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Hi, The video being too far down the page might be an issue. I've seen this cause problems before, and in your case I think it could be a problem. More broadly though, I don't think you should have those videos on the category pages, because the video itself is just image slideshow and actually does more to hamper the using experience rather than help it. As rich snippets aren't common any more, I don't think you're going to get much value from having these videos on those pages. Having the sitemap hosted at Wistia isn't a problem. You can point to a sitemap hosted on any site. Other likely problems are duplicate content. You seem to have significant duplicate content issues as I'm seeing about 3 variations of that page indexed. Hope that's useful, Phil.

Thanks for the reply. Was just trying to assess the impact of a link from a domain of high authority, nothing more!

Yes, it helped a lot. Thank you very much!

My pleasure and good luck International SEO is a bit of a minefield with no absolutely correct way of doing things, so enjoy the challenge & best of luck All Best Dan

If you have the same content in the press release as you put out there for the news sites, then it's a duplicate content issue.  Rarely does Google penalize sites for duplicate content (especially when it's just one page), they usually just choose one version and list that and then drop the others from the listings so they don't have a hundred results with the same content.  My guess is Google is choosing to list the news sites over your client's site. How authoritative is your client's site?  Did you use a canonical tag?

IF all you are doing is changing a graphic image banner, and if that is done solely based on country of origin evaluation there would be no negative SEO impact.

Hey Carson, Thanks for the response. 404/410ing was going to be my game plan initially, but I was curious if a 302 was "better" than returning dead pages. In either case, it's only a few pages so I don't think it matters much. Our traffic was from this page being used across our local citations which did receive referral traffic. They've since been changed to our root URL, so no worries on not 301'ing or 302'ing that link. 404 it is. The majority of the bad links are to our root domain, so I've been busy lately sending removal requests and such and preparing out disavow sheets. I was hoping for an "easier" fix to simply get rid of the dead pages, but killing them does indeed seem best. I guess I'll go with the original plan to kill the pages which have the bulk of the spammy links, 301 the "cleaner" old structures without links aimed at them, and continue trying to remove the spammy links to the root URL. Thanks for the input!

What is the best way to handle the sitemap for this situation? Do we need separate sitemaps for http and https?

Hi TheGoatMan, This is an interesting topic. My guess is that you're asking this question because you know about the EMD penalty of recent times. Curiously, this penalty did not appear to affect local business rankings as much as virtual business rankings. That being said, the EMD penalty did indicate to all business owners that Google is not a fan of optimized website URLs being coupled with low quality websites. If you are just starting a new business, choosing to name it with your service/geo keywords in mind is a smart idea. So, instead of being The Back Relief Doctor, your might name your business Boston Chiropractic Center (provided that doesn't already exist, or course). Thus, your domain name could be bostonchirorpacticcenter.com and both your business name and URL would be an authentic representation of your business. If, however, your business already exists, it wouldn't be my first choice to go with an EMD domain that doesn't reflect your business. I'd rather have The Back Relief Doctor reside on backreliefdr.com than on mybostonchiro.com, simply because I feel that all of Google's moves in recent years have been towards authenticity. You'll find differing opinions on this, but this is mine What you must not do, of course, is to misrepresent your business name anywhere by adding keywords to it. Use your legal business name or DBA at all times - on the website, building citations, social media, etc. Finally, there is the option of re-branding a business, if you feel there would be significant benefits in renaming The Back Relief Doctor 'Boston Chiropractic Center'. However, this is not a choice to be made lightly, as re-branding of a local business requires a massive citation cleanup campaign to edit all existing references to the old name so that they reflect the new one. This can result in temporary or long-term ranking loss and other problems, so this is a choice that deserves very careful consideration. Hope these thoughts are helpful!

You already mentioned what I would do: "Set-up canonical links on all date specific pages On each /events/event-name/id/date page, set-up the canonical link to point back to the newly created /events/event-name page." I think that would be the best practice.

I would worry less about what your communication to them says and more about identifying the market. To get a 20-40% return on who you contact, you're going to have to put in some major work into who these site owners are and if they want or need help. This isn't a numbers game, it's a market identification game. If it were me, I'd spend time on a few web design and website development forums looking for people who are asking questions about their site or have concerns, and then develop conversations with them. Step away from this being about you and make it about them. Hope that helps!

As others have mentioned, unless you are using dedicated servers it's likely most of your accounts are already closely related IPs and/or c-blocks already, so switching to a combined account will likely make little or no difference. In my personal opinion, I'm not a huge fan of Godaddy for my own hosting as I have a perception of a lot of low-quality sites also hosting there, which could influence my performance if they share the same server as myself, or spam from the same IP. I perfer to go with dedicated hosting or choose a slightly more pricey host to "raise the bar" on my neighbors. Probably doesn't make a big difference in the end but I have my superstitions.

Hi Muhammed, When you mention a link network, people immediately think about sites like BMR that have been thoroughly penalized. I wrote about them here: http://moz.com/blog/unnatural-link-warnings-blog-networks-advice It's a risky strategy, and definitely not my favorite. That said, I think you can inter-link your sites if you do it correctly. For example, you can link to content pieces from one site to another when the topics happen to overlap. I've linked from a philosophy site I own to a jewelry site when the jewelry site got deep on what jewelry means to us. What I wouldn't do is create 12 sites on the same topic and build a link wheel. I'd also advise you not to cross-link on a site-wide basis just because you own the site. It has to make sense to a reasonable user. Otherwise you'll get caught, re-penalized, and end up wasting a bunch of time that could have been spent actually gaining real life attention.

You're welcome. Peter

Hi Mark, I'm so sorry about the late response here. We know it doesn't behave as well as it could with the iPad and mobile devices, and it's on our list to fix. Thanks for your patience!

While I definitely think e-commerce over ecommerce, I bet ecommerce is typed in more. It could just be me, but I never use hyphens in search. For our site, we rank pretty close for attorney and lawyer keyword phrases, and those two synonyms are more different than e-commerce and ecommerce. So, either way, I bet you'll be fine. I would be curious to see your rankings vs conversions though. I'd bet ecommerce would rank higher, because I think that will be typed more, but I bet e-commerce would convert better, because that strikes me as the professional term. Just my personal take, sorry I don't have any hyphen data for you. Good luck, Ruben

Hello! Thanks for your patience while we're working on this bug. GA authentication issues are affecting a few customers; we understand that this is really frustrating, and our engineers have made it a top priority to fix. As CustomButtonCompany mentioned--please email help@moz.com and our amazing help team will get you back up and running. Jackie | Product Planner