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Thanks Ryan, it looks like they eventually changed the link through the resubmission without telling me. Took them awhile, but I think I'm in the clear.

Hi Don, I felt it was best to re-prhase the question since I was lacking a concrete answer. The answers in the previous question have been of great value to me. Thanks again for your willingness to answer my questions. Best, Andrei

Hi, I tested the code mentioned above: RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^(.*)index.(html|php)$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L] It works well for index.php, but not for XX-index.php. The site where I tested this code is bilingual, so there is also a GR-index.php file and the above code redirects it to the root domain as well. Also, another problem is that the code above causes the redirection of index.php inside any directory. For example, http://domain.com/directory/index.php is redirected to http://domain.com/directory/ How can I avoid this and keep only a "basic" redirection of http://domain.com/index.php to http://domain.com? Yannis

Hi Samuel, I see ... thank you for explaining what you meant about the dates. You're right, no one is going to search for the business name/year. Good luck with the citation building!

The best way is to use a crawler like Screaming Frog to detect all broken external links. These links need to be corrected, because it's bad for user experience, and if it's bad for the user experience, it bad for SEO as well. If the main reason of broken links is like the example above, because the products you mention on the page don't exist anymore, you will have to update each of these pages, not only removing the links, but also updating the description and putting links to the newer products. The question is if linking to your suppliers is a wise idea from a business perspective. You probably do a lot of efforts to get visitors to your site, and when they are trying to decide which product to buy, you send them over to the site of the supplier. Once they are on the supplier site you can only hope that they will get back to you once they make the decision which one to buy. Personally, I think your site would offer more added value if you would list the main products on your own site and add some value, like you would do if somebody would visit a physical store (which is the best model to choose, the difference between brand A/B, which A/C to choose on which budget, ...etc). rgds, Dirk

Hello James, Maybe you can help.  My clients company name is slightly different on their Facebook page than on their Moz local.  I would change this but we have more than 200 like to the page and Facebook wont allow me to change it now.  Is there anything we can do to correct this? Thanks, Ron

Thanks, Miriam! I'll take a look at those two links.

Sorry. I was reading in the discussion and someone had suggested changing the phone number on the listing and then closing. I'm guessing this would remove the NAP match of the listing and take away some of the negative issues with closing the location?  That was what I was referring to. I appreciate your help on this.  I am definitely much more informed on this than before and I don't know that there is a clear answer. It may come down to what the business needs to do from a non-SEO perspective and then we just adapt.  I can only inform them of the difficulties and risks involved.  Thanks again.

Hi, Just did a quick check on a few marijuana related keywords in Semrush. Don't know if they are really penalising the keywords, top results always seem to be a mix of (governmental) information, and sites where pro/contra are discussed: wikipedia - http://medicalmarijuana.procon.org/ - http://www.drugpolicy.org/medical-marijuana http://www.ncsl.org/research/health/state-medical-marijuana-laws.aspx http://norml.org/legal/medical-marijuana-2 http://www.azdhs.gov/medicalmarijuana/ I guess that unless the queries are very specific (like: buy medical marijuana online) it will be very difficult to get high positions in the SERP's. I would assume that the risk of having this content on your site is pretty low, especially if your content is balanced (pro/contra). We manage the biggest health site in the Netherlands (where recreational use of marijuana is allowed since quite some time). While marijuana is not really our top keyword, we do have like 120 articles/news items published and it does not seem to do any harm (as our organic traffic continues to grow). Hope this helps, Dirk

I understand why you would think disavowing links would be time better spent, but any professional would tell you that anytime you add a disavow file to your site, you are essentially raising a red flag and giving Google the in to really inspect your profile. That can be extremely detrimental in most cases. Links have age, just like domains. Fresh, new links will carry more weight than older spam links, especially if they are driving traffic to your site. I would spend my time building new links and not disavowing any links unless I am trying to remove a penalty. As I understand it, you have already been cleared of a Penguin penalty, so I don't think your time is best spent on disavow actions. However, there might be people in the community who disagree with that theory. As far as the EMD goes, there are over 200 ranking factors. Although it might be easy to point to their domain and say that is why they out rank you, you can't really do that. As far as evening the field, you will want to get ahead of them, not just get on their level. I wouldn't go through the redirect process unless it was my last option or hope. Just because the other domain has been registered for the same amount of time, doesn't give it the same value of the domain you are using. There has been no traffic to that domain, nor has it been crawled in that time, unless you have two operating sites. The domain that has been registered and in use is the more valuable domain. Is it worth building up your domain authority from scratch? The URL structure is not doubt important, but the focus should be on what follows the .com. Some other factors you should consider before you decide to 301 or disavow is general site structure and user generated content. Do you have a responsive design? How about any uniquely valuable content like customer reviews or comments? These are the easiest things to work on in order to build your domain authority and your trust signals. By no means do I want to discredit your theory, however, I would encourage you to seek further research to really understand the cons of all of the disavow files and starting with a new domain.

I have done that for my mobile domain, m.ramjet.com, and i am seeing the same stats as I have on my desktop version.  Any suggestions?

I totally get where you're coming from.  The squatter situation is extremely frustrating to be sure and isn't getting better any time soon.  If you can't make a trademark claim, it will be extremely difficult to get someone to sell who has no interest in selling. With regards to settling, I hear what you're saying.  I just personally feel that the .net is too big of an issue to overcome.  Whether we like it or not, people have been trained to throw a .com after everything.  If they see a mention of your brand, they'll likely assume the website will be located at [yourbrandname].com.  If you are using a domain with a .net and someone else has the .com, expect to see quite a bit of your traffic go to the .com. Think about all the names of companies and brands that are complete nonsense words (or extremely obscure words).  Grabbing a URL that is keyword focused will potentially help you with SEO, but it is often extremely difficult to build a long term brand around.  Also, keep in mind that keyword rich URLs may help in the short term for SEO purposes, but they can be extremely limiting if the company wants to expand beyond the keywords.  Even Moz had to go through this, changing from SEOMoz.org to Moz.com (as the old name limited the brand to being solely focused on SEO). Hope this helps! Mike

Hyphens have worked for me in the past in terms of rankings so I dont doubt the "ranking potential" but i stopped using them as much as possible for my users sakes mainly. It does affect the SEO, like it gets broken links since people misplace the hyphen or the link is without a hyphen so another site benefits. That URL length of yours is ok already. Obviously, I would again prefer an easy-to-remember URL so the shorter and more targeted, the better for me. It's a preference thing.

If the transfer from HTTP to HTTPS is done well with 301 redirects, updating the various webmaster tool locations, maybe a little press around the change (new links, social, etc.) then it should transition well.

Thanks again to Ryan and Cyrus for chiming in. I'm going with: noindex,nofollow all HTTPs pages (they're not in the index anyway) Pull canonical tags from all HTTPs pages 301 redirect affiliate id links to HTTPs version of the page Now, I just need to remember all of this when we finally get to transferring the site fully to HTTPs.

Absolutely Michael! That is what this community is all about Yes if you read carefully in the Keyword Difficulty and SERP Analysis tool page, it states... "Enter keywords to see keyword difficulty and Bing search volume." Even though you have the "Google" selected in the drop down. This had me very confused for a while until I emailed Moz and they helped me understand better how they are gathering the data. It is limited due to the amount of information Google's API allows Moz to access. Unfortunately we can only blame Google for that! haa haa! Good luck and always keep learning!! Puit0Tc

You're welcome.  Definitely get to the 'whys' behind what they're doing or thinking about doing. Also ask them who they hope to compete with by doing so, or what problems they currently see that they think this will fix. Things like that should give you a much better understanding of what they're doing as well as ideas on alternate solutions.

I would say you should do whichever is better for the user. Whatever will make their experience on your site a good one. I am a fan of getting as much information on one page as I can, however, there are some users who might want the highlights with the freedom to dig deeper if they need or want. Content heavy pages are always a good thing, but the UX is ultimately the most important thing.