Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You're welcome, Brian, and I hope you'll be able to find a consultant who can offer a second opinion. Sounds like you are trying to save your client a big headache!

I'm just made a similar move, moving my blog from blog.domain.com to domain.com/my-blog. I don't think I can use the Google change of address - it is throwing me an error when I get to that step in the change of address because I'm going to a sub directory, not to the root. "The old site redirects to www.domain.com/my-blog, which does not correspond to the new site you chose." Should I care? I'm getting organic traffic already on the blog URLs, and Google has indexed about half of the URLs that I submitted via the sitemap.

Hey John, I'm going to try to go through all of your answers, one by one: 1. Can it hurt us to blog at a high volume (4 blogs per day) in an effort to include all of our keywords and attach them to state and city specific keywords (ie. "keyword one" with "keyword one city" and "keyword one different city")? Yes, if the articles end up too short or too similar. 4 posts per day isn't necessarily a bad pace, it's just the quality of the writing that can get you into trouble. I don't know what your service is, but, do you need to have a variation for every city? I work for a business that provides city-specific services, but we write blog posts that are relevant for the whole nation, then have pages describing what we offer for each city. We do have some location-specific content, but most of our blog posts are not. Here's the way I'd figure it out: when people are looking for a given keyword, do they usually use the city name? When you search for the keyword without the city name, does Google return map results? If the answers are no, you can write one article that isn't location specific, and Google will rank it in all locations. **2. Is it more valuable to blog only a couple of times per month with deeper content, or more times per month with thinner connect but more keyword involvement? ** Totally depends on your industry. And company. Deeper content can rank for more keywords and has a better chance of getting inbound links, but it can limit the keywords you target. You really need to think about ... (next question) ... 3. Our customers are forced to use our type of product by the government. We are one of the vendors that provide this service. Because of this our customers may not care at all about anything we would blog about. Do we blog for them, or do we blog for the keyword and try and reach partners and others who would read the content and hope that it also ranks us high when our potential customers search? You should write content that appeals to whoever makes the decision to use your product. How often does the government choose whether or not to provide your service? If there's any chance at all that you could eventually lose your contract, write content that appeals to the people who choose vendors. How can you make their decision to work with you easier? Write articles about how your service solves their problem easily. Interview some government officials. Make it clear that you understand them. Also, write about whatever your company is knowledgeable in, so it's clear that you're the thought leader in your space. If it's really unlikely that you'll lose your government contract, or the government track doesn't work, I'd just focus on the last part: what knowledge does your company have that others don't? OKCupid, for example, got great links through their blog, which showed in depth analysis of how we date (making it a great purchase for Match.com, who, alas, stopped blogging). Pinterest developers have a Tumblr called Pingineering that talks about how their engineering team tackles big data issues (granted, this isn't on their site, but they're not struggling for links or rankings). 4. Is there an advantage/disadvantage or does it matter if we have multiple blog authors? Nope. Go for it. Hope this helps! I wasn't able to be very specific without knowing your specific industry, but this should point you in the right direction. Let me know if you have any questions! Kristina

Hi Michael, Just to add, even if Yandex is important for targeting Russian region audience, we have observed that some of the recently migrated / expats in USA  still use Yandex. I hope this helps your cause in targeting the right audience. Regards, Vijay

Hi Logan, Thanks for your response. Yes, I also agree however it's important that websites are maintained separately, that's why I suggested checking whether the person who asked the question has the resources to maintain them strategically. https://moz.com/learn/seo/international-seo Regards, Vijay

No problem I was going to go into a long explanation of how he needs to differentiate the listings from one another, but you saved me the trouble lol.

Generally speaking, having a flatter URL structure is typically a better play for SEO. To better understand why your network admin may have an issue.. can you provide a few examples of "old url" and "new url"..  You can use anonymous fillers, but I'm just looking to get a better understanding of what you have done. Cheers, Jake

Hi Matt, thanks for your reply! In the alias section of our ecommerce platform (Demandware) we have set this redirect: www.example.com --> HomeShow When HomeShow solves in the locale pipeline (www.example.com/en/home or /it/home etc). Is Demandware that automatically assigns the right home page based on this method: If it is the first time you land on Example and you don't have our cookie, Demandware will set the locale based on your browser language and the country from your IP (we use the country just for the shipping, so in this case we just consider the language). If it is not the first time you see Example.com Demandware will use your cookie stored, using the previous language you set. I.e.: you land for your first time on example.com, you come from Paris, the language was FR but you decided to change in DE for some reason. Then the next time you land on the website you will find DE as language and France as shipping country. HREFLANG We use hreflang tag in the code, it works perfectly so if you look for results in specific countries you will always find just the right pages (i.e.: if you look in Google.de all the results are www.example.de/women/etc, same thing for UK, IT, ES). The problem is just associated to the old home page, www.example.com. And all the sitelinks are correct, in the right language. This is the hreflang tag we have: WHY AN AUTOMATICALLY REDIRECT INSTEAD OF A LANGUAGE PAGE Because this is the logic we have adopted behind our ecommerce sites. We could potentially change this method to a splash page but the real problem is that in google.fr everything works perfectly!! It sounds absurd! In Google France we don't see www.example.com, we see the perfect snippet www.example.com/fr/home (if you write the exact query "example" (brand name), because if you look for hybrid keywords you will always find the right page in the right language). So the problem is just that if you type the query "example" you only see the 301 page www.exmple.com as the first result instead of www.example.com/LOCALE/home. I have found out that in Google Search Console, inside the internal link section, www.example.com is still in first position, with 37.000 links from different subdomains. I think that, as Rand Fishkin replied to my email, maybe Google feels free to decide what results display even if there is a redirect 301 that has been set for months. This is the reason why in France everything is ok, but in Italy or Spain is not. Matt, what do you think about this? Sorry for length of this post but I had to explain all the aspects. Thanks in advance! Davide

Hey Alex! Christy invited me to pop by. Your 2 businesses exist in two totally separate categories, in Google's eyes: 'Air Duct Cleaning Service' and 'Car Detailing', so provided that you meet the following requirements, you should have no problems with running 2 legally separate businesses, even if they are both being run out of your home: Have a separate phone number for each business that is always answered with the correct company name. Have separate websites for each, with completely unique content on them (no shared content). Do not interlink your sites in an attempt to cross promote them. Build a unique citation set for each. Don't try to piggyback one business onto the other in your local business listings. If you can meet all of the above requirements, you'll likely be best served by going with 2 unique businesses. If your categories were related (like Car Detailing and Car Wash) I'd be giving just the opposite advice, but as your two service types have nothing to do with one another, I vote for running two legally distinct companies. Hope this helps!

Thanks Seoman, That was why I was wondering if I should noindex the blog index page.  It is purely a listing of blog entries and not original content.  It seems to throw up duplicate content issues and Google seems to give it the most page power on the site even though it is not my most important page. I would want Google to still follow all of the links because those are the blog posts and the original content.  I don't know if the noindex is the best choice but I think it at least it would tell Google "Hey guys the blog page is not my most important page.  In fact it is just a compilation of posts" I haven't pulled the trigger on it yet, because I don't know if it will hurt me more than it is helping.  I just don't know.  If anyone has any other thoughts on the noindex of the blog index page which is not my home page feel free to drop me a line.

I agree with what Chris said tags are primarily there for users. They should not be indexed they are there to allow people to navigate your site more easily if you index them you will get  duplicate content issues.

John Mueller of Google Search recently shared quite a bit on the topic of links and website ranking factors in a Google Webmasters Hangout. Naturally gaining affirmative incoming links pointing to those blog posts will substantially help. Creating the post is only a first step, I find that marketing the post afterwards takes longer - but also is what really gets the content used. How I understood the conversation with John Mueller about on-page linking. When a link is no followed, Google doesn’t pass link juice. When a link is followed but is no indexed, in this case, Google does pass page rank because they are aware of the page. When a page is no indexed and the link is nofollow, Google essentially sees it similar to a 404 page and skips it will flag to the spiders that this page is now relevant and to re-crawl the page. CONCLUSION: When conducting a link audit, reviewing the link risk and considering factors currently ranking sites, the need for SEOs to understand NoFollow links is still necessary. This goes beyond the scope of the content distribution networks that we've tried. When something is this central to building your domain authority, I agree with Egol that a more hands-on approach has it benefits. Strong social signals also help a lot: each platform is unique from Google+, to Facebook and LinkedIn for lead generation.

Hello, It is very common for keyword rankings to fluctuate almost constantly, for a few reasons: search engines are constantly updating their ranking algorithms; rankings are based on user behavior-based signals like how often a link is clicked, bounce rate, etc., and those things are never constant; depending on your location and previous search results and actions, search engines will change the results you see personally; and on and on. It's better to look at trends in your aggregate rankings rather than individual rankings, and also to focus on things like providing great content and building an authoritative linking profile than to focus on individual rankings on a day to day basis. Overall, I do think you will see more stability when search engines have more data about how users interact with your site, but I know that the fluctuations in rankings will never stop. They will likely become less drastic, though.

Yet to finalize

Ok cool thanks for the tips Oleg

Set up 301 Redirects on pages which are similar. I.E. Personal Trainers redirects to Who's Who page for example. Once the traffic has started to go to the new site Google will start to list the new pages. And Visitors will start to realise it's the new site. Also put a big graphic on the old site saying we've moved to and link to the new site. Do a search on a search engine for the old domain and ask sites to change the links, Ensure that any well ranked pages are moved across to the new site, (if it worked before it could work again!) Once your traffic has fizzleed out on the old site redirect the domain as a 301 to the new site.

Thank you and don't forget to "Login to your Google Webmaster Tools account and navigate to “Fetch as Google” option available under “Crawl” section." When you submit select the second box to allow it to crawl all URLs attached Use the URL below to get you into Webmaster tools and click on the call to action Fetch as Google https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6066468?hl=en http://www.webnots.com/what-is-fetch-as-google/ https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2326164/index-your-content-faster-with-the-fetch-as-google-tool More good reasons to avoid Go Daddy https://moz.com/community/q/server-connection-error-when-using-google-speed-test-insight-and-gtmetrix https://solvid.co.uk/7-reasons-to-avoid-godaddy/  ( worked in this case as well) Here is a larger copy of the photo below. http://i.imgur.com/kWmuivK.png Hope everything works out for the best definitely, utilize free WAF it is very helpful in keeping your site from being successfully hacked again. All the best, Tom kWmuivK.png

My pleasure, Gal

Thanks Greg. Yeah, I didn't really want to go down the 302 route, it makes everything so much more time sensitive!

I have the same problem!!!