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Hi,

Do they both do/sell the same thing?

Which one has most visits?

Why do they want to merge them?

I would work on the assumption that it will affect the rankings on desktop too and if you have time to make your site responsive in time then I would - it covers all bases then.

Also, as mobile searches are increasing it makes sense to go responsive as soon as you can.

Hi,

What's the best way to deal with old news on a website. We don't want to take it off of the website but the news section will look ever bigger if we don't do something. Is there a good way of archiving?

(The news is currently all under a 'news' tab in the top nav).

Thanks

There's also http://httpstatus.io/

Hi,

Paid positive reviews are definitely not what they want to see but it's a bit less clear about paid impartial reviews as you aren't trying to influence what to write. I'd still steer clear though and find ways to encourage genuine reviews with the money saved. Given that you may end up paying for a bad or neutral review I don't see the point.

If you have Google Analytics (or similar) take a look at where the traffic is coming from and compare it to any historical data if you have it.

It could be something happened online like better rankings or a buzz about you on social media as Don said a link in a forum or it could be something offline like a newspaper or magazine article on you or even a mention on TV. Check referrers in Analytics.

If you have been at any trade shows that could also have driven traffic. Check 'city' report in Analytics.

If it's possible you may also be able to implement a 'where did you hear about us' question at some point - either when people come to buy something or as an after sales thing. That would help for future.

All good news for you though as you said but it's better to know why it happened so you can do more of it.

Hope that helps

Hi,

If I understand correctly, I wouldn't add anything to your main/home page URL. You could always add to the info on the page or the meta tags where it makes sense to.

A specific page for debt settlement would be best which would then be /debtsettlement

I would add that if you are going to have user generated content, make sure there's a review process so it doesn't get spammed/abused.

I don't think it's s a problem for you but there's more info here: http://moz.com/community/q/why-should-your-title-and-h1-tag-be-different

How do you mean 'is this bad' - what aspect?

It's not great that your meta description is the same on each page. It should describe the page, not be generic to the whole site.

Hi,

That should be enough to stop the search engines crawling and indexing the test site.

Remember to take it off when you go live though.

Hi,

If the dev site can't be crawled (which is generally the idea), it doesn't matter what you call the URL's on the test site.

If the URL's on the old site are good, keep the same names for the new one to avoid the need for 301's. If the URL's could be better though, change them but 301 the old pages to the relevant new ones.

Hope that helps

Hi, if you can get yours indexed first it would be seen as the original - otherwise it's difficult to tell.

Linda's answers sounds good and yes it does count as duplicate.

Hopefully they will agree to implement the tags as it shows you as the source and not them. Google doesn't always know which site something came from in the first place.

I'd 301 it if it has trust and no spam.

I'd look at doing the redirects to the most relevant pages though rather than just the home page - as you say the content is similar to what you have - it shouldn't be too hard to match up the important pages.

As others have said, alerts will come to you based on the search terms and frequency you have told Google - you can change these if the results emailed to you aren't what you are looking for.

In terms of what it means, all it means is that the web pages have matched the terms you asked for.  It doesn't mean the pages are of any set quality or ranking.

Alerts are great for tracking mentions of your brand and those of competitors.

Hi

Check out this http://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-link

Good advice above but I'd also ask him to educate you in SEO and his plan for marketing your site. Any SEO should be able to explain what they are doing for you and why - you are after all paying for them and it shouldn't be a 'dark art'.

If they don't help you, try and educate yourself using the great resources on this site and get another SEO...

Ideally you don't want a redirect chain. It's best to redirect the old page to the new, missing out the middle one.

Redirect the middle page to the new too.

Hope that helps

Disability topics definitely sound like the way to go as Egol said. They help set your client up as an authority on the subject, building trust with potential clients.

The (unique) content could also be used on other sites helping get the name of your client out to a wider audience.

Not sure that fishing etc will help unless you can link those topics to what he does.

Good luck