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Thanks. I checked, A and B both have different direct backlinks profile, so I def want to pass seo juice to new C domain from both of them. That was the plan to do B>C first, then stop A>B and do A>C. Correct me if I'm wrong I thought I can't keep A>B and A>C at the same time since 301 means permanent move, you can't move to two places at the same time.  So only A>B>C or A>B, B>C. Which one look less spammy for Google? Does it look spammy at all?

I can confirm that Andy is correct here, implementing that 301 redirect is best practice for this scenario.

Hi Wagada I ran an online shoe shop for many years and we occasionally got sales from Australia - it was appealing of course as the seasons are opposite to ours, so selling boots in our summer would have been a massive boon. The other advantage, of course, is that there is no VAT for a UK company selling into Australia - (I'm not 100% certain that there wouldn't be if you breached a certain threshold but it was the case for us). The problem for us was that our pages just did not rank at all in Google.com.au. When we tried marketing through Google AdWords, sales were terrible and we had to switch the ads off even though we were offering free shipping. When they saw the .co.uk floods of doubts about shipping time and reliability were clearly as an issue. My view is this. If we had bought an Australian domain  - .co.au then we would have started to rank for many of the products that we were attempting to sell over there. We couldn't have got around the shipping issue as it would still have taken 7-10 days to get the items there, but I'm certain our sales would have been substantially higher. You can try a subdirectory that might work after a fashion. You could even try a subdomain like au.sitename.co.uk. (But frankly, if you are going to go that far I would set up a simple Australian website). I think you know though that the only true way to appeal to the Australian market is to set up an Australian version of the site. Maybe you can get someone to build a simple Wordpress version, highly optimised for SEO? So 1. Best way - set up an Australian version  (you should own the domain name anyway as later the decision may be easier) 2. Compromise - sub-domain 3. Weakest way - sub-directory Your biggest challenge is, of course, marketing the product - who am I to say that if the media picked up on it in Oz and you got a 'heap' of backlinks from Australian news agencies that your page wouldn't rank, it might... but then again... Playing devil's advocate - if you lack the money to set up the Au site then that may suggest that you need to maximise sales in the UK first before thinking about tackling a country 10,000 miles away. Regards Nigel Carousel Projects

Hi Kiakh, Like Kris has answered, this is an 'it depends'. You'd need to be able to show a consultant your current pages, including the optimization of their tags, to get an expert opinion on whether changes you plan to make are likely to improve rankings, improve conversion, or the opposite.

put the domain to see the error please

Hi Miriam, I just fixed #1 and #2 is already true to a degree. My goal isn't to sell more logos to the local market it is to present my business as a visual identity company which is actually a more apt description of what I do for my customers. I have another website that i put together to present myself to local business on a case by case basis when I played with the idea of going to work for someone else. The site is garnergraphics.com and it gives a more well rounded view of the work I do. I'm in the process of redesigning Imageco.com, rewriting all of the copy and showcasing work that has more of a mass appeal so that I won't present myself as the one-trick-pony logo designer that my current site does. I guess my main concern at this point is whether or not I should kill off all of the geographic landing pages that are focused on logo design in order to start ranking locally for other terms. As I mentioned I still get a bit of work from those pages so I was thinking of moving them to a subdirectory and redirecting the traffic while I make the push locally... or will it hurt my local efforts just by having all of those pages? Do you think I should abandon the national market altogether or should I keep them and refocus all of those landing pages on presenting myself as a visual identity business? Ultimately I think my success is going to be determined by getting in front of local businesses, startups, and entrepreneurs so if the best move to accomplish that requires completely abandoning those pages I am more than willing to do so. I very much appreciate your willingness to offer me some guidance on this because I really do need all the help I can get. Thank you!

Wishing you best of luck, Dickens!

Hi, You should use hreflang across the 2 different domains: https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq-internationalisation#q16 And I would change the content as much as posible to make it relevant to the targeted country. Regards

Thanks, everyone, for your responses. They are very helpful and much appreciated!! Cheers.

It's great to see you working though your thoughts and options here, Paul, with the help of our community. Keep up the good work, everybody!

Hi JPrz26, I'm hoping you'll get lots of community feedback on this good question. I noticed you chose Local Strategy as one of your tags for this thread, so I'm going to approach your question with the assumption that your business model is local. I'll number some thoughts here for easy reading: Local SEO, and SEO in general, isn't a race. Both are complicated marketing disciplines that take time, and many shortcuts carry serious risks to the long-term health of your brand. Rarely, a brand offers something so phenomenal that it creates an instant craze (think about the recent Pokemon Go phenomenon), making national news. But short of your new local business making global headlines upon opening its doors (your head chef rescues a polar bear from the roof the Metropolitan Museum of Art), chances are strong that it simply isn't going to skyrocket past established competitors in the local or organic rankings. Because of this, if you need to be showing up on Google's Page 1 today, you should invest in Google Adwords for whatever search terms are most critical to your business. Depending on the competition level of your geo-industry, investment in PPC may be a temporary initiative to lean on while you build up the authority and recognition of your brand, or, it may be a permanent aspect of your total marketing picture. A bakery in rural Kansas may invest in 3 months of PPC until everyone in town knows they are the place to come for wedding cakes. Then, they can shut off the paid channel and rely on other forms of on and offline marketing to keep the customers coming in. Meanwhile, a personal injury attorney in Los Angeles is likely to have to keep the PPC campaign going indefinitely for specific keywords, because the market is simply so tough. Once you've got PPC in place, your local business should make the following core investments: Create a publishing strategy that will initially create local excitement about your business and then engage consumers over time on a consistent basis. Create content that informs and converts. Meanwhile, earning links from this over time should grow your domain authority, improving your rankings. Ensure that your business is listed on the major local business data platforms, consistently and completely (a product like Moz Local can take the sweat out of this via automation). Create a guideline-compliant review acquisition strategy that begins to utilize the local public resource of consumer sentiment, prompting locals to promote your business for you, driving new customers and new website traffic your way. Complete the circle by responding to all reviews, both with thanks for praise and offers of help and resolution for complaints. Analyze social media opportunities where you can build the most awareness of your new brand. Remember that social media marketing hinges on participating rather than selling. Begin to build an email database and put email marketing into practice. It remains one of the highest-converting avenues for many businesses. Sponsor local teams, events and organizations to begin building relationships within the community you serve, and coincidentally, earn further links that begin to establish your brand's relationship to specific geographic topics in the Google RankBrain era. Join local business organizations for further networking (think Chamber of Commerce, or industry-specific networks). Continue to build relationships. Apart from PPC, which you can activate today, none of these things are shortcuts. All of them take time, and you've got to have most or all of these components to begin to compete. Once you've got the basic components in place which your established competitors have already mastered, you'll be doing competitive analysis to identify competitive-difference makers - things that can set your brand apart from the pack. My list represents a start. I hope others will add to it and that it will be helpful in formulating a strategy that begins to get your business noticed as soon as possible, but also as effectively as possible.

Thanks Chris - I have numerous solutions pertaining to SEO modification to keep in check with the non-spacing naming of vehicles - dynamic images naming and miner Alt Tag changes -  however I feared that was my only solution to wait for Google to acquire the new naming convention.  Thanks Chris! M

Thank you, ma'am!

Hi There, Good question! Short answer here is: no, a Local SEO is seldom going to suggest a multi-site approach to represent different services a business offers. Here are some of the reasons why: You will only be able to build local business listings for the main business at the physical location, so there is no local pack ranking advantage to having two different websites, as you can't build additional listings for one of the services offered - this would violate Google's guidelines. Simultaneously, what you worry about with the multi-site approach isn't so much a duplicate penalty/filter (unless you duplicate content between the two sites) but, rather, the accidental creation of duplicate listings. If Google (or another local business index) gets confused by finding shared partial NAP (name, address, phone) on two different websites, it can confuse them and lead to the accidental duplicate listings being created, which can then sap the strength of the main listing for the main business. It can also confuse consumers. The way to reduce the likelihood of this would be to be sure that the physical address isn't on the second website and that you either have a) a unique phone number for the second website or b) put the phone number in image text. Even so, these things can get referenced off the website and pulled in that way, so it's not really foolproof, but it is a best-effort attempt. Finally, a major drawback of the multi-site approach is that, instead of every marketing effort you make adding to the strength of the brand, and therefore all aspects of what the brand offers, you are dividing this in half while doubling the management efforts that have to be expended trying to market two websites, instead of pouring all of that marketing goodness into a single entity. This really matters when it comes to your organic rankings. If you have an absolutely awesome website with high authority, you should be able to get your pages that surround the topic of this particular service the business offers to rank very well. With a second website, you'll be starting from scratch, trying to rank an unknown newcomer instead of simply building on the strength of the existing website by building great content and earning links to it, all under the umbrella of a single brand. So, hopefully these are points you can bring to the company to help them see why in both organic and local marketing, a single site approach is generally preferred. Particularly as we've moved into the era of RankBrain, the ability to become an authority in a certain topic has become a central marketing mindset. You might even show the client this website (Moz.com) as an illustration of how a brand can become associated with a topic (SEO) that then helps it to rank for a multitude of related facets (linkbuilding, on-page SEO, local SEO, content development, etc.). Rather than creating a website for each of these areas, there is just one Moz, and that has helped the brand to become known, overall, for all of these things. Please, let us know if you have any further questions!

We have connections to Barnardo's as a 'Professional Fundraising Group', meaning we support Barnardos monthly by donating/fundraising via just giving or simply sharing the name. We have had a link on their website for quite a while now, but we do ensure we post blogs updating on our achievements with the charity to make it as relevant as possible.

I seem to be having a very similar problem with my client's website. She is also a photographer. Since mid-April, her home page keeps dropping from Google rankings on and off on the desktop in incognito and non-incognito browsing. It seems to always be visible on mobile phones though. One day it's on page 4, the next day it's not anywhere to be found (even though some of her other pages rank). The site is here: evgeniaribinik.com I have done some blog writing (just text) for this client over the last few months, and recently she asked for some SEO help. After looking at her website, I noticed that she had WordPress SEO plugin on her site. She wasn't using this for the blogs, however. I don't think she did much of anything with SEO, but she did say that for the last few years, she was always on page 3 or 4 of Google. In mid-April, she saw that she wasn't ranking at all for the keyword "boudoir photography nyc" anymore, despite a few years of ranking for it. I told her Yoast would be good to use. However, after she installed it, the same issues keep happening. Right now, she has Yoast and WordPress SEO plugins installed (I'm not sure if this is causing an issue as well). But I really can't figure out why she keeps going on and off page 4. She also asked me to optimize older blogs that she wrote herself for SEO. When I look at them, they don't have meta descriptions, good titles or good keywords. I realize this is hurting her, but why would her site be fine for years and all of a sudden not now? Is it because Google made changes? Thank you in advance for any help you can give me! Jill

Thanks Kevin! You know something just occurred to me that maybe Google sees that they have used the same image and it occurred on our website first.  So Google may recognize that they are using the same copied image?? Or something else I considered, if I ask them to remove it then that may spark them to create better other images of their own (which they should do anyway). My theory therefore is possibly to just leave it alone?  Anyway, it's just a thought.

Awesome breakdown and many thanks for your insight! After checking out what you suggested it became very clear what the 411 was! Lots of good links in comparison to my 1 good link vs 23!