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Hey, that's fine, I'm just saying that if your old site was being penalized for bad links and you just 301 redirect it to a new site, the new site will likely also get penalized. If you can clean up the link profile, great. Note that 301s do not pass all the link juice, so you will be losing a little bit of link value by redirecting. As for the new domain, like I said, it's not going to have any value just because it was originally registered back in 1999. But if you just want it to branding, that should be fine.

Universities are really bad about changing the URLs of their homepage, department pages and other important content.   Most of the time they do it for no good reason or even bad reasons. I'm looking for feedback on the impact of search rankings, overall SEO efforts and how Google will view changing example.edu to subdomain.example.edu Why would you want to stink up the URL of your homepage?

Wow - that's a pretty all-encompassing question... I'm working on a blog post on exactly this subject... But to really condense it all down - there are still a TON of bugs in the system, so don't attempt to merge your +Local listing with your +Business page unless you're absolutely sure that you don't have any data problems (so if you can push an update through the Places Dashboard and it shows up on your listing). You'll need to request the merge by re-claiming your location through your +Business page, and it'll require postcard verification. After you've requested the postcard, don't change ANYTHING on the page or you can potentially break it and land your page in G+ Purgatory. Once you get them merged, never use the Places Dashboard to change anything - do it all through your G+ page, or through community edits. The release this weekend of the new +Biz management screen shows that hopefully they're moving in the right direction with a better admin experience. But for now, it's still pretty disjointed. You CAN see some cool stuff on the right side of the SERPs once you've merged the two if you implement the rel=publisher tag... and we've seen G+ business posts get indexed VERY quickly. BUT, you can't merge your +Biz with your +Local if you are a business with multiple locations - it's currently a 1-to-1 relationship - so if you want a single social feed for multiple locations, don't merge. That was pretty high level... hope it helped...

Here is the scenario and I am looking on how you would handle it. **name = my brand name I am looking to purchase a domain within the year: namehair.com I currently am using: namehairbrand.com I have purchased: name-hair.com My concern is if I began my SEO efforts and the brand grows extensively then the person who owns "namehair.com" will raise the price even more than the current price of 10k.  I plan on purchasing that domain name within the next 18 months or so and then direct the traffic to the domain "namehair.com". If I put all my efforts into "namehairbrand.com" and then submit to Google that I have changed domains - will I get my butt kicked by Google?  Thank you guys - you are really helpful! Denny

How to deal with the complaint directly is a loaded question. CMC-SD makes valid points... Social media profiles are an easy thing to start off with if you don't already have them. Profiles on websites of professional organization that you belong to can be helpful as well. You also want to build links to these profiles to increase the chance that they show up higher in the SERPs. Paid advertising on your own brand name can help in a small way in these sense that it will push the organic search results down (assuming your paid ad shows above the organic results), and this measure can oftentimes result in the ripoff report link being pushed below the scroll. If someone is searching on your brand name, most people won't have a need to scroll down. If it's a really popular ripoff report, there may be links to that individual report that are allowing it to rank higher which will just fuel the fire. You might not be able to get any type of satisfaction from Ripoff Report of the author of the report, but if you use OSE to check out where the links are coming from, there may be an opportunity to contact a webmaster site/owner and convince them to remove the link to the report.

Hi Tom That's great thanks for the reply Are there any other tools that would give me social insights into local niche trends in Twitter?  to target users who are actively discussing certain topics

How come?

Hi Stephen, That's a smart question to ask. Short and sweet: do not include anything in the business title except the company name. This is especially critical in Google's local entity, and because they rule the roost, I recommend following their rule on this everywhere you list your business, so that your citations are all consistent. Google is so crazy about this rule, they recently wrongly penalized a museum that legitimately has a city name in its business title. Read about this here: http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/google-local/1779-google-local-unfair-censorship-childrens-discovery-museum.html Quite nutty! In sum, remember, when you're dealing with a franchise, be it large or small, the business name is the same across all locations. There is only one McDonald's, only one Taco Bell, etc. Leave it up to the engines to show the address on the listing to distinguish one location from another.

Hello, I have 11 exact match domains for SEO and I rank for every one of the keywords 90% of the links are to the domain itself and not an exact match.  I have a 1% density on most and highest of a 3% density for the exact keyword and ranking for them on every site.  I feel that the exact match domains are still working to an extent. Also the EMD updates didn't mean exact match was going to just be gone forever, it just meant that it wasn't going to help you as much. Have a great day.

I would like to know what the effects are in regards to the SEO benefit.  Like what does the title need to include?  Is it good to make your website url, Current Date / Year be in the title of a press release ?

Spammy domains have been known to overuse the Hyphen... but using Hyphens does not make you spammy Matt Cutts had previously stated that Google recognizes the Hyphen as a separator and the Underscore as a connector... i.e. "red-wigdets" gets read as "red widgets" while "red_widgets" gets read as "redwidgets". For keyword purposes, a hyphen is technically better but the difference is likely negligible. Also keep in mind the EMD update. If your core term is "cheap red widgets" and your domain URL features "cheap-red-widgets" then the EMD has made the previous positive name correlation into a less powerful signal. Matt Cutts 2011 Underscore vs Dashes in URLs video http://youtu.be/AQcSFsQyct8 Matt Cutts 2009 Underscores or Hyphens in URLs video http://youtu.be/Q3SFVfDIS5k Matt Cutts 2005 Dashes vs. Underscores blog post http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/

In my opinion, go with Magento or BigCommerce. Pick one and stick with it as migrating to either a custom or another cart will be extremely expensive and time consuming. Your cost for migration depending on how big your store is can cost the same as the custom cart itself! In terms of SEO your best options are those two. Shopify and carts like Volusion are not that great at SEO. I really believe you can suffice on platforms like Magento and BigCommerce mainly because this is what they do. In terms of all in one carts like BigCommerce, you don't have to worry about backend problems and always have some sort of support. Magento while extremely customizable you will probably run into problems and need to pay for support or customization. If you have the budget go with Magento since you can customize everything and it will look similar to what you consider a custom cart. Sometimes these custom carts end up being more costly and troublesome than you would like.

Ahhhh, I see, well there are a lot of reasons to do them all separately, but if you want to do them all in one campaign, then they have to be on the same domain. You said register though, so I just wanna' make sure my new friend isn't cracking into his wallet too fast, because you only have to register and pay once. They have a 30 day free trial for pro (which comes with 5 campaigns, and 300 keywords), pro plus (with 1,000 keywords, 12 campaigns), and pro elite ( 3,500 keywords, 30 campaigns) I'm guessing that they are all separate domains, so in that case you would set up 3 new campaigns. Go to -> http://pro.seomoz.org/campaigns to start your first campaign Then honestly, with SEOmoz. Bam. My job her is done, ahaha. They will walk ya through the rest, and 4 steps, and you will be done in no time! I'll be around for about an hour if you need anymore help.

Glad I could be of some help

So basically it's better to keep those parameters, but show only less of them where possible. It answered my questions 4) and 6). Another thing is whether putting a (category or brand) word next to domain is better than on the end of a URL? (i.e. domain.com/sony/tvs or domain.com/tv/sony) Which one would get higher result on SERP "tv" or "sony" in both cases? Or maybe they both serves the same? And the final is what good or bad could happen if someone put the same keyword in all site's URL's? (i.e. I would be selling cars and my domain isn't included any word cars, so i put all of my pages in one folder like domain.com/cheap-cars/etc)

I used the feedback link on the bottom of the page to report the issue to google, we'll see if it helps...

Hi, third edit. Thanks for the answers! I have already read a little about it on the web. Exact Match Domains are no longer a good idea, since google made some algorithm changes. There are be better ways to use my time optimizing my webpage. Many thanks again, Best Regards, Daniel