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Hey guys, SEOmoz's software done a crawl for me, and we got a crawl error at this page: http://www.theattractionforums.com/%3Ca%20href= This translates to: http://www.theattractionforums.com/<a href= What do you think is going on? So confused!

I own a small ecommerce site and I've seen where one of my (much) larger competitors have purchased other sites and went the domain-redirect route. According to Open Site Explorer it is helping their SEO a bit. One question I would have is how many of these visitors from the blog are turning into purchasers on your friend's site? If a lot of them are coming and buying products, and you do the domain redirect, then you could potentially lose a lot of sales. You could make up for the lost sales by increasing your rankings for other keywords, but how much of a boost would you need to make up for the lost sales from the blog? When you are weighing your decision, consider the conversion rate from the blog vs. the conversion rate from search engines. Another consideration to make is if both sites rank on page 1 for a lot of keywords, and you cannibalize the blog, then you are down to a single placement on the SERP.

Hey Mike, When Google re-crawls your site they will update their understanding of your redirects. Right now since you have multiple redirects you are losing a portion of link equity with each subsequent hop. Therefore if you update your redirects from A -> C rather than A -> B -> C you will pass more link equity than you are currently. -Mike

I would not risk it, wouild be better to block in robots but i donrt really like that idea much either. A no index, follow tag is better of you can manage it. I have not seen your urls or know the reason why you have the problem, but it is best of cause to avoid the problem in the first place.

@Simon agreed - could be a 302 & check WMT Also, it may not be a bad thing having results in position #1 & #2 in the SERPs Means your client has listings in the best positions Another option could be to use a rel=canonical to wipe the site out very quickly - see Rand's example of how he removed his old blog: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday (generally, be extremely cautious with this approach but given your goals , i.e. remove site from index, it should be fine)

Cool I hope it keeps heading in that direction then... and now you know all about link juice too

Thanks MJ, I already bagged this one...

Tks for your explanations. I can't tell you for Spain, as i live in France (just for an exemple i use Spain) ! But I 'm pretty sure that Google handles all his new search features at the same time in France, Spain...(ouest europe). So, we can change location settings in France for some months now, but i think it's only a tiny part on  how the location is handled by google, as you can't change your ip address, your isp, But regarding "history" as you say, if a user is not logged, google cookies can't store any history , is it (or just a part of it but how much)  ? Even more, if a user don't allow cookie or javascript on his browser, you won't have any history on google servers. Tks for your comments on that...

Thanks Simon.  I totally agree with you about visitor experience - it's ultimately the most important factor and I failed to mention it.

If it is an HTML 5 page that should be just fine as it is the HTML 5 doctype tag. Check out the info here: http://www.w3schools.com/html5/tag_doctype.asp It might cause trouble with really old browsers, but if they have that going I would hope they have already thought about the reasons for and against using it EDIT: even better link: http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/#doctype

Technically it is okay as long as you are TARGETING Ireland. If there is no reason to have an .ie content wise, if everything is exactly the same, it might not be worth it to you. The .co.uk is already set up and has links, doing the same for the same content on another domain is a lot of work. And the .co.uk is so close that it'll probably out rank it for some time because the content is exactly the same. So if you do this, take the time to focus the site to the Irish. You might not change all the content, but if it doesn't need to be changed at all, you might just focus your efforts on the .co.uk site.

Agreed. It's called the web for a reason - a web of links. To my way of thinking, when I link out I am saying to Google: this is my neighborhood, and I am linking to it.