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Yes, the result is identical.

Peter

Hi Jorg

As the old site has URLs with .aspx I assume that was using a Windows server. Is the new site also on a Windows server.

I don't work on Windows server sites myself but I believe you can set up 301 redirects on your server using IIS.

For each old URL you would need to set up a 301 redirect to point it to the new URL. By doing that, bookmarked pages and links on the Internet to your site will resolve to the right page on the new site, plus search engines will also be redirected to the correct page and at the same time you will retain some but not all of any SEO value links to those pages are passing to your site.

I hope that helps,
Peter

Hi Jennie

Yes, the consensus used to be that a link from trusted sites like .gov (that's if we can trust government websites but then that's maybe for another discussion!) increase the trust of the page it linked to. The Moz SEO guide says the same in its summary on TrustRank: Earning links from highly trusted domains can result in a significant boost to this scoring metric. Universities, government websites and non-profit organizations represent examples of high-trust domains.

That said, there was a video posted about 3 years ago by Google's Matt Cutts that suggested that links from .gov sites carry no more trust than, for example, from a .com.

I think to a larger extent the question is how relevant is the linking site? By that I mean, is the linking site an authority on the subject for the link being given?

The most important thing really is relevance. In the context of the linking web page on the Bristol City Council website, whilst that page has some authority, the Bristol City Council website is not really an authority on wedding venues and as such the value of that link is probably the same or perhaps only a little more than a similar link from another site. If you had a link from a trusted authoritative site all about weddings then because the site is more relevant, then you may find that carries more weight.

I hope that helps,
Peter

PS. This is the Matt Cutts video I referred to above: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxTmZulcQZ0 - listen to the clip around 1:45 into the video.

Hi Jennie

Both URLs you listed do display metrics in the Moz toolbar for me.

In terms of the value of getting a link from there yes, there could be, the most value would be a link from it is going to a page displaying a wedding venue for hire.

I hope that helps,
Peter

Hi Alejandro

Sorry, I recommend you should redirect (301) the old URLs to the new URLs. You don't need to fix the old URLs, by that I mean you don't need to change them, just put them into the 301 redirect as they were. They will then redirect to the new URLs.

I hope that makes sense now.

Peter

Hi, as mentioned in the other answer I gave here: http://moz.com/community/q/where-is-the-rule-here-that-force-www-in-urls#reply_202351

the first checks for non-inclusion of the www in the URL (the !^www checks if www is not included at the start of the URL being tested), the second checks for a URL that starts with just the domain.

Peter

Yes, both result in the same.

The difference with the first one that I gave is that it tests !^www.mydomain.com for non-inclusion(due to the exclamation mark before the www) of the www.

The condition (RewriteCond) tests the URL following to see if it does not include www. If the condition is true (i.e. is does not include www) then the RewriteRule is applied.

I hope that makes sense.

Peter

Hi Katrine

For "Number of Domains Linking to this Page" it will be to the page in the Target URL column.

For "Number of Domains Linking to Domain" it will be the domain in the Target URL column.

I hope that helps,
Peter

Hi

Please see my answer to this in your other Q&A forum question:

http://moz.com/community/q/where-is-the-rule-here-that-force-www-in-urls

Peter

Hi, yes that's OK, there is no limit as such.

You may find it useful to also watch Matt Cutts' video answering the same question:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA

Peter

Hi Alejandro

I recommend you fix all of them. The reason for doing that is because you can then ensure that you pass on a good portion of any SEO authority/value the old page had on the old site to the page on the new site.

I hope the above helps and makes sense.

Peter

Hi, it's not anywhere that I can see.

To rewrite all requests to a non-www page to www you would use something like this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.mydomain.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

So where you see mydomain replace it with the prefix of your domain and where you see _.com _replace it with the suffix of your domain.

If using the above, please make sure it is properly tested with your other 301 redirects.

Peter

Hi Dustin

You don't say what you have been doing to raise domain authority for these sites. I assume you are referring to Moz's Domain Authority metric.

Moz states: "Domain Authority is Moz's calculated metric for how well a given domain is likely to rank in Google's search results. It is based off data from the Mozscape web index and includes link counts, MozRank and MozTrust scores, and dozens of other factors. It uses a machine learning model to predictively find an algorithm that best correlates with rankings across thousands of search results that we predict against."

Whilst links to your sites will have an effect in raising domain authority providing the linking sites themselves are trusted, the single most important factor in improving the authority of a domain in my opinion is to build quality content on the domain site itself.

With search changing then the measurement of a domain's authority is also likely to change. As Moz states in the first sentence above: _"Domain Authority is Moz's calculated metric for how well a given domain is likely to rank in Google's search results." _ By increasing the quality of content on a site by creating content that answers the intent of people's searches it will mean that pages on that domain are more likely to rank well in Google's search results.

I am not saying offsite optimisation is no longer important but growing the authority of a domain has to start with what you do on the domain's site.

I hope that helps,
Peter

Hi

How many pages are being measured on your site? An average site bounce rate of 36% is good but it is only an average. You really need to look at individual page bounce rates to see where issues may be occurring.

That you say the vast majority of pages are seeing visit duration of 0-10 seconds and page depth of 1 would suggest you may have a small number of high performing pages, but many are under performing.

For a low page count that could correlate to a low average bounce rate, but as I say to really need to measure page performance at a page level rather than a site level.

I hope that helps,
Peter

Hi Stephane

All sounds pretty wild and disconcerting. Where are you drawing your ranking results from? Could it be that personalisation is kicking in when you are logged in or out of Google or perhaps that you are testing results from different locations?

If you are not already then I would recommend you using the tools that come with Moz to do rank checking for the countries you are targeting. Moz's ranking tool depersonalises results as much as possible thereby giving you a more consistent way from week to week to check.

If you are using Moz to check your rankings then it's probably worth contacting Moz support to ask them to take a look.

Peter

Sorry about that Oren. I've not ready anything more recent either which would tend to suggest, until now at least, that the game hasn't changed much.

My best guess going forward as to what might change would be that we will see the same principles that Google is applying to regular search applied into YouTube. So the steady progress to search being more query based than keyword based to seek to answer the intent of the searcher's question will apply.

The other related factor is the development of semantic search and the knowledge graph. It seems reasonable if these same developments are applied to YouTube that we will see related videos providing more of the background story and associated data related to the video just displayed. Whereas up until now related videos have been chosen, for example, based on keywords in the Title, tags etc, the next evolution will see videos more related on topic.

For example, a video about the soil types need to successfully grow roses, may then offer a related video on pruning roses or the history of roses, whereas now we may more likely see just further videos on the same subject..

So, the above is not answers as such, just my speculation trying to look through a not very clear crystal ball.

Peter

Hi Oren

You are right, YouTube can be tricky to optimise for and I think with its closer integration with Google+ for a time at least it may even get trickier whilst the dust settles.

There was a YouMoz blog post on this subject last year, but whilst it's a little while ago now (in terms of how fast moving online marketing can change), I think you might find it helpful:

Dominating Youtube Search and "Related Videos" Results (Case Study)

I hope that helps,
Peter

Hi, it's possible that the 301 redirect that you think is handling this URL is not that redirect. It may be worth checking your .htaccess file to see if this URL path  /industry-sectors/equine is being managed by another redirect.

Check your .htaccess file for anything that might be overriding your URL path and taking it to the wrong URL.

Peter

@Jeff - sorry was obviously writing my response when you had posted yours. Almost a snap!

Peter

Hi

For pages that continue to exist obviously you need to redirect them to the new page URL.

For pages that you are removing, first off try to find the best match page to what they were about and redirect them.

For pages for which there is no obvious replacement, I will still redirect them anyway, but maybe to the home page of the site.

Google will re-crawl all new pages even when they match, to check content. In the context of a complete change of content for a page, very little if any SEO value will be retained but at least if someone is clicking an old link left on the web to a page which no longer exists they will be taken to a useful navigable page on your site.

Although you can no longer use .htaccess redirects, you can still do 301 redirects in Adobe Business Catalyst. Please see the documentation here: http://helpx.adobe.com/business-catalyst/partner/redirect-page-urls.html

I hope that helps,
Peter