Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Andy

No, it is a Webstore site.  We have no access to code or to the site folders, so we cannot do anything at all with the current .co.uk site at all, but repoint it and then 301 the pages we had.

There are few ways to do this and I would like to ask other Mozzers if they have found the best way.

We have a site .co.uk and are moving it back to .com.  However we do not have any access to the site folders for .co.uk.  (We have to move it anyway as our provider is withdrawing their service).

We have built our URL 301 redirect file and it is ready to go, but how to impliment it?

We can repoint .co.uk to another site, and then redirect all traffic for each URL but this is quite messy, or just forget trying to 301 each page and just rediect the whole site.
the .com has more authority already, but we ready do not want to frustrate visitors who are using a link to reach a product, only to find they hit our homepage and not the product.

Your thoughts would be very welcome or other ideas

Bruce

Domain Authority is not really something you can control.  It is a view taken by Moz, Google etc using various algorithms.   So now you cannot influence the rank easily.

I would recommend stepping way way back and take a broad view of your site and look at some of the key Domain ranking factors that Google (might, as we can guess but they don't tell) use.

Dropping a factor of 9 is large, so something must have changed in the bigger picture.

Bear in mind that just because the numbers have gone down, does not mean that your site has had a penalty or other such disaster, it could well be that your Pond just became a Sea for some reasons, which you need to take a view on in your broad overview of your industry.

Please let us know how you get on as this would be very interesting to all Mozers I am sure

Bruce

This might be an aside to the main issue, but this is a search phrase.  Do your customers or webusers, actually search for this phrase?

I haven't drilled into this any more, but would be very interested to know which bit of the keyword they would be searching for.

Phrases are really hard to get a good score on in my experience

Bruce

I would look to see if the happy medium could be in the way "Calls to Action" are used within the pages of the site.

This way by introducing "signals" it indicates to the end user, that they can see the quality, experience the company and also enquire or buy.

I imagine what you really want is an advertorial style site with Showcasing projects, products, call to action at the end or sprinkled amoungst the narrative.

Hope this is food for thought

Bruce

Thanks for the clarification Mark.

So distilling down the motivation of the client, they ultimately are looking for sales?

If this is the case then everything needs draw the customer to the basic motivations to enquire further. This would suggest a cleint based presentation.

If sales are not the motivation, then the site surely must be a vanity site to show how good they are at what they do.  In which case showcasing to the industry their expertise is the important ellement.

I could be wrong, but I think that the client wants a sales introduction site, not a vanity site???

Bruce

(edit typo)

Looks to me that some mighty tinkering has been going on, on a regular basis to get these ups and downs and vast swings.

If you can refer back your change logs to see where what and when has reflected in the traffic flow.

Also look at your Adwords account too.  When a key word that drives traffic but no sales is eventually culled this can be the result.  Low traffic, but very good quality traffic remains

Please let us know more info,

Bruce

Really interesting post

What is the client wanting out of the Blog? The answer will help determine the content.

PR or Sales?

Bruce

It is a really tough one to deal with, although Google does recognise ecommerce data for products and recognises that duplication of product titles and descriptions happen and does not from what I understand have a major issue, although you will be competing with the others for the key word and phrasematches with your own site. (edit expand explaination)

Depending how your own site is structured, product popularity etc will give an indication of how well you will rank for your own site versus the big boys.

My view is that whilst you should use your own site to reflect your brand identity, expand the Brand / Category pages with fresh new text to add authority to your site, and look at all the channels collectively and do not worry if your own site is appears to underperform compared to the rest.  This is normal as the volumes of traffic and exposure will drive sales.

Hope that is useful

Bruce

Just seen the update to this question.

If you have a high value, high margin product, yes you might be able to afford a AU$20 cost per conversion, but if you are only making AU$15 on a sale, then this makes no sense at all.

Hope this keeps the little grey cells working.

Bruce.

Everything points to the first flush of youth.  New site, lots of new content and google loves this.  Now time as started to balance as your rightly say, to settle the site to where it naturally sits as a new kid on the block, but not that new.

What-ever you do, do not tweak, if Moz page rank scores are good for your keywords etc, as this will end up with you being totally confused about the stats you are starting to see.

Make sure each main page scores well for your keywords and build good content and update regularly to your main category pages.  Products pages are static, so use your entry pages to add fresh content.  Improve each page where you can.

Penguin is cannot penalise sites without spammy links, so this is not the problem if you don't have any.

Remember Google is about quality end user content, fresh and unique.

Hope this helps on the journey.  Look forwar to many more questions in due course I am sure.

Bruce

Appears to me, that you are beating yourself up about milk that hasn't yet been spilt ( to mix my metaphors) (edit, brain thinking faster than fingers type)

Interestingly, another thread was debating about "if you can't beat them, join them" with reference to slighly grey SEO. Penguin goes to show that only bright white outshines the rest.

Please wait a few days or so to see how things settle, worrying about what if will not make a drop of difference to what is real.

301 redirects are 100% fine, but should match as close as possible to the original content pages. but no "Check out our new website", whilst you cannot state this on a 301 redirect, only via anchor text, will not be acceptable in good SEO terms as this is spammy to say the least.

From what you have written and not written, I think you really need to spend some quality time reading and studying SEO and how all aspects work before embarking on your next steps.

Hope this might be somewhat useful

Bruce

Disavow is common practise, when all attempts have failed to get rid of unwanted links or you are uncertain about the origins.  This is a short video by Matt Cutts Head of the Google Spam team who explains Googles postions

http://youtu.be/eFJZXpnsRsc

Hope this is useful

Bruce

Panda has just rolled out, so give it a few days to settle down and then review the keywords.

Once you have seen stability, then start to look deeper as required

Bruce

17th October we have seen dramatic increase in Google Crawl activity, not as strong as the last update, about half the pages were crawled this time than that of the last main update.

Bruce

edit typo

Our GWT Crawl goes wild when it reaches the UK, so nothing yet.

Looking forward to seeing the impact.

All this very hard work that we all put in makes us look forward to Penguin dropping by to those who ride on the crest of others work!

Have a great weekend all

Bruce

The SEO was right with the 301 with the knowledge that 301 will not pass 100% rank authority as the original URL. The 301 will drop between 1 and 10%.

Sounds a bit complicated the next bit so to save this complication. Have the info on both sites, but put Canonical tags on the pages with the duplicate data.  This is the preference from Googles perspective.  this tells google that this is duplicate content.  If you intend remove the data from these original locations then rel canonical etc will not be needed.

Google does not want duplicate data, therefore you should for good practice use the canonical or delete the other data from sites

Hope that is of use

Bruce

I would doubt that this is a test, but this is driven by other metrics.

Positions rises and fall initially and then settle, so this could be the result of your hard work.  If this was me and I was unsure as to why this has happened, I would also stop any further tweaks until I have seen how static these positions become, otherwise you will not be able to see what environmental changes have effected any future change.

Keywords can be very volatile for many reasons, seasonality, competition, trend etc.  So it is worth doing more research on what theses results mean and find out as much as you can as what factors have influenced this positive change and be able to explain what has happened.

Positions change like the weather so nothing is permenant in site ranks, so work will still nee dto be done to maintain the positions, but knowing what why and how is key to this future maintenance

Bruce

Good post Patrick

Your right, Google is not here to make us popular, that is our job.  Google has to protect its own postion as No1 search engine, by delivering top quality content first time to the user.

I remember a not that many few years ago starting to get really hacked off with generic search queries delivering porn, meds, directories, warez sites and other useless returns, hit a link and have pop ups galore to try and close before the next one popped open.  What a vastly different experience Google searches are now, of course with Browsers getting better too.  The flip side is that we have to work harder to make our own sites visible to the rank highly.

One other thing we noticed a week ago, was that another competitor who was the bain of our lives, has delisted the brand we were competing with them for.  That said, most who where on the scene a few years ago have also disapeared too.

Without doubt, penguin, panda etc will level again the playing field as Google has to remain the browser of choice for Google to remain at the top position.

(Edit forgot Bruce )

There is another thread currently running here about PPC.

What is interersting is that some Mozzers are reporting sites are getting only 10% organic traffic.

We are all in the same search for the elixir of SEO. We too are baffled by two competitors getting high ranks, but as we mentioned on another post, we also know we sell more than they do for the competing brand.

So it is not always true that those who appear to be winning actually are.

Bruce