Welcome to the Q&A Forum

This YouMoz post also covers some ideas for "boring" industries. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/3-steps-to-social-seo-for-your-boring-ass-clients.

Hi Tom, I would never throw away traffic unless it came from a "questionable" source. If the reason for the domain switch is because the domain more accurately reflects the client's business, then the existing traffic is also likely to be relevant. This gets you "one foot in the door" in terms of conversion. If you still have the existing site loaded, then you are in a good position, because you already know the URL and content of the existing pages. My recommendation to the client would be to do the work to salvage the existing traffic for the domain. How well you do the job will depend on how large the existing site is, how much traffic it has and how much work the client is willing to pay for, The process would be to add 301 redirects for all existing URL's on the new domain (that will not exist once the new content is added) in addition to 301's for all of the pages on the domain that you are transferring from. The best way to do this is to ensure that each is redirected specifically to a page containing content that is relevant. Obviously, if the old site is large and/or the budget is small, this will be more work than you are getting paid for. In that case, you have the option of redirecting groups of pages to a relevant category page, or in the easiest, but least advisable, just redirect them all to the home page. If the existing traffic to the new domain is insignificant, then you shouldn't lose too much sleep over just redirecting them all to the home page, but if there are some visitors there, I would explain to the client that sending them to a relevant page gives him a chance of converting them. If you choose not to redirect any of the pages you are just setting up a situation where you constantly play "catch up' on the 404's - you cannot know how long it will really take for every link in existence to be clicked by someone. Don't forget that the biggest link source will be indexed pages in search engines. These don't always get de-indexed in the time frame we expect, so there is no correct time period within which links will just go away. I wrote a blog post on this recently after doing a "salvage' job for a client whose designer installed a new site version and killed off all his old pages without redirecting anything. While your situation is different, It talks about redirecting for relevance, so might be worth a read. Hope this helps Sha

A negative effect would be from incoming links. You want the links going to the old page to route to the new page. I'd use a 301. The old pages might still be indexed if you do your proposed switch. Currently your site has a robots.txt file, but it doesn't have Meta Robots. Meta Robots will allow you to choose whether to index a page or not.

ohh yeah do us all a favour and keep it whitehat or at least grey.. don't join the dark side

Thank you for your response. Links is a big concern of ours, the option to display both sites on an entry page is a definite non starter, the client doesn't like that idea. I like the option of using sub folders. We would link between the two sites to allow a user to book rooms in either season. I suppose these types of projects are the ones that challenge us all to think outside the box. Thank you again, food for thought. Martin

Marin is the best performing platform, their bidding tool can be fine tuned in so many ways.  acquisio creates great reports, but lacks in Marin's bidding tools.  Also mongoose metrics is great at tracking inbound phone calls back to the keyword that generated the call.....which integrates with Marin, not acquisio.   Marin integrates with Adword, adcenter, Facebook & mongoose...so you can manage everything in one location.

type error: now that we are mentioning other languages.. It would be equally sweet if it would see the correlation between Ø and OE, Å and AA and so on.. (scandinavian chars for those of you who don't know) again the SE's do Update with images: as you can see, what OnPage O sees and what Google shows me.. 2 very different results even when logged out or tried from a completely different town at the opposite end of the country it would be helpful if I could change and force it to look for the right page Udklip-OPO.PNG Udklip-google.PNG

Thanks Daniel!!!! Looks like I'll be spending some time in the ol Q&A section

I hear what your saying EGOL  your point of view is from the content writer.

HI Ryan Thank you - good suggestion - I'll see if anyone else has had any experience of it - I may be lucky! Kind regards PH

Rich snippets are not guaranteed to be shown, indeed you have to be a bit of an authority in your field for them to show (easier if you're location dependent). I'm not sure if Google is showing rich snippits for adult products though (and I'm not going to start searching to find out, lol) Read the FAQ - http://knol.google.com/k/google-rich-snippets-tips-and-tricks#Frequently_Asked_Questions - sign up to the program - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/request.py?contact_type=rich_snippets_feedback - (you seem to be outputting data okay though it may struggle with non-Latin characters) and see what happens. Do you need a rating system to show up?

Hi Atul, As far as I am aware, Google will count all 50 of them, the only thing that changes is the way the PR is distributed. Even though you have nofollowed 20 of them, Google will still only pass on 1/50th of the PR to the followed links, meaning the PR that would have been sent to the nofollowed links vanishes. This means that the page will only pass on 3/5ths of the PR it would have done if all the links were followed. Hope this helps

Thanks Ryan for explaining things very clearly.