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Howdy, neighbor. If their server is indeed hosted with google - dont worry about speed and loading times, that's for sure. All my tests prove that there is no better place to host than Google (in terms of speed). Host provider office location doesn't matter, since their actual servers are located in,  most likely Provo, Utah. Additionally, nowadays the time to servers and back doesn't vary much with distance. Example - we got several servers - one in dallas and one in utah. the difference in response times is 30-60 ms. Now, there is no connection between SERPS and IPs, unless that IP is blacklisted. In terms of subdomain being on different server - there is no difference either, since as you say, it's for orders and quotes only. Many-many websites have their shopping carts on servers, different from main content servers. Also since you're not gonna have any content on that subdomain, or backlinks to that subdomain (since it's quotes and payments), it won't bring any rankings changes. You can even robot-noindex the subdomain if you're afraid of changes after it's being indexed. The only legitimate concern is UX, based on longer loading times. So, make sure that software server are fast enough and you'll have no problems. Additionally, the small lag is accepted (even expected), when you're being redirected to shopping cart/payment pages. Cheers.

The links actually are just in some forms

I'm sorry to hear that I would recommend requesting the people linking to your existing site that are using high quality powerful links to update the back link to point to your new site. the advantages of dealing with people with legitimate sites are they are much easier to find and will actually help you with these types of things. It's not the nightmare that it is trying to get a hold of a blackhat webmaster. Outside of creating a 100% legitimate website with a slightly different niche may be content, inbound marketing whatever buzzword you want to use for the very short time I hope it takes you to get your most powerful white hat links to point to your new website. Removeem.com It is a wonderful tool for finding the names and contact info of webmasters you can use it to make a polite request saying that you have a new domain and you would appreciate if they would please update the link pointing at your site. After you have taken the best Backlinks away from your existing site I would move to your new site. I would also be upfront about moving place text saying you are changing domain names in a  conspicuous location on your site. If you feel that your livelihood is being jeopardized by this I definitely can understand I would then really put 110% into creating some top-notch content and user friendly/mobile design on your new brand. When you go live you want to really have something better than what you had before. I'm sorry I don't know any methods that would be instant but I would consider using pay per click to soften the blow. I hope this is of help, Thomas

I reshot the video with shots from google images that are filtered for reuse. That completely covers me right? Bob

Hi Timothy, I agree with CleverPHD here, a couple hundred crappy links won't likely hurt a strong brand, and the amount of time it took to get them is not indicative of a spammer. In general 150 links from a true link spammer would be few hours or less. I will add another thought, up until last year when panda come down it was some what routine for people to still use link directories, and in some case there still are a few industry specific directories that actually make sense. I would certainly ask your freelancer to look up the Google Panda update and ask him to self evaluate what he has been doing. Hopefully, he will see the light. Here is a decent article over on SearchEngineJournal.com Hope it helps, Don

Removing 404 urls from Google indexes is a never ending job and often requires multiple submissions until they go away. But when should you submitt them for removal? If Moz finds them but Google is not reporting them yet in wemaster tools or Analytics... should you be proactive and submit them to google for removal? OR Wait until the show up as an error by Google?

This could be an outlier, but easy to check.  Use a browser plugin and set the useragent to Googlebot. Browse your site.  See if it is displaying anything funky.  I have seen sites hacked so that when Googlebot is the agent, they show links to viagra type sites.  I would otherwise agree that you need to become friends with the disavow tool asap.

Correct, the "end of chain" is what you want to rank.

I wish to add my two-penneth in here... Link building has changed hugely over the last few years and to the point, I am actually going to be dropping this as an offering within my consultancy services. Link building should really now be tied in to a bigger service / article marketing production plan. Of course, there are some sites / areas where you might still be able to go out and build natural links, but these are going to decrease over time. Google now wants to see a fantastic site with outstanding content. The happier your visitors, the happier Google will be. Content, content, content - focus heavily on creating something not seen on your competitors sites and market that through as many channels as you can. -Andy

Hi Lingke! Good feedback from everyone here. I just wanted to be sure to throw into the mix that fact that John Mueller specifically stated last December that Google does not want markup on on-site testimonials: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/wY1vF2RRos4/discussion More on this here: http://www.localsearchforum.com/google-local/26385-say-what-google-says-dont-add-review-markup-your-customer-reviews.html

Hi, IMO you should follow steps mentioned in below article to find all low quality backlinks then first try to remove manually if not possible then you can disavow. How To Identify & Remove Bad Backlinks @ http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/tutorials/how-to-find-remove-bad-backlinks/ Hope this helps. Thanks

OMG!  I just did ran Open Site Explorer for ALL links on the site and found what you are talking about.   There are DOZENS of spam links that should not be there! It looks like I have been hacked and had links added into my images folder!   Grrr. Thanks for finding this.   Clean up process begins in 3. . 2. . 1. . .

Hello Aniket, When you say you are switching from HTTPs to HTTP version of the site, do you mean that in reverse (i.e. HTTP to HTTPS)? HTTPS is the more recent development and is counted as a ranking factor by Google. Here is an article on the shift: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html To quote the article: "We've seen positive results, so we're starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal." The question of "how significant an advantage will it be?" is anyone's guess. We do know that Google has called for it, and that they are incorporating it as a definitive ranking signal. It still pales in comparison to your SEO bread and butter (on-site, links, etc.) but every advantage you can gain is a step in the right direction. It sounds like you will be in a competitive market, so anything you can get on your side will be beneficial. HTTPS, however, is likely a small-scale ranking signal and not likely to boost optimization efforts by more than 1%. Hope this helps and let me know if you have any further questions, Rob

The appropriate solution in this place would be to employ the hreflang tag to related the two geographically separate sites together. However, before you take that step, I would look to make sure the previous SEO company which created the .com did not point any harmful links at the .com domain which would make it inadvisable to connect the two sites together. Use OpenSiteExplorer to look at the backlink profile and use Google Webmaster Tools to authorize the .com site and look for any manual penalty notices. If all looks clear, go ahead forward with the implementation of the hreflang tag. Good luck and feel free to ask more questions here!

I've been doing it for years and have never come across this issue. Look towards an algorithmic penalty too. There is no telling what could have caused this, so you need to cover all bases. -Andy

To continue this discussion, here is an interesting thing that happened today. It might be a little egotistical but I have a Google Alert set up for my name. I was thrilled to get an alert today that I was mentioned in Forbes. Woohooo. The article mentions my name and an article I wrote and then links to: https://moz.com/ugc/what-is-an-unnatural-link-an-in-depth-look-at-the-google-quality-guidelines So, if I had published that content on my own site I could have had a link from Forbes. But...is that true? Most likely if I had published that content on my own site it wouldn't have had the authority to rise to the top of the SERPS and it wouldn't have had nearly as much exposure as it got on the Moz blog. So, I am guessing that I would not have gotten a link from Forbes and I would not have been mentioned by them either. I think that as I get more authority there are some articles that I want to publish on my own site, but there are others that I want to publish elsewhere for the exposure. One thing that I find does well on my own site is if I do a study with unique information, or if I write an article on a very specific topic. But, if I am writing about a broad subject, at this point an article on my own site is not likely to outrank Moz and SEW.

sorry bit confused now since title tags are meta tags ?

Thanks for the mention Rebecca. I wanted to point out that link removal is likely not as important to Google when it comes to Penguin rather than a manual penalty. I wrote more about this here: http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2374406/penguin-recovery-should-you-be-removing-links-or-just-disavowing Also, the comments in your disavow file are not read by Google. The file is processed automatically so lines starting with "#" are just skipped. They're mostly for your own records. It's confusing because the documentation Google gives makes it look like you should be including info about whether or not you've tried to remove a link in your disavow file. But really, this is only information that is necessary in a reconsideration request which would be for a manual penalty.

In my head, good UX results in good SEO.  I think you need more copy for the user to talk about all of your great Houston SEO experiences, but that will also give more fodder for the bots to read and traverse. Other things that come to my mind.  Google search console is looking at your entire site.   On your site as a whole, the word "houston" is mentioned a lot and the word "seo" is mentioned a lot and probably "houston SEO" happens a fair amount. But if that is the case, out of all the pages on your site, which one should Google rank for "Houston SEO"?  What signals are you giving that are clear to the point of whacking a 2x4 over the head that "this" is the most important page on your site that relates to that key term.  You may need to look at how you use keywords across the site.  You may want to look at how you link internally and on what anchor text you use internally. I know this is not the same example, but what comes to my mind is this WBF https://moz.com/blog/why-good-unique-content-needs-to-die-whiteboard-friday Rand states that if you really want to rank a page on something, your content has to be 10x better than everyone else's. It has to be that good to stand out to Google and users to rank in the SERPs. Is your SEO houston page content 10x better compared to all the other pages on your site (and to your competitors' sites) as it relates to Houston SEO?  The suggestions I gave on how to add more content related to Houston SEO to a specific page underscore that idea and in the process, it also adds some additional keywords on the page without it looking too spammy.  Good for users good for Google. The other aspect that not a lot of people talk about is how making the page "sticky" aka making it really useful, helps with SEO.  Google tracks people clicking on a result and then coming back to the SERPS with the idea that if you stay longer on a page then it must be "better" and it helps with the rankings.  (This is also why making sure your meta description is on point for conversion as you have to get people to click that result if you ever want a change to have them get to your site and stay a while).  Adding all that additional "houston SEO" content on a page will hopefully cause the user to stay longer and improve your quality score with Google from the standpoint that Google should see people spending more time on your site before or if they click back.  This is also why using bulleted lists and short paragraphs work.  People skim.  If they see a bunch of long text, they will leave quick as they do not want to process that info.  Lists, bullet points, bolded highlights, pictures, I will hang around and glance through that for sure!   Moz blog post and video on pogo sticking.