Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Dennis & Erica, Thanks for your input. I'll wait for Linkedin to release something. At least I'm not alone with this one.

No problem - that's what this great community is all about

Joey, Thanks for your response. To answer your questions, the blog has a totally different URL. However, as I mentioned, a snippet of each entry is embedded into a page on our website, followed by a "read more" link that directs the viewer to our separate blog. As far as integration, I agree that it seems like the best choice here. However, I'm fairly new to this and don't have full control of the final changes made to the website, blog, etc. To my knowledge, our decision to host separately in the first place was because we wanted the ability to individually share/publish posts via LinkedIn. Again, thanks for your feedback. It is much appreciated! Lauren

Hi Ali, So, Google's guideline on this is that the business name should be exactly what it is in the real world (https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en_). Businesses should not be adding modifiers to their name for the sake of search. If the business is now considering going through a formal/legal re-branding process, then this would be mean marketing-wide, including the website, all citations and other web references, the way the phone is answered, print materials, radio and TV advertising. You'll need to pick one name and use it everywhere. This will need to be the legal name or DBA. Yes, it could be of some degree of help if the legal business name included the city in it, but whether this advantage would be great enough to warrant the major task of a formal re-brand will be a big decision for the company to make.

You're welcome. Great insights as usual. And this just further emphasizes the importance of content as well as how it relates to organic rankings. If a company has no interest in using words written well, search doesn't have much interest in it.

Anthony I am glad I'm not alone. I sort of accepted that Facebook was making life hard work for it's posters to shake more money out of us but when organic reach drops from the high hundreds to mid thirties for no apparent reason, you gotta ask what's going wrong! Have a good one

Hi guys Really funny to read this! I had some advice from a former compettitor  (he has since sold his cateeing business) his site has little or even no interesting content (a handful of blog posts) but ranks well for all the keywords that we Desire . I asked him how he did it and he said that he put his site on around 600 directories! He still ranks really highly even though he sold it a year or too ago. The other thing he mentioned was buying blog posts on other sites about his. So if I was to Wright some interesting content and get people in the catering industry to link to it. I should over come the directory spamming approach that he has taken? Perhaps a free tool or check list for weddings or something? his site gastrocatering.com mine is sussexchef.com

I totally get where you're coming from.  The squatter situation is extremely frustrating to be sure and isn't getting better any time soon.  If you can't make a trademark claim, it will be extremely difficult to get someone to sell who has no interest in selling. With regards to settling, I hear what you're saying.  I just personally feel that the .net is too big of an issue to overcome.  Whether we like it or not, people have been trained to throw a .com after everything.  If they see a mention of your brand, they'll likely assume the website will be located at [yourbrandname].com.  If you are using a domain with a .net and someone else has the .com, expect to see quite a bit of your traffic go to the .com. Think about all the names of companies and brands that are complete nonsense words (or extremely obscure words).  Grabbing a URL that is keyword focused will potentially help you with SEO, but it is often extremely difficult to build a long term brand around.  Also, keep in mind that keyword rich URLs may help in the short term for SEO purposes, but they can be extremely limiting if the company wants to expand beyond the keywords.  Even Moz had to go through this, changing from SEOMoz.org to Moz.com (as the old name limited the brand to being solely focused on SEO). Hope this helps! Mike

Good question, I do see this one a lot. I have built a "few" ecommerce sites and can tell you that following SEO basics is a must. From there it is all about the product's page content. This can be a huge challenge because often times you have very similar products. In a case of multiple colors, you want one product page with color option selection. Multiple sizes can be tricky, for clothing Amazon is a good example they list a drop down. But that may not apply to somethings like screws, piping, and in our case O-rings. My last project I had many different sized o-rings, in many different materials, some of the different materials had the same sized o-ring. The first thing I had to do is familiarize myself with the industry. Learn why there are so many different materials, durometers (hardness), certifications and sizes. After I ingested it all and got a firm grip I moved on to a basic overview.  I took a hierarchical approach. Broke the o-rings out in to material type,durometer then finally listed each size individually. The next challenge was how to I make unique content for a same material same durometer o-ring with out risking duplicate content penalties? This is where Excel saved me. I listed out some standard information and broke out size information, everywhere possible. Then populated cells with unique information and finally in the last column did a concatenate to produce the final description. You can see an example on our site here:   By listing the sizes in metric, inch, and fractional and referencing the part number, model number as many times appropriately I was able to avoid duplicate content problems even though this o-ring description is fairly similar to the next size. I will admit with about 8000 different o-rings this was a very long and tedious task. But thus far has proven to be a nice feather in my cap. Another tip that I am a fan of is user reviews. Not only can you integrate a microdata schema that search engines can pick up on, but it also gives the site the ability for customers to create content for you. On the referenced site we don't use reviews but in future sites it is something I am definitely going to be implementing. Hope this helps and if you have any follow ups on what I showed you I'd be happy to respond. good luck, Don

Hello Andreas, alankoan123 made some good points in terms of creating an efficient blog structure. I will address your questions directly: 1) Would it benefit us to host these two blogs on different domains? From a marketing perspective, yes. Having separate domains that are equally accessible and memorable increases your chances of customer involvement and therefore increases your chances of completing an objective, whether it is traffic, conversions or market penetration. This will require dedication, time and resources, but 2 blogs which speak directly to separate clientele is a good idea if you can't bring them together reasonably easily. As for SEO, this is a tool you would use to help your blogs get found (along with content marketing, among other things). Having 2 blogs will not help your SEO directly. Having a good SEO approach will help your 2 blogs. We are also wondering if it would help our hurt our SEO to take the content related to our corporate blog and move it to the new domain? Depending on who you talk to, it might not help or hurt you. Moving content simply requires a 301 redirect which effectively moves all "link juice" from one domain to another.  There are arguments (and some evidence) that shows that small levels of link strength are lost during this process, but it isn't sufficient for you to be concerned about it. A redirect can help you if it makes your brand more visible, enhances customer experience, or otherwise improves your sites trust metrics according to Google. Long story short, your needs and strategy should determine  your next move. If you have the resources to create 2 blogs and move your current blog to them using 301 redirects with minimal cost and effort to yourselves, then it is probably worthwhile. If you are short on resources, perhaps another approach is necessary. Either way, your SEO will not be heavily impacted as long as you follow best practices regarding your 301's and in putting up your blogs. Cheers and feel free to pick my brain further if you have questions. Best regards, Rob

I suppose you're correct but it's all relative to the keyword in question, isn't it?

I'm not very knowledgeable in this area. There are a few things that you can do though - Look into advertising in areas where mid-life women are regularly. So that would be places like AllRecipes, TripAdvisor, Health & Beauty magazines & sites (livestrong), possibly OKCupid, Match.com etc. Go to these pages and hover over an ad you see. Depending on the site they will either have a URL that makes no sense, or they will have a google doubleclick/adsense url. If they have a google URL you can target them through AdWords. Facebook advertising would put you right in front of everyone who kind of wants to buy things all the time anyway. The Google display network is a bit tough to crack. How much work have you been putting into it? Not that it's bad to expand to other networks, but what are you looking for?

If the numbers are at that level I would completely agree with you. Are they tracking conversions? How many conversions would they have got from those 5000 visits and what is the value?  It might be a simpler argument to say "Here is the cost of new site + maintenance. This is what it earned.   Here is how I could better use that same budget if we focused on one site".  I find that those business cases type arguments are a lot easier to get across sometimes that explaining the SEO rational.

Good discussion going on here. I did want to highlight this Google Forum discussion in case it would help with this topic: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/business/language/business/m9ye2hHR5Nw/nlzE_WQgKf4J

A part what the others wrote, I would not recommend to redirect the old penalized websites (if they were penalized) to the new domain, because the penalization will be transferred to it. What I'd do was to update the good backlinks from the old EMDs to the new domain, asking the owners of the "good" sites to do it.

No but we will certainly pencil it in for a trial. Thanks

I agree reaching out is something we do all the time, however we did have a very good link as the DA was high and relevant and all we asked was that they used our named incorrectly, we also pointed out a typo on the article (we put it nicely). As well as correcting the typo, not responding to our email, they deleted the whole section about us, and in the process removing the link. So contacting them is something we always do, however sometimes there can be consequences, on this one I wish we had just left the our branding wrong and kept the relevant link.

Here's my $0.02: I think that these two companies probably made decisions, but not completely based on SEO or organic ranking. The Mic.com site that is using sub-directories will likely see much better SEO, because all of the content is on the same domain, and not treated differently. My assumption for the Vice.com site is that they want to have different channels or content on other subdomains. My hunch is that for Vice.com, they decided to go with subdomains, so that they could have this content live on different physical servers or different infrastructure. I took a look at the main site, www.Vice.com, and it's using Tumblr, running on AWS with Elastic Load Balancing. For the Munchies.vice.com, it's running on WordPress. While it is possible to have content displayed from WordPress on one subdirectory and Magento on another (by either installing both applications on the same server, or creating virtual links behind the scenes) a lot of companies will opt to do this on separate systems. That's probably the reason that they went this way. In the end, SEO doesn't trump everything... But, here's a reference about sub-domains vs. subdirectories on Moz: In the past, I've answered a similar question in the past here: http://moz.com/community/q/blog-on-subdomain But the gist of it is: store.mydomain.com --> content on the store. is treated as a different site, and SEO efforts (content, inbound links, social media) only help the subdomain. mydomain.com/store --> subdirectories are usually the way to go.  All of the content, inbound links and social media shares will help build the overall domain authority for you. My recommendation is to go with the sub directory (mydomain.com/store/, and there are a whole lot of articles that back this up: http://moz.com/community/q/blog-on-subdomain-vs-subdirectory-best-practices http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/ http://moz.com/community/q/best-place-for-a-blog-blog-mydomain-com-or-mydomain-com-blog Hope this helps, Jeff

If the transcripts were first uploaded by you and they just "scraped" them, then I wouldn't worry about it in the long run. But if they are doing the transcripts themselves and you don't have it anywhere, then that might be a cause for concern.

Thanks David and Jarno, I thought the following may be useful to you. After extensive testing, we followed this process to remove the Sitelink: We added  <meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow">only to the page shown within the Sitelinks. Within our tests we found removing the page within GWT only elongated the removal process, therefore we refrained from doing this. Within GWT we did a Fetch and Render to inform Google of the change.</meta name="robots"> Within less than 24 hours the Sitelink was removed from the SERPs and organic sessions have not been effected whatsoever. Feel free to ask further questions if you'd like further information. Thanks, Phil