam.  Sorry for the delayed response--been pretty tied up.

You still have only a small sampling with those major brands. You're probably seeing more because there are more links to sample from for the big brands.

Hi Robert, Just checking back in to see if you had had a look in Webmaster Tools for any indication of a penalty. This is the sort of drop we associate with penalties, be they manual or algorithmic. If they were using a link building service called My Blog Guest (or if they had used MBG at any point in the past), they could have been hit along with almost all other MBG customers. Google has gone on a rampage in the past few weeks, penalising a very large number of sites associated with that service: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2335246/Google-Penalizes-MyBlogGuest-a-Guest-Blog-Network The blog comment links could be a culprit as well.

Yes I know what you mean - the external links are not directly explained, but there are signals on the site to keep visitors shall we say relaxed. I don't like it but i'm not in the position to advise on that site at the moment. It's possibly something on-site going on - same server for both as it's IIS (DNN).  If I overlay the GA organic results  for both sites they are identical (good and bad) apart from the second site being far more accentuated. At least if we separate link wise then that will remove that possibility.

Both very useful answers - thanks.

Thanks Chris thats cleared that up! Ash

Just to follow up on your last question about 404s, Kim... No, having a bunch of 404s like that will be no more work for the server than if they were landing on actual blog pages - in fact somewhat less work as the 404 page generally has less content and far fewer database calls. Also, a page timing out due to server load (server working too hard) doesn't generally result in a 500 error, it just returns a timed-out error. 500 errors are delivered when something actually breaks the server's ability to deliver the correct page content. Paul