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Hi Doug, I think Localeze will help you remedy some of the NAP consistency issues your client has, but I would recommend that this be backed up with a manual check on your part to discover bad data. In my opinion, no service beats manual action as a way to remedy bad NAP data. It can be quite a big process. Hang in there and good luck!

You seem to have a good handle on the issue but you might consider getting an experienced SEO in for at least a second opinion. We can only give very general help here on the Q&A, as we don't have access to your data They do say to wait at least a few weeks for results Cheers S

That's why I was going to name them dueling-pianos and dueling-pianos-1. They both like like the first version. Thanks for the tip!

A nice little whiteboard friday, that you may find of value jack http://vimeo.com/5849049

Just to have you even more comfortable 404s doesn't hurt your site

#1: no.  Once both pages have been recrawled, and maybe a month has gone by to "settle" out the link juice, they'll be independent pages again. Now, having said that, it's very possible that once you've 301'd a URL, it's going to be very low on the crawl priority, as the 301 TOLD Google that the redirect was permanent.  But eventually it'll recrawl it.  You can force it in WMT with a Fetch as Googlebot + Submit URL. When Google appears to have the memory of an elephant regarding links, the circumstances are usually something like this: Google crawls the URL and gets Good Stuff. Then, the URL goes away (404s or 500s). Google is hoping to see that lovely lost URL come back, and even if it no longer finds links to that URL (internal or external), it will continue to try to refetch that for quite some time (months, it seems).  Ditto Bingbot, btw. In the absence of new info (the page simply is missing or broken), Google will keep its cache of what was on the page, show it in the SERPs, and retain link metrics from it to other pages....for a LONG time. I've seen no evidence at all that Google has a "memory" for past link juice and transfers that juice the way you've described.  However, it seems clear that the folks at Google DO have the ability to look at link history manually, through their tools....for instance, to evaluate changes in backlinks for penalty reconsideration.

I'm pretty sure this won't work....Google will still treat those as separate domains. What I saw 2 years ago was pretty compelling evidence that ZERO domain authority was transferred between subdomains.  More recently, I've seen examples where it seems that this has changed a little, and SOME of the domain authority was carried over....not sure how much, but the examples I saw made it seem like it'd be in the 10% to 40% range. Now, let me throw out a suggestion your IT folks might not have thought of:  you may be able to appear to host all your content on your www subdomain, even if the content itself is physically hosted on separate servers.  All that's required, really, is that the main domain's servers implement reverse proxy for the other domains. Slingshot SEO posted this article on reverse proxies a while back, and it's definitely worth a look.

Yes, pointing from a subset to a superset of information is one of the main reasons for the canonical. So Google would not view it as improper. Just remember... Canonicals are a suggestion NOT a directive. Google will choose whether to listen to you or not.

Again, it depends (lots of answers in the SEO world is like that lol)  It depends on what type of penalty you have but one thing is for sure, you have to remove bad links you've done before (if it's indeed a link penalty) or you need to clean up your site structure .

Hi Ben If you could break down your traffic data into segments, such as branded keywords vs non-branded keywords, that would be a big help.  A drop in branded keyword traffic would reflect seasonality, whereas a drop in non-brand might suggest the effect of Penguin.  If you have any historical rankings to back up those traffic figures as well, that would help. We've all made mistakes in SEO - the challenge is to learn from them.  I think LinkDetox is definitely worth the money.  You can also tweet for a discount and I think it still makes the tool free for a short period if you do - so you can try before you buy.  Send Christoph a tweet (he made the tool) to check if this still is the case: http://twitter.com/cemper

After much discussion and further research here's the approach we have taken: 1. Setup all domains in Google Webmaster Tools 2. Verified ownership of all domains in Google Webmaster Tools 3. In Webmaster Tools chosen "Change of Address" specifying that the site has now moved to our chosen primary domain being the .au domain 4. Setup redirects for all old domains If anyone can suggest any further improvements to this strategy please let me know!

While this may not have been a parking problem before, it is now.  Google intentionally delists parked websites.  Put at least something on the site and I'll get it indexed almost immediately.  The site doesn't even resolve.  Google won't include that in their index.

You may want to check this video: watch?v=Filv4pP-1nw

First off, thanks everyone for your replies I'm well versed in best practices of 301 redirects, sitemaps, etc, etc. In other words, I fully know the optimal way to handle this. But, this is one of those situations where there are so many redirects involved (thousands) for a large site, that I want to make sure that what we are doing is fully worth the development time. We are migrating a large website that was already migrated to a different CMS several years ago. There are thousands of legacy 301 redirects already in place for the current site, and many of those pages that are being REDIRECTED TO (from the old URL versions) receive very little/if any traffic. We need to decide if the work of redirecting them is worth it. I'm not as worried about broken links for pages that don't get any traffic (although we ideally want 0 broken links). What I am most worried about, however, is losing domain authority and the whole site potentially ranking a little bit lower overall as a result. Nakul's response (and Frederico's) are closest to what I am asking...but everyone is suggesting the same thing...that we will lose domain authority (example measurement: SEOmoz's OpenSiteExplorer domain authority score) if we don't keep those redirects in place (but of course, avoiding double redirects). So, thanks again to everyone on this thread If anyone has a differing opinion, I'd love to hear it...but this is pretty much what I expected: everyone's best educated assessment is that you will lose domain authority when 301 redirects are lifted and broken links are the end result.

I agree. These kinds of sites with similar link profiles mushroom towards the top of the SERPS all the time. But then as Google catches up with algorithm updates and applying them to their indexes, those kinds of sites disappear for ever.

Hi Neoptic, Keri asked me to stop by to take a look at your question. I believe what you are asking is how to get your homepage ranked above the local pack of listings. Is that correct? If so: If you are already in the local pack for a given keyword phrase, you are unlikely to also gain an organic ranking on the same page. Since the Venice update last year, it has become quite uncommon for any local business to have more than one spot on the first page of results, except in industries or geographies that are sparsely populated or poorly documented. If you are not in the local pack for a given keyword phrase, perhaps because you are lacking a physical location in the target city and are having to rely on organic SEO for service radius cities where you lack a physical location, then having city landing pages for each of your service cities is the typical marketing strategy. For example, an SAB (service area business) may be physically located in San Francisco, CA., but may serve San Jose, Berkeley and Oakland. This business model can pursue high local rankings for San Francisco-related searches, but must typically purse organic rankings for any other service city. He can create city landing pages to help him go after these secondary organic rankings. If this concept is new to you, let me point you to a recent article of mine that I've been told has been really helpful to many Local SEOs and local business owners: The Nitty Gritty of City Landing Pages If you already know about city landing pages and are experiencing a scenario in which your SAB is already ranking organically  (not locally) on page one for a given keyword phrase but is simply ranking below rather than above the local pack of results, then your ability to influence this may be limited. Google has several different displays. In some, there are a couple of organic results above the local pack. If a business is strong enough (SEO-wise) it could appear in those couple of top organic results, or, it may find itself just below the local pack in the handful of results that appear there. Very often, what I see in the US is those top spots being occupied by giants like Yelp, but not always. I think it would be quite difficult/impossible to outrank something like Yelp, but if I saw a result in which the top couple of organic results were other direct competitors of my client, then there would be a chance that some strong organic efforts might succeed in allowing them to break in there. This would likely involve both content development and linkbuilding and possibly other things. I hope one of the three scenarios I've described matches yours. If not, please provide a more detailed description of your scenario and goals. Thanks!

I don't know one for an h ref, but there is one for <header>: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077 I don't know if this is what you are looking for. Hope that helps. </header>

Hi Jason, Most of time these days (but not always) when you experience large differences in ranking between Google and Bing, it's often because of backlinks. Taking a quick look at your backlink profile in OSE, I'd venture to guess either a Penguin action or "unnatural links" penalty is a good candidate. Try the Panguin tool to see if your drop in traffic corresponds with a known Penguin update (requires a Google Analytics account) Hint: when you've got a link on a page like this, you might be in trouble: http://www.playcasinoguide.com/links/Sports.html Here's a conversation I had with another webmaster facing a similar problem: "You probably want to try to save the site. I'd start by doing a complete site audit for low quality links. Our friend Paddy Moogan wrote a great post about this: http://www.stateofsearch.com/step-by-step-guide-finding-low-quality-links/ The big question is if you need to file a reconsideration request. Did you receive any messages in Google Webmaster Tools? If not, you may want to file a request just to see Google's response. Often they will verify this way if a site has received a manual penalty or not. Also a good post by Ryan Kent on identifying penalties: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/identifying-link-penalties-in-2012 Understand that Google's reconsideration process can be a several month process. It's best to try to remove as many links as you can - (and show a serious effort to do so) and use the disavow tool as a measure of last resort. Finally, and I can't stress this enough, the number one thing that helps after you've cleaned up bad links, is building good links. Keep us up to date on your progress. With some work and due diligence, your site may come out of this fine." Best of luck!

Whew! Big thread. Sometimes, when you can't find all the broken links to a page, it's easier simply to 301 redirect the page to a destination of your choice. This helps preserve link equity, even for those broken links you can't find on large sites. (and external links, as well) Not sure if this would help in your situation, but I hope you're getting things sorted out!

Hello Darin, Typically search engines do a very good job of figuring out this particular issue. However, you may have a problem because the rel canonical tags are "self referencing". This means that the lower case version says "I'm the canonical!" and the upper case version says "No, I'm the canonical!" If your developers can force the rel canonical tags to be all lower case URLs (assuming that's what you want to go with as the canonical version) it should take care of any potential issues here. If they want to go ahead and update all internal links to make them lower-case as well it wouldn't hurt. Keep in mind their time and if they could be using it for more important matters that would have a better ROI. Summary: Fix the rel canonical tag issue by choosing one case or the other for that tag. Consider fixing internal links, as you suggested, if it isn't too time intensive verse other current projects, or at least add it to their plates as something to do in the future when they have time.