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Rasmus,

Google has been doing this (changing your title tag) for a while now. Google doesn't normally just "guess" your brand name or website name, they usually get it from somewhere. I would try to find out where they are getting it from and see if you can change it there. As Andy suggests, if it's your WordPress blog, then there is a chance that they're taking it from your blog's title, and you should be able to change it.

Hi Brant,

It's always a good thing to be aware of all of the links pointing to your website. I would look at the Webmaster Tools link data, but realize that it's not necessarily going to give you all the links. I would also look at Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, and ahrefs links, as well. If you find there are links that you think are low quality, I would use the Disavow Tool to disavow them.

If there is a site that has copied your site, then consider filing a DMCA request with Google and the web host to get the content removed. You might look at your site's log files to see which IP addresses are hitting your site and getting the content and try to block it from happening.

Hi Huey,

What I would do is first look in Google to see if they're crawling and indexing all of your products. For example. search Google for this:

site:www.domain.com/getproduct.aspx

With that search you should see your products getting indexed. If not, then there is an issue. I don't recommend that you use any redirects at all, as Google can crawl and index URLs with parameters in them.

That said, you should not be using a 302 redirect as it's only temporary one and Google will NOT change the URL, as they are doing now. If you used a 301 Permanent Redirect Google should then show the full URL.

If at all possible, I recommend getting rid of the session IDs and cookies. If you must have them, then those session IDs should not be in the URLs. I would, though, get rid of them for the search engine crawlers at a minimum.

No, Google does not penalize you for having content that requires registration in order to view. As long as you give Googlebot full access to the content so that they can crawl it properly, it won't be an issue. There are plenty of sites doing this successfully, and they don't have any problems.

Denise, I don't think you have too much to worry about when it comes to duplicate content. Google's crawler, Googlebot, has a mobile version and a desktop version: so you should be serving Googlebot's mobile version your mobile content and vice versa for the 'normal' desktop Googlebot.

That should generally take care of most of the duplicate content issues. I would, though, go ahead and take a look at this 2011 video from Matt Cutts and the link in the description that talks about mobile duplicate content issues.

Dana,

Yes, Google has indexed the page. However, if you view the source code of the page you won't see any text of the customer reviews. Even if you view the cached version, there is text there: but it's not necessarily text on the page. If you view the cached version, and then see the source code of the page, again, the content is not there. The reviews are not there in the source code.

Let's take this one step further. Search Google for one of the testimonials or a part of one: "Marc Palermo is a great customer service" which is NOT indexed in Google.

Google sees the source code but doesn't appear to be indexing the content.

Jean-Francois,

If you want to accommodate the company asking for the link to be a 'nofollow' link, then that's fine. I would nofollow their link. If you have more than 50 links on the page, though, I would consider whether or not you need that page on the site at all or need to split it into several pages.

Linking out to appropriate on-topic sites will generally not hurt your site's rankings. But, keep in mind that you need to police those links to make sure that you're not linking out to any malicious sites.

Stephan,

When it comes to redirects, as long as the server returns a 301 Permanent Redirect when a page is requested, it doesn't matter absolutely whatsoever when it comes to SEO and rankings.

There are other considerations, though. If it's done at the registrar level, then it will inevitably lighten the load on the server. But, you generally won't notice a difference unless there's a large amount of traffic and a LOT of redirects involved (thousands of redirects, not just a few).

Sika22

Typically, when you come up with a URL structure, that URL structure should closely resemble the breadcrumb trail of your site. So, if you have something like www.domain.com/category/product1 then you should be able to go to www.domain.com/category/ and get a list of products.

It looks like the URL structure you're talking about is adding extra keywords, and that's not necessary.

Fiona,

Just to be clear, what you're referring to are subdomains, and not domains. You're right, though, there are definitely issues related to duplicate content that is going to cause ranking problems. Typically, Google will rank the content that they crawled first: the others will be the duplicates.

The best way to deal with this is to decide which subdomain you really want: which will typically be www.clientdomain.com and then 301 redirect all of the others to www.clientdomain.com.

If, however, there is unique content on the other subdomains, then you wouldn't want to redirect those.

Oren, Keri is right. Followerwonk has said that Facebook is a lot different from Twitter, and so you may not be able to get the same data.

At this point, I recommend looking at Google Ripples for posts on Google Plus, using the Explore tab, and also looking at info from sites like CircleCount.com. I have a feeling that Google is being very careful about the data and analytics that we can get for certain reasons. For example, as AuthorRank potentially comes into play, there's going to be certain info that they just don't want us to have access to.

Marike,

Whenever you change URLs, there will be some changes in rankings. However, ultimately, combining several established sites into one larger site will be better in the long run, as it helps with your overall Domain Authority and trust.

Keep in mind that 301 redirects are important--and if possible you may consider moving some content over time, and not move all the content all at once.

Also, your links will need to be updated: reach out to as many site owners as possible to tell them about the new URL change and ask them to update the links.

If you have good content on your site, there's a good chance that someone will add a link to your site from WIkipedia if it's appropriate for the topic. That happened to me and my site, and I can tell you that the links from Wikipedia helped: and I even see traffic from Wikipedia. I wouldn't be concerned whether or not the links are going to hurt your site: they will help establish trust.

If your business is established enough and is a public company, for example, there's a good chance that you either have a Wikipedia page for your company or you should start creating one. You'll need plenty of neutral informational type of mentions (news articles, etc.) that establishes your business's credibility.

One important thing to note here is that Wikipedia is a part of the Knowledge Graph, and it's important to get your site/business/link mentioned in the Knowledge Graph. Wikipedia is one way, but you can also participate in Freebase, which will help, as well.

Dominik, whenever you change URLs (domain names) from one to another, there are going to be issues that come up like this. When you redirect one domain name to another you pass on all of the history, links, and soforth to the new domain name.

When you redirected the old domain name to the new one you combined the links of both domain names. And the new domain name could have a link profile that is not very good (or that was worse than the old domain name). I would take a look at all of the links of both domain names and perform a link audit to make sure that there aren't any links that you need to get removed or cleaned up.

Like Andy said, I wouldn't worry too much if it's only been about a week. I've seen various issues such as canonical tags being added to a site's pages that have taken a long time (up to two months) to be ironed out.

If you have refreshed the content, the best thing you can do is to make sure those pages are crawled quickly.  You can use social media (Twitter, Google+, etc.) to Tweet and mention those URLs and get them crawled. I would have a strategy in place to get new trusted, authority type links to those pages, as well.

Blenny, I would be extremely cautious about redirecting another site to your site, even if it's ranking well now. There are a lot of issues that you need to consider, especially given the fact that all of the factors (links, history, content issues, etc.) are going to be passed on to the new site.

You'll need to look at the site's link profile in depth to make sure that the site isn't ranking well for a particular reason. The site could be ranking well right now because of certain links to the site: but Google, for example, has not penalized those links yet. I've seen sites that have a lot of low quality links that help a site rank: but when Google gets around to re-analyzing the site (i.e., Google Penguin), the site then literally falls out of the rankings and becomes penalized.

If it's a new site that you recently bought, are you sure the former site owner didn't just pump up the site's rankings in order to sell it? Perhaps they used techniques that would eventually get the site penalized?

I don't like to sound pessimistic here, but you have to look in depth into the site before you redirect it to your current site. Your current site could end up banned or could end up with a penalty, especially given the fact that you say that the content isn't that great.

Gregory, without doing a full SEO analysis, it's difficult to pinpoint what exactly is going on here. However, doing some checks with a few tools, I was able to see that there are a few things that could be effecting rankings. For example, the page hasn't been updated since <tt>30·Jan·2014</tt>, which might be around the time that the page started to have an issue with rankings?

I would update the page again with some new copy to see if that will help. Sometimes when you refresh a page it will cause Google to like it again (query deserves freshness type of thing). You could also get some more social shares of the page (Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, etc.) and some new fresh links to the page.

I wouldn't get too caught up, though, in the actual pages and their rankings. This will fluctuate from time to time, and it really can drive you bonkers if you're obsessing over individual page rankings. What I would focus on is building your site's overall authority with new links from trusted authority sites. This will elevate all of your pages in the rankings, and make your pages more "algorithm proof", meaning that when Google changes something in the algorithm your rankings are going to have less of a chance of being effected by those changes.

Keith, there are a lot of factors that go into the actual search engine rankings that you and I see on the search results page. With the particular query "what is google voice", Google has decided that the MacWorld article, with a title of "what is google voice" is more appropriate for the query than the actual Google Voice page.

I would gather that from the query that the user is wanting an explanation of the product: they're not wanting to go to the Google Voice page itself. So, Google is showing the answer to the question rather than the actual site that they're asking about.

This also is a good example of Google Hummingbird at work, where they're able to understand the query better, and deliver better search results based on the actual query, not just look at "keywords".

Mike, you may want to re-think your strategy here. There is no need to create specific targeted landing pages for each location. Rather, you would want to make sure your site is optimized (or the location pages are optimized) for the locations that you do have. When you set up your Google Plus local pages you can specify the area that you service.

You'll want to also work on getting more local citations for your business, which will include mentions of your NAP data (name, address, phone number).

Chad,

The latest versions of WordPress do a pretty good job at fixing the holes in WordPress, so I would make sure that you always have the latest version. Also, take a look at the Wordfence plugin, as it is a security plugin that does a lot to stop the majority of the security issues involved. I recommend upgrading the plugin to the paid version, if possible.

As far as optimization goes, I recommend Yoast, as it does a great job of fixing basic SEO issues. However, I recommend adding custom title tags and meta description tags whenever possible.