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Hi!

there are several options depending on the situation.

1. The new site is essentially redesigned but maintains the URLs structure > the links will still work (I know it is now your situation, but 1 to consider);
2. New site, same domain name, same content, but different URLs structure > 301 the old URLs to the matching content new ones via .htaccess (assuming the site is hosted in an Apache environment);
3. New site, same domain, different content structure and different URLs structure too > 301 the old URLs to the most related content page of the new site
4. New site, new domain name, same content but different URLs structure > as point 2, but in this case you can also use the "Change of Address" option in Google Webmaster Tools (under "Site Configuration"). I think that Bing webmaster central offers a similar option
5. New site, new domain name, different content structure and different URLs structure too > as point 3 but with the GWT option too (and maybe BWC as well).

Hope this helps

Yes, that sound suspicious. Ask for details:

500 -1000 links from how many unique domains?

• 50 links from 1 domain means 100 domains...
• From what kind of site? From real third party sites or they use their own network of sites or blogs? There's a huge difference.
• Using what kind of tactics? comment marketing and forum? That could mean spam. Or from guest blogging, which could mean spinning in their blogs' network
• Doing outreach? Then the price is ridicoulus
• Directory submission? Probably they are very poor directories
• Social profiles? Them alone are not enough and many are no followed links

And ask for real examples, if they can give them. Or check out how the did link building for their own site.

Hi,

IMO the 20 point jump was the conseguence of cleaning the paid links. And the fact you are not anymore on first page is a conseguence of the correction too, because it represents the real position of your websites without that links and the juice they were passing.

Therefore, the only way to return to the original ranking is planning a new - licit - link building campaign.

Unfortunately country agnostic tools don't exist (or that's my experience).

I know your pain, being it mine too.

By the way those tools can offer you good insights (and can be personalized, as the Content Discovery tool by SEOGadget)

Another technique, especially for understanding what the influencers in your geography/niche are sharing - hence what kind of content may have more social echo - is the one described by Richard Baxter here.

Then, you should not forget Topsy.

Doing a search with www.honestbabe.com Google revolves with this serps: http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&site=&source=hp&q=www.honestabe.com&pws=0&pbx=1&oq=www.honestabe.com&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=1345l1345l0l1954l1l1l0l0l0l0l0l0ll0l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb&fp=9441c9e3bb40875d&biw=1920&bih=955

As you can see from the sitelinks, Google has picked up some urls with www. and some without. This is surely caused by the fact that both versions are crawlable.

The best thing to do is to redirect 301 the root domain name to the subdomain www.honestbabe.com, if this is the version of the site that owns the highest % of backlinks

That way Google (and users) will be redirected always to the www. version and index just that one. Don't worry about the backlinks eventually existing and linking to the not www. site, because the link juice from those links will pass almost entirely to the www. linked page version.

Previously today I answered to a similar question: http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-content-joomla

I suggest you to check it, also because there's the code you have to add to your .htacces file (if you are running on a apache linux enviroment).

The first thing I would ask to myself is:

are these URLs over-optimized?

If the URLs looks like: www.domain.com/category/sub-category/keyword-keyword-keyword and keyword can be a three words query... then probably that url is over optimized and can be more a danger than a competitive factor.

Good practice tells us that is better to have the primary keyword in the url, better if matching, and not used like a digest of all the keywords we want to rank for in a page.

Apart that, you have to consider also these other two factors when it comes to urls:

1. Usability: too long urls are very hard to remember, therefore you are loosing the opportunity to receive direct traffic from users typing the url directly in the browser (for instance, as many of us do typing directly: www.seomoz.org/q to enter the SEOmoz Q&A
2. Too long urls tend to not be used as a way of creating natural linking citation, as when you cite - for instance - a post using its url and not creating a classic link with anchor text.

Therefore I would not use any of your alternatives, but this:

www.domain.com/keyword1

and 301 the old urls.

Finally, about on page optimization, I suggest you to read this old but still valid post by Rand Fishkin:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization

Hi Christopher, Answering by points:

1. Google needs a certain amount of time before start showing just the canonical version of the site, time that depends on how big the site is.

2. I suggest you to keep the 301 redirection in the .htaccess file

• because so you are sure the the not www Urls in the SERPS are sending users to their www versions;
• because may exist backlinks sending to not www links and this way your a redirecting not only users but also a great % of that backlink juice to the correct URL;
• because exists also Bing, which obviously does not care of what you decide in GWT.

3. what you did is incorrect. Infact the www.domain.com/index.php url version of the home page should have to 301 to www.domain.com, let say the opposite of what you have done.

Redirect 301 /index.php http://www.domain.com/

Finally, about finding SEOs, why don't you try the job section here in the Seomoz site, here > http://www.seomoz.org/marketplace/jobs?

Ciao

When I read the question I was imagining something like: I am ready to do some well craft cloaking and, why not, injecting links in my competitor sites...

To submit you site to directories, if they are relevant to your industry, doesn't have their PR cut (easily to check if you confront the mozRank with the PR... if the PR is - let's say - 3 and the mozRank says 6.4, then that directory has been penalized by Google), and the page your site will be listed is regularly crawled... then it is licit. Remember, a link profile should look "normal" to Google eyes... and it is normal that as site is listed in directories too.

On the other hand, being yours a video company, I can only imagine the infinite opportunities you could have in order to create a smashing inbound campaign... I suggest you to read this amazing post published just yesterday in the SEOgadget blog:

Why You Should Supercharge Your Video Strategy & How to Do It

which surely may give you great ideas.

That tecnique, which is substantially the same of the "featured products" and "who bought this bought also that" module in the eCommerce sites, is perfect in order to make your products/shop profiles discovered and indexed faster... but not really for internal link equity (passing of PR). As yourself wrote, that would be just temporary.

But it is not a tecnique to discard. If your shop profiles are well optimized,and the overall domain authority is high, those profiles being indexed can rank very well for the shop names itself and some related long tail keywords.

Then, if the profile are designed in order to be really useful, full of informations about the shop, with nice goodies (i.e.: relevant reviews) and graphically appealing, then probably those profiles page may obtain natural inbound links (for instance by the same shop owners sites).

That way the profiles page will rank even better and may also rank for more competitive localized keywords, and the links it obtains help increasing the Domain Authority of the site, which - in a loop - helps the internal pages ranking better.

Discard the subdomain option, because it's a link building killer. A subdomain is an independent site for the search engine respect the main domain, therefore you would have to do X link building campaign for the X category of product you have. Then all the link gained by a subdomain would not have ranking value for the others, because they a different sites. Therefore, for categories, the best is: www.domain.com/category. For the product page the best is always to strip the categories and subcategories from the URL: www.domain.com/product. This diminishes a lot the risk of duplication content, that can appear when you assign a product to more than category or subcategory.

Mmm...

I think you are looking at this issue from the wrong perspective.

I mean, even though it quite obvious that having a percentage of followed links bigger than the nofollowed ones (link equity), that doesn't mean that you should not do - for instance - good comments to great posts in amazing posts (both authoritative and not).

Those links in comments, if editorially justified and with a natural anchor text are not a problem at all, if they are in site where the overall quality is high, also considering all the other comments.

Linking out to your own site within a comment, though, should be done just if it really means adding value to the post you are commenting... then, if it is considered spam or less, it is also depending on the judgement of the blog owner. So, I repeat, using natural anchor text or even the same URL as anchor, can be somehow as you were telling him: "Ok, I'm linking to my content, but I swear it adds value to your content and improves it". Usually the comment doesn't end in the spam folder.

Stop before you are deleting too many things.

Consider this: deleting photos (because of their link) are you making the product pages more interesting?... I doubt it.

And don't delete the breadcrumb, as it is a great on page optimization "tool", because helps the crawlers understanding where they are in the links architecture of the site. And because they are also a great usability help for the users.

Don't worry overly too much if you have more than 100 links per page (and you have 120, which is not a huge surplus)... as Google along these months have repeatedly affirmed that it has no problem with pages with many links inside.

Yes, too many links can dilute the link juice a page is passing to the others, but it that page is a product one, don't worry.

Eventually try to optimize the home page, category and subcategory pages, in order to have a good hierarchy. For instance, the home page linking just to the product categories (and eventually to the most important products); the categories pages linking to their subcategories, and this ones to the other subcategories of the same categories it is a part of and to its sub-subcategories, if they exists.

But do not delete links that are useful like photos or breadcrumb.

Links in PDF do pass link equity. Be sure though that the PDF are correctly saved as text not image.

I warmly suggest you to read this great guide about SEO for PDF by Lunametrics.

The fast answer is: No.

Or, at least, there aren't actually studies, which offer correlated data about Microformats and Rankings.

What Schema.org allows is

• a better, semantic, comprehension of the content of your pages by the Search Engines;;
• an higher % of CTR

We may also hazard the hypothesis that Google may consider the CTR percentage an user signal valid also for ranking purposes (as, similarly, it may be the Bounce Rate percentage), but - still - we are in the fied of hypothesis.

What is sure, it is that doesn't exist a direct causation between microformats and rankings.

Finally, about your products being listed in Google products, again, there is not a direct causation between having your products listed in the Product vertical and organic ranking. Both are based over different algorithms, as it happens when we deal with Local Search  and classic organic results.

One fundamental question: is the redirection based on IP detection or user agent?

Because if it is over IP detection, then that's something Google deprecates.

Instead, if it based over User Agent, then 302 and 301 are substantially the same for Google in this case, even though with a 301 you are sure to pass link equity.

On the other hand, why have not you considered these two options:

1. Making the root domain luxury.com the country selector page, so people land there then choose the country they want;
2. Dedicating the luxury.com root to the main country target, not using redirections at all and adding a over alert to all the people entering in the root that exist a version targeting their country (alert based on IP Detection, this time correctly).

Apart what said by Highland, start checking the crawling information. The campaign will show at first just 250 pages crawl, in order to give you a first glimpse of the on site issues your site may have. After few day you will have all the pages of your site crawled.

Use the keyword tracker and connect your Google Analytics account to the campaign. After few days the crossed data will start showing you potential low hanging fruits.

Said that, I suggest you to attend the free webinar SEOmoz weekly does for all those ones starting using the campaign tools as you: http://www.seomoz.org/webinars

First of all remember that the hreflang annotation is not necessarily needed in every page.
Said that, it really depends on your devs facilities what method to use, if in-code or using the sitemaps.

Both work fine, and what you should not do is using both at the same time, because the possibility of creating contradictory hreflang annotations increases.

If you are referring to Local Search (as to say, Google Places), then that seems to be one of the local ranking factors. Be aware that probably it is referred to the IP location.

Said that, the IP Location plays a role also in the geotargeting of the site. For instance, if you want to rank your site in Spain, then to have your site with a Spanish IP (via a local hosting or having a Spanish IP and acting via proxy), is a positive factor.

I your specific case - targeting spanish speaking people residing in another country than (in your case) Venezuela - then you should have this kind of hreflang:

<rel="alternate" hreflang="es-FR" href="the content in spanish url"></rel="alternate">

This way you're telling google to show the URL in Spanish to people searching in Spanish but living in France.

if Google thinks that your content si a copy from another site, the page copied will be penalised by the Panda algorithm.

Sorry to disagree with you: if "copied" content was a problem, then we will have sites like Techmeme out of the index.

The problem with with publishing syndicated content is not the act of republishing it, but the value you add or not while republishing the content of another site. For instance, if you add classic content curation practice, as commenting inline or before or after the "copied" content, or if you published it and open a discussion that generates UGC content, then that copied content is not a problem.

Be aware, I am talking of content republished with the permission of the original author/publisher of the content itself.

Other thing is scraped content, which don't add value. In that case the scrapers seriously are at risk of Panda or, simply, of being filtered out of the visible index.

Similarly duplicated content can be a risk when it comes to products description in an eCommerce or Classified site. That content - again - seriously can lead you to a Panda penalization. That's why it is always better to rewrite the standard products description, or add more unique content that may add value, as "the site review" of the product, users' reviews, etc etc.