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Matt, no offense, but this is all very basic stuff that you must know very well before starting to do any type of SEO. People here usually discussing somewhat more advance topics. As I understand you are expert in dog training. Imagine person coming to the professional dog training forum and asking umm how to tell the difference between the stud and the bitch. File Manager in Cpanel. 99% of Internet providers use Cpanel. I would assume GoDaddy is using it too. So all you have to do is login to your GoDaddy account and go to Cpanel. If you do not know how to do it, I would suggest calling GoDaddy tech support or reading up their help files. Once you click on the File Manager, it would look like File explorer in windows, but only for your website. Click on Upload file button, pick the file to upload and you are done. I have attached the screenshot of CPanel I am not trying to discourage you but if you have no budget to hire someone else and do have time to learn. I would suggest digging into Goddady help files, calling their support or just using Google to figure out how to manage your site. pUwXo.png

Read that so many times; no help about if I should make all my posts about 1 keyword was provided.

Hey Russ, Thanks for your reply. I will do my best to answer your questions 'back at me'! 1. I was aware that the reconsideration request may have no impact and as the client doesn't recall receiving a penalty notice, I just got it done to ensure we were covering all basis. And for a couple of minutes used, I thought it would be worth checking. 2. I agree we need to do some link removal. One question on the back of that, and ensuring we do what is needed within the client's limited budget is, if the links/websites are no longer listed in Google (which from the partial data we have from the old company, many are not), does removing them hold any value as the links won't be passing signals of any kind if the site's not in the SERPs any more, right? 3. My only concern with this one is the risk of duplicated content. The client has already re-written the home page and is in the process of re-writing the others because of the previous company's spammy SEO approach. To get them to write another version is going to be too much for them. I'm definitely considering getting them on a fresh domain but don't want to inadvertently cause them more problems! Thanks for the article, that came out during a time of illness so I completely missed it. Thanks!

There's a few ways to look at this.. but it entirely depends on the domains. If they are all brand domains, then you secure your brand names and redirect all traffic to the main domain. If you're aiming at SEO value, then you gain the authority (if there is any) of all the domains that you redirect to the primary. Why wouldn't you want to redirect 100 domains? Honestly I don't think Google would look at that like a red flag, but again it entirely depends on the domains. If you redirect domains with bad reputation, or former penalties, then you'll automatically inherit the bad reputation. So that can work either way - depends on the domains.

Hi Sarah, If you mean putting a rel canonical tag on a page that you are going to (or are) 301 redirecting to another page...then it doesn't matter at that point as the 301 redirect happens at the server level and will redirect the bot to the new page before the old page (and rel canonical tag is read). Hope this helps! Cheers!

I assume the new url format / structure is also the new inner link structure (all links in the site are updated with the new format). if this is the case the indexation is based on this not based on old urls following the 301s. As far as testing them - did you test to see what response code do you get when accessing the old urls ? Though I don't understand why you'd submit a sitemap with the old urls? ** To send google's bot to crawl those and see the 301s and delist them from the index. How do you ping it? ** There are a lot of free services available that you can use - just run a search and you will have several to choose from.

Hi Craig, Glad you found it! Joomla can be a nightmare sometimes. Matt.

Hi Guys Thank you all for your responses. It seems pretty definitive that I should go for the root domain option. I do have one more thing to ask though. If I do switch the site back to the root domain, should I still keep the Kigu Kids domain going too? Considering it's already ranking in Google around number 7? Tom.

Ok this is my plan... Tell me what you think, I'm going to google each of the directories brand nanes I submitted to off of seomoz, and if any of them are not ranking #1 in google for their brand names I will request a link removal... Should that suffice?

Also, Would love to hear your thoughts on Title Tags?  I know the best practices that SEOmoz suggests, however One expert I spoke with recently in local search and google places believes that putting your company phone number in the title tag helps get local rankings with blended search (both organic and google places) They also say that Google still credits title tags longer than 60 characters.  G may not show the full title tag however users are still getting credit for them even if longer than supposed to be. Below are 3 examples that the expert mentioned above suggested. Austin Office Space 78701 | Commercial Real Estate 512-861-0525 | Search Rent and Lease Listings In Austin TX Austin Office Space For Rent - 512-861-0525 - Find  Retail and Commercial Property For Lease in Austin TX Austin Office Space  [image: numbers_button_skype_logo.png](512) 861-0525 - Find Commercial Real Estate Property For Lease in Austin Tx What are your thoughts?  I am looking for guidance on a good HOME page title tag to use for the website www.AustinTenantAdvisors.com

Ahhh,  I see what you mean now. Yes, good idea . Will get that implement to. Yes, everything is duplicated.It's all the same apart from the url which seems to be bringing in to different locations instead of one. Odd url Generated(notice it has 2 locations in it) http://www.bestathire.co.uk/rent/Vacuum_cleaners/Walsall/250/Alfreton Correct location specific urls - http://www.bestathire.co.uk/rent/Vacuum_cleaners/Walsall/250 http://www.bestathire.co.uk/rent/Vacuum_cleaners/Alfreton/250 thanks Sarah.

Thank you! yes, I have read the articles that you suggested. Makes me think it's not the problem to be honest, but I can't be sure. The industry is pet clothing HAHA! http://www.moondoggieinc.com we already are pluggin away on social media - FB, Twitter, & Tumblr (who doesn't share picutre of their pets in clothes lol!) My homepage is getting better, but pages off of it like /dog-harness-php and /dog-clothing.php are what I'm having trouble with. On-page grades I get A's for both... hmm It's kinda like i wish I had a guide to help in the process of learning seo... seems trial by error right now. I can make most things look pretty, but getting them to search right is hard!

Yes, you should create shorter excerpts. There should also be an option on WordPress to allow more than one blog post on the home page, you should increase this number, so each page is differentiated better than the home page and blog post.

No problem. Glad you managed to sort it out. Matt.