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It's likely your client will still maintain his rankings for "city + service" searches since the city is not changing, but, remember, your client does have competitors out there working on local search too. Regardless of your street address change, rankings may fluctuate based on how hard they're working. A drop in rankings would occur if you sit back on your laurels and all of your competitors are working tenfold (naturally, organically) on local search, but I don't think changing a street address would have a major effect.

I hope someone on this thread will comment about their tested results with having to do the same thing, since I don't have direct experience here.

To add, you absolutely have a big task at hand to make sure all of the downstream listings that feed into the local search algorithm (and Local+) are all corrected to reflect the new street address.

Maybe check out this link from Blumenthal's about moving a business to a new location: http://blumenthals.com/blog/?s=changing+address

Also, the readers at Blumenthal's are also very committed to giving advice and answering q's. Might be another resource for you on this question.

You can also implement cross-domain tracking in Google Analytics so it won't be considered a bounce as your web visitors go from one site to the other.

See these guides https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/gaTrackingSite

http://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1034342?hl=en

Your other option could also be to make one domain a blog of the other domain. For example, something like:

www.sparrowmakeup.com.au/portfolio

You'll have to forgive me if that structure is incorrect. International SEO is not my forte yet.

Are referring to cross-domain tracking in Google Analytics?

If yes, in the most basic sense, it's a way for you to share the same Analytics tracking code with multiple domains, subdomains, etc.

I'm a visitor on your website www.ilovepeanuts.com. Your website sells peanut brittle. It just so happens I love peanut brittle, so I decide to buy some from your website.

The only problem is, when I get to your shopping cart, it resides on store.ilovepeanuts.com. If you don't enable cross domain tracking and use the same tracking code on both www.ilovepeanuts.com AND store.ilovepeanuts.com, you lose valuable data about my user experience on store.ilovepeanuts.com

Cross domain tracking allows you to preserve the same visitor data between your website and your store website.

Hope that's a simple enough explanation.

Thanks. I thought that might be it. Definitely was considering that one. Great to know it's worthwhile.

Francisco,

What is Avinash's program? Is it still offered?

Thanks!

90 days of data is available, as everyone's already pointed out.

Furthermore, you won't be able to see the previous 48 hours of GWT (Google Webmaster Tools) data from today's date as it's still being compiled.

Google Analytics will not store the "Queries" but will record any clicks on organic keywords in your Organic Search sources section.

It takes at least a month in my experience to see changes showing in search results. I also see a lot of fluctuation in client accounts, so definitely look at average ranking trends over a longer period of time.

Also, there are few external links to your website for the term "kayak fishing" http://awesomescreenshot.com/03112whz3f

It's true the other domains all have kayak fishing in their urls, but you also have links with that term in your URLs too site:yakangler.com/kayak-fishing

I would recommend trying to get links from quality domains using anchor text Kayak fishing and other phrases incorporating Kayak Fishing ("submit kayak fishing stories" for example), and linking back to the relevant pages on your website plus a few links to the home page.

Just don't overdo it and keep it natural. You may even want to check in with a few Chamber of Commerce websites or local city/town websites, as they may be looking for content or resources for people who want to kayak in their area.

Best of luck to you!

There was some activity reported in http://mozcast.com/events for January 2013. Also, have you checked to see if anything was done by webmasters of your website around that time?

Hi Mark,

What are you doing to get external links to your website? Check out some of the page 1 competitor listings for your targeted keyword using Open Site Explorer. The people ahead of you may have a longer list of quality links, older domain age, more social shares, etc.

Check out what your competitors are doing, and if it's white hat and great for users on your website, try to replicated it on your own.

Also, you have a lot of great content and sections on your website. I really enjoyed finding the kayak fishing reports--though at first I was confused because I was expecting to see regional weather reports for kayakers in those designated areas (probably because I'm not a kayak fisher).

Regardless, these reports are really fun to read and I think you should leverage them more in your SEO. We all know that thoughtfully created user content is beneficial, and you seem to have a lot of that. I would optimize this page http://www.yakangler.com/submit-content with more content about "Submit your kayak fishing stories" and text about how to do so on your site, examples of what you're looking for, etc. Currently the page says it will auto-close in 5 seconds but doesn't.

Also consider changing the anchor text in your footer link for "Links"
Though you link that anchor text to legitimate links, Google bots may not be able to understand that, and may think you are in fact trying out some blackhat when you're not, as you said. Try changing it to "helpful resources" or something similar.

Hope some of these suggestions help.

Hi Scott,

Thanks for the reply. The developers will take care of that part. Have you ever heard of anyone using 400 instead of 404 when it's more of a user-generated error?

-EEE3

We currently have a custom 404 page set up for our clients, but the developer has it returning a HTTP 200 for the status code. Big no, no. I'm having that fixed right now.

My question is, currently, the custom 404 page is only returned for urls with the extension .aspx:

• For example : ilovepizza.com/pepperni.aspx would return a 404 page because the correct page is ilovepizza.com/pepperoni.aspx

Any other format of URL without the extension (example ilovepizza.com/thumbtack) does not trigger the custom 404 page we've created, but it does trigger a server error with a 404 HTTP status page. I want to change this so this type of error also triggers the custom 404 page because it's more user-friendly and would return them to the website.

My question: Is there any benefit to making the /thumbtack errors return the custom 404 page but with a 400 Bad Request HTTP Status?

Kind of a novice here in those aspects, but does the 400 Bad Request status indicate that it was a user mistake and not a mistake created on the website?

Other suggestions?

Based on this answer from Google, http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=146750 you can't use the product schema if a customer has to make the purchase offline or at another retailer.

Does anyone know why they set it up this way? Has anyone ever tried to use product markup on a website when the product is purchased offline?

Also, is there another solution or another markup that would apply?

Thanks!

We use the "See more" script on our sites, and from what I understand, at least from other Mozzers, this is an okay practice. http://www.seomoz.org/q/using-more-info-javascript-toggledisplay-tag-for-more-info-text

We also use the rel="prev" and rel="next" to some success, but I can't comment on how that's functioning canonical-wise, because IT WAS DROPPED from our latest redesign and is going to be added to our client's website in the latest release. Oye.

I'd love to hear how this works out for you. There are some really great Mozzers on here with loads of experience about canonical tags and duplicate page issues. Can't wait to see what they have to contribute.

Hi Anthony,

Has the business claimed its Local+ page? Perhaps a verified listing would help. Also some downstream local citations could possibly give it a boost. Scott also has a great point about making your link profile look more natural too, even though it's completely justified to have lots of links on the company name.

-EEE3

Hi Michael,

Not sure if this helps you out at all, but I found this about the canonicals and SEOMoz crawl report in a previous Q http://mz.cm/11erRj6:

As far as the SEOmoz crawl reports go, not that setting a canonical won't stop these pages being reported as duplicate content.

From the help:

"Keep in mind that that canonicals will stop the pages from ranking against each other, but they will still show up as duplicate content from a UI perspective, so we will still count them as duplicate."

I have the same issues on my accounts. I'm focusing on making the pages content as unique as possible, or using the "noindex, follow" meta tags to see if that makes a difference.

I know you may have a lot of pages on your website, but perhaps writing short descriptions on your products would help. It might be worthwhile, but completely understandable that it may be a huge undertaking if you have hundreds or thousands of pages.

I agree with James. I also use Woothemes and their FAQs, theme docs and support sites are great. I haven't yet used their WooCommerce yet. James have you?

Thanks Paul. Maybe now that Analytics will be showing change history that will also save time too.

I like your idea about an external document. That seems more approachable than having our clients who are not so comfortable make their annotations in Google Analytics.

It's definitely not a helluva lot to throw at me, but instead is exactly the sort of thing I was looking for! Thank you so much Paul for such a thorough answer. This is definitely the direction I've been moving toward.

The most difficult thing with my clients is there are so many hands in the pot, and they often don't let us know what's going on with their external marketing efforts. Additionally, some of our clients have multiple marketing agencies making changes to their websites, and there are multiple admins on the Analytics.

Holding the client responsible for the updates is a great idea, and it would just take a lot more prodding on our end.

This discussion was spurred by a client that saw a major decline in non-paid search traffic (Google only) over the last quarter of 2012. There were no penalties in GWT, so this leads me to believe as you said it was an algo update. I'm going to use your tips to try and further isolate the affected areas.

I really appreciate the time you took to answer my question. Thanks again.

One more: http://www.forrester.com

I'd love a better resource for this one also.

I know you're looking for something specific, but here are some worthwhile resources you could try if you haven't already:

• http://blog.kissmetrics.com
• http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33742/12-Revealing-Charts-to-Help-You-Benchmark-Your-Business-Blogging-Performance-NEW-DATA.aspx
• http://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/insights/library/studies/?cat=measure-and-analyze
• http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Future-of-Big-Data/Overview.aspx
• Google+ - follow people like Avinash Kaushik which will then lead you to a slew of other Analytics brains as well. They often post interesting stats they come across.

Some big research firms also have Internet Roundtables, for example, like the one JD Power & Associates has for the automotive industry.

You might also see if any research papers have been published by doing a scholarly search since programs such as Masters of Science in Analytics are growing.

You could also check out some of the Google Analytics Certified Partners' blogs.

Not knowing what sector you're in, you could be right in that there hasn't been a study specifically catering to it, but maybe you'd be able to pull in some applicable data from the resources above.