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Ok yes.  Thank you!  All makes sense. Long term we'd love to have people landing on the notebook page for the appropriate search term.  It would make a nicer customer journey, and the user would feel like they were 'in the right place'. But short term as you say, we'll focus on what's ranking and go with that momentum. Thanks again! Isaac.

Here is my take on this! In my personal opinion all TLDs are similar in the eye of Google it’s just that people tend to consider .edu, .gov and .org links more authoritative and link to it naturally as compare to .com and .net domains and which is why special TLDs tend to win the race but this is not always the case. My advice is to see if the org domain has a good and clean link profile and if they are getting a link from quality sources, then go for it and if not the idea is to pass it like any other non-quality domain you pass. In my opinion, saying that Google give importance to some domains as compare to others is nothing but a myth. Hope this helps!

Thank you for your response.  There is clearly some great advice which I will apply. However, it's just popped up on the top page for 'mid year diaries 15-16'. Panic over  But it's great that we have some other things we can now apply to the page. Thank you very much

Lol, thanks!

Hi Dirk.  Thank you so much again for your response. Yes we must get your whole site sorted for our mobile users.  But like you say focusing on the landing pages are essential  Better get cracking! Thanks again Isaac.

Links are nofollow and are brand-name-based. In my opinion a link that generate referral traffic is always good link, also in the eyes of Google I would not worry about it

Anytime!

Great Stuff! Thank you for your time guys.

Thank you so much for this detailed response, and linking to those essays.  What an invaluable resource.

Yeah i agree with Hutch42, aim to create content which is high quality and people will genuinely want to link to it. The blog would also allow you to target the content much more effectively. Do some keyword research and figure out what kind of things people are searching for in your industry and create some unique content around this.

Backlinks are going to matter much, much more than number of pages. Don't use subdomains; they share almost no domain authority with the parent domain.  AND, you aren't as likely to get a country-specific boost as if you used a country-specific TLD,  Possibly you're just unclear on the difference: if so, here you go: the subdomains are qualifiers to the left of the domain (e.g. www., blog., etc.) and TLDs are the right side of the domain (e.g. .com, .org, .co.uk, etc.). E.g. use www.toaddiaries.ca instead of ca.toaddiaries.com. If the content is really similar across the various countries, i.e. it's just translated, you should use rel=canonical (pointing to the country-specific page) and hreflang alternate (in ALL pages, pointing to all of the other versions of the page).  See Maile's talk on this here. Pay close attention to the distinctions between LANGUAGE and COUNTRY, e.g. spanish versions might exist for dozens of countries, and those differences matter.

Understood.  Thank you so much Andy.  This info is invaluable to use as a small company. Isaac.

Thanks so much guys, really helpful. Will a 301 pass this "age trust", or any other trust factors?   I'm moving over from a long establish domain,  about 4 years old.  It's a flash site though, so i want to convert to something more SEO friendly.  Also how long does it take to gain trust? Got some high quality backlinks (only about 20 but very relevant).  The 301 will help pass the "link juice" right? Cheers. Isaac.

Thank you so much!  Yes that does help indeed. One small question if i may? I maybe have 20 backlinks to the site, but all high quality and very relevant.  I would keep almost all the value of these links wouldn't I? And wouldn't it bowd well because Google 'knows' I've been around for a while? Thanks. Isaac.

Hi Issac, Keyword cannibalisation is pretty much exactly that. This is why it is important for pages to be as unique as possible. The two below are sort of a similar thing, except the first one refers to linking to your key pages from a product page by way of a short sentence that has a link with some nice on-topic anchor text leading off. On your product pages, have a text link back to the key page that isn't the crumb-trail. You can also do this from other pages closer to the homepage Internal Links to your key pages -Andy