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Well, I spent an hour or two reading through it yesterday and commenting on my twitter feed. have alook at @firstconversion for the juicy bits (tip: there were not many) 125 pages of the dryest, most boring text you have ever seen, it certainly looks real. It does look like the kind of text that would be used to train their testers ie the manual for a 5 day class, rather than a "go home and read this" text Everything in there matches what we have heard. To be honest, I didnt see much in the whole 125 bloody pages that wasn't widely known anyway More of a revelation was the names of the two companies that are providing these human testers. An enterprising SEO might try sign up...

Oh if I felt like agreeing. Understand it was a challenging day. I have one client site surpassed by two sites with PA and DA of 1. No links, on page worse than my clients and, arguably, we have better content.  On top of that I have another client site surpassed by clowns with Chinese and Australian links to no where, etc. The others are all junk - literally 40 to 60 linking root domains with maybe five even close to unpaid, non-reciprocal, and that are at least within 90 degrees of the site content (the others are somewhere beyond 180 degrees. Yes, Google occasionally has a moment and a JC Penny feels the sting. On the whole, I see too many who do not and the rankings in anything competitive are replete with BS content, from BS sites stuffed to the gills with Keywords and linked to Bangladeshi laundromats. So, why the rant.....I was getting ready to suggest PR Newswire to my clients as a counterposition after seeing so many competing sites simply run the same content as on their homepage over and over through our RSS feeds. Yes, both Ryan and Justin are correct; I just wish Mr. Google would take some uppers and get about the business of cleaning out the junkers.  Don't worry, I is still smilin' cause we are smarter than them!

That is what I thought. Thanks for the reply.  Now I need to find time to return the favor to the board.....pay it forward.

Nice video link! Thanks for the info as this is now.... ANSWERED

I would probably be thinking about two things: First for the domain authority / page rank, if you do the redirecting correctly (301) then you will probably see an initial drop off as the search engines try to figure out what happened, and then you should go back to where you were as it should still be taking into account the old domain's information along with the new domains info. So the question there is whether or not the change is worth that minor hit. So the second thing I would be asking is what does changing to the new domain get me? Is it more memorable? Does it fit the brand better? Does it get your highest value keyphrase as the URL? etc... each answer would sway me one way or another. As an example I once new of a site that sold church furniture, and they had the chance to get "Pews.com", while switching over to this URL would be a pain, I would totally suggest going after it, and embracing it as it hit one of their strong keywords. The other option of course was to build a subsidiary site just for pews (since they sold more than just pews), but that is where you need to look at your brand, and how you want to market yourself over time. For the pews.com example I could easily see re-creating the brand as "Pews.com" as that is much more memorable, and quickly tells users in my industry what I do, and how to find me all at once. The branding question is obviously the bigger one here as I think the historical value, and links of the domain will transfer over fine as long as you do the technical pieces you need to.

Yeah, sorry didn't know to mark it as answered. But we've redirected successfully, thanks!

I'm 50c each way to tell teh truth, the more i think about it

Hi, Thanks so much Zachary. In fact I am purely from linux background. This is the first time I am dealing with IIS. let me check albiet short and IIS Manager. Apart from web config file, I read about global.asax file. I think these files are are used for redirecting a whole site, right?. But in my case I need to redirect some of my old html pages to aspx pages. best!

The site looks really low-quality to me right now (not sure what it looked like two months ago), with lots of ads and just snippets of content from elsewhere. Ask yourself if this site ads value to the user for their particular query. I couldn't find any pages that did.

I have never worked for Google or any other search engine so I want to make it clear the below is my best understanding of how the process works, and I use it to base my actions upon. I feel my understanding is valid but the examples could probably use a bit of work. I am always willing to entertain other ideas. Crawlers find and explore links. They capture data and record it in a database. That data is then processed by the search engine. If Page is A indexed, the URL will show in SERPs as Page A. If later you 301 redirect Page A to Page B, when the crawler discovers the 301 redirect the search engine will update the URL in SERPS to Page B. With me so far? Later you decide to 301 redirect Page B to Page C. When the search engine recognizes the redirect (i.e. the crawler discovers it) the URL will once again be updated in SERPs to Site C. Any instances of the Page A or Page B URLs in the search engines database would be displayed as Page C in SERPs. Despite the search engine's database having the correct URL to display in SERPs, crawlers are not provided this information. As long as link exists and a crawler can find it, the crawler will attempt to follow it, subject to normal factors such as nofollow, crawl budget, etc. If you modify the initial redirect from Page A to Page C, the crawler will detect the new header change and the search engine will update their records accordingly. The above information was shared with respect to the appearance of the URL in SERPs, but it should be identical for the backlinks as well. Rather then forwarding the backlinks from Page A to Page B, those links would be directly forwarded to Page C. So instead of it re-directing  from A to B then C, we write a new redirect for A to C. Is this better? if so why? If you modify the existing redirect to go from Page A to Page C, it is better because it is a single redirect. It is better for your servers (less redirects to process), better for users (quicker page loads), better for you (less redirects to manage and less opportunities for something to go wrong) and therefore better for search engines. You are rewarded for this improvement with your link juice flow being stronger.

everywhere I've read says it is important My early SEO days weren't pretty. I read a lot of information which was far from credible. Much of the information made perfect sense in a "of course the world is flat! If it was round the people at the bottom would fall off" type of way. Much of my day used to be spent optimizing meta keywords, building links from blogs with follow links, and many other activities which are frankly crap but otherwise promoted from random sites as having value. Then I changed my focus from learning SEO from anyone who seemed like an expert and restricted my focus to truly credible sources. That change was the single best move I made. If I may make a suggestion, stop reading SEO information from "everywhere" as the overwhelming majority of it is crap. Focus on a few, reliable sources of information. Even then, always question and test new learnings. A few sites to start with are: SEOmoz, mattcutts.com/blog, matt's videos on youtube, and Google's official blog. It would take months or years to sift through the information on these sites alone. You will pick up links to other credible sources of information and be able to form your own opinions.

Both But definatly Canonical

Ryan, with the perfect answer yet again. You always beat me to it man! Keep up the good advice!

Good answer by Devin, If you are coding a site from beginning I would put them in order, but if the site already exists and it is a pain to change don't sweat it. If it's a quick global fix in CSS I would take the 30 minutes to do it personally. But like Devin said the most important thing is that you don't use a bunch of H1s on a page and the H1 should of course contain the main keyword phrase in it.

Research google panda. Many sites are in the same situation a you. Time + cleanup usually somewhat helps, according to rumors

Hello crvw, thanks for the info. 1.  I guess what I am getting at is that let's say I don't like the way thesis or genesis looks, or any of their available themes and I plan on having a programmer completely edit the template to change the way it looks, is it better to start with the thesis or geneis framework-than say the yoast blank seo optimized template for example? 2.  Why would people change from thesis because of that?   Just curious.  Thanks so much William