Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Oleg - very good of you - will see how I get on...

Hi Steven, Can you please provide some more detail? What, specifically, in the dashboard is pointing at the Google+ page? Do you mean the website URL field in the dashboard now lists the URL of your client's Google+ page instead of the URL of their website homepage? Please, provide as clear a description as you can.

No, I just searched the questions, and they all seemed to address different types of links than mine. But, thank you! I will read that now.

Agree with Dave. Since you are doing one-for-one 301 redirects then you are delivering the user to the page that best matches their intent. If you were redirecting all of these to the home page, then that could be a problem.

Thanks for that.  What you are experiencing by the way could be because the server does not have a reverse dns entry.  A lot of servers do not come with those and that could also be affecting your ability to send out email.  Also be sure that your spf records are setup correctly so that they are viewed as credible.  I had a similar issue a while ago, and it had very little to do with my ip and very much to do with a lack of a reverse dns.  Also, you should run a blacklist check on the mail ip to ensure that it is not listed on 1 of the 150 spam lists.  I use mxtoolbox to check that.  Hope that helps.

Hi Peter, Thanks for your reply. The site in question does not have a high domain or page authority but I hear what your saying. I wouldn't of thought we would be able to keep the second set of old pages live as the domain name is not changing!? Thanks Rob

Thanks all for your great responses, I have got some reading to do and Marcus I have implemented a few of your suggestions and will monitor its success! Thanks again Roger

I suppose that technically if you really wanted to come clean you could ask the currently linking domains to remove their links since the subject of the site has changed.  Those that don't, you could disavow. I'm not saying to do that or not, and I don't know if I know anyone who would but it's an option.

Thanks Davenport and Everett, I've got XML sitemap submitted already, checked robot and no index etc but no stats yet. I'll wait for a few weeks more but it just doesn't make sense to not get any stays after a month. Meanwhile, If i figure out anything, I'll reply here.

Hi ZIhe, I'm a little over a year late, but in case you are still watching, I'm thinking you need more local keywords on page and in title's? If you are ranking for universal, but not local (organic), then that might be the issue? Just a thought. Cheers! ~BB

With respect to local search, Google is providing the most relevant search results relative to location. SO, when considering optimizing for local vs organic, wouldn’t the correct answer be that it depends on the type of business? For example, in a moderately sized metro area like Concord, California, a sandwich shop should weigh heavily in favor of doing everything they can to rank locally because Google will serve up the most local results when people are looking for a sandwich shop (in the immediate area). A law firm, however, certainly wants clients who are close to their office, BUT they can also take clients throughout the city. So if they are optimized for local search, at the expense of organic, wouldn’t they be losing out all of the other prospective clients who search outside of the “local” (immediate) area that Google deems close to the law office? Very few will drive across Concord to get a sandwich (unless it’s Togo’s….I LOVE Togo’s! ;-), but many will make the drive for an attorney if they feel that attorney is the best fit for their complex legal matter. I have been holding off doing local search optimization for this reason for my law firm clients. They rank very strong for vanity searches, while the “7 pack” are underneath, competing with each other all bundled together. Plus, as I suspect and hopefully someone can confirm, as with the example above, my clients show strong wherever the searcher’s location is throughout Concord, and the others (7 pack) show in the immediate proximity of where the inquiry was made. Is that a fair /correct statement?

Right on. Whenever you make big changes to the structure of your site (or in the case, completely taking your site down), you can choose to submit a new sitemap to Google. This is more or less a "heads-up" to Google that things have changed on your site and to recrawl/index it when available. It does not mean that Google will go ahead and crawl/index things right away, more of a "friendly reminder". Your 301 redirects will immediately work if someone sees your old site in the SERPs and clicks on it, so you will be safe there. Once Google recrawls your site, it will see the 301 and take note that it is a permanent redirect and slowly remove your old site from the SERPs. You definitely can submit a sitemap listing all of the URLs that now have 301 redirects, omitting any of the URLs that are now "broken" or you are not 301-ing to the new site (if that makes sense). Hope this helps. Mike

If the new website is related to the old website, redirect as many individual pages to the new site as possible. Match up the pages and that'll create the most seamless way of moving the site from the old to new. All your old traffic will end up in the right place on the new site. Benefits there include any SEO or inbound links will pass pagerank over to the new site as well giving you a bit of a boost. If the old site has nothing to do with the new site but it's your new brand, company, or project that you want to draw attention do, just do a straight 301 redirect and explain that it's a new project somewhere on the page. Any existing traffic from the old site will follow through and learn what you're currently up to on the new site. If the old domain has no traffic, no SEO, no inbound links, and really doesn't have anything to offer, keep it parked.

Yeah, I actually requested that the canonical tag be added into the editable fields area when creating a page. Works like a charm — except when you're trying to add canonicals for /content/. Because it's automatically added in the CMS, I error when trying to create a canonical stack for: mainsite.org mainsite.org/content mainsite.org/Content mainsite.org/content/index mainsite.org/Content/index Your suggestion is definitely worth floating to the developers, though...thanks!

Amy, I'm sorry you have to deal with a snafu like this. I noticed that the content most relevant to the keyword on the page tends to be pushed down below what reads like "SEO copy". For example, on the page about moving from the UK to Adelaide, Australia the entire first screen's worth of content is general info about Adelaide, and you have to scroll down pretty far to get to anything specifically about the UK. Another example is on the country-level pages (e.g. /spain, /thailand) the "Top Cities" with their score-bar and relevant links are pushed down below several long paragraphs about the country. Perhaps your users are already aware of the basic information about the country if they want to move there, and the more visually-appealing and helpful "Top Cities" area should be moved above? If you're worried about the SEO ramifications of moving the text content down you could just try this out as a test on a few country landing pages. Let's think about the visitor for a minute. If I searched for "Moving to Dallas from the UK" and landed on this page I would not be happy: http://www.movehub.com/usa/dallas/move-to-dallas-from-uk . I would be looking for information on how to move to Dallas from the UK, things like visa requirements, good Vs bad neighborhoods, cost of living, job market, etc... Instead, all I see on my screen is a lot of fluff copy about how Texas isn't all about oil production anymore, and sidebar links to content about international container shipping costs, and moving to cities in Australia and Canada. The site needs a more intelligent way to show relevant content and links on a per-page basis. Some examples: Instead of showing links to Adelaide, Brisbane, Perth, Sydney, Toronto... on that page, show the cities closest to Dallas, like San Antonio, Austin, Houston... Instead of showing the general "about Texas" type content at the top, move it down or get rid of it alltogether and show the content that was once hidden below the fold up top: Moving To Dallas from the UK, and Comparing Dallas Vs London. Put in some links to pages about things like visa requirements from the UK to the US, and some job-search assistance (top employers in Dallas?) and you'll have a much more useful page. More specific to the problem you experienced, however, if the content is no longer on the page it may just take Google some time to recrawl all of the old URLs again and see the updated content without all of the "keyword stuffing" they may have misunderstood. My advise would be to refresh your XML sitmap with new lastmod dates and resubmit it to entice Google to recrawl the pages again and see that the excessive keyword use has been fixed.

Hello BeytzNet, When people, including Matt Cutts, explain how the flow of pagerank works they tend to do it in simplistic terms to avoid confusing the situation, and to make sure that everyone understands the fundamental concepts. Yes, at a fundamental level, the more links on a page the less pagerank flows through each of those links. However, it is quite a bit more complicated than this. Navigation links are treated differently than in-copy links. Footer links are treated differently than those at the top of the page. Sitewide links are treated differently than single links, etc... When looked at this way, you can see how a link from within the body of a post is going to probably flow much more pagerank than one of the site-wide navigation links at the top of the page. I agree with Maximillian that you should think about the best experience for your users. Here's an idea if you don't mind creating a totally separate page template and navigation... Just show the top-level category page navigation on the blog instead of the complete drop-down list to sub-categories. This will drastically reduce the amount of links on the page while keeping the visual user-experience much the same for continuity and convenience. You can put the blog navigation in the sidebar. That said, there really is nothing "wrong" with changing the look and feel of the blog from the main site if that is what you want to do. Just think about the visitor who has five items in their shopping cart already and decides to click on a link to a blog post, which then feels like a totally different website.

Federico brought up some good points when he suggested sub-directories above, but I'd go with sub-domains in this case. If a service provider can't figure out how to build their own website they are unlikely to get any decent links, let alone one from CNN. Policing them all would be expensive, possibly even unscaleable for the business model. I think the use of subdomains as outlined in his original question would be one of the few proper reasons to have them. Just make sure you verify each and every one of them in GWT so you know if/when any "manual actions" or important messages come through from Google. Getting SEOs to agree on sub-domain Vs sub-directory Vs separate TLD can be like trying to herd cats sometimes. That's just the way it is.

Hi Donna, yes I agree with you completely. If the marketplaces saturated for instance if you ever tried to rank for attorneys it's not easy. I no that Google is now taking your KML file from Google maps and long with your longitude and latitude to mark the map that is important information that you should have (The latitude and longitude is not being used by Google as to my knowledge yet however the KML is and needs it) I have a client that is a very competitive market right now in the city of Toronto not a extremely large city but not the extremely small city either and we're doing very well with local its not easy to do but you can rank with older companies thought to be an institution that could not be removed from Google's first place especially with universal ranking

WhiteboardCreations: thanks, I may try the plugin and cancel 301s Takeshi Young: well it's over three weeks as mentioned above, the traffic dropped after 4 days G Webmaster do not show any 404 new pages were indexed within two days I use Yoast plugin and do not index tags, categories etc there were no changes inside the actual pages and the traffic were through whole site, not just few high traffic pages

Could it be because I get referrer traffic like that at first?