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The template for look of the website will make no difference whatsoever. Google understands that you are serving different markets with a .com or a dot CO.uk or any other TLD that you find serves a different country entirely Matt cuts has a video on it explain it you will not be penalized for making a website with three different or more TLDs explaining what you sell or what you do as long as they're targeted for each country answer posted properly meaning the database should be in the country that you are targeting.

Why do schools And students alike want your referral traffic? " While the math example was exactly that, an example, yes the links are highly valuable to the students. I know they provide value to the students because the links are bringing in referral traffic (these links actually take up 3 of the top 5 sources of referral traffic). " Explain to me how that helps the student? They're not in search engine optimization the kids going to school you're talking about something that benefits yourself sir With 200 EDU links you will be manually audited and I guarantee most likely penalized unfortunately. Not saying this because I want to be that way soon because Google wants it to be that way it's so clear that if you at all try to abuse any of these things such as a high-profile EDU not only will you most likely be banned from Google you will be made to case study. You came to this form for advice. And you seem to be taking the advice that while I'm not saying anything negative about goes with what you want it to do with what you want to hear and that's not really beneficial to you so I'm going to tell you exactly what I know from researching .edu use and what is going to most likely happen considering that your Telling us your site is not relevant to what you will be publishing. Thus it is a business to make money off of kids who are in school is it not? I personally am not putting on trial I'm not trying to make it sound as bad as I might've made it sound but I don't care I'm just trying to prevent you from getting a whole Lotta trouble Just an update. Please Google link schemes or may I add links to benefit myself in any way using dot EDU & .Gov I believe you'll find a long list of people that felt similarly to the way you felt unfortunately Google does not like people benefiting off of other people like schools government institutions. Ask yourself this question Will you be creating content that will not be required to be linked to for any such reason whatsoever in order to access it? Does your content benefit you in any way shape way or form? Why do you believe that you should have the right to benefit from this content and cools private search index where they a private corporation get to choose who benefits and who doesn't mean at the end of the day why would it be best for them to go to you instead of you releasing it directly to the school? Lastly if you are going to be releasing content and it would benefit people in school today. You should be working hand-in-hand with the school itself and releasing the content with the administers approvals not talking to us about how you can get link juice from the dot EDU which by the way will not give you anymore Link juice then a.com.org.net domain but for the fact that.EDU use DOT com guys are regarded so highly they're given a lot of authority meaning they make wise decisions into who and why they link to somebody to if you were to make links from authorities as highs the Edus  you do use you would get the same thing so if this content is that valuable ask you again and unless it is as relevant you don't Benefit at all from thinking from it. Another thing that alarms me you seem to think that because.ED use might not lose their link power or link juice. Over time and I might be inclined to agree with you on that however Google doesn't care about that they care about your site they can take away the links pointing to your site that are dot EDU's and give you know power from them I want you to understand that take Your site and eliminate it from Google if they want to do that doesn't hurt the dot EDU links but it will hurt your business because it will not exist on the web. I just want this to be clear. And I think you know as well as everyone else that from what you've said that you're worried about putting this out there if it was 100% legitimate you would not be worried about it and you would post it so I think you've answered your own questions again sir and I urge you to either ask with your last private question to SEOmoz for advice That would be the wisest thing to do. This is the last month and you have into the 15th ask for free do it and you will know the answer. My honest belief is you will not do very well creating a company that is creating content for schools so that you can get link juice from the content you make targeted to get benefit off of edus

Thanks for your reply. It's not even ranking for adult terms including keywords in the title tag but it once did? Surely it should still rank for such adult search queries?

Google knows the difference and that is why they wouldn't give it the same value. They are looking for other websites to link to your site on their own. No organic link is going to have tracking variables appended to it, meaning that the backlink was "self-generated". As such, your link value is discounted (especially press release links).

Hey BobGW, Rand covered outreach emails in a recent Whiteboard Friday if you have not had a chance to watch it yet. Although not 100% applicable to the void you mentioned, it should give some good insight on how to get that friendly conversation going. If you are going through steps 1-6 as you mentioned, you should have no problem getting personal in your email outreach. You can view the Whiteboard Friday here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-separates-a-good-outreach-email-from-a-great-one-whiteboard-friday If your email outreach is done along these guidelines, I believe it should help with your conversions from the get-go. Hope this helps

Has the "other guy" converted the current page to Google+ Local? If not, you could just "overclaim" it onto Google+ Local, take control of it, and be done with it. Also, for the medical field Google allows doctors/dentists/etc. to have a "personal" business listing, and a "practice" listing, if there's multiple doctors/dentists/etc. at the same practice. This is so people looking for their provider by name can find them, as well as someone searching for the name of the practice. I don't see why fitness (health) would be  any different. If Google doesn't allow practice/personal business listings for fitness, you could create a page with the name of the studio using exact address/phone and then report the current page as a duplicate. Hopefully this helps!! If you aren't sure how to tell if he converted it to G+ Local you can pm me

Great, I really appreciate your help. Marcio Elias

No problem happy to help

I've seen people recreate their primary landing pages at new URLs, link to them from a custom sidebar menu, and then rel=canonical the original landing pages, linked to from their primary navigation, to those new URLs.  I wouldn't do it, though.

Hi, As far as I know this is not possible, also the answer/ question you mentioned doesn't speak about including multiple sitemap indexes within a sitemap index. He's referring to multiple sitemaps within a sitemap index which is of course very normal. As also mentioned within the error section of the Google Webmaster Help part about the Sitemaps: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35738 there's an related error to this: Incorrect Sitemap index format: Nested Sitemap indexes. Hope this helps!

BM7 This really is what Alan says, but the good news is there is help available . I will ask our VP of dev in the a.m. for the answer. I will have him PM you from here as he doesn't have an account. He is a master of these type issues. Or you can PM me with an email address and I will have him reach out to you. Best, Robert

Not sure what it's going to take to kill this theory that visitor stats are used as a ranking factor, but here's some food for thought. Google has shown repeatedly that their primary focus for ranking factors is things which can be consistently applied to all sites, and are hard to fake or game. (And they work very hard to punish sites they do catch faking or gaming ranking signals.) The only way they could gather these visitor traffic signals is by jacking into your Google Analytics or Adwords/Adsense accounts Google Analytics is used on a little over 60% of websites. So Google would be ignoring over 40% of websites (including many of the really big players who use enterprise analytics like WebTrends, SiteCatalyst etc) using data from Adwords/Adsense would be even more unreliable as an even smaller percentage of sites use these. incorrect implementation of tracking codes causes completely inaccurate Analytics data. I see this on new client sites all the time in 30 seconds I can adjust your website to have Analytics report any Bounce Rate you want. another trivial tweak to your site's code and I can have Analytics report double or triple your pageviews. Bottom line, trying to track visitor stats is far too unreliable and easily manipulated, not to mention outside their own terms of service. On top of that, Matt Cutts is on record as categorically stating that Google does not use visitor stats as ranking signals. (I was in the room at SMX Advanced last year when he said it. ** The one exception to this is Google's use of bounce rate from the actual SERP pages. It's widely considered that having a user click on your site from a SERP, then quickly bounce back to the SERP for another search is an indication of negative quality of your site. In addition to all of the above, as you yourself state, Bob, there are many sites where a short time on site and few pages viewed can be indication of a site that does its job very well. IMO Google's not dumb enough to measure all sites with the same yardstick like that. Hope that makes sense. Paul

Great input!  Thanks for taking the time to respond, I truly appreciate it!

Huge congratulations on the new status, Dana! The gag is, we've all been turned back into Aspirants. Glitch in the Matrix, I guess, but check yourself and you'll see. (Points are still there, just the title has changed.) Paul

I don't agree with this response. Sorry Dana. BigBlaze is going to lose rankings very easily. Also, listen to Matt Cutts here talk about duplicate content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z07IfCtYbLw Also watch this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFNK8gSDxHA If you can't do 150 product pages with a unique TITLE nor DESCRIPTION, then you don't deserve to rank. Do 10 per day. Your problem will be over in 15 days. After that, start writing a couple paragraphs of original content of why your service is better than the competitors (even if you don't have competitors). You are in this for the long haul. Your TITLE - 10x20x1 furnace filters - shop at furnace filters canada My example TITLE - 10x20x1 Furnace Filters - Breathe Clean Healthy Air & Avoid Allergies.

Hi Nakul, That is a big help, thanks. is there a general concensous about how much established SEO benefits gets passed through with a 301? I.e does 100% of link juice etc get passed through from one domain 301'd to another? thanks

I think you can remove the sitemap since it returns so many warnings. I don't think sitemaps have so much seo benefits but rather helps google find pages that are hard to find in your site or no accessible through regular href. So make sure your site has a good structure and that all page can be found by browsing your site (click on links from pages to pages) and you will be fine sitemap or not. Use linksleuth to crawl your site, if you are not sure of the accessibility of all pages.

Agreed, agreed, agreed. Best

I've just solved my own question lol It turns out that the URL's that I've blocked in my robots.txt file were still in the index.  So now I'm manually removing them via the removal tool I hope this solves any duplicate penalty I may have

That makes sense, thanks for clarifying Mike. I was looking for a "local" plumber and I would obviously prefer somebody with a local number in my area, rather then a 800 number. Let's say I am in Boston. I would prefer somebody with 617-xxx-xxxx that I'd like to call. If somebody with 800-xxx-xxxx or an area code that I am not familiar with in my area, I might not call them. Considering that, if it's a global company servicing clients nationwide, I am sure it makes sense for them to invest in local numbers for each major city/state they service. Thanks again. Thumbs Up