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So basically, It wouldn't benefit me to use more than what I am already using?

Hello Tony, I agree with the below opinion that a unique name (or different variations of your current name) would be best for branding purposes. However, I know that at this stage it may not be a viable option. While having your brand name mentioned frequently can be a positive aspect, that is only the case if it is recognized as your brand. It would be possible to market your brand while leveraging its popularity through brand association and search engine optimization, however it will be difficult and will require much effort.

While on a smaller scale it may not have a direct influence on ranking (because it is a brand name) it can be an issue if it is overdone. I believe for brand names (in most industries) Google does not penalize as heavily when compared to standard anchor text or keywords. However, moving forward I would try to limit over-usage of your brand name and continue to use the other variations as well.

Some resources to help you below: The International SEO Checklist International SEO : White Board Friday

That is one bad predictive model then Thanks for the answer.

Vadim, We already have an offshore page and it ranks quite well for the term in Google. We typically hold two SERPs for the term offshore merchant accounts--one for our home page and one for our offshore page. Thanks for your suggestion! Regards, Meghan

Hi WebTalent, has your question been answered?

Awesome, superb answer and exactly what I was after. Thanks so much!

Hi James, As far as I'm concerned, this remains the best and most comprehensive post on the topic that i've seen despite being a few years old http://www.distilled.net/blog/social-media/youtube/youtube-seo/ However, the TL:DR is... Description length doesn't really matter, but I'd try to keep it punchy so no more than a few sentences. Include a naked url link in there if you like in order to drive a bit of traffic Keywords at the start of the title seems to help. Keep the title normal Page Title length, so... 70 characters ish max Make sure you upload a closed caption file (which will be read as akin to page copy for the video) Tags do seem to help, so include any that you care about Most important thing when optimising for YouTube is actually driving retained views. Make sure people watch the video all the way to the end and don't drop out early on. Embeds of the videos count kinda like links and, assuming they drive quality views, they will also help increase your rankings.

Hey Dana, I'd answer this question... with a question, which is "where are your audience?". Syndication across platforms is only going to be valuable in so much as it reaches more of your target audience and so I'd suggest starting with working out who they are and where they hangout. My perception is that you're going to hit the point of diminishing returns pretty quickly after you cover off YouTube, Vimeo and potentially Daily Motion (if you're accepted), but for your niche, there may well be other sites which have a concentrated pocket of your target audience. I'd ignore the list of sites you linked to altogether, as I think it's completely wrong. They seem to have confused "highest traffic" with PageRank and then lump hosting platforms (which don't display user submitted content on their sites) into the mix. Cheers, Phil

prweb.com http://www.npr.org/ http://www.betanews.com http://www.directionsmag.com http://news.thomasnet.com/ http://www.nanotech-now.com http://www.prlog.org/ http://www.downloadjunction.com http://www.newswiretoday.com/ http://www.pr-inside.com/ http://www.24-7pressrelease.com http://www.pr.com/

Hi Rob, As the other guys have pointed out, it isn't possible to control when and how Google changes your title tag as far as I'm aware. You can try and send signals to Google such as linking to that page using specific anchor text, on-page copy etc. I just did a few tests and the correct title tag seems to be appearing so Google may have figured it out and switched back to the correct one. Are you still seeing them showing the wrong one? If so, could you link to a few examples of search results where this happens? Cheers. Paddy

PR and SEO do go hand in hand though, if they have an external/internal PR agency then use the coverage they provide and use it contact bloggers, put it on social media websites etc. It's something I do for our clients and works quite well. Use various branded links in the content and push that out to websites/bloggers that will help influence customers.

Thanks, the spammy link has been ranking for about 2 months now. We have tried reporting to Google- but haven't seen them take down or demote the link..

I think Moz shows you the SERPs for the keywords you are tracking, regardless if your Website is listed or not in that SERP. There are another paid tools like: https://serps.com/ Hope that helps!

Unfortunately, several of the sub domains are _extremely _large sites that require a lot of processing power on the server.  Nearly every single one of these sites has it's own dedicated server. Holy smoke! but I will see what we can do about moving some. I run a site that gets a lot of traffic...  It is on a dedicated server and when I needed more capacity they have added drives, memory, new processors...  You can have multiple boxes running a single site. Have you talked with any hosts who specialize in running really busy sites? I've been pushing to take back the root domain, but have so far hit resistance. I would say...  If we are BigCompany.com then why are we sending our traffic to outhouse.BigCompany.com? I used to work at a place that did this (I was not on the web team)... they would move important stuff all of the time, abandon URLs without redirects... it was really rude to the institutions who linked to them.  All of these moves were done on whim... Without thinking of how it impacted visitors, partners and the bottom line.

Ok I understand now, are you probably under attack? I'm sorry for that. But if this is a negative seo activity by an evil competitor, is it probably that he will do the same for your new domain? By the way I think Chris tip is good, avoiding any redirect for now. You can restart your e-commerce on the new domain and simultaneously try clean your old web site with new content & gwt as you try until now (never give up).

no, never seen this before

Robert, may I suggest that if you come up with a good study and results, you consider submitting a post to YouMoz? I would love to see something like this show up in my submission queue:) I get to take a first peek at all of our YouMoz submissions and, as you can imagine, I am extra happy when the topic is Local! As for the carousel, I like this: "Hopefully, we will wake up in a month or two and it will have been changed." Haha! Here's to hoping. Thanks for the very enjoyable chat, Robert!