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Awesome! Thanks for the update.

I would create a new webmaster property instead of trying to change the address of two sites. Are you setting the new site up as HTTPS? What are you doing with the old domains? I would make sure you keep the registration active on them so that no one else can buy them. Aside from refreshing content and HTML data, creating a new Webmaster property, monitoring performance and verifying that the dynamic 301s are working I can't think of anything else really.

I agree and I disagree. I know in this case it could be considered "low priority" but in all reality, this is the snippet you want showing when someone searches for your keyword, so it really should be optimized with the rest of the meta data, all at one time. Changing bits and pieces isn't the most efficient way to get it done. It is more likely to see a change in rankings when the on page optimization is all completed correctly at one time. Use the on page grader tool here to double check each page individually. It will give you a list of the things you need to change to best optimize a page for a particular key term.

I can't imagine why any CMS would be designed that way or, why, from a coding standpoint, it would be hard to remove. I try not to second-guess third-party providers (because I've been in their shoes), but that sounds like borderline BS to me. "Can't fix it" is far too often "Don't want to fix it". My gut feeling is that Google will ignore a standard port 80, and will only index the port if it's non-default or if the entire site (including internal links) is explicitly using the port. By adding that canonical, though, you're definitely sending a mixed signal, and there is risk. I've never seen this actual situation in play, so I can only speculate. Is it possible to remove the canonical tags on these pages and using 301-redirects or some other approach? Unfortunately, a lot of this depends on how the pages actually resolve and what other signals are in play. It's a bit tough to tell without looking at the specific site.

Since these are branded terms, I would recommend that you do a simple search on Google to see if your competitors are already paying for your branded term. Not all of them do, especially if your branded term is irrelevant to your products. More likely than not, if you are ranking 1 organically and not paying for your branded term in PPC you will still get upwards of 90% of the clicks. Most people searching by brand already know what they are looking for and where they want to buy it. They will look for your SERP. If you want to test the theory, turn off the paid campaign for a week and see if the traffic on branded terms increases organically or if you see a huge decline in traffic. AdWords is easy to Beta. Maybe it isn't cutting spend altogether, but dropping your bid to position three. Having two listings next to each other is the holy grail of SERP positioning.

Thanks, What I'm going to do is attach the domain to the blog, but the blog will just remain the same blog.

Hi there! Did you see the most recent comment? An example URL would be very helpful! Also, what tool(s) are you using to crawl your site? Christy

Hrm... I'll do some digging to see if I can find anything odd/off. And ask some of our other frequent users to see if they're having the same issues.

Google selects the location for SERPs based on the IP address of the searcher. The only detriment to having your site hosted in another country would be if they are in what could be considered spammy locations. For example, my company is in Wisconsin, my server is hosted in California. No harm no foul. If my server were hosted out of India, it would be considered unnatural and spammy. I think UK to Belgium is reasonable and wouldn't be considered unnatural.

Hi Thanks for looking at the issue. There should be four working nameservers. I have four set in both WHM and at my domain registrar. I added two more two (3 and 4) so maybe they are taking a while to resolve around the web. Will look at the SOA, thanks. Server and domain set up isn't at the top of my skill set. The domain you mention in this thread is just a testing domain to see what happens with a certain kind of content so it hasn't been treated too seriously to be honest.

First off you may want to edit all of the extra junk on your question (

Have fun.

We don't use Comscore. Analytics transparently kept tracking everything without any change. We don't use Tagmanager url matching tracking, but unless you have not defined rules which include the url protocol it should not need any attention either.

Hi Greenstone! Great questions from everyone in the community here! I will add, from a purely local perspective, you might want to be sure you've got all these ducks in a row: http://moz.com/blog/troubleshooting-local-ranking-failures Hope you'll come back with further details, based on the the questions the community has put forth!

There will be one main domain that will act as a landing page for the three divisions. I am getting divisions that will be starting on a new domain name.

Not really an expert in robots.txt - but you could always try to simulate Rogerbot using a tool like Screaming Frog (the tool is free if you crawl less than 500 pages). You can enter a custom user agent. Rogerbot seems to be rogerbot/1.0 (http://moz.com/help/pro/what-is-rogerbot-, rogerbot-crawler+shiny@moz.com) and try crawling the pages on your site. In default mode, the tool will only crawl pages that are allowed by the robots.txt. If the tool crawls your pages, then something is wrong with the robots.txt - if not, than you should contact Moz staff to check with them.

Hi James, have been considering ssl for a while, maybe time to make the switch, thanks for the share. Have been struggling with bounce ever since organic overtook referrals, is pretty hard to create product documentation and get people to move to another page, especially as most bookmark the pages and close the page when they've finished reading. Having blog pages has helped and since including a forum bounch has dropped, but still a little over 40%. Good luck with the new site launch, hope it goes well for you

I think that over the past few weeks search traffic itself has declined a little, that is what I meant. I don't think the age will matter. It will help in the users eyes to show longevity. I have reviews from 1999 on my site