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i want to take it back to the way i first started with it instead of moving away from what i wanted. So i would like to include a lot of the same content, but what i am worried about is losing all the links. My hosting company have put a new installation of joomla in a new subdomain and then this will be put under www.in2town.co.uk and then i am trying to learn how to keep the old links for the new site

Make sure /forum/ is excluded in your robots.txt file then go to Google Webmaster Tools and request a URL removal. You can request the entire directory be removed. Here's a page from their help files about the tool. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=164734

Why wouldn't you want to include a link to your help desk? If it's a resource that visitors will use then you should include it. As for a nofollow link, this is just going to stop link juice being passed to your hepdesk page, but other links on your page will pass less link juice as a consequence, so without more information, it doesn't seem to make sense to do this. If there's a reason why you don't want visitors to access the help desk then don't include the link at all.

Thanks for the answer. I have got some Joomla and wordpress experience. This time I am going for custom development in .NET for scalability purposes.How does these things are taken care of in custom development?

This may be a little late to the game, but, Dynamic Page titles in IMO are not great. However, Will including page Views in the title benefit the users? Maybe. But I don't think that one or two dup page titles will kill your SEO. Worse case, could you mod your system to not allow Title which have already been used?

Hi Greenman, Google has stated publicly that they do read pdf documents. "...However, while we can process HTML, PDF, and Flash files, we have a more difficult time understanding (e.g. crawling and indexing) other rich media formats, such as Silverlight" (from Google Webmaster Tools Forum) So, I think this strategy will definitely help your seo efforts. As with all things seo, there are a million ways to chase backlinks (here is a good list of back-link article to read) so I wouldn't put all your eggs in one basket, but I think your off to a really good start. Good luck with your site! -bryant jaquez

Thanks for your extended answer. So in fact if i have a blog online at this moment and I have optimized the homepage of the blog for a targeted keyword and have for e.g. 5 category pages with url structure domain.com/category1 and I will remain the exact url structure and content in my new magento webshop, then there will be a big chance I keep my curreny rankings, is that correct? Thanks in advance!

As Ryan said, robots.txt file is very useful when you wanna block (disallow) some pages. Indeed, if you don't want that spider crawls your page you must use robots.txt (noindex tags will let bot crawls, but not index, your page). I have got a small website but i dropped robots.txt in my folder. Maybe write just Allow: / could be useless, but you can say: "I respect protocols"

I am going to leave the SERP, Yellow pages etc the actual number. The places I am wanting to track are on our main corporate site and on the branch specific websites. As far as PPC vs Organic etc I want to track all traffic sources. Right now I am most interested in trying to get a better web vs non-web tracking at the branch level. This will help me show how much business the web is driving vs local paper phone books, word of mouth, etc.

...any other steps we can take to ensure neither site gets "dinged" by the search engines... What you are doing will almost assure that one of the sites will be filtered from the search results.  And if you are going to have lots of links between these  sites I am willing to bet  one month's pay that one of them will be filtered from the SERPs in under six months. other meta tags to let Google know that we are not scraping Google doesn't really care if you scraped that content or if it was a gift from the Pope.  They don't like to show duplicate content in their SERPs and will work to filter as much of it as possible.  Adding meta tags will do nothing...... Your primary problem is cross-domain duplicate content... adding "our partner over at resources.site.com recently published the following report ... yada, yada....." sounds like more duplicate content WITHIN the domain. There are no shortcuts.  If you want to ensure that both sites will perform well you will need to pay the price of unique content. this isn't ideal but it's what I've got to work with If you were my employee I would  hope that you would try to educate me.

Hi Thomas, Check out this article talking about how Google looks at Twitter's use of the hashbang. http://searchengineland.com/how-twitters-technical-infrastructure-issues-are-impacting-google-search-results-86229 I always link to the non-ajax version. Casey

Yes, linkvalue from Website A will transfer to Website B. This will work best if Website A and Website B are about the same topic.  If they are not about the same topic then this might not be a good idea. Also, before you do this you should ask.... 1) do both of these sites have the same linksources? If they do then those duplicated links might not be worth much.... also, 2) will the webmasters who linked to Website A be pleased to see that they are now linking to Website B.  If not, you will probably lose some of your links. Good luck!

Gregory - Check out this new blog post, might contain just what you're looking for; http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-profile-tool-to-discover-linking-activity

One more example related to exact match domains. http://www.lakai.lt no seo for a 3 years,(about 1000 monthly visitors) added google  analytics yesterday to catch 404 , and submited sitemap. Competitors are way too good for this kind of site, but still. For most competitive keywoards the site is on first SERP. I think stable number of visitors for a years does the job,  supporting such an unfriendly to google robot website.

You don't need a sitemap on any site, but its a good thing to do on any site if you want the best SEO. The document type doesn't matter because the engine crawlers don't change based on the version of the standard you're using.

This is basically a way for sites to try to control the performance hit of being crawled too often by the bots. I don't think its ever worked to get a site deemed unimportant by the engines crawled more often than they would otherwise. If your site is not getting slammed by bots (and if it is, you probably have bigger performance problems to go after first) then, like Ryan Kent said, there isn't much use for these.

Hi Atul. Based on your question I have spent some time trying to locate an official reply from Google on this topic. I was not able to find such a statement. Therefore, I modified my reply from "Google will discount links (from the same C-block)..." to "Google can discount..." What we know for certain is Google is a very intelligent organization and they have entire teams dedicated to ensuring search quality is maintained. Google specifically wants to ensure links are independent in nature. Links from the same C-block is clearly an indicator the link may have been influenced and is not independent. I would even go further and share it is common belief amongst SEO professionals that C-blocks affect links. The entire concept of "SEO hosting" is based upon offering hosting with different C blocks. A great white board friday discussion on this topic: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/which-link-metrics-should-i-use-part-1-of-2-whiteboard-friday Rand shared in the above video "the best single metric, non-aggregated metric, that we've got to predict Google's rankings with correlation data is the number of Linking C-Blocks." TL;DR - There is strong evidence which indicates C-blocks information is used as a ranking factor, but I was unable to locate any specific statement from Google confirming this information.