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Do you have the option of not displaying the extension on your URL? That way no matter what underlying language you use, you have the same URL and don't have to worry about updating links in the future.

My logic is that the content isn't that bad, and has potential for improvement. It currently drives 30% of organic traffic to the site and accounts for 75% of the total urls. At the moment, we just want to get out from under the Panda penalty, and work on improving the content in the future. Moving it to its own url seems like the best option until can improve it later.

Just adding my agreement with both EGOL and Oversteer

LOL, I don't know why it came out that I deleted also the first answer... I confirm what said in the other answer and give you the reasons: the blog in the same subdomain, like it is now, extends the long tail the site is ranking for (aka: you site is more visible for a bigger number of serps the blog gives a voice to your site, the more relevant the more the content of the blog is high quality all the links that the blog by itself obtains, are links that affects all the site, therefore also the "standard" part of it, helping its rankings

I feel that your graphs look OK.  The trend is nice, there is traffic and its coming from a variety of sources.  I would gleen a bit more from the stats if I knew a bit more about your business and a relative timeline for which the data has been compiled.  I would not worry..........

I agree, potential students will likely be searching for specific degrees by academic field. The page that is optimized for "online degrees" will be the page that high schools, businesses, other universities and education portals will be linking to most often.  When these programs are marketed the marketing materials could invite links to this specific page.

Hi Rory, That's not the default tendency of apache. If the file doesn't exist, it would normaly return a 404 error. You might have a .htaccess file on your server with some rewrite rule that allow such thing to happen. I might also be a misconfiguration trying to show a wrong default 404 page. Also, to fix your broken css/images/links when the page is in a subdirectory, you should use urls relative to the root of your domain, so instead of simply using href="css/main.css" you might want to use href="/css/main.css". Finaly, have you looked at your HTTP headers to see if this page was returning a 404 or a 200 code? For your default 404 page, you might want to look at this : http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/core.html#errordocument Regards, Guillaume Voyer.

Hi Greg, Every single link points to www.bestholidaynews.com only and the only links to your page is javascript created. So they are the only ones getting juice as Alan said. I was just pointing out some tools you can use for future posts to check for external links to your site that pass link juice. Brett.

the only way to inoculate the main domain if you go with a subdomain is if the topical focus of each is very different.  If they're very similar, it's much more difficult to pull off.  Of course if they're different enough, that's valid reason to not interlink. If they're totally related, and there's no interlinking, it could be perceived as attempting to stuff search results with multiple entries.

Thank you for the reply. I should add that this 75% of the content is an application (i.e. it is all the same). So the traffic is about the same on all of the pages. We need to choose between 404-ing the content or putting it on a subdomain. Do you know if having thin content on a subdomain will affect the original domain? I've been searching for a while, but can't seem to find anything concrete about this. Thanks!

I would investigate your "Link to Root Ratio" based on Anchor Text.  You want a very low ratio, between 1 and 2.  So for each Anchor Text phrase, you will have a certain amount of Root Domains with an amount of Links.  Dived the links by the domains and you will have your ratio. Example: colorado springs realtors = Anchor Text 221 = Root Domains 1664 = Amount of links from those domains Link  to Root Ratio: 7.5 for that Anchor Text "colorado springs realtors" (Way too High) You want to spread out your key phrases, pages being linked to, and remember that Google knows how natural links will look for the anchor text. The overall goal is to have many links coming from many different urls, from many different cblocks, with many different anchor text variations. This most likely is one of many factors.

I would suggest you talk to the developers as Theo suggests to exclude visitors from your test site.

Thank you, along the lines of what I was thinking but the added insight on domain authority makes perfect sense...now.

Any hosting or ISP packages for SEO are not really SEO packages at all, they're just submissions. At some point in the future there will hopefully be more transparency on this stuff, and companies will have to make a proper distinction where they can't just loosely use the term SEO, when they only offer something that is under 1% of what SEO really is.

Yes, If you add the noindex meta tag to the page it will not be index the next time Google crawls and re-indexs the page.

Thanks Sean, great input!

I'd certainly agree with that, Dunamis. I don't ask for links, and I don't respond well when asked for one, unless I have a relationship with the person. I have even been asked for one by someone I knew, and tried to explain nicely that an OBL from an SEO site to a real estate site didn't really make much sense for either of us. My advice, Rhys, would be to focus first on establishing a relationship. If the resulting relationship is solid, and both sites are relevant, a simple mention of your need to acquire more natural links may well spawn an offer.

I don't have the answer, but do have limited experience. We had a client mark the map wrong for the office address, and the places ranking fell significantly. I have to note, there were (as always) other things going on with the places account ( duplicate issues)  so I can not tell you this was the problem.  Certainly didn't help.