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Hi sichristie, I find your question confusing, probably because it's a complex scenario you're trying to describe. If I understand it correctly, I agree scenario 1 would be better for SEO because it's all about reputation. If you're looking for an explanation that might resonate with lay people, I'd try an analogy that builds upon the rationale you've described above. Here's an example of what I mean. Say to your audience, "Assume you are lost and thirsty in a desert when you come upon a set of three paths pointing in different directions. All three have a sign posted with an arrow saying "this way to fresh water". One of the paths looks like it's been there a long time. It's deep and well worn. Up ahead you can see others have taken this path because there are small items like candy wrappers and cigarette butts shed along-side the path. The other two paths are faint and debris free. You're barely able to make them out in the sand. It looks like their signs have been planted there recently, maybe even moved a few times." Which path would you take?

Right, as was said a little earlier in this thread, "quality over quantity". Getting a write up in a local paper or being listed on the directory of a local township site are all great signals that you're legitimate and doing the thing you say you do. Don't ignore advertising either. As Rand mentions in the latest Whiteboard Friday, "advertising can show returns in many organic channels, including SEO." http://moz.com/blog/advertisement-investments-organic-roi-whiteboard-friday.  Cheers!

Right. It'd just be things like spammy links, paid links, the usual things that could get a site in trouble. Doesn't sound like you'll be doing any of that.  Plus it seems like a good way for local people to get involved.  Cheers!

"a significant rankings boost" Here is how I see it..... If a page of mine moved from #5 to #4, I would call that a significant rankings boost.   If it moved from #50 to #40, I would call that trivial.   If I am on the first page and get any movement up I would call it awesome. About domain authority...  I almost never look at it and can't tell you the DA of my websites.  It has just slightly more than "entertainment value" to me.   But, plenty of people worship those numbers.

Hi Thomas, I was wondering how you got on with this issue? Since it has been 5 months have you started to rank higher? Also, what were the types of links to your site (e.g. www.domain.com/?id=123456)? Thanks, Jason

Ya, that's a mess. Either 301 to a live page or let the 404 be delivered on its own.

As far as the AdWords accounts go, you should choose the account that is performing the best and copy everything over through AdWords Editor. Before copying everything over, you will need to have one merchant center upload that has all of the products first then it's easier to move everything to the best performing account. I don't think there is any way for your Google Rep to be able to promise a transfer of history, so the account may take 4-6 months to return to a similar performance level. I think that managing all of these products in one place from an advertising perspective is significantly easier than running them all through a bid management system. and it's likely right now that they may be trying to compete against each other and drive up costs.

We have found proposals to be a waste of time. We charge flat rates that are on our website. We have no contracts. We send them a 1-page summary that outlines the monthly fee, a recommended budget, and a blurb about how we  work. And that's pretty much it. Someone is either sold or not sold on the idea of paid search and Adwords. And a proposal from an agency will not change that. A conversation can. Same goes for whether they want to work with you. It boils down to price, and most importantly trust.

Glad to see you got things worked out. Best practice is to always have a "Disallow: /" rule in place in the root location when building a site, or to build it on an IP address via cpanel. A long long time ago we had an issue like this when we hired a rookie web designer, and had to go through everything making sure it was set correctly. Htaccess, robots, sitemap, sitemap crawl frequency, ODP (open directory project) settings, EVERYTHING. Hope everything works out for your new site! Also, since you are having large load times due to a heavy template style, you may want to check this out:  http://designshack.net/articles/css/18-css-compression-tools-and-techniques/. Compression is your friend

thanks for the info, I was also interested in this matter

Thank you Everybody for taking the time to Answer our Question

Without seeing you analytics I can't do much more, but with what you are saying I think you should re-look at how your thank you page is performing, see if that page is getting 2 around double as many page views as sessions, or if there are a large number of page views with less than 1 second, or if you look at your thank you page, is the previous page nearly 50% of the traffic.  If your goal is set up correctly the only thing that could be causing this would be the page double loading in quick succession or having 2 copies of your GA code on the page.

Thanks Ryan, much appreciated! Andy

How do you know you are getting beat? Do you have national keyword reports that support this? What are you using for tracking?

Hey Ryan and Jim thanks for your answer. I'm going to check those ressources.

Since when Cloud Hosting has become popular, Google downgraded the importance of server location as a factor in International SEO. So if you want to use a server in another country, and the hosting service is good (for all the things told by others here about latency, especially), than you should not have too many problems.

Hi, I pointed out that Google is a web registrar to elude to the fact they can search registered domain names and return those as results. Google can WILL also use anchor text and links from any site they find a link to your site. Even if you disallow crawling via robots.txt.  If somebody is linking to you and Google finds it, and there are no more appropriate results they will return it when somebody searches those keywords. I would say first your main issue is the redirect. Second you must not have a strong enough keyword profile or you just launched and have not given Google enough time to get an updated SERP out. Either way fixing the redirect should be your primary focus. To answer your question sorry for being blunt here, the reason the parked domain is out ranking your live domain is because as far as Google is concerned it is the most relevant result. There is social media, it is registered and there is a cache of anchor text that is out ranking your live domain right now. You need to fix the redirect, build a link profile on new domain and give it time. It may not make much sense if you look at it from only your side. But Google isn't a magic genie that can update billions of SERPs every minute. The best thing you can do is help them help you. By fixing the redirect you tackle the issue 2 ways. 1. Even if Google returns your parked domain the user is sent to the correct domain. Second Google will see the redirect and index it appropriately thus removing the ranking from the parked domain. I hope this helps and I didn't mean to sound rude if it came off that way, Don

There's also http://httpstatus.io/

Hi Nakul, Thank you for your feedback, I read the beginners guide to link building, and a few articles around directory submissions that also suggested the same thing. Cheers