Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I downloaded mine and found some opportunities to engage in a forum that was referencing a brand we represent

I believe the best way to proceed here is to change your quality backlinks to the new URLs as well as do 301 redirects.  In the end you are rebuilding your blogs authority at the new domain 301 redirects just help the process.

So that was strange. When we did the site search we saw 9 entries from very old low level pages. Now it seems to be back up and all we did was install Webmaster tools. Ok then. Thanks Google Gods!

I would start slowly building solely "branded links", stay away from anything that could be considered a "money term".  Once you have some trust and authority for your brand I think it becomes safe to sprinkle a few "money terms" amongst your links to give Google a pointer.  Alternatively don't do any link building and focus on producing quality, relevant content and links will grow naturally - then you don't have to worry at all!

You'll also want to check whether you have fewer pages indexed now than before the redesign. if you have significantly fewer pages, you'll have lost a lot of long-tail search query traffic. Check out what search terms brought traffic before, and to what page, compared to after the redesign as well. Paul

thanks, good resource

Me too.  It was that video that helped to clear things up for me.  Then I could see when to use robots.txt vs the noindex meta tag.  It has made a big difference in how I manage sites that have large amounts of content that can be sorted in a huge number of ways.

FYI the urls shown above are just examples and not actual URL's.

Hi there, In terms of some personalised link building suggesting: Clients/partners/customers I always recommend the first step in any link building campaigns is getting the quick wins. Sit down with the people in your company and list any companies and individuals who you have worked with, used their product/service, or had use your services. These are often the easiest links to get as there is already a relationship built, so get the Project Manager or Account Manager who had the closest relationship with the partner to simply make the call or send an email asking if they will link to you. If the relationship is good, they are nearly always happy to. In regards to products and services your company has used, you can often get a link by offer a testimonial to go on their website. It's win win as they get a real customer review and you get a nice link. List every company you've spent money with, be it software, products, or even your catering firm. These are great links to get. Also, if you have any execs or senior staff members, leverage their contacts. Book in 30 minutes with them and ask them to go through their major business contacts (or even better, their LinkedIn account) and find out which business contacts would be likely to link to your business. You can earn some really valuable links just by approaching your Chief Execs golf buddies. Guest posting This is the bread and butter link building for a lot of companies nowadays. It's a great and scalable way of building links, creating relationships and adding value to the web. Find powerful websites and blogs in your industry, and simply approach them offering to provide a piece of content for their site. Have some of the experts from your company write great articles and guides to their niche (you'll be surprised how happy people are to knock up an article about something they care about). This can be done on scale, and is a effective and positive way to earn yourself some very strong editorial links. Broken site fixing This isn't my idea, in fact it only came about this week through this excellent post by Eugene Krall: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/php-errors-as-a-means-of-getting-links If you have some PHP boffs in your company, get them to go out there and fix some website errors in their spare time. People will be delighted with the help and happy to give you a link. You never know, it might drum up some new business too. Inbound Content Of course, the most scalable way of getting links is through the viral effect, and this can be achieved by adding outstanding and eye-catching content to your own site. This isn't just a case of posting an interesting article though, you have to think outside the box to come up with content that is going to blow people away (or at least impressive them enough to hit the 'share' button). This way is a longer game, but once you've built up a fan base you can be receiving tons of new links every time you press the 'publish' button. In regards to the link building methods you proposed (directories, article submission, social bookmarking etc etc)... I'm not one for playing the black/white hat game, but what I am passionate about is SEO that works against SEO that doesn't, and the fact of the matter is that in most instances these tactics whil be ineffectual at best, and actually damaging at worst. There are some good directories out there, and some article submission sites that might send some benefit, but these are few and far between and the effort it takes to find them will be the same as using a safe and effective tactic such as those above. You've got to remember that if a link is as simple to acquire as submitting an automated form, then it's unlikely to carry any SEO value at all. If SEO were that easy I'd be retired and sipping cocktails on a beach! Good luck, let me know if you want to discuss any further link building tactics or if you need any help with your campaigns. Thanks, David

A delayed thank you, yet a thank you nevertheless for some good recommendations.  My programmer is reviewing the Yoast SEO module and running into these types of issues that Yoast really can't help with.  We have a long list of issues we are addressing.  I'll write more when I know more as to our ultimate solution.  But you present some helpful options.

It may be true that a devalued page on a high quality site may have more value than a develaued site on a low quaility site. but only one copy of duplicate contnet will not be devalued. i have not seen anything from google to sugest anything different. nothing about high value sites or manual or auto posting. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtbNpeYP_OM

Sorry casey, All pages are on the same domain with DA of 65

What about turning them into regional sites?  A has inventory located in this state, B inventory only in that state, etc.  So they are not exact clones.

a) the less deep you can go in directories the better, keep it as close to the root as possible so #3 is out. b) marketplace should be in it's own directory since it's your brand and you should have a main landing page mindflash.com/marketplace c) don't repeate keywords, looks like stuffing, so no to these ones: mindflash.com/marketplace-training-courses/software-training mindflash.com/training-courses/software-training therefore i would research the best combination or three word mid tail searches that can capture two main phrases and all three for example: mindflash.com/marketplace/software-training-courses "software training" "training courses" "software training courses" mindflash.com/marketplace/software-courses-online or maybe more specific fits into your model mindflash.com/marketplace/php-software-training or mindflash.com/marketplace/software-training/php-courses if you need more hiearchy/granularity, but don't add folders for SEO sake - add folder if you need to organize the pages more logically use dashes not underscores use all lowercase no caps no spaces of course no funky characters drop the .html or .php extensions better to not have a slash at the end (don't forget to canonical)

Thanks for all the feedback. After some serious review, I am convinced that Google somehow began indexing our HTTPS pages and dropped all our HTTP pages.  As this is a .net website with a web.config file,  what would you all recommend I do to make the google bot read the http pages instead of the https pages. Would you add robot.txt file to the web.config file or handle it another way. Again, thanks for all the assistance.

At a domain level (and exact maths aside), yes. However at a page level (i.e within an article), then the link juice is evenly distributed across the links on the page. It gets complicated when the other link strength factors are brought into it. For example if there were two links on a page, one in the article and one in the page footer. The link juice would be distributed 50/50, however the footer link wouldn't be given the same importance and strength as the one in the article. This goes for your links in the article too. Although the link juice will be spread evenly, there are still other ranking factors that skew the importance of the links, such as the order and placement. So the number of links you have in the article effects the PageRank distribution, but there are many other factors surrounding links. The main one that will effect this issue is the diminishing returns of links to the same website (e.g yours). So if you have 4 links on a page they might get the PageRank spread evenly at 25% each, however this doesn't mean that they will all carry the same weight and value to your pages they are landing at. Cheers

Google is most likely following links on other sites pointing to your old site and then 301'ing to the new site so you're seeing activity in WMT looking here is still see two pages in the index: https://www.google.com/#hl=en&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=site:http%3A%2F%2Flampslightingandmore.com%2F&oq=site:http%3A%2F%2Flampslightingandmore.com%2F&gs_l=hp.3..0l4.1146.2239.0.2363.6.6.0.0.0.0.309.1495.2-3j2.5.0...0.0...1c.gwNTMFHM_dQ&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=13df23ca690bfc6f&biw=1920&bih=968 you can go in and remove the site in WMT using the remove URL tool and see if that stops activity in that old WMT account. Crawling or not crawling, reporting or not reporting, there is not an issue here though - the 301's appear to be properly set up.