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Quite correct.  I unfortunately assumed that everyone already knows this bit of information.

You should be able to mass redirect all of the sites at one time, and be fine.  I've done this with a client situation once before, but I'll grant that during that case we redirected only 11 domains at one time.  I can't fully vouch that it will be the same as 30 domains... hopefully someone else may be able to lend their experience with a higher number like  that.

I'd say something else you really want to take into consideration here is do you want to do a domain wide redirect, or a page based redirect?  One would entail far more work than the other, but depending on circumstance it might also offer greater benefit.

With a site-wide redirect, you will of course be funneling everything from the old site onto whatever target page you choose on the main site (likely the home page I'd guess).  When Google notices that a domain has a site-wide 301 on it, that domain will quickly start to fall out of the index, and the link power it had can also surprisingly quickly start to degrade.  Pretty straight forward stuff over all.

If you were to use a page by page redirect method, you could sort of custom tailor what new pages you'd like the old link juice to flow to.  Say on one affiliate site you have a hub page for custom truck grilles, and it has a large amount of links coming into it.  You could specifically 301 the affiliate page to its "sister" page on the main site, which would then boost the target page by a greater amount than if you simply did a mass site redirect.

Even another situation to take into account... If the content across your affiliate sites and main site are all similar, you could use technique #2 with rel canonical tags, rather than 301 redirect.

Another idea that you need to examine... the company hasn't bought any links, or become involved with what might be considered 'Black Hat' SEO, has it?

I say this only because if any Black Hat SEO occurred, and Google slightly caught on to it, they might have intentionally lowered your toolbar PageRank to send you a message before taking any sort of direct action.

Hi Vinny,

In general LinkScape updates every 30 or so days. So if you gain a new link or 3 part way through LinkScape's cycle it's very possible that it will not be included in the most recent update. Also, as awesome as it would be if LinkScape's directory were as large as Google's, it isn't. This is mostly just due to technology constraints I'd guess, and not having dozens of ENORMOUS data centers like Google. Because of this there is a chance that some links will not be picked up (especially if the links might be on really new sites, or maybe rather spammy ones). So it really turns into a waiting game to see if those links you know exist are picked up on the next LinkScape cycle or not.

Finally, unless I've managed to totally avoid it this whole time, the index doesn't have any sort of history. The amount of data storage required to maintain such a history would be crazy in conjunction with how often they currently update their index. To name drop one of SEOMoz's competitors (sorry guys XD ) majesticseo.com does actually offer historic indexing services. I don't know how in-depth they are when you're fully subscribed, as I've never been a paying member of their services. It may be something worth checking out.

And if someone comes into this question and corrects me about SEOMoz having historic index access, definitely do that instead! I know I will =P.

That would go hand in hand with what is discussed in the 2 videos I just linked in the above answer (which I edited in afterwards, so you may have missed them before).  Definitely I'd recommend watching both of the videos. I believe they'll help answer a good number of your questions.

Hi Peter,

The answer would be both yes, and no.

If the directory is ranking high on the Google SERP then it stands to reason that the page and domain in question likely have good ranking metrics and signals. If that is the case then there is a good chance it could be a strong link to help your site.

However, here is where the "no" part of the answer comes in to play. It would depend where the link is actually being placed on the site. If the link is not going to be on the exact page that you're landing on from the SERP page, then you aren't getting the entire story. You would have to do some digging around to be able to fully understand which page the link is going to be placed on, and what the metrics of that page are.

Depending on where the link would end up, the #6 result on the SERP could actually provide a stronger link for you than the #1 result. Other things to take into consideration of course are topic relation between your page and the linking page, and the amount of total links on any given linking page.

I'd suggest watching the following recent Whiteboard Friday videos, if you haven't already. They can help you better evaluate the potential link value from individual pages and/or sites.

1) http://www.seomoz.org/blog/which-link-metrics-should-i-use-part-1-of-2-whiteboard-friday

2) http://www.seomoz.org/blog/which-link-metrics-should-i-use-part-2-of-2-whiteboard-friday

If the site is only going to be in effect for 5 days I wouldn't put much effot into heavy optimization. I would only do basic on page stuff that requires all of 5 minutes of your time - title tags and such.

Reason being there is a high chance the Google bots won't even come by and index the site within the 5 day period.

First you need Google to see you as a brand. Then you need to get Google as familiar as possible with your brand, what it does, and what it offers.

If you are an SEOMoz Pro member I strongly recommend watching this webinar on becoming a brand in Google's eyes. If you're not an SEOMoz Pro member, I recommend you become one, and then watch the webinar I've linked.

Research has been done which shows that having a top ranking for both the organic and paid versions of a search term results in a higher click through chance. The increase is usually anywhere between 1% and 20%. Nothing dramatic, but it helps.

People are more likely to click on an organic result over a paid one, though. Searchers are generally slightly distrustful of paid ad results. So I'd say your problem may lie with my 1&2 advice tips.

Check your adwords account to be sure of the search terms your ads are displaying for. Are they displaying for very broad searches, and not the exact keywords you specified? Are they being clicked on and converting for those broader searches? If so you might want to change up the exact keywords you use both for Adwords and your Organic SEO.

Are there diminishing returns for optimizing a site? No. At least not as far as being penalized for organically achieving new rankings.

Now then, you say you're getting good high rankings for various search terms, but you're not seeing increased traffic. Let's figure out why that could be.

First of all, when you're checking you're rankings, make sure you're not receiving personalized results for having clicked on your own website too many times. Do things like make sure you are logged out of any Google accounts you may have, and add the code  &pws=0  to the end of the URL for the searches you do.

If personalization is not affecting you, and you are achieving those ranks, then you likely have some other problems. There are 2 things most likely affecting you.

1st) Are you using the right keywords? If you're a company that offers a 'credit card fraud investigation service', you don't really want to be ranking for terms like 'credit card fraud'. That term isn't specifically related in its intent to what you are needing. Someone searching for credit card fraud is probably looking for information about, can you guess it, credit card fraud! They're probably not so much looking for people who investigate credit card fraud.

2. Your search description snippets might not be working well for you. Make sure you have meta descriptions declared on every page that is ranking, or is of importance, which clearly describes the content on that page. If you don't have meta descriptions when someone see your site in a search result, they could be seeing a description that looks something like "We have been in service since...... keyword is what we do if..... we don't think that way". Basically they're seeing something that makes no sense in relation to what they searched for.

If you declare targetted meta descriptions, you're likely to have a better click through rate, and thus more traffic.

The Google bots automatically crawl sites such as Yelp, Insiderpages, and Citysearch, so in time they will manage to reach your profile on those sites. Once they do reach the profile, they will usually automatically scan the reviews there, and add them to your Google Places account's reviews.

Basically it's all automatically done. You just have to sit back and wait. It can take up to 3 months from personal experience, and even potentially longer. If nothing else you could use the time to find a nice bar on Yelp, and go hang out there until the Google Bots decide to get their gears in motion.

Also, make sure that the information listed on your Yelp/Insider/Citysearch profile is pretty much the same as the information on your Google Places profile listing. Things like the business title/name and address should be the same, so that way Google can be sure that the profile it is looking at on Yelp is for the same company it has in its own Google Places databse.

There are many different plug-ins the Wordpress community have developed to do "related post searching" for you.

I'd run a search through the Wordpress plugin database to see if you can find anything that matches your needs before running off and developing your own PHP to do the same thing. One plugin I know of is Yet Another Related Posts Plug In. See if that happens to fit your needs.

Ah ok. I understand now. I wasn't picking up on what you were saying before.

If with the soft launch you are already putting the "new" version of the site on their intended final URLs then yes, you can let the engines start crawling those URLs. For each new URL you let the search engines crawl make sure to 301 its corresponding old URL (the old site) to the new version to minimize any duplicate content issues.

If for whatever reason you can't quite 301 the old URLs yet (like if you still need instant access to reroute traffic back to them) you could try using rel=canonical on the old pages and point them to their new counter part only if the main content on each of the pages is almost exactly the same. You don't want Google to think you're manipulating them with rel=canonical.

As I'd said, there really isn't a reason to let them get a head start. The URL's will be changing when you transition the new site out of the subdomain (ie beta.sierratradingpost.com/mens vs sierratradingpost.com/mens - those are considered 2 completely different URLs) and the engines will have to recrawl all of the new pages at that point anyway.

And when you drop the sub domain you definitely want to 301 all of the old site structure's  URLs to their corresponding new page's URLs. That way nothing gets lost in the transition.

Yeah, just refer to our conversation above as I think it will pertain better to your situation.

The only issue is that you have to keep in mind that Google/Bing defines pages on the internet through their URL's, not the content. The content only describes the pages.

So if you let the engines pre crawl the pages before dropping the subdomain - simply for the reason of letting them have a "sneak peek" - you won't really be doing yourself much of a favor, as the engines will just be recrawling the content on the non subdomain URL as if it were brand new anyway.

The reason to do it the pre crawl way would be if you're already building back links to the new beta pages. Then it could make sense to let the engines index those pages and 301 them to their new non subdomain versions later. In my opinion the benefit from this route would outweigh any potential duplicate content issues.

Good catch.  Or you could try adding &pws=0 to the end of the URL string for your search, and that should eliminate the personalized results from being delivered to you.

First you might want to post the non shortened version of the URLs. I know many people do not trust shortened links from sources they don't know well enough.

Your competitor may be buying links en masse with customized anchor text for the links. I see it daily with the competitors of my client's sites. If you aren't in an overly competitive keyterm space, a few thousand bought - anchor text optimizied - low quality links can easily be enough to get someone ranking for terms even though the rest of their SEO is abysmal.

What YesBaby is talking about is somehting like Google's Website Optimizer. When someone goes to sierratradingpost.com/mens-stuff, for example, it will give 50% of the people the old version of the site for that page, and the other 50% the new version. It will eliminate any duplicate content issues as the 2 page variations will still be attached to the same exact URL.

Definitely a viable option if it fits with your game plan of how you want to do things.