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Thanks!

Bill, thanks for the great advice!

Thanks to David, Patrick, and EGOL for their great answers. You all help make Q&A such a great place!

The Google webmaster blog published an updated guide four days ago [link: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/].  I'd recommend following it to the letter. Another thing to watch out for when changing hosts is to make sure your DNS settings are ready to go on your new host before you cancel your old one.  These days this is usually fast, but I've seen sites go down for ~48 hours because they didn't take this precaution.  I'm not sure what your level of computer savvy is, so here's an explainer on DNS and why it's important [ink: http://www.howtogeek.com/122845/htg-explains-what-is-dns/].  Basically it's how your browser translates a URL into a form that it can understand and provide a page back to you.  Most hosts provide this free, and it's something you never think about until something goes wrong with it.

I think that if that pluggin just gives you a schema markup. Why not just to go to schema.org get the local code and place in your page. With that you would avoid a pluggin instalation that you slow page speed just fot a simple code that you can get on web.

They will re crawl the website soon but if you want to resubmit a page to them go to wmt and hit fetch as google and put the url you want them to crawl.

Hi Pete, If you are physically located in Sheboygan, then you should be reflecting this in your: Titles, meta description tags, content The footer of your website that should list your complete NAP (name, address, phone) The Contact Us page of the site, which should again feature your complete NAP So, yes, if you're in Sheboygan, do optimize the site so that it makes this clear, in a natural, non-spammy manner. If you don't have a staffed, physical office in Sheboygan, that's another story. Hope this helps!

It can do - as others have said, there is a lot you can get away with with brilliant results if you manage to go undetected, and the linking pages' metrics are good enough to fool search engines about their quality. Spam still ranks - "churn and burn" link development (where you cycle through throw-away domains, ranking one for a short period for a highly-profitable keyword, putting a new site in its place when it is penalised / banned) still legitimately works too, but is obviously not most people's idea of a great long-term business plan if they have any desire to build a brand or use their online brands offline. But if you rank top-three for [buy cialis] for two weeks with a domain you spend $9 on and link development you can spin easily for new sites, you will come away with a healthy profit. Not saying this is what your competitor is doing, and engaging in outright spam is a bad idea if you don't plan to ditch domain after domain, but it can absolutely still work if quick rankings are all you care about.

Well yes, I know, I wouldn't have done it myself this way for many more reasons, but that's how I acquired the site and now I'm going through fixing and optimizing things. Amazingly is, that my tiny optimizations had already a huge impact on visitor stream, especially with users noticing them Alone bringing the Pagespeed from like 60% to >90% did increase user activity as also search results already by a 20-30% and revenue by 50% in less than 2 weeks! I can only suggest anyone to make a site speedy! Anyway... back to topic! Well, in the case I would not have a page under /, I would of course had choicen either /de/ or /en/ to redirect to with 301 or 302, when visitors would have reached the home page. But the more I think about it and after the thoughts I had previously on my post to Jane (which hers was also a great help, same as yours!) I think the best results might be really achieved by keeping the homepage as it is. Just not sure yet, if I should add to the home page a x-default hreflang attribute or maybe none at all? Or maybe one for each language? I thought even about doing a small test maybe first with other pages under the domain and protocol the results, before going after the home page, which is the one bringing in nearly all traffic. Well, things seem now a lot more clear of what to do and what to avoid and I believe I can figure out a way now to make it work Thanks everyone!

So it doesn't look like Google is penalizing them, and are actually rewarding them. I agree. I think that most of the time, Google will filter pages like these.  Some of the time the entire website will be reduced in rankings. But, sometimes stuff like this will get good rankings, and those good rankings might persist for a long time. If a person decides to place that type of content on his website, he should know that it will probably have a short life in Google's search results and might cause his site to be penalized.

There is no right or wrong here.  It is how you feel comfortable laying out a site.  A menu with every page on a site can be a disaster for a user experience, but if it's not that many then it's fine.  You could do a single services page and then just add links in the context (assuming a paragraph or something for each term.) or you could do a secondary menu for instance on the right side of the page that links to the particular pages.  Whatever makes sense to you and users, I won't speculate without knowing the full sitemap.

One of our sites had issues previously, bad links. We went through the disavow procedure months ago, but no change in rank until yesterday - up about 28 spots, broke the #50 barrier, all since the update.

Hi Nils, If you aren't producing translated content, but are just going to put some posts out in English, I do not believe you will see a problem. You could consider putting the English content into a subfolder like /en/ and including a header such as http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en"> in the head. You could also target that subfolder to an English speaking country in Webmaster Tools, but you can't pick more than one country, so that doesn't seem the right option here (i.e. you'd have to choose the UK, US, or another place, and if you're trying to get visitors from all over the world, that could hinder your rankings in all locations bar the country you choose). If your entire website is geo-targeted to Sweden, either by a .se domain name or geo-targeting in WMT already, you might have a harder time ranking in foreign countries as Google has been told that the entirety of the site is for the Swedish market. However, on a generic TLD like .com, you should be able to pick up a good amount of search traffic from other markets with English content.

Hmm, don't recall this ever happening with Yelp before. I guess we all have a bad day once in awhile

Yeah, like Miriam, I feel like I'm not understanding some key aspects of this situation. Why is the old site still live. How different is the new site? How is the old site being used? My bigger concern, from a traditional SEO standpoint, would be that the old site might have pages/assets/etc. that are duplicates and could harm content on the new site. It's hard for me to see how the new site could be completely different and still be the same core business, honestly. In terms of the phone number, though, I don't think Google really associates that with any kind of spam or malware signal. The fact that the phone number is on another site probably isn't going to harm your new site, in a core SEO sense. If the owners of the old domain started to generally make trouble and try to ruin your reputation, then having people connect the number to you wouldn't be great. Again, I'm not clear on how bad the situation is. It's remotely possible Google could use the phone number to connect the sites, in the sense of seeing them as owned by the same people, but I think that's far-fetched. That would probably only come into play with something like a link network. So, short answer is that I think the risk is small, but I hesitate to say that decisively without knowing more.

All great points. The individual sites are going to be re-designed as they are old designs and the content is a little thin. I will take all your points into consideration and make a decision. Thanks for the great answer!

Hi Syed, I definitely agree that the second URL looks too spammy - especially because some of those areas of London are nowhere near each other (Hertfordshire is about an hour away from the "City of London" - an area in East London - and the demographics of each area are astoundingly different!). Without having seen the pages live, I would probably 301 the second page with the longer URL to the first page, or break out the services offered in different parts of the area to showcase people working in Hertfordshire, the City, etc. If there was enough original content, you could have a page for different areas. My guess is that there is no difference, however, or that there would not be enough different information to justify regional pages - that the page is for one business targeting multiple areas. If so, go with the redirection option.

Google's advice is always to do things with the end user in mind. The search engine wants to act like a person and not like an algorithm. Don't think about "SEO." Think about people. In this context, I would think about the target audience. Would the audience prefer that all of the site's elements be written in the language that they best understand? Of course. So from a user-experience standpoint, I'd highly recommend that everything be translated. Just in case you're not aware of the best practices for multilingual and international SEO, I'll refer you to these resources at Moz, Aleyda Solis, Google and more: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192 http://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights http://www.internationalseomap.com/ http://moz.com/blog/40-plus-tools-to-advance-your-international-seo-process http://www.aleydasolis.com/en/international-web/successful-development/ http://moz.com/blog/the-international-seo-checklist http://searchengineland.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-multilingual-and-multiregional-seo-157838 Good luck!

301 the old links to the new linking structure. If it is already a high ranking page, the link weight should carry through. Since it already ranks high, I would keep as many elements as you can the same, unless they dont rank well and need to be improved. Make sure to do a site search for indexed pages, and redirect or create a removal request for any unatural cms-generated links. (component/SAMPLE/123456 etc) DO NOT just delete the entire folder without seeing how many on page links still link to those pages. Check your on-page links to see if it is generated by the menu system, or if is hard-coded in the content. Wordpress also has a few items you will want to change in the robots.txt file vs the old Joomla site. User-agent: * Disallow: /feed/ Disallow: /trackback/ Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /wp-content/ Disallow: /wp-includes/ Disallow: /xmlrpc.php Disallow: /wp- Allow: /wp-content/uploads/ Sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap.xml Disallow: /wp-content/plugins or you could also use this one: User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /wp-includes/ Disallow: /wp-content/ Disallow: /archives/ disallow: /? Disallow: ?replytocom Disallow: /wp- Disallow: /author Disallow: /comments/feed/ User-agent: Mediapartners-Google* Allow: / User-agent: Googlebot-Image Allow: /wp-content/uploads/ User-agent: Adsbot-Google Allow: / User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile Allow: / Hope this helps! Best of luck with your new build.

Sorry for the late reply. The reason why we need a second website is because one has adult orientated images.  As google places does not allow nude. http://mycompanytor.com  - Has the Google Plus Business - Non Nude http://mycompanytoronto.com - Has the Company Branding - Nude. I hope this is clear. Thanks for your input.