Welcome to the Q&A Forum

That is a huge discussion but my advice here would be first, don't try too hard. If you do, you will get hit by the dreaded over optimisation penalty and Penguin will come down hard on you. If you want to optimise for a phrase, just make sure you have that at least in your URL (where possible), the page title and to a lesser degree, the description. Then focus on making the content as good as is humanly possible. Look at what your competition are doing and then improve on that - I don't mean copy it though Local SEO is a different matter and hard to get right if you don't have office in these locations. I have approached this in many different ways in the past but try not to just create pages that are called /locksmith-bristol/ without having a good reason for the page to appear there. You can do it, you just have to be careful and remember that every page must have content that is 100% unique. However, that doesn't mean spinning it or just making it similar - it has to be totally unique and can sometimes help to get a 3rd party write this for you. Hope this helps a little, and I am sure you will get lots of other advice Andy

SEM Rush is a good tool for that: http://www.semrush.com/

Are there any businesses out there that write world class guest blog articles for subjects that match my business? World Class?  Probably not, but if you get an article of that quality you should post it on your own website.  That is the type of article that attracts a lot of attention and has the potential to rank #1. Also, i've read that doing this for links is really moot because the blog posts get archived and become pagerank "unranked" thereby offering little link value after about a month or so. This depends where you are posting.  You should be able to dig down through historic posts and see what happens to their posts after a few years. Once they get archived do they still get counted by google and does the anchor text and page rank still count? If they are being archived you don't want to do this. Honestly, it's best to post unique and valuable content on your own domain.  If you start giving it away you are feeding your competitors and creating new competitors.  Do you really want to do that.

Any Reply ! - Really i want to make it back !

Thanks for the replies. It's kind of what I feel - I can't really bring myself to start swapping links with 'Bulgarian dog widget' sites! I had just been assuming that the value of a reciprocal link was pretty much null if the two sites were of similar standing - IMHO that's how it should be. I link to sites that I like, that's the way it should work. Having said all that, I do have some more targeted, less precious sites that I might set up a 'useful links, / resources / our friends or whatever euphemism is favoured these days. But, I draw the line at some of the off-topic junk I see on my competitors.

No, I've not received a notification. Thanks, Sean.

One additional thing you could do for the client is to seek out any external links to the alternate domains and see if you can update them so they now link to the main domain. As far as a timeframe, I usually see a time period of two to three months for things to restore back to normal. The earliest changes I've seen have been a month. As long as the new merge is, like you said, for usability reasons also, I imagine it's a great move for people using the website and it was a good thing to do. You may want to beef up the content on the main domain for those terms that dropped in rankings, or try to do some guest blogging related to those keywords so you'll get links back to the main domain.

Thanks David I was actually looking for something more than the basics... I realize the tactics and best practices are universal. However I was hoping to find those industry specific nuggets... Thanks anyway

One website with cities n url's for other pages is strongest I would think.

Hi Bayan, Sorry to hear your search engine traffic has dropped. It might be helpful if you posted the section of the .htaccess file in question. Here's some things I would double check: 1. Does the .htaccess file serve a 301 response code for the redirect? (probably, but worth double checking)  What I might try is create a file of all your OLD urls and upload them into a crawler like Screaming Frog and test them all out to see if they both redirect to the proper URL and with the correct response code. 2. Did you redirect the 2000 pages to unique URLs, or did you redirect them to a single url (or handful or urls)? If you consolidated your URLs to only a handful, this could effect your rankings. 3. Did the content and other HTML elements stay the same during the redirect? For example, did the title tags stay the same or reasonable close to the original? Big differences could cause the URLs to lose relevance and thus rankings. 4. Less crawl errors = good. I would check the Index Status in Google Webmaster to see if the number of pages discovered/indexed matches up well with the number of URLs on your site. 5. Proper sitemaps submitted? Oftentimes when you change your URL structure it's good to submit 2 sitemaps - one listing all your old URLs and another for the new. This way, search engines will attempt to crawl the old URLs and "process" the redirect. Probably not an issue for you since the change was 6 months ago, however. 6. Finally, I'd keep my eyes open for any other causes that may have caused the drop in traffic, i.e. Algorythm Updates, Site Issues, Backlinks and so on. That's all I can think of, but there may be more. Let us know if you find anything!

Thank you Devanur Rafi sir ! Will look into that Links you share !

Yes, I noticed that big domains (on the basis of popularity and brand awareness among the public) have an enormous advantage in the SERPs.  I think that they generally deserve it. Where they don't deserve it is when they have a single product with a skimpy description but they outrank websites where the entire domain is dedicated to information about that product category and they have offer many different products of that type and all of the supplies and accessories. Google seems to be very poor at identifying topic-level depth and expertise.

Hi Marcus, I used copyscape and I found out that there are 4 copies of the contents of my site's homepage, 2 of them copied almost everything and the other two just the first paragraphs. Is this critical? The other thing I noticed, before 17th January, our target keywords are pointing to our homepage, today when I checked, many are pointing to the different pages of the site. Do you think it is time to review the keyword density of the site for each page? Thanks in advance.

The cache date that you see in the search results does not necessarily correspond with the last time your site was indexed.  Your site may have been re-indexed with your new content today, but the cache might still show your page from a week ago. The best way to improve crawling and indexing is to improve your PageRank.  The higher your PageRank, the more resources Google will be willing to spend on your site.

My best guess has to do with link velocity and age. Imagine you are a well established site, been around 10 years. You have 10,000 links. That link velocity would average 1,000 links per year. Imagine you have a site that is 10 days old. It has 1,000 links. That average is 100 links per day. That probably sets off a trigger like trending topics in Twitter. You get enough juice fast enough and suddenly Google thinks you are a big deal. That's the only explanation i can come up with as to how something new can pass up something established. With a brief history it can easily be influenced by mass link buying. Just my guess though.

Sitewide links are generally believed to be of lower value than contextual links, and can even get you penalized post-Penguin.  They can still be good links to get when used in moderation, but best to mix them up with other link building tactics like guest blogging.