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Absolutely, many sites go through a total re-branding. The history of the site and probably the existing back links will get the site going rather fast, providing the site has not been penalised or anything like that in the past or suspect link building. Make sure you create a good sitemap and have a good 404 page setup for all pages that no longer exist. be sure to remove all the pages that you no longer want/need. Take advantage of some of the existing pages on the site if possible, the history and any links to those pages will be a good start for those pages. Also look at the possibility of 301 redirecting any pages that have pagerank or links coming to them to related new pages that you create.

You need to think about whether your site has been hit with a manual penalty or an algorithm penalty. If you have had no messages in WMT then it is probably an algorithm penalty. Panda is now part of all algorithm changes so you may have been hit by that. One of our testing sites got hit by Penguin in May and we decided to test out if a 301 to a new website would work...it didnt!! It took just over 5 weeks for Google to catch up and the site lost all its rankings again. I was actually surprised it took that long to be honest, Google's algorithm is too smart for that so I would advise trying to fix any problems before you give up and start a new website. Penalties will last as long as you have the problem. The issue here is, if it is an algorithm change then it is harder to figure out what is wrong. Whilst a manual penalty is worse, at least you know what to do in order to fix the problem. You need to look at any duplicate content issues you may have and if that is all ok then look deep into your backlink profile because it must be 1 or the other. If you show us your URL then maybe one of us could take a quick look and give you some more info.

So did that process of escaping the special characters solve your issue, esiow?

If your niche site is working better for you right now there seems little point in 301-ing it to your main site. Not only do you risk losing rankings (as your main site may not rank for the terms your niche site used to), you've already said your main site doesn't convert as well - so even if you get the main site ranking in place of the niche site, you'll still likely lose sales. If I were you I'd keep the two sites for now, as Gary says don't interlink them and try to make sure the content isn't exactly the same. However, I would encourage you to consider what you might want to do in the future. Where do you want to invest your time and focus your attention? Do you want to improve your main site, or your niche site? Continuing to invest in both (i.e. dividing your resources) may mean you're left with two sites which are just 'ok' rather than one really great site which might not be the smartest move long term.

If I were going to disallow something I would go with noindex tags. The robots file is perfect with just those 2 lines. Then, there are some plugins that will help you avoid any SEO issue like SEO by Yoast. Personally I like to noindex,follow tags, categories, and archive pages, that's it. But again, noindex, follow with a robots tag on the page, not using the robots.txt. SEO by Yoast will make that as easy as it can ever be with just a small configuration steps. Give it a try, you can always disable plugins Wish you the best!

One tool I've begun to use more frequently is Search Queries in Webmaster Tools.  It doesn't tell me what keywords I'm not using already that others are, but it does give me insight into how people are already finding their way to our sites.  I look at the percent changes which show me trends in what people are searching for and use that information to add new content and more in depth information.

Wow, thanks Gary!  You rock! We are a Yahoo Store, but FastPivot has been our developer for several years.  It appears maybe one of the developers made a mistake of some sort and their blog posts were creating pages on our site.  I'll ping them. Thanks again I really appreciate your help! Ron

Hey David Let us know if you're all set with Martijn's answer. But do you mean; a) after entering multi-word keywords Moz does not then track them correctly? or b) you are having trouble entering multi-word KW's to begin with into the software? I just tried adding a multi-word KW and it seemed to work fine (even without quotes) so maybe there was a bug. If you continue to have trouble you can also email help@moz.com directly for product related support. -Dan

On the big question, I definitely agree with Gary - Penguin can cause an algorithmic penalty, and that can impact your entire site. It's definitely not something to mess around with. Google devalues links all the time, but that's separate from Penguin. When Penguin 1.0 launched, Google made it clear the update was punitive. As for when Penguin runs, we're really not clear on that. Penguin data seems to be updated outside of the real-time algorithm, but it's tough to say whether that only happens during an official Penguin update or if the data is updated more frequently. My gut feeling (based partially on the few Penguin recovery stories out there) is that it has to be a bit more frequent than the confirmed updates, but it's certainly irregular. I don't think every six months is accurate, honestly. Recovery is tricky - since Penguin is algorithmic, reconsideration shouldn't help in theory, but the reality is a bit more murky. Penguin does need to refresh, and the links do need to be re-crawled - Gary is certainly right about that. Those timelines can be highly variable, though.

Your welcome. Here's a little insight on the two shopping cart systems I mentioned. Note that both systems have added (and are promoting) the standard e-commerce hoopla of auto-generated product pages and the sort of stuff systems like BigCommerce do. But they do both also have the simpler option of just using the cart and checkout system and allowing you to put your Buy buttons anywhere you can reach. I started trying to set up AmeriCommerce because it had the most features. But as I got in deeper, the complexity of the features and the poorly written technical documentation overwhelmed me and I gave up. If you have some brainy tech guys they can probably understand the documentation better than I could. I then switched to UltraCart and have found it much easier to use. You can see the standard cart appearance on some example pages on their website. My cart at EasyDigging.com is pretty heavily customized. They will soon have a easily modified HTML/CSS based cart available. There documentation and tech support is pretty good.

Hi Jon Thanks for your response. The MOZ bar seems to work weirdly for me: There are certain links on my page that are present in Javascript, and are not being crawled - they don't show up in the source code, and I also checked the same using Screaming frog. These links are relatively low importance, and I don't want the search engines to crawl them, which is why I'm fine with them being left in Javascript. The pencil icon in the Moz Bar highlights, and shows these links as 'followed internal links'. Not sure if this is how it should be - should these not be detected at all (they are present in unparsable JS, and do not show up in the source code either!) Look forward to your response here. Regards

ok, thank you.

Hi David, There is no direct view of that information in the interface right now, but we're going to work on surfacing that information in a better way in the upcoming months. We'll be adding monthly timeframe before the year's end (if all goes well) and that should give you a 12 month history view of your keyword distribution and for each tracked keyword. We're also working on adding the keyword ranking history CSV to the rankings section so that you can have your history 2 years back. We hope to have that added end of October / early November. Thanks, and please let us know if you have any other questions! Miranda Rensch - Product Manager

Hi! Can you try disconnecting and then reconnecting the Twitter account in your campaign settings? Once you do this, give the app a couple hours to refresh and see if new data populates. If you're still having problems after that, please send a ticket into help[at]moz.com as we'll probably need to get a developer to take a look at this for you. Thanks in advance for your patience as we work through the bugs in this initial beta release of Analytics! Best, Sam Moz Helpster

I realized the question was a bit wordy and disorganized so I reworded it and posted it here. http://moz.com/community/q/what-s-my-best-strategy-for-duplicate-content-if-only-www-pages-are-indexed Totally answered!

Hi Ron, I think there may be some value in building your YouTube presence for certain keywords, but you're looking at this situation all the wrong way round. Really - you should start by looking at your business goals and determining whether, for a specific keyword, you want users to go to your site, or to YouTube to watch a video. If the keyword is informational and potentially appeals to individuals high up in your conversion funnel - that is to say, they aren't already engaged influencers or members of your community - then getting them to watch a video on YouTube that helps solve a specific problem or provides decent (non sales-focused) information might be the way to go. If you're then able to create good content to fit with the user intent for that keyword - THEN you can think about optimising your YouTube videos and presence with specific keyword intent. Don't start with the form (video) or the channel (youtube) but instead start with the audience and the business goals - then work out your strategy from there. in terms of optimising for YouTube - basically, the Title should be treated like a title, the description like a meta description - then you need to drive targeted engagement (not just raw views) in order to get the video ranking. Embeds and links also help, and uploading a transcription manually will allow you to rank for longer tail phrases which match the text in the transcription itself. I hope that's useful.

no. just seems like keyword level penguin "penalty" on home page. i came up with something a little different we're going to try. we created a page /home and put the rel canonical there, and we're using a 302 to redirect /home to /. i'm hoping google will index the homepage as  /home while it "temporarily" goes to get the content from /.

Author schema really shines and helps with clickthrough on the SERPS in Google results for posts and articles and sometimes pages.  (see attached) It is not so much useful beneficial, (even though it can be done, and you may still find value) for your author page. Also generally G+ profile is linked to your Author schema, You cannot add schema to your moz profile page. Or in that case use your moz profile to link to your site like you can with G+. Even though this could be really cool idea but not sure if Google will allow that Hope this helps zLGCd3e.jpg