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Good question.  You are in a unique position of starting from scratch and expanding, but the SEO and branding principles would remain the same in my opinion: Do not 301 or rel=canonical anything.  Your homepage is your brand identity not only to consumers but to search engines as well. If you start doing funky things like redirects or other markup to "point" google in a direction to maintain some sort of rankings, you will regret it moving forward as your company grows.  Its harder to go back and fix those type of permanent decisions. Don't worry about the homepage rankings for product 1 vs. product page.  Just make sure your site is flat enough that your main product pages live off of the homepage/root from and information architecture standpoint, the homepage will carry enough authority to carry the product 1 page and maintain its rankings. Google is smart enough now that putting that product one level deep will not change much.  Internally link to it properly, mark it up, utilize breadcrumbs and eventually the homepage ranking for those specific keywords will move over to the product page and your rankings shouldn't see a dip.  I have done this a handful of times without negative consequences. The sooner you move it, the better and let it start sitting with the search engines.  You will be fine.

I don't think that, right now, It has a huge amount to do with G+. However, you can bet that the integration will be there at some point in the near future.

Hi Marie, Can you please elaborate on what you think is a completely earned link as well as giving us some example? I am in the same boat as azu25 - it is hard to earn links when you are starting off because no one knows you, so how do you go viral while avoiding link scheme penalties? Other ideas I had: 1. Offering bloggers coupons that they can blog about. Their audience would be able to use the couple to buy form your store. 2. Offering free giveaways from your store. The blogger could blog about this. Could this be seeing as a "free" product form search engines?? What is your opinion on the two ideas above? Like azu25 has stated, it seems that many domains with high authority do give away products to their bloggers, but are still ranking....it's hard to compete with 1000 monthly links. Also, what is your opinion on building blogger relationship and asking for that blogger to blog about you once a month (recurrent blogs)? Regards, Carlos

Didn't know about Market Wired. PRWeb (Vocus) customer support SUCKS! So if they are similar services, definitely go with Market Wired...

Perhaps a competitor or hacker are trying to displace them from the search results? One of the 'spam' results has "2,427 links to this URL from the past 32 days" according to Open Site Explorer - have you checked to see if any of that anchor text is the company name? I don't have full access to Moz at the moment so can't see. http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/just-discovered?site=www.yolo2.cwsurf.de%2Findex.php%3Fpage%3DUser%26userID%3D4146%E2%80%8E

Thank you for helping me in this. I now have the clarity in making the right recommendation to my client.  However we are now left with 2 options: Create unique design/Content for the new brandnamebianalytics.com and work on optimization from scratch. Redirect brandnamebianalytics.com to brandname.co.in or vice versa. The reason we've considered this option is because brandname.co.in is rich in content and drawing around 3000 visitors traffic per month and we cannot afford to lose the reputation the (co.in) site has earned till date. I appreciate the time you've taken in replying to my query and I look forward to your thoughts/recommendations in the above mentioned issue.

Hi Silkstream, Yep - it's almost always a relief to know what you're experiencing is part of a mass bug rather than an individual problem. Google tends to respond to system-wide problems with more speed and care than they do to edge cases. So glad I was able to answer your question and give you some peace of mind!

Great thanks Tom, clearly a develpment i missed!

"Foremost, shouldn't we get rid of that embed option on our page? I mean, isn't is stealing from our backlink potential? I can't imagine juice would somehow pass back to us through a Scribd-located doc or embed but I haven't found info affirming or contradicting that." Yes, I absolutely agree that you should remove these. I'd also look for embeds of their Scribd documents and do a little bit of link reclamation and see if you can get a link added to the original content. Can't hurt, right? "And secondly, isn't a Scribd collection a bit analogous to posting videos on YouTube and hoping your page will ultimately benefit from it via clickthroughs, etc? At this year's MozCon I heard a strong argument against that." You could go a few ways on this - I don't think it's causing a huge issue. I might name the Scribd document something different from their own blog post, to try and rank for different variations on the titles.

With the army of new TLD's coming out. We will have to see how much weight (or lack of) Google will place on them. But from previous actions, the top TLDs .com/net/org will carry more weight than usual in terms of Exact or partial match domain.

What I do for situations like that (I would assume the short term goal would be to start showing up for that brand when you search for it)  - I'd decide if it's really possible to get on that search term quickly. For the example "Crazy Man" I would deem it to be a longer term project since it's very general and even a kid will type that in. I would go for the "no-space" version for this one For a brand term like "Cheese Media" I would definitely start with the space since nobody really searches for something like that and you'd easily get that "brand" Either way, during the course of your brand name building process (unlinked mentions, links, citations) - I would throw in the alternate version for a certain % of the time. Long term, you'd see your brand to start ranking for that as well. Personally i prefer making up unique names when im starting a new business, it makes the branding/seo part easier lol Hope I helped you out somehow

Just to add to Alan's answer,  and this is from pure experience: You'll likely see a "down" period. Expect organic traffic to drop for a few weeks and hopefully get back to previous level or better. If you rely on organic, up your spend on PPC during this period Do not redirect internal pages to the root. domainA.com/page should redirect to another inner page. Don't start redirecting groups of pages to the new root. Like Alan said, pages without external links are not worth redirecting. Make sure you get  all of your links from OSE, Majestic, Ahrefs and WMT to get a decent picture. Ensure you're redirecting to similar content too! Change the site address in WMT, verify new site in WMT - watch this like a hawk, especially crawl errors. Once the new site is up, submit your XML sitemaps to WMT. Triple check your robots.txt, and other robots directives - I've see too many sites go up with NOINDEX and full robots.txt blocks. Fetch pages in WMT to ensure you're getting 200 response codes on your most important / new pages Recrawl all your old pages (that you've redirected) to ensure they return a 301 > 200. No chains, just 1 301. There's probably more, but those are the essentials.

Hi Again, I figured that must be the case, with the fictitious name. Totally respect your NDA, but need to mention that this makes it impossible to research nuances that might be affecting the firm uniquely. There could be so many factors involved. Regarding the comma, best practice is to use a single format across all listings of the business, whether with or without the comma. I've never seen this issue formally addressed by Google, so we have to go with a 'it's safe to say' stance here. In other words, it's safe to say that keeping your business title formatting identical will free you of the possibility of problems, while any discrepancy might put you at risk for problems. Upshot: aim for total consistency here.

Hi Sheldon I love getting a little creative, but let me make sure I understand. You're talking about basically the name of the product being an "unknown unknown" to customers. They don't know the name even exists, so they don't know to look for it? But there's something else similar which they do know to look for - and your client needs to show up there instead? So essentially we have to find a way to call streaming movies "DVDs"? Thanks for clarifying first -Dan

Hi W, Sorry but I'm not sure I understand your question 100%. Can you share the URL and the problem you're having? Thanks

It looks to me that Google just updated the criterion as of yesterday 10/29 in the afternoon.  I have seen that now all you need is 10 followers and an account that has been active for 30 days https://plus.google.com/u/0/+OtavioSilva/posts/Qz7qFcdYDF6 That said, I have had various team members get custom URLs for personal G+ pages as well with varying amounts of "engagement" and not site verified.   My twitter feed has also been "a twittle" with comments around getting G+ customized urls, so there has been for sure a recent relaxing of the rules.

Hi Paul, Sometimes, you will get an automated response before action takes place. However, if a month has gone by, I would go the Google And Your Business Forum and report the entire issue, including your report to the troubleshooter. See if a TC will take interest in your plight and escalate for you.

I can understand your situation Josh..!! But, as per my opinion, You should show the clear picture to your client. Be frank with your client. Tell him statistics that If we do this kind of things then it will be resulted in this. Make your client aware about how big changes you are going to do. OR You can give recent example of Moz.com. They have done something similar things. They have made 301 redirects for all seomoz.com URLs on Moz.com. You can see its current PR and DA and all kind of things. So, Collect such data and show your client the realistic view.

Hi, there are a couple of issues here. I could find no reference to the company "ConvertMedia" being called "Convert Media". It's a small difference I know, but it's enough to make a difference. Google is able to split words and understand where one word is made up of two, but because these two words as you say refer to a different service, then that is the main cause of the problem. Google's mission is to return relevant results to the person searching and to do that it tries to fully understand (as much as their current algorithm is able) the **intent **of the search. If someone types in "Convert Media", Google will understand that the person wants to be able to convert some media. The fact that there are a lot of services that offer that means there is a lot of pages Google can return for that search and as such, it makes providing a result for "ConvertMedia" much less likely unless you have a prominent brand. For example, "hoover" has become a generic name for vacuum cleaners, but if you search for "hoover machine" the hoover.com website is displayed top. If however, you search for "convert media performance advertising" then that search shows a different intent by the searcher and the ConvertMedia website is returned in the search results. It's a tricky one, but I would first do some analysis to check where exactly ConvertMedia do rank for "convert media" as that will give you an indication as to how far you need to climb to reach page one. I suspect it will be a fair distance. The other thing you could do is produce a page on the ConvertMedia site that says something candidly about ConvertMedia does not "convert media", but can be mistaken for that service. Having said that, I wouldn't necessarily recommend that because I think it undermines your brand which is exactly what you want to grow and be known for performance advertising. I am not sure the above helps much but I hope it explains the challenge you face is ranking better for "convert media". Peter