Thank you John for the tips.

We have a community on our website and could leverage that for such engagement.

In light of penguin update, is link building using badges(like "I love SEOMOZ" badge)

still considered a white hat tactic?

I have read old posts on SEOMOZ blog about this topic and wondering if this method is still effective.

Look forward to feedback from MOZers.

Thanks Keri!

Yes. Definitely! HTML with CSS is way to go!!

Thank you so much Todd!

1.       When I disable java-script in Firefox and load our home page, it is missing entire middle section.

2.       Also, the global nav dropdown menu does not display at all. (with java-script disabled)    I believe this is not good.

3.       But when type in  <website name="">in Google search and click on  the cached version of home page > and then click on text only version, It displays the Global nav links fine.</website>

4.       When I switch the user agent to Googlebot(using Firefox plugin "User Agent Swticher)), the home page and global nav displays fine.

Should I be worried about#1 and  #2 then?

How to find what Googlebot actually sees on a page?

(I have tried "Fetch as Googlebot" from GWT. It displays source code.)

Thanks for the help!

Supriya.

Hi Dylan,

Thanks for the reply. The community website does not exist anymore as a standalone website. It is now a sub-domain on our main website.

e.g. Before -

we had www.mainwebsite.com and www.communitywebsite.com

After -

we have http://community.mainwebsite.com

And this sub-domain has thousands of duplicate page titles.

Will that affect www.mainwebsite.com?

We recently moved a community website that we own to our main domain. It now lives on our website as a sub-domain. This new sub-domain has a lot of duplicate page titles.

We are going to clean it up but it's huge project. (We had tried to clean it even before migrating the community website)

I am wondering if this duplicate content on the new sub-domain could be hurting rankings of our root domain? How does Google treat it?

From SEO best practices, I know duplicate content within site is always bad.

How severe is it given the fact that it is present on a different sub-domain?

Thanks Ryan!

Yes, our traffic and ranks for the roor domain have dropped after this new sub-domain was added.

Thanks Ryan for the detailed reply!

Yes, we have it as a sub-domain i.e. community.mainwebsite.com.

sorry for the typo.

I have a question about this:

"Even if you did everything perfectly, there is some loss of link juice from your redirect which will lead to some of your rankings dropping, which will directly lead to less traffic."

Even though there is loss of link juice from the backlinks that were originally pointing to community.com, how could that affect mainwebsite.com negatively? After all, those are additional links that we are getting after the migration. Number of backlinks to mainwebsite.com actually increased due to moving the community website.

Are we missing anything?

We made this huge change to get SEO benefit as well. The hypothesis behind this move was that merging of two websites will increase the authority of main website and improve ranks and traffic.

What do you think about this?

Thanks again for your help!

Hi,

We recently moved our community website (around 50K web pages) to our main domain.

It now resides as a sub-domain on our main website.

e.g. Before -

we had www.mainwebsite.com and www.communitywebsite.com

After -

we have www.communitywebsite.mainwebsite.com

This change took place on July 19th.

After a week, we saw 16% drop in organic traffic to mainwebsite.com.

Our ranks on most of the head keywords including brand keywords have dropped.

We had created 301 redirects from pages on www.communitywebsite.com before this change was made.

Has anybody seen this kind of impact when domains are merged?

Should we expect that within 3-4 weeks Google will be able to re-index and re-rank all the pages?

Is there anything else we could do to rectify the situation?

Any feedback/suggestions are welcome!

Thanks Daniel!

Is there any resource that provides a list of good aggregators and blog directories?

I am wondering how effective rss feed submission (to RSS aggregators) is in terms of getting traffic and backlinks?

Also, how about getting listed in blog directories?

Do these tactics work anymore post Panda update ?

Thanks,

Supriya.

I am curious to find out what is the blogging platform of choice for enterprize level companies (employees more than 500, revenue more tan 150M).

What would be the best solution from SEO point of view?

I have used Wordpress in the past for small companies and feel that is the best.

We are currently using Telligent. Is anybody using it?

Thanks Daniel! The reason I was asking is if we use keywords w/o trademark symbols

we may run into legal issues hence we were thinking of optimizing the page for keyword with symbol in it.

For example:

As a keyword, is "Cisco" the same as "Cisco"?

I tried a couple of things to find out:

1. I put both keywords in Google adwords tool. Google displayed search volume data only for Cisco. That means it ignores the symbol.

2. I typed in Cisco and Cisco in Google search.

of SERPs are the same. And the first page results are almost same excpet for Google Places listings.

Based on above two observations, I think that Google treats Cisco and Cisco in the same manner.

So if we optimize a page for Cisco, we will get benefit for the keyword Cisco as well.

Does anybody has any other experience?

(Note: the keyword used here(Cisco) is just an example.

Thanks,

Supriya.

Thanks!! That was very helpful!!