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Hi, A google plus local page could help for local rankings, especially when Google SERPS return a 'local 7-pack' of results. In my experience I have not seen many Google SERPS with G+ Local listings showing in the results for web design / seo related queries.  However, I have seen Google show a G+ Local listing for one SEO company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin because they branded themselves as the "Milwaukee SEO Company" with a matching domain name, but this seems to be the exception. When you say 'Google Plus Local page', I assume that you mean a Google Plus Business Page created in the 'local' category. At this time you can only merge a G+ Local listing with at G+ Business page that was created in the 'local' category, however service area businesses (SABs) do not qualify for this merging at this time. Meaning, that if you are required to hide your address in your G+ Local/Google Places dashboard (if you only service customers at their location and/or customers do not come to your office), you most likely won't be able to verify your G+ Business page, so they wouldn't get merged either.

Thanks, Everyone! I am basing the Domain Authority on the seoMoz number on my reports. It went from mid/high 40's to 39. Page Authority for Home is 49. MozRank is 4.32, MozTrust 4.60. While not innovative or groundbreaking, our content is original and not duplicated, thin or syndicated at all. I have not checked bounce back rates on the blog pages. The links to the Home page from the blog were not part of the navigation structure, but internal links from the content. I have now deleted the links I was concerned about. I think they were too keyword stuffy. I have never employed spam tactics but I do sometimes get a little carried away with on-page optimization for keywords. We have never had a ton of traffic as we offer a primarily local service that doesn't bring a lot of frequent traffic. And then we lost traffic a few months ago due to losing position in the SERPS for our 2 main keywords, so we have very little traffic.

I think listing them on separate landing pages like you mentioned is the best way to do it. Are there cases where some of those sub pages could be placed into a sub-sub category to help clean up the look of the overwhleming listing of pages? Could you instead provide a search box that might filter / list related pages instead of showing all the pages? What is your ultimate goal for all that content? Scott O.

Actually i am sorry i am not clear your this point.i have tried a lot but can't.will you please explain ? " Setup your theme and templates to use structured data in the HTML. This will tell Google specifically what your pages and products are best categorized as. http://schema.org. You can use this especially for product reviews which may show up as rich snippets in the search results "

It depends how many services you offer. Right now you're listing 3 and that fits fine in your navigation, but at some point you may want to add more services. I think what you're doing now works, but I'd create a services menu if you have other services. We can only give you opinions on this forum, so you should test both and see what works better.

Thanks Ryan, so this means to get for example interview_id=819 redirected to the correct article, I have to provide the ID also in the new URL? TLD/category/category.php?interview_id=819 to TLD/category/interview-name-819 Should be something like this in Regex: RewriteRule ^category/([^/]+-)?([0-9]+)/?$ category/category.php?interview_id=$2 EDIT: After working on it the whole day I found the following solution (as I'm working with Wordpress). Maybe it is useful for anyone: I'm using the following function now: add_action('parse_request','oldsite_redirect',0); // 0=before (most) 'parse_request' calls function oldsite_redirect() { if (isset($_GET['interview_id'])) { global $wpdb; $sql = "SELECT post_id FROM {$wpdb->postmeta} " . "WHERE meta_key='interview_id' AND meta_value='%s'"; $sql = $wpdb->prepare($sql,$_GET['interview_id']); $post_id = $wpdb->get_var($sql); if ($post_id) { $permalink = get_permalink($post_id); if ($permalink) { wp_safe_redirect($permalink,301); exit; } } } } Solution found here: http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/12824/url-rewrite-based-on-a-custom-field-value/

Hi, Thanks for the help, I have two more questions though: 1.  If I set up the same (exact) URL structure with the .html in wordpress (new site) Would I have to use re-directs, if so, why? 2.  How do you go about setting up the URL extension in WP, I know their is a way, it read it on a site, but hey did not tell you how? Any info, as always, is appreciated! Jimmy

your page looks very clean on user side, you're showing links in your navigational portion of the page to your inner pages (level 1) as needed. What I don't understand is why you have links to level 2 pages (the further sections of level 1 pages) even if they're not clickeable. This is not a big cloacking issue but you're actually showing to users and bots different version of the page. If I were you I'll remove the links to level 2 pages and links to level 1 pages only from your homepage. The value to level 2 pages will be passed from the level 1 pages and then navigational links will make the juice flow up again to upper levels. This seems to me very natural, I'll only remove those hidden links in the homepage so you'll be easily below the 100 threshold.

Paul, I would also add, as kevbudmonroe says, big site changes can create flux which can soon be recoverable, or better, on its own. Im sure your scouring the analytics for clues but if you havent already look at your intelligence reports in Google Analytics - they might throw up something you didnt think of. Good luck, Andy

Hey Dan, I have some experience with a few of these. Mainly phpBB and vBulletin. I think both are pretty well and it is really all about flexibility in modifying SEO needs, in which both can allow you to do easily. I personally like vBulletin and their community, but it could be quite expensive and does hog up resources. phpBB is open source last time I used it (years ago), and it is great to build off of and there are plenty of successful sites running on phpBB. Bottomline is your budget. If you have the budget go with vB, if you are just testing something..try phpBB. They are both pretty good.

Thanks guys for your inputs. By the way, this issue is already resolved last year. Thanks again!

Re: Sitemap - standard length of time is 30 days, or until you notice search engines have de-indexed the old URLs.

Thanks for the help. Can you give me an example of gathering info a little at a time?  A website that does this? Remember, I am trying to get leads, not make a sale. We will be giving away a white paper.  Any other ideas are welcome.

I am glad I was able to help. Please let me know if you have any issues with pair as I doubt you will. But they really are a fantastic web host and I think you made a great decision. I'm happy I could've been of assistance Sincerely, Thomas

I'd add the critical factor is "will this micro site stand on its own?" Meaning - is there enough unique content, value and trust for this site that it deserves to rank for its own phrases? If the micro sites share most or all keywords or content as the main site, or if the quality of the micro site is poor, or if it is only filler content purely for liinking, there really is no difference between micro sites and a link network. So if you want to go the route Charles describes (and I too have used with great success many times for many clients), be willing to achieve those goals.  If you think you can "get away" with artificially faking it, you may get away with it for a while.  However even if you do, all it takes is one manual review or an algorithm update to wipe out all of that work, and even possibly flag your site in a way that would require four times as much effort to recover.

If you can check through all the backlinks and can be sure that they're good quality links, I'd bop in a 301 redirect. I look for two things when considering 301s: Traffic and live links.  Your client has both. If she is serious about promoting the new site as the definitive website for her brand, then I'd put in the redirect.  For continuity's sake, you may want to make the new page similar to the old one, or carry the same brand messaging, but I think a 301 is much more preferential than a landing page.  It would pass on link strength and also not interrupt the user's journey.

Hi Highland, Thanks for responding to this I totally agree links are more powerful than where you are hosted, my concern is that having them altogether on the one platform (Magento) will affect the rankings in the sense that they won't be able to build up the same amount of domain authority. The way Magento is set up you can host them on the different IP's and that would get rid of the hosting issue, but do you think it would affect SEO if they all were on the same platform (Magento) sharing the same store and having different content and Meta data etc? I can't find any information about anyone who has tried it and had success with it from an SEO stand point. I appreciate your input and help Highland