Welcome to the Q&A Forum

i always open internal and external link from my site no sale window.

In terms of Google +, I need to swot up on this as I'll admit I don't have much of a clue!  Noticed a mozinar video about it, I think, so will look at that as a starting point. Cheers for this: http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies.  I've had a brief look so far, but will look at the article more thoroughly when I get chance.

SEO student is correct re where manual or partial manual penalties will appear. As to your real problem, I do not think it is a manual penalty. I think you have messed things up with trying to build a new site on the old while it is still up. Is there a reason you did not build the new site on a dev domain : OliversDevDomain.com/clientsite? Get the site where you want it and then simply repoint the domain. Probably, you have 'confused' things with the search engines by having duped content, and/or you have redirects that are 404ing, etc. Have you run the site on screaming frog or similar software to see what you have? That would be my first move, then I would make a change in how I was rebuilding. It is likely, if the rebuild is complete and you no longer have duplicate content (and the url structure is unchanged) you will likely pop back into the rankings fairly soon. I would be disingenuous if I did not say that given the approach to the redesign, it is likely there are other issues. If you have a baseline crawl of the old site to compare to the new that would be helpful. Good luck with this, Robert

Oliver,  I am not sure what your question is re client 1, it sounds as if, currently, their fourth location is not on page one and there may be a bit of work to do on it to get it there. As to Client two - DO NOT try to reclaim or create new profiles for them. You will create a problem you and the client do not want to deal with. There is a high likelihood you will create merged listings and cause problems. I am assuming when you say: all of them were claimed by another company 1 year ago.  But now I cant re-claim them unless the other company releases them but that wont be easy. you are saying another SEO or Local firm. For us, when we work on client's Local, we do not claim the listing, we claim if for the client and give them the passwords we set up for them. For a company to try and hold that is, IMO, unethical. (Assuming they have no contractual reason for same.) Any discomfort from dealing with the other company is nothing compared to dealing with trying to create new listings, etc.  (And you are going to need your clients to help pressure them, not you. At least the client is more likely to have success.) The client with your help can get Google to work with you if they do not have the passwords, but it will be very difficult and time consuming. You really need the passwords and to work to get them from the other firm. I hope this helps, Robert

I'm not familiar with CodeIgniter, but this isn't terribly different from how Wordpress and other PHP-based CMSs manage permalinks. Currently you're simply forwarding shortened URLs (/contact/) to the actual URL (/site/contact/), which isn't ideal. It would be preferable to remove the base path (/site/) from the URL completely. This guide (http://www.web-and-development.com/codeigniter-remove-index-php-minimize-url/) has a good rundown on how to control this in .htaccess. I believe that the sections titled "Removing 1st URL segment" and "Routing automatically" are going to be the ones that are applicable to your case, because you're trying to change the controller. You should also take a look through the original documentation at http://ellislab.com/codeigniter/user-guide/general/urls.html. You're also going to want to make sure that any canonicals being used in the match the intended URL, and that any incorrect URLs (eg /site/contact/) are 301 redirecting to the proper URL (eg /contact/). Use wheregoes.com and type in the /site/contact/ version of the URL to test this - it should spit out "301 redirect" not "302" or anything else. If you're not really comfortable messing around with htaccess, I'd highly recommend trying this out on a development server and making sure it all works correctly before you move it to a live server.

I guess I am unsure of what you are looking for then. ahrefs does separate them out in terms of showing a percentage and being able to look at the sitewides versus non, but there is no way to exclude them overall when you have used the disavow tool, etc. When you have someone nefariously linking to a site with 20000 links from a single site, it muddies the water to have them all there. Even though they show what is or is not sitewide, it would be nice if you could see the reports totally excluding them. Best of luck

Hi Sam, That's great to know. IMO the ability to get these 'just discovered' links into the main index is a significant advantage to Moz over other tools. Given a just discovered link must first be tweeted, these links are (generally) more important than non tweeted links, and therefore of more importance to the overall link profile. Cheers

Thanks...

Hi Bob, I want to apologize for the misinformation I gave you. I misread your question and apologize for that. Paul, I apologize if I miss led Bob. I misread it, and all I can do at this point is apologize. I put the work in because I read the question I thought they were speaking of something else. So that's why I spent the time to Try and answer it. I've spoken to Keri privately and while I can't say I will never misinterpret something  again ever I am definitely doing things to prevent that from happening. All the best, Thomas

I know of no valid reason not to use Google Webmaster Tools - there's way too much paranoia on this subject, IMO. If you're knowingly doing something extremely black-hat, then maybe, but Google can detect most of that without GWT. GWT isn't adding any kind of tracking to your site - it's just revealing to you what they already know, for the most part. The nice thing about GWT is that it can help validate the XML sitemap and, once validated, help you figure out what's getting indexed. I suspect these other tools are just looking for some default name for the file, and you're using a non-default one. You can map it, as Thomas said, or you can just tell Google what the filename is. Beyond the SEs, I'm not sure who really needs to process your XML sitemap.

Thank you guys for your answers! You just confirmed what I always had in mind. Honestly, his budget is VERY low for what he wants and his expectations of what SEO can do are completely out of proportion (he believes SEO could put his homepage on the first page in a couple months). I guess I will continue to push the idea of different landing pages per brand, or ultimately, be brutally honest and make it clear that his expectations don't match his budget and he'll never get the results he wants without a huge investment. Thanks again!

I've tried this. I moved content from page 'A' to page 'B'. I did not even delete page 'A', and google re-indexed both the updated pages correctly. In webmaster tools, I submitted page B first, and then page A immediately after. Note: There were a few scraper sites that were scraping the content in question. Performing a 'site: <domainname.com><"string of text in quotations here">' in Google showed page B for the content first, above the scrapers. I know this is not a scientific way of determining if you are the owner of content, but it seems to me that Google still gave our site, and page B, the ownership of the content in question.</domainname.com>

You may find this case study helpful of a blog that decided to exactly that: http://www.koozai.com/blog/search-marketing/deleted-900-blog-posts-happened-next/

Just to add what some other folks have said here, I think that the look and length of the title tag may have a CTR effect in search result listings. Because the vast majority of people tend to overstuff and over-elongate their title tag, I think that a pithy one stands out on the page -- particularly if it is optimized for the exact keyword phrase that the searcher entered into the search engine. Just as the Google author tag adds in CTR value to the listing vis a vis author photo, name, etc., so too might the concise, short title tag pop a bit more. (I have no data to back this up, mind you. Totally just a theory.)

Thanks Brady, the backlink profile looks clean.

Having many links on a page will not reduce the PageRank of the page that it's on. However, it will reduce the amount of PageRank being passed to the individual links on the page, so you should try to keep the number as low as you can while maintaining a good user experience. A general rule of thumb is to keep the number of links to 100 or less, although many ecommerce sites have many more (the typical Amazon.com page has 400+ links). Linking to high-quality, relevant external sites is believed to improve the relevancy of your own page. These should not be nofollowed. In general, it should not be necessary to use nofollow for external links unless you are linking to a direct competitor (but then, why would you be linking to them?) or in the case of UGC where people may leave links to low quality sites. In general, just use your common sense and link to any relevant internal or external pages that you think will enhance the value of your content. Don't use nofollow. It's good to use target="_blank" to have external links open in a new window.

I've seen no evidence of a boost in .org or any other TLD vs another lately.  We have a couple thousand clients to compare and while new sites seem to be doing better than old but .org doesn't seem to be ahead of .com in any meaningful way. I would definitely not change just for a .org but if it makes more sense, brand the correct way for your business.