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Ok, thanks again. BIG HELP!!

Does a duplicate content penalty impact specific pages or entire sites? If I wanted to test using the cross-domain canonical on a certain section of my site, would the impact be visible? Or would I need to put cross-domain canonicals on everything appearing on both sites in order to see the results?

That is what I though. However, is the on page optimization only valuable for long tail key phrases that are not requested very often ?

Oh, I think it goes back to the root of all evil: cash. We are a corporation and have several sister companies under our umbrella that, collectively, have good sized budgets. And, in fairness, we may have gotten lucky with our assigned rep I'm not proud of it; I think it's a huge, huge miss on Google's behalf and a ding to their reputation if they play preference for advertisers (ahem, keyword unavailable). I don't envy your position because this can be so frustrating - thank goodness for groups like this where you can either find answers or commiserate?!

Hi, Thanks for your message. I know for a fact that this is negative SEO as since we started ranking in September, over 200 links from similar forum profiles (in some cases multiple profiles from the same domain) were set up, all linking using the keyword that we were ranking well for. I am the only one that does any link building for this site so they were definitely added by somebody else.

I tend to subscribe to the 'don't change the page names' rule but sometimes, it just has to be done for the greater good. The trick her is to be absolutely fastidious in the approach to rewriting the old pages to new and try to make sure there are several benefits to the new page name and url structure. You are not moving the domain so you are only possibly impacting page level metrics so I tend to feel that if you 301 and come up with a better structure for humans and a better architecture for search you will not have any major problems.

Well when I was in the same situation as you and had loads of pages that were part of an archive that were all indexed in Google - numerous with low PR - I used a 301 redirect on all of them to tell search engines of their new home. I did this in 2009 and they are all still indexed and bringing traffic into the site today - I am leaving the redirects there forever. If I was in your situation and it makes sense to put a 301 redirect on a page as it still exists just under a new URL then I would do it. 301 redirects don't cause issues with search engines when they are used properly to move a whole site from one location to another - content relocation this is their purpose. Hope this helps Gary and answers your question..

Thank you for your answer! Yes, that is exactly the case. We have been testing this and it seems that "Googlebot" doesn't hit the wall at all with the normal settings on. With these results it seems that we don't need to treat "Googlebot" differently because it doesn't seem to store any cookie or local storage data. Tech savvy users can bypass the pay wall by other means as well so that's not a big concern for us.

Hi, Ya i am agree with you that there is big difference between both the search transactional and informational search.  Can you share with me your both keyword which provides you similar result??

Hi Raphael, Without actually investigating your client's unique business, my response will have to be somewhat general. The main areas one would investigate would be: 1. Age of domain 2. Strength/optimization of website/inclusion of local hooks on site (like NAP) 3. Correctness of Google local listings/lack of violations/lack of duplicates 4. Number, quality and age of citations (if yours are new, you need to give them time to go into effect) 5. Consistency of NAP across all citations 6. Review count 7. Proximity to city centroid 8. Traditional SEO factors, such as linkbuilding There are other areas that could be applicable, certainly, but these are the main ones. Here are some resources regarding local search rankings and related factors: http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/09/26/infographic-citations-time-to-live/ http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2012/10/02/how-long-does-local-search-visibility-take/ The above are a few selections which I feel will be highly relevant to what you are trying to understand about local search ranking factors and the time it can take for your work to go into full effect. I hope you will find these useful!

Hi Green Hornet, There's very recent breaking news on this topic, actually. When you move to a new location, Google advises you to close the old listing and create a new one. However, historically, this caused a really bad problem of a yellow label reading 'this place has permanently closed' appearing on the listing, even if the business had actually just moved. Not good. So, I was really happy over the weekend to discover that Google has altered the messaging to read 'this place has closed or relocated'. While not ideal, it's still a big improvement. There's a great discussion of this going on over at the Local Search Forum here: http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/google-places-important-updates/867-yay-permanently-closed-moved-business-google-update.html Definitely, give that a read through.

You are very welcome, Mark!

Gerd knows a lot more about CDNs than I do Yes, you absolutely need to have the CDN content appear as your own subdomain. Standard SEO applies for your image and video content optimization to make sure the content which is now sitting on the subdomain (not your TLD) gets indexed properly.

Hey thanks, the site is less than 30 pages. But would it be just as acceptable to just forward the entire domain, or is it better practice to 301 each individual page. And if I do 301 each page, do we ALSO need to forward the domain? I appreciate your help! Derek

think about it, you pass PR to me and i'll pass PR to you. At the same time we'll tell Google we are in cahoots together.:( The easiest way to explain it is that Google is that linking to other sites on your site might make Google think that you are selling links and could get you penalized, so as an SEO you have a rule to never link out to other sites unless they are trusted domains like Facebook, Twitter or G+ pages. And in those cases you are linking to your social media profile pages for the user and not for helping other sites rank better which is against Google's TOS. There is information directly on Google's Webmaster Guidelines that you can provide to them. Sometimes people prefer to hear it directly from the horses mouth.

Hi Fred Post the message text if you can Stephen

I suppose one easy way via robots.txt would be a NoIndex / Disallow across all content on the new site. And with this you would only measure new brand/page design. If you are not really that interested about SERPs but the user traffic and the look and feel, why don't you try A/B testing? I think running two different domains will not really validate much as you are not covering indexing (due to canonicals) and will probably only rank on the new domain/brand for your landing pages.

Canonical tag to what? Themselves? Or the page they should be? Are these pages unique by some URL variables only? If so, you can instruct Google to ignore specific get variables to resolve this issue but you would also want to fix your sitemap woes: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1235687 This is where it gets sticky, these pages are certainly not helping and not being indexed, Google Webmaster tools shows us that, but if you have this problem, how many other technical problems could the site have? We can be almost certain you have some kind of panda filter but to diagnose it further we would need a link and access to analytics to determine what has gone wrong and provide more detailed guidance to resolve the issues. This could be a red herring and your problem could be elsewhere but with no examples we can only give very general responses. If this was my site I would certainly look to identify the most likely issues and work through this in a pragmatic way to eliminate possible issues and look at other potentials. My advice would be to have the site analysed by someone with distinct experience with Panda penalties who can give you specific feedback on the problems and provide guidance to resolve them. If the URL is sensitive and can't be shared here, I can offer this service and am in the UK. I am sure can several other users at SEOMoz can also help. I know Marie Haynes offers this service as I am sure Ryan Kent could help also. Shout if you have any questions or can provide more details (or a url).