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To start I would make sure you have your current site structure well mapped out and that they are working with the designer to make sure pages aren't being dropped. A great tool to use is Screaming Frog for this. We find with larger sites and ones with extensive blog content that is the biggest issue that any potential 301's are in place when the new site rolls out so as not to lose rankings from broken inbound or internal links. I'd also make sure the site maps are updated and ready. You may also want to make sure the architecture of the site hasn't changed dramatically for major pages. I would look to see what are your top pages for landing pages in Organic search and make sure they aren't being buried deeper in the site for no reason. So a page may have been mysite.com/awesomelandingpage and with a redesign it gets moved to mysite.com/genericfolder/subfolder/awesomelandingpage and it could lose some of it's link authority. Just a few thoughts....

Hey everyone! We are investigating the possibility of a different color scheme or configurable themes. As for the ability to toggle which side the toolbar rests is also something we are looking into. Please let me know if you have any more feedback you'd like to provide and I'll pass it along to our product team!

Hi Israr, Since your site is properly targeted to Pakistan in Webmaster Tools, don't worry about having a .com domain as opposed to .com.pk. The WMT configuration does that job perfectly. I would be tempted to guess that one of a number of things is happening: It could very well be that the US results are being affected by recent updates and those updates haven't rolled out to the rest of the world yet (the US usually sees updates first; in the first Panda roll-out, it took Google a long time to extend the roll-out past the US. I remember being at a search conference in Poland over a month after Panda was released in the US and people kept bugging the Google rep about when it would come to Europe!). In this case, you might be in for a good ranking improvement in Pakistan soon. It also might be the case that there is more competition for the term you want to rank for in Pakistan than there is in the US. If the query pertains especially to Pakistani audiences (mentions location, is about a product or service only available in Pakistan, etc.) then other competitors might have fared better in providing adequate localised signals, whereas your site might be appealing to a more general audience (as far as the signals it gives Google are concerned). Is your website hosted in Pakistan? The location of a website's hosting should not be a major factor at all, but it can make a small difference if Google has trouble figuring out what the intended target country is. Your WMT geo-location should have taken care of this though, even if the site is hosted in the US or elsewhere. Also, do you have a good number of links from other Pakistani websites, whether they be .com.pk domains, sites hosted in Pakistan, and sites with a lot of Pakistani links themselves? Again, not a massive ranking factor, but if most of your links come from the US or other foreign countries, this isn't as good of a location signal as if you have a lot of links from other local websites. To be honest, I think that the first scenario is more likely and that a movement upwards in the US results is a good sign...

Andy, many thanks indeed for your observations and comments - a great help and I'm now off to do a re write!! thanks again

On the subject of articles and pages that list headings of articles.. any idea on minimum text needed before something is regarded as 'thin content'? I have a site with pages like that and was producing to thirty to forty pages per week (news items).  I had thousands of those pages and would delete old ones about once a year.  That site got hit in one of the first Pandas.  I noindexed those pages right away and the site recovered within a few weeks.    Now I continue doing the same.  The anchor text is two to six words that are perfectly descriptive of the content or something snarky.  Since the pages  are not indexed I don't think that they are a problem. I have had some slight panda problems that I think was caused by some pages that I added to a site almost ten years ago.  It was a lot of photos with two to three sentence descriptions.  So, I noindexed them and will beef all of them up to  a couple hundred words and the really good ones up to 1000 word articles with several photos.  But, I think that a couple hundred words would be adequate - but nobody knows for sure.

You can remove them via GWT as Chris has so aptly mentioned.  Best way to do IMO.

Hi Alex, When it comes to bad links pointing to your site, definitely remove them as an when you can (i.e. immediately, acknowledging that it will take time to contact every linking webmaster and negotiate the link removal). If you are going to suffer any ill effects in rankings from removing bad links (which does happen if Google was passing PageRank through those links), it's still best to get this done sooner rather than later. What you do not want is bad links that haven't been noticed to suddenly be picked up upon, resulting in a manual penalty.

Hey David,Nice analysis you did for nlpca.com. Can you help me out finding major issues with my site www.shoppal.in 2 Main things I need your suggestion for are: 1. Am I stuffing the keywords in individual pages like http://www.shoppal.in/zovi-coupons. Auto generated keyword "Coupon" is arriving several number of times on this page. Is it stuffing which can be taken as over optimization ? 2. Does you feel "rel=Canonical" should be maintained in individual pages. I am new to this and really need guidance. Regards

What's a good guide for doing this? We're using Joomla and if Google just displays the first author that'll work great.

Hey guys, Thank you so much for all your inputs. Sorry I was very busy couldn't get back sooner. I appreciate you advices. Chris

Irvco, I checked with our head of Local, Amber, who I consider an expert and she states as follows: You don't have to add a special character. It just depends what vanity URL's have already been generated by Google and accepted by the listing manager. Sometimes you don't have the option of adding characters. You can either accept the vanity URL or keep what you have.I hope that helps you out, Best,Robert

Hi Robert, Jonathan has said that nothing will be passed as parameters, but even if they were, I don't see that there would ever be a _penalty _for this (in the true sense of a penalty - algorithmic or manual penalisation for spam). You could flood Google with a million query strings and no canonicalisation if you did it badly which could get dangerous, is the only thing I can think of and even then, this would be easy to fix with canonicalisation on your own sites.

Hi As Dennis confirmed, the 2nd link is showing the rich snippets. Try not to rely on the site: operator, and instead (first choice), query Google specifically where your result should appear first naturally, in your target country. For example, https://www.google.com/search?site=&source=hp&q=IT+and+Management+Training+Alpharetta%2C+GA+&gl=us yields the desired result:http://screencast.com/t/szChNsHMjS42 Alternatively, you can always try the info: operator which is usually more reliable. Your first result is a bit more confusing to explain, http://screencast.com/t/nY3u6eCdeIfV. You have 2 results appearing for the exact page title query, and that might be the reason why you aren't seeing it (at least in this example): https://www.google.com/search?gl=us&q=Java%2C+Perl+and+Python+Programming+Training+&gl=us Just as David-Kley said above, you've implemented the microdata correctly and it's really up to Google as to whether the query deserves rich snippets or not. On the up side, you are getting quite a few rich snippets, so just look around  https://www.google.com/search?gl=us&q=Perl++Programming+Training&gl=us Thanks, Dave

Thanks Miriam, I guess we still have about two more weeks before we get there. I'll be excited to see if start to move up at all then. Best, Ruben

That is a big 10-4, thank you for pointing that out.

Third vote for using the site and not redirecting it here (pending a re-brand of sorts to suit the fact that it's now owned by your company). You have the opportunity to take up a lot more real estate in the SERPs than you do now, whereas redirection at worst removes the old site from the results. At best, you might see a small improvement in your rankings, but you're already ranking better than that site to begin with. As EGOL says, PageRank is logarithmic so if you're dealing with what is a weaker website (whether in actual PR or toolbar PR - the latter of which is a fairly outdated metric but still gets used for basic comparison purposes), it may actually be many times weaker than your stronger domain. At best, using both site might allow you to target different sections of the same audience, appeal to different needs from the audience base (very large clients versus smaller businesses, etc.), and for results where you rank top 10 with both sites, you're about 20% of the results, not 10%

Hi DragonSearch, Oops! I'm sorry if I didn't explain that well. You would not create a Google+ Local or Facebook Local business page with an incorrect address. You'd want to create one with a correct address, that identically matches what you enter in the Moz Local CSV. This way, we can validate your information and then, once validation is complete, we can push you data out to our 7 supported partners, which are: Infogroup Acxiom Nuestar/Localeze Factual Foursquare Superpages Best of the Web Hope this helps!