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There's basically two ways to look at it and John is right - testing is key.

Getting new business is critical obviously and if they're not yet bidding on your brand then I'd focus there BUT it's worse to pay for that first click and then lose the visitor when they find a competitor on the second query.  So if your competitors are bidding on your brand you need to grab it, the cost per click is less and you can't afford to lose the conversion after you're paid for the first click but you of course don't want to use some of the limited budget on a second click if you could have had it organically.

Then there comes the discussion over the cost to monitor competitor activities vs the cost of just bidding on the brand.  If it costs more to manage it and monitor then just bidding would be the way to go obviously.

Worse case you can test bidding on your brand and monitor the assisted conversions to see how that works out for you.

Hey Karl, Dave here.

As I'm sure you can imagine, it's pretty tough to get a feel for the issue without more info.  If you'd like to PM me the URL I'm happy to take a quick look.  I may respond back here to help others but I won't list off any details that could be considered proprietary or confidential.

Cheers !

Dave

As Dimitri notes, you can click the lock to get info.

I've also found https://www.sslshopper.com/ssl-checker.html helpful.  I use it regularly to diagnose specific oddities.

For different details you can also try https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html.

If I had to place my money of what would happen next from what I've seen int he past I would put it on one of two things assuming you are 301 redirecting to the new homepage:

1 - Nothing.  Penalty passes instantly or is already assigned to the domain which was part of what the focus of Penguin 2.1 was about.  Matt Cutts, discussing this update said:

"The previous iteration of Penguin would essentially only look at the home page of a site. The newer generation of Penguin goes much deeper and has a really big impact in certain small areas."

or ...

2 - Google gets tricked and passes the weight but not the penalty.  In this event the rankings will likely last somewhere between 1 and 3 weeks before the penalty follows.  I've seen this happen as well but mainly in cases where the penalty was an "unnatural links" warning.

Google luck and if you go for it, I'd love to hear how it turns out.

I've always used it as a "this person is responsible for this content" which helps clarify things.  Yes having an author deemed an authority helps of course but on the other side, they'll never be an authority if they don't start somewhere and your own blog is a good spot to work from as a starting point.

Re: taking inspiration from the work of others, as long as that person or work is getting credit for it (i.e. stat sources noted, etc.) then there's nothing wrong with it.  That author write that piece so they get the credit.  the author of the stats (for example) will get the credit for their work on their own site (re: authorship).

This is of course opinion as content ownership has a whack of grey areas but if you know your sector, what you can and can't ethically do, and properly credit your sources in the post - you shouldn't have any problems.

I'd be interested in hearing what someone else has to say about the way the canonicals are coded.  You're doing yours similar to the way I do DNS Prefetching with the double slash to start the URL:

It works fine with prefetching as all the browser needs to do is find the IP of the domain but I'm not sure here how it'll handle sub-directories including www and I hate variables even when they're "it should work".  The more common way to canonicalize your secured page would be:

/>

I'd be interested to hear if anyone has any direct experience with this but at the core of technical SEO issues I always lean to "most common usage" and "how Google shows it in their examples" just to make sure there is minimal chance of hiccups or issues.

That aside though, the developer is right though I'd always still prefer to just see the pages at a single URL.  Since that can't be done however ... canonicals are the way to go.

I used to do a lot of affiliate marketing but it's been a while so take this with a grain of salt though I do work with sites in a similar situation ...

The key here in original source.  If you get picked up as the initial source of the content then you're OK, if you don't then your resellers will outrank you and you'll be paying them for traffic they  earned with your content.  The same can be said if they are significantly stronger than you.

In your shoes I'd write 2 versions of the descriptions, one for you and one or resellers.  Don't let them take yours, let them take the content that meant for resellers.  Then you'll always have original content.  It'll be double the work of course but that's better than writing copy for every site.

To be fair - you may want to mention that they should consider writing their own copy but if they don't want to they can take the copy you're offering to give away.

I'm always hesitant to switch domains and you do have some good links in there that would be a shame to lose.  If you have a manual penalty (which i assume you don't) then it might be something to consider (though still not my favorite path) but with just an algorithmic kick in the butt I'd audit the links, disavow the low quality ones and build up from there.

As a warning I'm sure you're aware of, when you disavow the bad links you'll likely be disavowing links that are actually passing weight currently.  The site might see a small drop in rankings after but that's better than a massive drop with the next Penguin update.

I suppose that technically if you really wanted to come clean you could ask the currently linking domains to remove their links since the subject of the site has changed.  Those that don't, you could disavow.

I'm not saying to do that or not, and I don't know if I know anyone who would but it's an option.

Good point.  I've taken that approach that if I use it well, it'll work well and until it's replaced and not working - will continue to.

But as with all things SEO ... one always needs to pay attention to what's going on around you.

In a case like this (with major brand sites as those listed) you won't be dealing with a penalty insomuch as you'll be dealing with a case of content being ignored.  For example, if a local shop has the same content as Amazon, Amazon will generally win.

I can't possibly answer the question better than Matt Cutts himself so he is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgbOibxkEQw#t=77 You'll notice that the focus of what he's saying is on unique content and giving Google a reason to rank you.  This is a case like that noted in my comments about strong outranking weak; if a site is up against a strong site - Google is going to rank the one they believe is the most trustable and that will be the biggest brand (generally).

Now, I cannot for the life of me find it but I know that recently Google has comment elsewhere that they may look to user intent.  If a user or their query indicates a preference to online buying then they would rank Amazon and if they tend to imply a local purchase then a local site would rank with exactly the same content.  I know that's from recent comments from Google but I cannot remember where I saw that.  Sorry - not a great source.

Either way however, the stronger site will win if the content is all up at the same time and the stronger site may even beat original source if Google decides it's more reliable or fits a searchers intent better.

Always a good rule of thumb to follow Josh's advice here.  If Google gives you an opportunity to give them more info about your business or site ... drink the Kool-Aid and do it.

Penguin 2.1 has taken place since then (on October 6th).  If you're still in Google's dog house then it's a matter of not doing enough or not doing it they way they wanted you to.  Or that wasn't the issue.

I have seen a number of cases where people believe they have been penalized when in fact their links have only been devalued.  This leads to a scenario where they spend gobs of time getting links removed and submitting disavow lists without effect when the real issue was that the links they had held less value and what they should have been doing was building high quality links instead.

Well, this is an opinion question but I'd go with PlayHazel.com.  Again though, this one is just opinion and I'm just thinking, "Which would I be more prone click?"

While the exact definition of "stronger" generally falls on pure authority and strength, it is skewing more to perceived user intent.  What I mean by this is that if Google infers that the user is looking to purchase a product they would be more prone to rank Amazon however if they believe the user is simply looking for product information they would rank the Samsung site.

I a lot of generic queries it's difficult for Google to determine, at least early in the search cycle where they may not have a pre-defined idea of what you're trying to do.  In that case they would have to lean on pure strength.  That said, as they're getting better and better at personalization of results, one could conclude (and I personally do) that if they see you searching phone models and generally clicking on online stores, that they would then infer that even on the next model-specific generic search, that you'd prefer a shopping experience delivered over the Samsung site and it's product based information.

I'm pretty sure I've seen something like this but obviously not sure the exact details. Do you mind PMing me the competitor and the query so I can take a peek?  I don't need to know the client.

Manual actions aren't update based, they happen on an ongoing basis when someone at Google looks at the site and decides it's in violation of their guidelines.

Good luck !

I hit a similar issue with a client once.  A completely legitimate second business running out of the same address as the first.  We simply set the second one as "Unit B" and mentioned to the letter carrier that there would be mail delivered there.  As long as you've been nice to them and given them a nice Christmas card they'll probably do you the favor of delivering the Suite B verification card.

Not the whitest of hat things to do technically probably but ethically they were 2 registered and visited business and it wasn't their fault they both were run out of the same location so I didn't personally have an issue with it.

Hello Lydia.

First - I don't recommend it in general but it does work to a degree.  It used to work better.

The idea is that if you link to a page dedicated to a subject and cram enough instances of that phrase onto the page (such as in a product list as in your example) that the page will rank for at least longtail versions of those queries.

In the example you sent it likely does work to some degree but that's because they're a fairly strong site.  Nonetheless they probably saw their search volume decline as of late as it's pretty thin content.  Focus on this type of strategy and you're basically asking for trouble.

If you stick to creating good content people want to link to and work hard to get people to find it and link to it in the first place (pretty necessary) you'll do far better overall.  If you want to rank for longtail phrases - build real pages on the subject.  Sure you can mention and link to products but provide some value for readers - not just a product list.

And of course ... GOOD LUCK !

Thanks to the OP for sending the info across.  For those who may be wondering what was going on to create this I won't give details obviously but in short, the site was setup as a Service Area Business (SAB) wherein their actual address is hidden but they've selected a radius they serve.

For those interested there's a page on it at https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038163.