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Wonderfully stated.

That's probally the only answer I could think of. Thanks.

Yes I have recently done something similar 2 times. One time for a local company which had a SEO targeting an geographically unsuitable service area for my client. It is a traffic school operating in a large city situated next to an even larger city. The SEO took a new domein xxxcity.nl and focused the keyword strategy on this as well. But how do the instructors pickup and drop off students in city A north and city B south within a hour or 90 minutes. Never going to happen 8 times a day on time. And it doesnt convert well either because people now this when the see an offer. But I undid the city in the url part by copying the website enterely and placed a simple php script in the WordPress index.php file in the root. This replaces the domain for all request and redirects with a 301. The destination domain is the domain the client previously used. // Permanent redirect of all PR from A > B // Get http request headers for requests on old page   $uri = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; // Get the path after the old domain to redirect to corresponding page on new   $url_path = parse_url($uri, PHP_URL_PATH); // drop the city from the url and go to new location   $location_new = 'http://www.xxxrijschool.nl' . $url_path; // send 301 and load destination url   header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");   header("Location: $location_new"); exit(); ?> The above script I place on the old domain A but only after copying the whole website to the new domain B. If it's a 1-on-1 copy then this script is places on A. Thats all. It will cost some PageRank to move 2 times for 1 page but the transfer starts in a few days and will be noticeable in 2 weeks or so. After 6-8 weeks it will mostly be moved and normalize from there on. If in between we optimize on-page and aquire good backlinks then it will turn the decline of rank and can outperform the old site in a matter of 8 weeks. For larger and large site it's recommended that the time to live for DNS records is set to 5 minutes at least a week in advanced, This is recommended by google somewhere in the guide for transfering domains in webmaster tools I believe. Hope this helps/ Gr Daniel

Hi BobGW, Wow, what a question to ask; it's fairly subjective and dependent on quite a few variables (like experience, life cycle of the campaign, ect), but that means we should get lots of answers! Here is my Top 5 contribution (in no particular order): Optimize Your Landing Page I like to optimize the bottlenecks first and that means making sure that my website and landing pages are ready to receive paid search traffic. Ask yourself these questions: does my website load as fast / faster than my competitors? Are the call to actions clear and on my landing pages? Is all the on-page SEO complete? Make it Easy to Purchase & Proper Ecommerce Tracking Make sure that your purchase funnel is simple and easy. Only capture the necessary information (save the extra for follow up emails and visits) and reduce any unnecessary steps in the checkout process. Have thorough and accurate Google Analytics Ecommerce tracking integrated (make sure to link your Adwords account to your GA profile as well). Develop an Efficient Adwords Account Architecture A proper account infrastructure highly impacts the success of a campaign. Take the time to brainstorm how it's best to lay out your company's campaigns and ad groups. Many times referring to the website's navigation (sitemap) can help develop this portion. Keyword Research & Maintenance Once you have your campaigns and ad groups decided, you can begin to fill them with keywords (often times keywords will help you identify new ad groups or campaigns needed too). Remember to keep the keywords focused and tightly grouped. Consistently set time aside to go through your keyword reports and matched search query reports in order to improve your keywords, add negative keywords, and identify new groups of keywords. Research, Experiment, Promote, & Improve Learn as much about Web Analytics as you can and how it applies to your Ecommerce strategy. Invest in the appropriate marketing tools for competitive research, SEO, and analytics. If you don't already love digging huge data, then you should get acquainted with it as quick as possible. Make sure to continually test new ads, ad copy, banners, ect. Find the higher performing ads and ditch the ones that are costing you money. Have campaigns ready to go for special occasions like Flash Sales, holidays, graduations, ect. Making sure to keep a disciplined routine with your PPC campaigns will have a high impact on their success. The consistent, incremental improvement is usually what contributes the most for long-term success. Bonus: Understand Your Customer Lifetime Value "Our competitors are buying PPC leads based on gathering long term customers that only have to get bought once and then they are repeat customers with no more cost." It sounds like your competitors have an understanding of the customer Lifetime Value of their customer's. In addition to Sales Revenue, as a metric for measuring success, they could be using the CLV of all the new customer's acquired. I would highly suggest an ecommerce company compute its CLV to most accurately understand its Customer Acquisition Cost, which will enable the marketer to do a better job in the PPC market.

Thank you, Jane. You rephrased my question much better. You're correct that the old site wasn't being penalized (rebranding was the reason we moved it.) I have plenty of time to improve the new site before I need to use the old domain. Thanks again, Harriet

First thing, keep it simple and easy to use otherwise people won't use it. probably add to your contact page as well. If you wish to use our content or quote a piece, please email email@domain.com. Or: Would you like to quote or reuse our content for Free, please email: email@domain.com. assuming you are not wanting to charge for it. hope that's hopefully

The reason you can't see individual referring keywords from which a site is getting traffic anymore is because of Google's policy on not showing the vast majority of these in Analytics. Instead, you see "not provided" listed alongside a lot of organic traffic figures. More about "not provided" here. Others' answers about using Webmaster Tools, etc. are our best way of analysing the keywords used in organic traffic nowadays.

Copyright protection, possible seo benefits (depending upon description), technical data (if you see a shot you like, and want to know how/what it was taken with), size parameters (for when people search for certain sizes)

Hi Marie: Thanks for your quite detailed response to my question. Some of the possibilities you mention probably don't apply for the following reasons: 1. None of the URLs' changed, so it cannot be that. 2. Page titles did not change, so it's not that. 3. As for unnatural links, these have existed for several years. In fact we succeeded in getting 28 our of 100 removed and made a disavow request for Google for the other 80 toxic links. While the link profile is weak it is not worse than what it was before. When the upgrade was launched in early June Wordpress was upgraded to the latest version. I wonder if at that time some issue did not develop with robot txt or no-index. I find it very curious if that a removal request was made for the 175 URLs on June then the number of indexed pages went down for a few days and now they are back to 851. My developer may be a little bit shy about accepting responsibility about this issue. Is there any source, a Guru or sorts that could check the Wordpress installation to see if that is the source of the 175 appearing on Google that should not be there? Someone way to eliminate any doubt about what is causing this issue? Thanks, Alan

Hi there, Realistically, the tag should be used for duplicates, yes. How "duplicated" a page is, is subjective: a page with 50% of the same content as another page is probably going to count as duplicated as far as Google goes... where that line of duplication acceptability goes isn't something any of us really know. For pages where the content is totally different besides the header and footer, you technically shouldn't use canonicalisation. However, experiments have shown that Google honours the tag, even if the pages aren't duplicates. Dr. Pete did an experiment when the tag came out (admittedly a few years ago) where he showed that you could radically reduce the number of pages Google had indexed for a site by canonicalising everything to the home page. I personally had a client do this by accident a couple of years ago, and sure enough, their number of indexed pages dropped very quickly, along with all the rankings those pages had. As an ecommerce site that was ranking for clothing terms, this was very very bad. It took about six weeks to get those rankings back again after we fixed the tags, and the tags were fixed within about five days (should have been quicker but our urgent request went into a dev queue). So the answer would be that Google seems to honour the tag no matter the content of the pages, but I am pretty sure that if you asked a Googler, they'd tell you that it should only be used for dupes or near-dupes.

I can't say that I have seen any negative effects from it so far. I have done this with ecommerce sites and they havent been affected. Maybe others can share their experiences.

Ah, that's a shame. It does our Images sitemaps / Web sitemaps without issue. I would have thought it would have been okay with any videos. You could ask their support to test it, on the off-chance it collates the information you need it to, they're very good and get back to you within 24 hours.

This made me say "What!" With some other words following. http://moz.com/community/q/https-sitewide-move-has-resulted-in-huge-rankings-drop Not specifically SEO, but when comments nowadays suggest link farming, also makes me go "What". What makes you say 'what', White?

Hello, First deactivate the Sitemap functions, clear cache and then reactivate the Sitemap functions & voilá the error 404 is gone! if not, add this to the .htaccess file: <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^sitemap_index.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=1 [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]+?)-sitemap([0-9]+)?.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=$1&sitemap_n=$2 [L]</ifmodule> cheers! Arnold

Thanks guys for your advice. Am I best to no follow individual links or do it in the meta tag? If I no follow all links on a page will it stop internal link flow around my site. I have some pointers to relevant pages on my site in the bod of the text.

Thanks very much for your feedback! It helps a lot.

Hi Denverish, Thanks for your reply . I just logged in this morning and added the same site again and it worked. Not sure how. Thanks for your suggestion