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Cool, Wayne. I hope it does help!

From a not local perspective, redirecting based on IP is generally not the best idea. Early on at Distilled in Seattle, our I{ address was in Washington DC! IP Addresses are not reliable in the United States. There is that problem, plus the fact that Google only crawls from California. Therefore, depending on how the redirect was set up, they might just see the San Jose area content. Therefore, I am glad you decided against the redirect. I think your idea of letting people define where they are and find a new provider is perfect. The people in your area get the right content and others that happen on that page get to find a preferred vendor.

This may be a situation where it is worth your money to hire a consultant and use an NDA and get some professional advice. We have a list of recommended companies in the footer that can be a place to start looking.

I have conformation directly from Google's John Mueller that this is not a problem and the penalty will NOT pass between domains with hreflang.

So glad to be of help, William!

Hi CakeLady, Your hands are a bit tied, but there are a couple of things you can do prior to the move. Create a spreadsheet listing all of the citations of the business so that you have this ready to start working from, as soon as the move is live. Remember, Google doesn't let you list (re-list) a business until it has actually opened, so you want to hold off on actual implementation until the move is accomplished fact. Create a document assessing all areas of the website that will need to be updated to reflect the new location once the move happens. Again, this way, you'll have your plan of action developed and ready to put in place quickly once the move happens. Create another document containing social messaging snippets you'll be publishing on all your social profiles once the move happens, announcing the change of location. Create additional new content (for the website, blog, both) to be launched when the move goes live, reflecting the new location. Prepare your client for the fact that they may experience some ranking changes until the business is re-established at the new location. Study up on the best way to implement a move in Google's local system so that you're secure in current best practices. With these things in hand, you'll be able to act swiftly once the move happens.

I'd go with the umbrella brand pages. Your reservations all make perfect sense, and managing content for 10 pages sounds miserable, plus they'll all take a ton of traction to get started vs a single page. Most users are tolerant of a brand that has products they may not care about. Unless they're seriously different (like a plastics company selling kid's toys, garden equipment, and medical devices) it makes more sense to keep them together.

Thanks very much for the link!!

You can honestly go with either, in my opinion. But how are you going to differentiate yourself from all of the other services? What if you partner with a food delivery service.. pizza... kebabs... whatever, and have something ready at or near the time of arrival. I'm thinking about the bar crowd. What do you think? That's a bit of differentiation in my book.

Hi Wayne, I vote for a good mix of: Locally relevant sites, like local newspapers, local business organizations and possibly local blogs Industry relevant sites, like industry publications, industry organizations and industry blogs I wouldn't focus on one over the other. I'd go for both!

Hello Henya, this is a great strategic question and ultimately relies on your long term growth initiatives for the United States and beyond. Having .ca as your country-code top-level domain can prove beneficial for local search queries. This could be a contributing factor as to why the .ca site has brought in more traffic. Using site analytics can provide you with your referring sources to confirm this. Additionally, have .ca as your ccTLD will provide you with the ability to market to the French speaking provinces more authentically as you have the "home town" advantage of being a Canadian retailer rather than a U.S. domain. If the U.S. marketplace is determined to be a growth opportunity I recommend maintaining the .com domain. Having the .com domain will serve U.S. and _should _ultimately convert your U.S. customers better than U.S. customers shopping your .ca site...again you can verify this using analytics. The lift in conversion should provide enough incremental revenue to support maintaining both domains. Also, if your client decides to open a brick and mortar store in the U.S. the .com site will become incredibly more valuable. Hope this helps! Matt

Hi Mark, If there is zero relationship of data between the old site and the new one (such as you've described) you should likely be okay. Regarding blocking bots from crawling the new site until it is ready, this falls a bit outside my area. I expect you could set up the robots.txt file for this, but I recommend starting a new question on this topic to get expert advice from our technical SEO experts. You have to be sure to do this correctly to avoid problems. Hope this helps.

All, Thank you for the quality information. I was not aware that 'out of country - bad influences' would not affect your UK site performance. I agree with your logic that untold ip addresses would slow down site speed thus affect Google rankings. Thanks Mark

Hi Stacey, I am not sure there is _one top provider _in this industry. As some have different methods for acquiring rewards and giving out the rewards. It may be the question of what works better for your customers. Here is a good article at various types of programs available: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/31990/7-Customer-Loyalty-Programs-That-Actually-Add-Value.aspx http://mashable.com/2012/04/05/customer-loyalty-program-tips/ Hope this helps!

That's an idea Keri... I think the answers so far have helped pay for this months subscription already!! Thanks ...but if anyone else has other ideas, keep them coming

How many links do you have, Bing may ignore your page if you have more than 250

Hi Aholyman, I think it's very good that you're giving this such careful thought. So, if the keywords are identical, then yes, this might be seen as an unethical arrangement, though not a forbidden one (without a contract stating so). I'd take it case by case. Good job giving this such a thorough examination.

Thank you Jane, you give me the opportunity to explain better. I am targeting the english language, more than the single country, so If I have to pick up one I guess .com would be better for that. Yes I also want to target french market (it is a french hotel) and I have a french version of the site under the domain/fr directory. I guess it's remarkably weird to have the french version like this: hotelsinavignone.fr/fr So i think I am going to go with a less exact KW match but .com extension. myhotelsinavignone.com (english site) myhotelsinavignone.com/fr (french site) Thank you all very much. DoMiSoL Rossini

I like EGOL's idea of partnering with US websites that do not ship to Canada and arranging a referral scheme. This is one way to take advantage of US sites taking up real estate in Canadian results. I agree that "canada" is likely a common modifier - if the product is niche enough or bought in small enough quantities, large-scale keyword research tools might not be of much use. Consider other modifiers, such as "ca" as well. Don't go overboard on the keyword usage though: stuffing "Canada" into every title is unnecessary and will start to look unnatural. Make sure you've taken advantage of localisation tools and techniques such as geo-targeting and the rel="alternative" tag for language, i.e. specifying en-ca as English language, for Canada (or French as well, if that's part of your market!). Unfortunately if your competition, albeit irrelevant US sites, are incredibly strong, you'll need to compete with them on standard metrics such as the rate of link acquisition and the quality of the links you both build. Don't worry yourself with building the same number of links Petco has outright, but you may need to look at figuring out their rate of link building and look at their social / content activity, and devise a plan to match that as best you can in the future. You don't need to build the same historical numbers as these huge sites have, but your competitiveness needs to rise to match or better the sites you want to keep up with / pass.

You will be ok, sites in different tld's are not treated as duplicate content. Matt cuts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo