Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Well, the only alternatives you have to that are: Don't change it Open the whole partner site in a frame Rebuild the whole partner site It's worth mentioning that I personally  don't believe that bounce rate is a metric that any sane engine would use as a ranking factor.  I'm not that sure about time on site either (you could argue cases for both being negative factors as well). I don't think that a frame is going to fool anyone.  So if you really want to send that signal and believe you need to do the whole thing then I think you are stuck with having the only option being rebuild your partner area. Unless your partner area is very basic indeed, I can't see that being worthwhile myself.

Clean URLs will help you out a lot, but you will probably still your site dance a little bit as Google gets to know the new content.  You're not going to see near the damage though I first mentioned.  The more you can keep it like the old the better.  If you clean it up a little bit as you implement the pages, you could actually see an increase in your rankings when things settle down because it will look like fresh content to Google.

Hey thanks, the site is less than 30 pages. But would it be just as acceptable to just forward the entire domain, or is it better practice to 301 each individual page. And if I do 301 each page, do we ALSO need to forward the domain? I appreciate your help! Derek

When thinking about links without keyword-rich anchor text, think about how people are linking to you on their own, without your actually building the link.  They're more likely to link either with your main brand name (AccuPOS), your domain name (AccuPOS.com) or text like "read more" "click here" etc.  That's one reason that Penguin has targeted keyword-rich anchor text links, because they aren't "natural" - i.e. it's unlikely someone would link to you with "Restaurant POS Software" unless you specifically ask them to.  So when building links it's helpful to have a good mix of these other less-specific anchor texts, to appear more natural.  If the link appears on a page that is talking about your keyword, there's some evidence to suggest that that semantic info might help in a similar way to keyword-rich anchor text.

I agree with Phil.  The site isn't being redirected to the new one.  Most likely what they setup is a rewrite instead of a redirect. Tell the tech team that the url of the old site should never be visible. And you can use tools like this to verify that it is actually redirecting.  (you should see a 301 redirect) http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/

It looks like you've changed this to the regular Facebook like button?

Hi Derek, I think kjay, Harald & Will have all pretty much covered removal (or correction) of links that are being called from within the pages on your site and using 301 redirects to capture traffic from external links. I would also make sure that you have a well designed custom 404 page set up for your site so that any link that isn't covered by the work you have done on the above will still provide an opportunity for the visitor to get to the content they are looking for. You should make sure that your custom 404 page contains some well written text that invites the visitor to explore the site to find other content that will help them and a menu that will allow them to click through to other parts of your site. Hope that helps, Sha

Yes, I've been blessed with this task. I have been able to achieve #1 rankings for many less competitive keywords and Page 2 ranks for the biggest keywords we're after. I don't suspect the Tables in our site are holding us back from a Page 1 ranking, since the competition gets so much more severe in those spots, but MAYBE!? We do have a Wordpress blog on our subdomain, blog.accupos.com and there is already the stock CMS system there, I don't think we really need to move the rest of the site into a CMS, but just wanted to see if switching to a CSS site would make the difference we need to boost in the ranks. The content is well optimized, the design is good, site is 9 yrs old, there's about 150 pages. Not too bad..and we do have an on-site programmer, who's never built a site in Divs before (don't ask me how). So I guess my 2nd question would be; Do I outsource this job? or trust that our in house guy can figure it out with no errs?! I didn't even think about this before. He's a bright guy but hey, your first time is your first time. I'm sure there are tricks to writing perfectly clean code for Divs and CSS, any suggestions?? DM

Not sure really what you are looking for but - great content like infographics or anything that is easily shared like photos or videos that includes your branding is great. Retargeting banners is also something that is super for branding.

Excellent! Good luck Derek.

OK, so, a flat architecture would suggest more links on the homepage, not less. You're trying to reduce the number of clicks from the homepage to each piece of content, not increase it. If there's good quality content on those pages that helps your sales team, leave it up! If it helps the sales team, then removing it will probably cost you sales, right? I'd stay away from nofollowing those links, and I'd stay away from using rel="canonical", since the way you mentioned using it isn't how it should be used. Removing 9 links from the homepage won't do all that much for you IMO. I'm looking at your homepage now. I don't think you need to worry about removing internal links. I would recommend changing the links for "QuickBooks, Peachtree, Simply Accounting, MAS 90, MAS 200, and Line 50." Either remove the links and leave the text, OR a better solution would be to link them to an internal page on the site such as /quickbooks-pos-integration.html, and target those types of keywords. But definitely don't link to quickbooks.com's homepage, they don't need that link juice and it isn't valuable to visitors. Taking a look at the link metrics for your site, you're at homepage PA 53 and DA 43, which isn't far off from the page 1 ranking sites. I think some link building would make you much more competitive for that keyword. You're currently on page 4 when I search for "POS software", and it's an internal page that's ranking, not your homepage. Get more links to your homepage using POS Software as the anchor text, and do it in a non-spammy way. That will help quite a bit I think.

If there are newer pages in place, and the newer pages cover the same topic, then yes you should canonical the older, outdated pages to the new pages. I would normally suggest to replace these older pages but you shared they "still need to be up" so the canonical tag would be the next best solution. Using the canonical tag will allow most of the link juice from the older pages to flow to the newer pages.

The 301 and canonical can be used to solve similar issues, so it gets confusing. For home pages, I think the canonical is a good route, because it "sweeps" up other variants as well. For example, someone might hit your home-page without the "www" with an affiliate ID, etc. One canonical tag on the home-page prevents all of that. The "alerts" in our system can be a bit hyperactive. Usually the All-In-One canonicals are solid. We're probably just giving you a general warning, but it's tough to tell without a specific page.