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Hi. Thanks for your comments. The migration happened six months ago, and there's no sign of recovery. I've seen quite a few big migrations tank due to mass redirects, and every one I've worked on that kept URLs largely the same has been fine. Our crawl errors are now pretty low, and we keep working through any that come up. It's frustrating work!

Awesome Dan, many of the points you raise are things we are looking at and the video was spot on. Many thanks for the effort and wisdom!

It would make sense that the same idea behind Authorship for the written word would eventually be applied to video content.

Is there a reason you are considering option 1?  Option 2 is simpler to implement and doesn't chain the redirects.  Unless there's some other, non-SEO reason for considering option 1, I'd go with the second option. If you are considering option 1 because you want to only be changing the domain and not also changing the subfolder when you do the domain migration, I wouldn't worry about it.  As long as you are setting up 301 redirects for each page to redirect to the new URL for that page, Google and Bing can understand that out just fine. Kurt Steinbrueck

Hi Andrews, While the difference between dashes and underscores use to be a big issue a few years back its something that seems to hold minimal merit now. The two can be used rather interchangeably without any major impact. This was phased out around the same time as exact-match-domain value was as far too many people were abusing the long-tail dash page method.

I would call it a great startup... simply fascinate me! Ok, I checked your link profile and it seems clean, websites SEO areas are not weaker... just a suggestion if there is a possibility try to shorten your URLs as it will gonna hurt you in the longer run! Problem: I didn’t really figure out the exact problem but I am sure that there is no penalty case or something.... I believe you should continue to do what you are doing and after some crawls it is going to be back on 3 to 4^th pages from several different key phrases.

Hi Matthew, Thanks for asking about MediaWhiz SEO (formerly TLA). As you may have heard, we recently rebranded as part of the larger brand consolidation initiative at our parent company, MediaWhiz. You can read all about that initiative, and why we made the brand change from TLA to MediaWhiz SEO, here in Search Engine Journal: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/embracing-change-in-seo-goodbye-tla-hello-mediawhiz-seo/65421/ Bottom line: much like the rest of the SEO industry, we are evolving as a business, and our product model is evolving as well. If you’d like to know more about our evolution from TLA to MediaWhiz SEO and what we are up to, please feel free to email me at bboser@mediawhiz.com. I look forward to hearing from you. Brock Boser Senior Vice President MediaWhiz SEO

Thanks Graphics Online! That's what we were thinking.  Good to have an opinion posted back.  I'll try to post back and let you know how it goes after implementation.

Thanks Adam, This is the strategy I have been wanting/planning to implement, I think this temporary drop will give me the opportunity I have been looking for to make it happen. Torey

Thanks Adam, that's pretty much what I thought. The owner of the company is pretty paranoid and I'm a bit of a novice at this so I wanted to double check since this isn't a full domain change. I know the pages will be redirected but I'm waiting to hear back from the coder that they'll be 301s.

I run leaderboard ads above the design, a skyscraper at top left and a rectangle below the first photo in the right column.  All of these are visible above the fold.   My rankings are great in lots of very difficult SERPs. The important thing is.... These ads to not compete with my content.  My content is clearly visible and perfectly obvious to everyone and anyone who lands on the page. Also, the ads are not the dumb, irritating, provocative, suggestive stuff that would put off lots of people. Bottom line... its not HOW MANY.     Instead... it is WHERE and WHAT.

Just to add. I believe the advise was, if you have a .au, .uk or in your case .be, they its not a problem. but if you have a .com then server location may be used. that's just from memory.

Thanks Lynn, The pages comes up under the main page link and I think if i am not wrong, they come up because those titles are on the top navigation menu. Seems like Google ignore the demote request and show the navigation menu list. In terms of link popularity, other pages have more links than those comes up on SERPS.  I will be testing a few things, if works, i'll share the details here. Thanks again,

Awesome! I believe it will change once Google will re-crawl your website!

Hi Rameet, Sorry my first reply didn't answer your question. Let me take another stab at it here. If the business is truly local (i.e. has a unique physical address, local phone number and face-to-face transactions) then it can rank for multiple cities by utilizing city landing pages for each office tied to the Google+ Local pages for each location. In such a case, you would not be optimizing the entire site for a single city. Instead, you would be building out your basic service pages without gearing them towards a single city and then you would be building your city landing pages that would target each of your physical location cities. That would be the best way to approach this, in my opinion, and you should be able to work towards high LOCAL rankings for each city where you have a physical presence. But if we are not talking about a truly local business and are talking about a virtual one that has to compete for ORGANIC rankings, then yes, if you optimize all of the site for NYC terms, you are sending a pretty clear message to the bots that you want to show up organically for NYC-related searches - not Chicago-related searches. I would expect the SERPs to reflect this choice, meaning that you could well lose organic rankings for Chicago if the whole site is optimized for NYC. *I will add, though, with as little detail as we have about the client, I have to speak in general terms here. I'm not auditing your specific client's situation so my reply needs to be seen as a rule-of-thumb suggestion rather than a carefully planned marketing strategy. Hope that makes sense!

I feel that there should be some form of redirect that can be conducted without passing on link juice value. From my perspective, it's not gaming the system or trying to game Google. My client doesn't want any link juice passing on, but wants to keep the old domain for people accessing the domain directly. It's a shame really. Google holds a massive grudge, even though these guys trusted a big name in the SEO industry.

Why is the domain only in one part? Is there a best practise way to do this - I was going to watch the webinar about the transfer from seomoz to moz... So would I create an htaccess file and put it in the subdomain folder blog.domain.com to redirect to domain.com/blog - also how would I create a wildcard redirect for pages I might miss i.e. blog.domain.com/page - to domain.com/blog and these redone pages should I 301 to the blog home or just a 404 page?

My pleasure, Sida, and good luck!

Thanks Phil.  Unfortunately we have not seen any changes since removing video entries in our sitemap associated with list (category) pages. For the two examples above (the videos associated with www.ebags.com/category/handbags/m/leather and www.ebags.com/department/handbags), I even went so far as to deactivate the video entirely in our video provider and I verified that these videos are not in our YouTube channel. This is really baffling.

In this particular case is a female clothing company that provides new stuff each 3 months, they never repete the products!-) Thanks for all the answers and I think I wlll customize and improve the user experience by implementing a dynamically-generated message via cookies during a 301 redirect. This would result in users who have landed on expired products receiving a message letting them know that the original product they were seeking is no longer available. This enhances the user experience because it informs users on why they are being redirected. As I´m working with magento I will try to find a ready to go solution as a plugin but If I don´t, I will make my own and send to the forum !-) Many Thanks !-)