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Copyscape.com will tell you if you have duplicate content. If you have a big site with loads of pages I'd buy credits or you'll have difficulty because it only lets you check a few pages per day (I can't remember what the limit is). With the paid version you can upload your xml sitemap (s) and it'll check all the pages in that file. Then the report will highlight the bits of copy that is duplicate.

I looked at Hubspot, but decided not to use it in the end. I didn't think it offered anything extra that Moz doesn't. It was also expensive (if I remember rightly). And I like Moz, best of all the SEO tools...

Hello Edward,

First of all, you've joined the right community! In my experience Mozzers are incredibly friendly and helpful.

I can't give you a complete SEO strategy, but these suggestions may help:

1. Check out your competitor's backlinks. 
   I have no idea about your industry, but you must have competitors. Use the Moz backlink tool (Open site explorer) to see the backlinks your competitors have. This will give you a list of potential sites you can then try and get a link from. In my experience, it's easier to get a link if you actually speak to the site owner so if they display their telephone number then ring it!
2. Blogging
   You already mentioned blog posts. If you have the time to, you should be posting something regularly on your blog. I believe it is better to publish high quality blog posts less frequently (but still on a regular basis) than poor quality ones more frequently. Make sure you write for your human visitors first - the search engine robots have no interest buying your cavier!
3. Online review sites
   There are several independent review sites where your customers can leave a review of your products and services. Although this won't increase your rankings, if the reviews are good it will increase the conversion rate of your site. Some have an agreement with Google, where once a reviewee has 30 positive (I think 4.3 or higher rating) reviews, then the star rating will be displayed in the SERPs. This can increase CTR which means even if you're not in the top spot your listing will stand out and the stars will encourage visitors. We use Trustpilot, but they are quite pricey - the other company we were looking at at the same time was reviews.co.uk who I believe are a little cheaper. You can also use your Google business page to gather reviews but customers have to create a google account if they don't already have one so the take-up may not be as strong.
4. Reach out
   There are about a gazillion foodie blogs out there. I know because I love food and I read them! Why not send some samples to some carefully selected blog owners (pick the most popular) for reviews / tastings? The reviewer will get some free caviar (not to be sniffed at, eh) and you get some tasty links.
5. Reach out some more
   Why not do the same with your favourite national newspaper foodie columnists? They all have online versions of their columns and may provide a link. At the very least they may include your site in their supplier lists which would be nice.
6. Winter Olympics!!!
   You sell caviar, the most luxurious Russian food available. Use the upcoming winter olympics to your advantage (though you will have to be careful about copyright).
7. Start an online recipe book
   This doesn't need much explanation... Make sure to use the rich-snippet recipe mark-up (or the data-highlighter tool in Webmaster Tools) to 'tell' the search engine's that it's a recipe (if you have a picture of the recipe then this will display in the SERPs increasing CTR.)

I hope these help! Do let us know how you get on!

Best wishes,

Amelia

Hi Josh,

I'm doing a similar thing - not exactly the same as we are merging 2 websites into one and then just for the fun of it putting the whole lot onto a new domain...

We've not done this yet as our new site is being built. Anyway, I found this webinar really useful: http://moz.com/webinars/domain-migrations-lessons-from-the-moz-transition and this blog post: http://moz.com/blog/domain-migration-lessons

I hope they help!

All the best,

Amelia

Hello Stephanie,

I would wait and see if re-instating the meta tags fixes the problem.

I would resubmit your sitemap(s) to webmaster tools and do the fetch as google thing in webmaster tools. These should get googlebot to pay your site a visit to reindex all those meta tags. Then wait for a week, and see if your listings/unique visitor numbers increases.

If this doesn't help, then I'm a bit stumped, because in all honesty the yoast plugin pisses all over the all in one pack - I've used both and in my experience yoast is the best wordpress plugin for seo - nothing else comes close.

Listings drop for all sorts of reasons, and I have to say, it would be highly unusual for a plugin to cause such a thing to happen - similarly, meta tags shouldn't really affect rankings too much. If they affect anything on your site it would be CTR (if these are meta descriptions you're talking about), which could be the reason your unique visitors have reduced.

All the best,

Amelia

Has it increased your average time on page? That may indicate a good user experience so Google may reward you for it. However, as Chris has indicated, load times may suffer with live chat. We took live chat off our website because of this.

You can tell Google in webmaster tools that your site has changed address. Only do this if the entire site has changed address though.

There's a Matt Cutts video on moving domains here:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106?hl=en

Best of luck,

Amelia

Hi,

I've identified a list of key influencers within my niche. I now want to connect with them, specifically to ask them to provide regular content for our site (they'll hopefully promote it via their own channels as well as us doing some promotion). The reason I want to do this is because it's easier to move Mohammed than the mountain! - I want to piggy-back on their success!

How would you go about doing this? Some of the influencers are follwing us on Twitter and I've had some nice discussions with them over the last few months or so (our Twitter has only been going since about March this year). Would you reach out via Twitter, or call them up? I really don't want to mess this up!

Thanks,

Amelia

Hello,

Our sites are on https and have been for around a year and a half ago.

The only site we switched from http to https was really young when we did it and so the risk of lost rankings/traffic was minimised because we didn't have much to begin with. However, I have to say, we didn't really notice any difference before or after.

The only issues I have with the https version is that rich snippets don't seem to show. I suspect this will get resolved though as more and more sites move over to secured versions.

Good luck with the switch, Andy has given you all the info you need on that so I won't add anything else!

Best wishes,

Amelia

Sounds good, please count me in.

I am an inhouse online marketing executive. I work for a UK commercial mortgage brokerage offering BTL and commercial mortgages as well as bridging loans.

Thanks!

It sounds like a temporary redirect so, yes a 302 would be correct. Remember 302's do not pass link juice though.

Hi Luke,

Use the canonical tag. Some info from Google here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en

Good luck!

Amelia

We did it  as a response to managers above our heads within the business deciding it was a good idea. Had no choice! But, as I said before, it made no real difference, though (again, I said this before) our site was really new (about 3 months old on a new domain) so it's hard to say whether we really lost traffic, because we did not have that much organic traffic on the site at that time.

I think you're wise to wait for the dust to settle so you can learn from others' mistakes

Chris is right. Moz is an analytical tool. It won't suddenly help your rankings just by purchasing it!

I think you are right, if you think your pages have thin content then that is the most likely reason why you have poor listings in the SERPs. Work on that, but don't stop building links. Never stop building links!!! Moz tools do help with this, the open site explorer is fantastic (although there is a free version of this, it doesn't give as many results) for discovering new linking opportunities. You say that when looking at your competition's backlinks you can see that 80% of their links come from news sites - how did they get those links in the first place? If they didn't buy them then they must have obtained them via legitimate means. Think about how to get your story in front of the right editor to be included in a news piece. Don't make up news or try and send out flimsy press releases - find something worth doing. Could the company you work for do a fundraiser for a local charity? Your local paper would run that story - especially if you could link it up to a personal story within the company. If it's national coverage you are after, then you'll need to be a bit more creative, but I'm sure that if you had a little 'brain-storming' session with your team you could come up with loads of ideas.

Have you tried SEMRush? We have both Moz and SEMRush. I like Moz best, but my colleague is a fan of SEMRush. It's just a preference thing. Try that tool too, it's not the same as moz, but it is a viable alternative, and like I say, a colleague of mine much prefers it.

Whatever you do, don't stop building high quality links to your site.

Good luck!

Amelia

This totally depends on too many variables for me to say (I think anyway).

Personally, I wouldn't overwhelm your visitors with too much wordy text - they're interested in test driving your cars and possibly buying one, NOT reading a load of gumph on the cars. Either they like the cars or they don't, obviously you need to include the benefits and features of each vehicle, but really I wouldn't write huge volumes of text because that'll put people off.

Hi Luke,

I'm interested in other responses to this question...

If I was in your position after seriously berating the dev I would make sure you disallow the dev site in your robots.txt and use webmaster tools to remove the URLs from the index. Then I would password protect the dev site so the search engines couldn't get there even if they try.

Like I say, I'm interested in other responses! This is what I would do, but I don't really know if it's definitely the right thing to do. Does anyone else have anything to add?

Best of luck - its crappy when someone else's error cocks up your work: when our site launched for the first time our IT department screwed up on a monumental scale by getting the DNS settings wrong.

Amelia

We didn't particularly want it at the time, but I'm pleased we have it now (funny how things work out, eh?) I'm also pleased we did it when we did it because, as said before, the site was very new on a new domain so there really wasn't much in the way of organic traffic to lose . I think I'd have had a nervous breakdown if we had to do it now when the site is much more established and I actually have some listings to lose!

Although, I did successfully manage to move it onto a new domain without losing listings in April when we formed the new company so I think I can handle most things But, still, it did give me a few sleepless nights worrying about how I would explain to my CEO why things went wrong! But, they didn't and I honestly believe that if I can move a site from one domain to another and actually gain traffic and rankings then anyone can!

You may find it does the opposite of what you intend if your visitors don't use social media - they'll feel left out of the party and nobody likes that! There are many many reasons why someone would choose not to be on social media, and forcing them to have an account just to read an article is never going to work - they'll just leave and find the content elsewhere on the web.

Check analytics to see how socially engaged your visitors are. If they are, then I'd test it as a tactic - it may not work for long though, because it's the sort of thing Google doesn't like ('Don't do as I do, do as I say!!!!')

I bet Mr Cutts is thinking of a way to thwart your plan as I type this

Good luck whatever you do, and please let us know what the outcome is!

Amelia

Maybe google is testing the two landing pages to see which is better for the user?  I am assuming here that Google has signals that indicate whether a site/page is useful or not to the people using the query to find them. I've noticed this sort of thing happen to my sites and it always settles down in the end.

As for your client - I'm in-house now, but when I was agency-side I would have found a questioning client tricky. I think though, that honesty is the best policy - even if you have to say "I don't know why Google is behaving this way. I am looking into possible reasons why this could be happening, but I may never find the answer. I am monitoring your site and am continuing to optimise your homepage for the keyword, 'voltage optimisation'."

Sometimes clients can be difficult, but they have to understand that some of the things Google does are a complete mystery, and that's just the way it is.

Hello Niners,

There's very little control over this... Via webmaster tools you can demote a sitelink, but you can't tell Google which pages to choose. You can also turn the feature off altogether (though WHY someone would want that is beyond me...)

I guess you have control over the hierarchy of your site, so you could influence the sitelinks, but I don't really know how you'd go about doing this....

Best of luck,

Amelia