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Haven't read anything or experimented with using canonical link elements to indicate your preferred domain. You should have server redirects in your Apache/Nginx config file for this and also set the preferred domain in GWT to really take care of that issue. Yes, Google will certainly decide for you if you don't have other indicators on which site you want to rank for select keywords. I suppose you'll need to decide which site to keep, but if you want both then you've got a lot of work ahead of you. Ideally, you should be ranking each product page on each site for unique keywords rather than duplicating efforts and wasting resources on trying to rank the same product page on two different sites for the same keywords. Not sure why anyone would want to do that for any other reason than testing. Anyway, my strong advice is pick a site and then merge the other site into it. If you're using Magento or WooCommerce or some other mainstream e-com platform, this should be rather easy, if not just time consuming. If they are different platforms, then I recommend Magento or a custom solution for best technical SEO features. If you can share more details about your job, I'd be glad to help.

From 100 links, 40 pointing categories looks ok for me. Google is against link building practices and follows such practice ( PENGUIN ), so if you want to do link building and not get caught, you need to build a very natural link profile: - Anchors: Do not use the exacly keyword you want to rank as anchor, instead use long sentences including your kw. - Variety: Do not get just "keyword" links, links with url, branch are also important. - Nofollow: It´s very important to include nofollow links in your link profile. - **Footer/sidebar: **Avoid links from footer/sidebar, specially if they are nofollow. - **Variety of domains: **Get your links from different domains. - Avoid links fromk penalized websites: It´s also very important to analyze the domains your site is going to be linked are healthy enough. Fore more complete information, checkout this article: http://moz.com/ugc/category/link-building

No, never got a clear answer. Still not sure what the problem is.

Ya, that's a mess. Either 301 to a live page or let the 404 be delivered on its own.

Page 2 and 3 is particularly bad but even page 1 is bad. Some terms in the industry show US retailers on position 1 that don't even ship to the UK. I really don't think people from the UK interact that much with some of the sites on page 1 - by contrast leaving aside Amazon and Ebay they would be unknowns here to 99% of people. I also don't think it is results from google.com since why would random foreign language retailers appear so high up (in fact if we assumed they were showing USA results, I would be asking why so few US retailers show compared to those from New Zealand and South Africa). Having put this one to Rand I think the issue here isn't as easily solved as I hoped but you are right about their results. When they are this bad people will switch to Bing.

Hi Ivan, do you have an update on this?

I've seen it disappear when using a Google from a different country, google.com.mx or google.ca for example...  Neither of these make the searches more generic however.

Thank you guys for your effort I appreciate it. I found the answers i think.

Hi, Just did a quick check on a few marijuana related keywords in Semrush. Don't know if they are really penalising the keywords, top results always seem to be a mix of (governmental) information, and sites where pro/contra are discussed: wikipedia - http://medicalmarijuana.procon.org/ - http://www.drugpolicy.org/medical-marijuana http://www.ncsl.org/research/health/state-medical-marijuana-laws.aspx http://norml.org/legal/medical-marijuana-2 http://www.azdhs.gov/medicalmarijuana/ I guess that unless the queries are very specific (like: buy medical marijuana online) it will be very difficult to get high positions in the SERP's. I would assume that the risk of having this content on your site is pretty low, especially if your content is balanced (pro/contra). We manage the biggest health site in the Netherlands (where recreational use of marijuana is allowed since quite some time). While marijuana is not really our top keyword, we do have like 120 articles/news items published and it does not seem to do any harm (as our organic traffic continues to grow). Hope this helps, Dirk

Yes, presenting the reasons you should keep it on one domain [duplication of effort between two sites, splitting up potential links, duplicate content on the sites, possibility of Google thinking you are creating a link scheme by linking between the sites] might convince the decision-makers. If there is no way to convince them, for the magazine site I'd optimize for long-tail search terms relating to "magazine" or "travel" or whatever is unique to the publication's content. [And from reading the media kit, it sounds like luxury lifestyle content is an intended focus, so I'd probably emphasize that.]

For just a simple example, website speed optimization could also help in a website's performance in search engines. So I'd try to cover most of the possible issues a website has, in order to have benefit from all the channels.

By the way, I buy my certificates here: https://www.namecheap.com/ In my opinion from a visitor perspective, to move in and out of ssl during a visit is bad; they would notice something is changing and average visitor wouldn't understand. So I would go for a 100% https. If you google about it you will find a lot of testimonial saying moving everything from http to https didn't have much impact in terms of performance. In my opinion the bad name of https is all coming from ages ago when protocols and hardware were not very good at managing it.

Hi Sorry for repeating, but you gave the answer all by yourself: if you need to know how many people searched for "New car" in the U.S. , you can use both Adwords keyword tool and google trends to get this data. Here is an example for the car industry. Once you determine the keywords you need, you can benchmark and analyze data with many tools (eg. google trends and google adwords, or also semrush, searchmetrics, and moz tools), to get the trends and search volume for all those keywords, and get insights on the industry field youre working on. Hope this helped

Your gap will disappear if you get back into the News index. Best of luck!

I had a problem with this when auto-complete caome out. The name of the site I was working on had two words in the name, the first word was also the name of a competitors site. If you visited their site once, that was it... you weren't getting to the second word to find us! We saw a 30% drop in visits. Some of it came back, but not all of it. I discussed this with our Google rep at the time, and they assured me it had nothing to do with auto-complete, but I couldn't find any other explanation.

http://www.apelectric.com/6241-Generac-Guardian-Series-14kW-p/6241.htm This is the code I used:

In the short-term, even using 301 redirects may have a slight negative effect on the weight of your links, but in the long-term, they shouldn't be affected by it really.

It works i removed the parameter in WMT and today it works very happy with it

Years ago, we used Fontographer to create custom chars to add to a font which when published would make all kinds of chars avaiable in Google et al... Don't know if it's still in play....but seems like it from what is above...

Iredeto, I do this on a few of my sites and it works out well. Saves on crawl budget, keeps google from accessing my affiliate links, and keeps any pagerank from passing through the links, which keeps me in-line with Google's webmaster policy on links. One thing to keep in mind is that Google may show those URLs in the search results with a message that they can't show the content because it has been blocked. If you want to keep this from happening you may have to remove that directory GWT using the URL Removal tool. If they get re-indexed in 90 days (or whatever the reset time frame is) you will have to do it again. Hopefully that won't be an issue once you get them all removed the first time and block the folder. Using rel = "nofollow" tags on the hyperlinks going to that directory wouldn't hurt either.