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If the previous site was penalized in any way and you're trying to start with a new domain, then you don't want to redirect or note a change of domain. This is going to help them update their index to reflect the new domain for your pages. I don't know enough about the penalty, but if it was a manual action then you really should fix the penalized domain before doing this. If you're too far into the penalty box, then you almost need to start fresh. Can you offer any more insight on your current situation? Without knowing much more, my instinct is to say to not note a change of address if you're trying to move forward from a penalized domain.

I would just setup wild card 301 redirects via htaccess. Allows you to establish rules to redirect whole directories to new pages: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6877486/how-can-i-use-htaccess-to-redirect-paths-with-a-wildcard-character

Yes, and this is especially problematic if you change all of your internal links to point to the new page, thereby leaving Google little reason to recrawl the old page. There are a couple of quick, simple solutions to this... 1. Update your XML sitemap to include the OLD URLs and set their priority to 1, update frequency to daily, and last updated date to today. This will tell Google that the old URLs are important and updated, so you may be able to coax Google to recrawl them quickly. 2. Use "Fetch as Googlebot" on the old URLs to show Google the 301 redirects These are, admittedly, speculative, but Google hasn't given us a clear solution to this very common problem. Good luck!

Hi Jason, In addition to following both Bryan's and Matt's recommendations, you can also use the Google URL Removal tool to expedite the process. Once you have correctly added the noindex tag and have set up Google Webmaster Tools (now called Google Search Console), you can use the URL Removal Tool here to tell Google to go ahead and delete the URL from their index.

Just to add to Dirk's response, Adam Melson at Seer Interactive wrote an excellent post called "Link Building Guide: When You Have No Links". Check it out. The other thing I'd like to note is, you should plan on spending the same amount of time promoting your posts as you do writing them. And yes, depending on the level of competition you're up against, it can take months or years to gain meaningful traction.

Hi Rand, Thanks for taking the time to answer my post. It was actually my Moz analytics campaign which flagged up the issue - I so understand they're guidelines, rather than definitive answers. I think you've cracked it for me though! A true gent - your moustache would be proud. Where my site differs is in it does not link to the individual posts and shows all content from those blog posts in full on the category page. I'm now going to go away and (get someone much cleverer than me to) implement changes in the way of snippets of blogs linking through to the full blog articles. Thanks again for the help.

Unfortunately, there's not a lot of good info out there on this update. Can you give us any insight on the keywords/URLs you saw impacted?

Hey there! Sorry for the confusion. We did have a hiccup with reports this morning. Your logos should be available again on your reports. Let me know if you are not able to see them in your exports.

It definitely can, I saw once a site that had hundreds of redirects and it was definitely slowing the site down as they had to run through all the redirects first on the server side to see where the user should be forwarded to.

Something in the title you sent triggered a thought and after checking I realized you're dealing with a .co.uk domain.  I have found the .co.uk Google to be far more tolerant of heavy keyword use and even link spam so you're probably in a battle with folks who are indeed keyword stuffing or worse and finding yourself having to do the same just to keep up. It's a bit of a slippery slope but I will admit that even some recent work I did in the UK required a slightly more heavy handed approach to SEO than I'd typically do.  So while I wouldn't recommend it in the US, the title you're suggesting will probably work well in the UK. Cheers ! Dave

Here's the video from Moz Academy on Understanding your Crawl Diagnostics You can also start with this "retro" video of Rand Fishkin  Crawling & Indexing

The appropriate solution in this place would be to employ the hreflang tag to related the two geographically separate sites together. However, before you take that step, I would look to make sure the previous SEO company which created the .com did not point any harmful links at the .com domain which would make it inadvisable to connect the two sites together. Use OpenSiteExplorer to look at the backlink profile and use Google Webmaster Tools to authorize the .com site and look for any manual penalty notices. If all looks clear, go ahead forward with the implementation of the hreflang tag. Good luck and feel free to ask more questions here!

Just speaking from personal experience on this as a consumer rather than as a marketer - some jingles are annoying in actual sound, but regardless of that, I can remember word-for-word, note-for-note, jingles I heard 30 years ago, some for businesses that are no longer even in business. And, in chatting with peers, you start singing one of those jingles and everyone joins in, laughing, because they have these burned into their brains as well. In fact, if someone mentions the name of a business, I find it's very common for someone else to chime in with the jingle, just because they associate the brand with the tune and find it amusing that they do so. Now, I was too young to be a consumer of anything more than dolls and Kit-Kat candy bars 30 years ago, but these days, my family listens to the radio at least once a week to hear football games. One jingle we hear over and over again is a really simple one for an auto parts store. It says, "Oh, Oh, Oh, O'Reilly - Auto Parts!". We've noticed where the local O'Reilly auto parts store is, we sometimes can't keep ourselves from singing the jingle if we notice the sign while driving by and if we need to replace our windshield wipers this winter, you can bet that's the first auto parts store that will come into our heads. We don't have a similar jingle in our heads for Joe's Auto Parts or Bob's Auto Parts because they're not on the radio. Songs are really magical. Listen to how simple this jingle is, but how the repetition of the word 'Oh' makes it feel energetic and fun to mimic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkSDGk67IWI So, again, speaking purely from personal experience, I do hear jingles, I do remember them if I hear them frequently enough, and they do make me feel sort of amused about businesses ... and, while feeling amused, I've given space in my brain over to the business to be recalled when I need their product, because their advertising has put a tune to a spot in the local business landscape where I live.

Hi Ricky! Has everyone answered your question?

Hi Chris, Apologies for not getting back to you quicker. I believe that Daniel was correct. There are only so many slots available on one page. Even if you search for Grand Theft Auto, there are only roughly 20 positions for a consumer to choose. Then they are listed by price, as most consumers want to see them by price. You can really shine in the shopping section like this by getting a large number of reviewers to review your product. I don't know of many people who use the Google Shopping area without the reviews section. so Even if you were selling something for .99, if you had zero reviews you were probably more likely to not get the click. These ads have always been the cheapest I've ever run. I would definitely recommend playing with your bid and monitoring the impressions, click through rate, and conversion totals. Every business has its own difference when working  with the Shopping campaigns so I would highly recommend spending some time to really isolate your top performing products from your feed and bid on them individually. The more specific you make your bids the less you will likely end up paying.

Thanks for the responses. It was my opinion that technically it should not affect anything but with the current direction of SEO and the potential affects of Engagement as ranking factors I thought it might be interesting to discuss. Appreciate your comments....thanks

Wonderful news Matt, Russ and David, glad its been sorted