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I've been researching a similar concern - redirecting our blog from swiftype.com/blog to blog.swiftype.com (our marketing automation platform uses subdomains).  While my instinct was 301 redirects, some coworkers had some of your same concerns.  Our solution was to simply create the new blog with identical content, stop posting to the old one, and add new canonical URLs of blog.swiftype.com/{slug} to the swiftype.com/blog posts.  We've been doing that for a few months now, and will be 301 redirecting in the very near future. Anyway - thought it might address your concerns a bit if you are willing to hold off on the redirect for a little bit and let Google associate the two pages before redirecting.

Thanks - that was my feeling as well, but as I'd never done it before, I'm interested to hear others thoughts on it.

A writer recently recommended my company, Swiftype, in a blog post.  However, he called us Swift Type, which adds an additional t, splits our name into two words, and uses an additional capitalization.  Would it be out of line to email him and gently correct him? I appreciate the recommendation, and will absolutely focus on thanking him for that, complimenting his content (which is fairly good), and just add the correction at the end of the email.  While it isn't a huge deal, a search Swift Type brings up the Swift programming language and SwiftKey as first page results, while Swiftype only displays our content (he also didn't link to us, so a user would have to search to find us - reaching out could also be a chance to spur him to link to us).

I've put together a glossary of terms related to my industry that have SEO value and am planning on building out a section on our site with unique pages for each term. However, most of these terms have synonyms or are highly similar to other valuable terms. If I were to make a glossary, and on each page (that will have high-quality, valuable, and accurate definitions and more), wrote something like "{term}, also commonly referred to as {synonym}, {synonym}," would I run the risk of keyword stuffing penalties? My only other idea beyond creating a glossary with separate pages defining each synonym is to use schema.org markup to add synonyms to the HTML of the page, but that could be seen as even more grey-hat type keyword stuffing.

I guess one other option would be to work the synonyms into the definition so that the presence of the keyword reads more organically.

Thanks!

All the value you are trying to claim: links for relevant sites with high-quality content.  That's a smart goal. However, creating websites solely to link to your site will trigger link scheme algo penalties.  Additionally, even if it didn't trigger the penalties and just added no value, creating high quality, unique content will drive more value if you just host it on your own site. Then reach out to bloggers and other writers pointing them in the direction of the content.

I'm looking at acquiring a competitor who operates a WordPress plugin with the same function as mine (although ours is much better - they used this plugin to acquire leads for other software). We're trying to determine the best way to execute it. They are the number 1 result on a very high value search, and the number 3 on another (which appears to the source of all their customer acquisition, they are simply a very well named, long existing WordPress plugin, and so haven't had to fight much to keep their ranking). Ideally, we'd be able to take over that ranking, but I'm not sure if that is possible. For one thing, they don't have a website beyond the WordPress plugin, so even if we wanted to, we couldn't 301 redirect it (as far as I know). Second, wouldn't a 301 redirect likely result in entirely losing the ranking? We are actually highly relevant to anyone who ends up at this plugin (the owner has actually been recommending us and contacted us because his customers who have left have had a good experience), and wouldn't be redirecting it to piggyback on the link juice, we'd be trying to acquire the customers that have been discovering this plugin organically.

I understand why Google defaults to policies making purchasing high ranking domains not very valuable. However, it seems like if you've built a company that derives a high volume of its leads (and thus acquisition value) from organic search, that there would be a way for a company in the same space to acquire at least the rankings, if not the link juice.

Hopefully that was clear, if not, let me know where I lost you, and I'll attempt to clarify.  Thanks!

If someone is masking their IP, even if you were able to get the full IP, it wouldn't be useful. Any PPC click fraud will be doing this, and at a scale that they believe could fool Google, so any free or affordable tool likely won't catch it. However, if you are looking for IP logging (a tool that actually records IP addresses and attempts to link to businesses), check out a1webstats. It's not super accurate on the business names, but it does record all visitors and their IP. I've attached a redacted screenshot of an example.

They've got a 30 day free trial if you are curious and just want to take a look. We tried using them to ID companies that weren't converting, but they match most of them with the telecom, rather than the actual company.

If you are looking to precisely identify where an IP address originated, I'm afraid you'll have to contact the NSA. The best resource I know of is here: http://www.iplocation.net/, which states "Although it would be nice to be able to find precise location of a visitor, it is almost impossible to find exact location of a host given its IP address." It does go on to list some more tools that you could try and use, but again, click fraud practitioners will be using much more powerful tools to disguise themselves.

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Thanks - so the 302 redirect suggests the page has moved temporarily, which it has not. It simply cannot be accessed until a login. Is that considered "moved temporarily?" Since it will be accessible with a login, is that considered a temporary move? I will absolutely make pages that require login noindex. Should I make them nocrawl as well?

We have a login required section of our website that is being crawled and reporting as potential issues in Webmaster Tools. I'm not sure what the best solution to this is - is it to make URLs requiring a login noindex/nocrawl? Right now, we have them 302 redirecting to the login page, since it's a temporary redirect, it seems like it isn't the right solution. Is a 301 better?

Looks to me like someone added some kind of SEO tracker to the footer at some point that no one else was aware of. Have you tried installing Ghostery and seeing if it shows up as a tracker? I agree with the other commenter that it is almost certainly not an SEO issue, and that you should be safe removing it.

If you have permission to use their images, just get images from them, name them accurately, and give them accurate alt-text. Duplicate content has to do with your own content, in general. Since the point of naming images and alt-text is to help Google understand them, it's not a big issue if an image has the same alt-text as another or appears multiple times on the site (especially since they should all be coming from an images directory, no matter where they are on the website). Also, images are much more likely to be naturally reused than text, as licensing photos is a long accepted practice.

They'll be easily visible to a crawler. They'll be extracted based on their HTML/CSS elements, which are additional signals of importance and of website structure. Don't worry about it. If the HTML of the page includes the raw text, a crawler will understand it.

Maybe, it's more likely that they've simply moved to an updated, more sophisticated version. Generally speaking, PageRank above 4 is good. Also, try installing the MozBar and judging by Domain Authority or MozRank. For the metrics out of 10, look for 4 or above. Out of 100, 30 or above.

It's all going to depend on your CMS, but if you are looking to understand what is being referenced, right click on a page on your site and select view source, the search for meta. The meta property description is what should be there (almost all CMS's allow you to edit this). Your page title should be much shorter, and you shouldn't have multiple pages with the same title. Again, nearly every CMS makes this very easy to edit.

How long ago did you add the redirects? As with many SEO changes, you'll need to give Google time to recrawl and reindex your site. This can take several weeks in some cases, and even then, it will sometimes take multiple recrawls for Google to entirely index the changes. This assumes everything else was done correctly and nothing else is causing the duplicate content warnings.

Dots aren't used in URL structure except to signal a change, either from subdomain to root, root to tld, and in the URL string to indicate file format. Use dashes to separate words.

This is one of those things that just takes time. We moved our blog from /blog to a blog. subdomain about 2 months ago and have only recently seen SERPs reflect that. Also, the SERP results got better gradually rather than shifting overnight.

Could you provide a bit more context? If you are simply trying to outrank the definition of a keyword, it's not going to happen. Google is pulling that definition from its Knowledge Vault, and their algorithm has determined that result most likely to be related to that term is the definition. However, if, for example, you are trying to rank for the name of a business that is also simply a word (let's say "Twist"), you may be able to out rank it in local searches. Setup a Google My Business account and a Google Places page, and start optimizing for Local SEO (I've never done this, so I don't have great tips).

Unfortunately, if you are trying to outrank the definition of a word Google's algorithm believes most searches are looking for the definition, it's likely not going to happen. If it's the name of the business, then you may eventually be able to outrank it, but if it's just a keyword, it is almost certainly impossible.

Agreed. I work at a company that builds search engines for websites (TechCrunch uses our search), and one of our biggest advantages over a product like Google Site Search is we'll crawl your site on demand (we're not a competitor to Google's web search product, obviously, so our on demand recrawls aren't an option for SEO ranking). Google, in its attempt to index the entire internet, cannot recrawl your site as soon as you make website changes, nor can it determine perfect relevance for every page immediately upon crawling. Unfortunately, a lot of times, the answer to "I fixed everything, still hasn't helped," is to wait it out. My recommendation would be keep doing what you are doing and work on good, sustainable SEO, and give Google a bit more time to crawl and index the new pages. It doesn't look like there is anything you are doing that is causing the problem, so I don't have a ton more to offer here.

Good luck!

Some good suggestions above, try some back link checking tools, check their Domain Authority, etc. However, in my opinion, the best way for you to ensure your SEO person is building good links is to learn the basic difference between a good and bad link and actually check them yourself (the bigger your site and the more links you build, the less feasible this is, but the concept that you should be able to look at the links being built and understand what is a good or a bad link is still applicable). Obviously if you are building massive numbers of links, this is difficult (although there are tools that can help), but if your SEO employee (I assume it is singular) is building good links, they shouldn't be building massive numbers of them unless they are coming organically (through creating content or a product that is so popular that high quality links are appearing without traditional link building). Also, how are you measuring success? Ranking growth? Number of links? Quality of links? If you ask your SEO person to report on the links being built and ask he/she to include measures like Domain Authority, Page Authority, etc and then just try and audit the links periodically, you'll start to learn enough about SEO to measure their performance yourself (seriously, try Googling "audit my back links," there's some great tools out there, as well as reasonably simple explanations of the major things to look out for.

I also agree with those mentioning that outsourcing SEO is a dangerous (if somewhat necessary) strategy. In my opinion, learning about SEO basics is one of the single most valuable things a small business owner can do, since it will both improve your ability to market online, as well as protect you against hiring a bad employee.