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Yeap, you are in the right direction. I just wanted to point out that, choosing one of those is a desition you've to make. Gerenaly, the most used are: https://www.domain.com https://domain.com So, when you've chosen one, the others must be redirected with a 301.

Thanks for answering all of my questions! It's interesting that when I do a simple site:search in Google none of the main pages of your website are appearing. Most of the search results are either archives or comments. Typically, I've seen this kind of thing happen when something goes wrong in the redirects or a site is penalized. It looks like the big dip in indexation didn't occur until about August. I would think that if you pulled the trigger in June, pages would start dropping out of the index much sooner. In this case, your theory about a possible penalization might be right. I'd be interested to see what happens once Google considers the disavow file (unfortunately, that will take some time). Does anyone else have any input or possible reasons why pages on this site have dropped out of the index so quickly?

It is important to keep in mind that the Search Visibility metric relates only to the keywords you are tracking, so it isn't exactly correct to say that the Search Visibility score is skewed if you are tracking branded keywords. This is an accurate visibility score for the keywords you are tracking. You can definitely see the Search Visibility for all of your non-branded keywords by using the filters as you suggested, which will give you a different perspective of your Search Visibility versus your competitors. However, you could say that, in and of itself, the score is somewhat skewed just by the fact that these are the keywords you have chosen to target, rather than the total Search Visibility for all of the keywords you and your competitors may be ranking for. If your competitors aren't specifically targeting the same keywords you are tracking, you may be ranking better for those keywords, but you may not necessarily be as competitive in the overall rankings for every keyword. Our metrics can only be calculated for the terms you choose to track, so it is really just a view of the keywords you are targeting and not necessarily the full picture of your visibility as a site overall.

I have to agree that the first thing to consider (well, after fixing those broken links) is how your content ties into your conversion funnel. What compels me to stay on your site once I've found the answer I'm looking for? For example, if I'm just looking for recommendations for fans and I land on your post about them, once I've read, why wouldn't I click right back to Google? Out of curiosity, what constitutes a conversion for you? If a visitor doesn't bounce away, what would you prefer them to do?

Hi Jay, I agree that probably it won't really matter if you have implemented the rel next/prev tags. But still I would always make sure that the pages will just have the actual page number added to it so they will be unique. In most cases this is a very easy fix for developers or in some CMS' you can do it yourself. That's why I wouldn't take the risk and make them unique. Martijn.

Hi David, Thanks for your thoughts. I had just come across the multiple H1 issue and have it as a 'to do' - agree it's not great. Thanks for spotting it and making a it a point. We do have some bad site links, yes. There has been previous SEO work done in the past and I'm trying to understand what has been disavowed before submitting a new file myself. In the mean time I've been trying to get bad links removed manually. I also wonder how much of these bad links (that ski trip article for example) were part of a prior SEO strategy ... Much of this is a guessing game. I'll tackle these two areas and monitor what happens. Many thanks, Jonathan

Hi, Well the link you posted sounds very shady and probably is, the screenshot was most fun to me as nothing in that screenshot points to some useful code (the advantage you have if you can code ;)). Anyway, programmatic optimization itself is something that I don't see any big(ger) companies do at all in the way they describe it. But in the end you can programatically optimize certain elements, it just happen that often as companies wouldn't have the knowledge, tech, resources, analysis for it in place to make it happen. Optimizing content/ titles/ headings based on keyword data that is automatically analysed shouldn't be that hard if you would really push through on the issues. Martijn.

+1 to what Gaston said! This is the perfect example of when to use hreflang. It doesn't matter if it's a blog post or a more important page on the site - if you have international versions, use hreflang. Cheers, David

Hi Cyrus, I actually see you coming up organically (just searching in Google) for these terms, on the first page. I'm not using Ad Preview. To start troubleshooting any issues with your Local SEO, I'd recommend going through this: https://moz.com/blog/local-seo-checklist Remember, too, that location has a greater impact on Local Pack rankings than on organic ones, so while you may be physically closer to people in Wilmington, you may not be as strong organically as the Jacksonville competitor.

Hi Kevin! I apologize for not noticing your thread earlier. Don't know how I missed it! You are describing so well what happens when a multi-site approach begins to get out of hand. While you could, of course, run 5 different websites, the long term health of the brand is likely going to be best served by consolidation, with proper redirects being set up from the old sites to the new umbrella site, and citations being corrected to reflect the change of URL. You'll likely want to dedicate good resources to earning some new links, while you're at it, to the main site, to strengthen your hand, and a dedicated review acquisition campaign would be smart to throw into this mix, too. Could you lose rankings? Yes, it's possible, but you can mitigate this as much as possible with proper redirects. The major benefit of consolidation will be that, going forward, every single action you take will go to strengthening the brand, rather than you having to slice that up 5 different ways. Your goal will be to become the dominant player in your city for everything you do with an incredibly powerful website backed up with a unified marketing plan. I do recommend going with folders rather than subdomains. It's simpler. Hoping you'll get some other opinions from our community, and that this one helps. Wishing you luck in the work ahead!

No problem! It made me smile. You guys are awesome.

Just seconding Chris. There's no reason to reproduce the site. You're question gets right into why, too—you wouldn't have a lot of control over which would rank. 301ing the exact match domain to the branded one is what I'd do.

Can you please tell a bit more on "make it fun" part?

That was kind of my thought as well but with the drop in traffic I have to look at everything. SO strange.

It would be safe to assume that Panda considers engagement metrics as part of its analysis of site/page quality.  For example, a page with additional UGC, comments, shares, etc.. is likely to indicate a higher quality of content than a page without any of those factors. Jake Bohall

Mmmm, Birmingham hotel breaks Birminghan hotels with transfers Boths keywords are long tails from Birmingham hotel, but I'd bet are enough different to deserve separate pages.

We'd love to hear what you find out, Dmitrii!

Hi there, at first sight, there are several issues. non-www and www versions arent redirected do not have a crawable sitemap.xml many of the sigle pages dont have a friendly URLs performing a search: site: site:universityforddurham.com appear over 8.000 results. The indexing part i believe is caused by the the lack of sitemap and the lack of friendly URL. Best of luck. GR.