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Would handpicking the best links and contacting the sites to ask them to switch their links to your new website be an option? That way you can be more confident of not damaging the new site whilst trying to retain the best of the old sites backlink profile.

You might find some of the success stories posted on the Magento website interesting, Atterley Road, for example: http://www.magentocommerce.com/customer-success-stories/atterleyroad/

Hope that helps!
Greg

Personally, I would replicate your website structure, so in this case, go with by Country. I imagine you'll always get a cross-over which ever option you choose, but for simplicity now & in the future, this sounds like the easiest option!

Ahh I see, I think if I was in that position I would try and have the dodgy links removed where possible, if you think they might be doing more harm to the site. Remember just because you've not received a warning notice in Webmaster tools, it doesn't mean that these links aren't negatively affecting your sites rankings, it may just be that there's not enough to have triggered a warning message, or as mentioned before they've simply been devalued.

What was it that caused the popularity around this particular blog post?
Do you mean that the decline in overall site traffic is down to a decline in traffic to this specific post? Or that it just correlates with the decline?

Hi Novos Jay,

Do the shady backlinks you mentioned still exist and point to the site?
Have you used the disavow tool at all?

The reason I ask is that it might just simply be down to the fact that the links that were holding the rankings and traffic up previously, are now gradually being devalued through various algorithm updates, so in spite of your recent work to do the right thing, there's still going to be an overall negative effect.

Perhaps with a little more information about the types of links (the shady ones) and quantity/% of the total backlinks, I/others might be able to give you some more specific ideas on what's happened?

Thanks,
Greg

Hi Sara,

It looks like it's an update being pushed out over a number of weeks:
http://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-confirmed-16981.html
& http://www.seroundtable.com/mozcast-update-not-really-16995.html

Thanks,
Greg

Hi Carla, yes it's possible to merge Pages that represent the same thing and have similar names, so in this case it looks like it should be no problem at all...

1. Make sure you're using Facebook as yourself and not as your Page. Go to the Page you want to keep.
2. From the top of your Page, click Edit Page 
3. Select Edit Settings
4. Select Merge Pages and click Merge duplicate Pages
5. Fill out the form and click Send

https://www.facebook.com/help/249601088403018/

What's causing the blog posts to rank above the product pages? Better information? More in-depth photos? Reviews? More content in general? If it's any of these, then think about you can apply these positives to the product pages so people start sharing and linking to those more.

Hi Demetrios,

As the other replies have said, no, it's definitely not typical. I would be a little concerned if this is a typical contract clause for this developer.

Thanks,
Greg

As others have said, definitely the new/tweaked version, it's a big improvement, nice work!
Greg

No worries, thanks for the reply anyway, all sorted now.

That's worked this time, perhaps it was a glitch in my connection or Firefox.
Thanks!

No, I mean the links within your own profile (eg. you have metapilot.com on your profile).
Thanks, Greg

I tried that but had no luck, will give it another try, thanks.

Hi Alan,

One option you might not have considered is buying a pre-buiilt premium responsive theme, either as HTML/CSS templates, or a Wordpress theme, then customize the design to suit from there. Some of the big theme marketplaces like ThemeForest have premium themes focused on holiday rentals, so I can imagine you'll find something suitable. This should reduce your costs quite a lot, whilst still allowing you to keep up with the competition.

Let me know if you would like any further advice on this.
All the best, Greg

Hi,

Do the sites have the same company name in the page titles, or elsewhere on the pages? Do you already link between the sites, or are they run entirely independently from each other?

Having trouble trying to edit my listed websites in my Moz.com profile, there's no delete/save button for the custom links panel, and the main save buttons don't seem to have any link to the links box.

Any help appreciated!
Thanks, Greg

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/pros-and-cons-of-watermarked-images.html

"Will Google rank an image differently just because it's watermarked?
Peter: Nope. The presence of a watermark doesn't itself cause an image to be ranked higher or lower."

Good point Russ, I guess the days of being able to analyze your links from a purely % point of view are numbered, if not, over.

Sorry Gareth, misread on that part, how many posts/pages are there within the category you're looking to change? Does the category level have many links pointing in?