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First, you don't want to hire an SEO company that makes "guarantees" about getting you 1st page Google placement within a short amount of time. A) Google's in charge, not them, so they can't promise you anything. B) Generally, the techniques that are utilized to get you 1st page results quickly are against Google's quality guidelines and are easily discovered and penalized by Google. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en To elaborate on point B, more specifically, I'm talking about the creation of "unnatural" backlinks that are intended solely to boost rankings for particular keywords. I would definitely interview the SEO company and ask them what sort of techniques they employ. If they mention link building, I would insist on seeing samples of links they've built for clients. If they show you poorly written articles or discussion forum posts containing money keyword links such as "house painter boise" or "office furniture delaware" then I would recommend you avoid the company. These exact match anchor texts can improve a website's ranking for such terms in the short-term. In the long-term, however, a website's link profile will show very obvious signs of abuse. It's kind of like a person who's been on steroids for an extensive period of time and will inevitably get slapped with a manual or algorithmic penalty. You want a more modern and up-to-date company that utilizes quality content marketing and creative social media and marketing solutions to garner your website more natural links. I would also attempt to diagnose if your website currently has any such penalties. You can use Google's Webmaster Tools to check if you have a manual penalty, or you can use something like the Fruition.net Google Penalty checker to see if you were negatively impacted by Panda or Penguin. If any of the above prove to be the case, I would then do a lot of research on penalty recovery before hiring an SEO company to improve rankings.

Dr. Pete, I just ran across one of your webinars yesterday and you brought up some great ideas.  Earned a few points in my book Too often SEOs see changes in the rankings and react to counter-act the change.  Most of the time these bounces are actually a GOOD sign. It means Google saw your changes and is adjusting to them.  If your changes were positive you should see positive results.  I have rarely found an issue where a user made a positive change and got a negative result from Google.  Patience is a virtue.

Hi Chris, Since the 404's don't appear to originate from the landing site you mentioned (I ran a quick check), there obviously are (or have been) links out there that point to those URL's. They could be links from another site, URL's that have been indexed in search engines or even old browser bookmarks. Since you have no way of knowing where they might all come from, the 301 Redirect is the only complete solution. Philip is correct in suggesting that getting the links fixed at the source would be the ideal, but on its own this would still leave open the possibility of traffic coming from other sources. Since the 301 Redirect serves the dual purpose of preserving the traffic AND sending a signal to the Search engines to deindex the old URL and replace it with the new target URL, source is eliminated as a factor. Hope that helps, Sha

This should not have an influence on your linkjuice, rankings or traffic as long as you don't make any changes to the files that are on your server. People move from one host to another all of the time.  Google understands this.  Also hosts move websites from one machine to another all of the time. Google understands this. The only caution that I might have is.. are you moving to a different country?

I doubt if phone users are serious buyers. I would make sure you have a lot of other things in place before worring too much about making money from phone users. If you have the 98% under conrol, then you can spend time and effort chacing the remaining 2%

best info across the industry is that there's some loss of value in the transfer overall.  Also, just because a 301 takes place does not mean it will remain - Google will want to get additional confirmation over time that it's still as relevant as it had been before the 301.