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No way. Not at all. Not only that, but it would definitely get you less clicks even if you did get better rankings.

Always remember: Your page's title is the thing your potential customer/user/client will be clicking on to first visit your page. This is a very important point of first contact in the digital marketing world. Think about the way you search and what gets you to click on links from Google. I bet it's somewhere around 95% based on the title present.

If you were Googling "Xbox One Games" and saw:

• Xbox+One+Games+Review+PS4+Games
• Xbox One Games Reviewed and Uncovered

Which one would you click?

That's fine, if that's your branding. Not sure why you need the ".com" part unless you're like expedia or somebody who often emphasizes their dot-comness. But guess what.. they don't even include the .com in their title tags.

You're skipping the most important part here though. The branding you stick on at the end doesn't matter NEARLY as much as what you're doing with the rest of the title tag. This is where you get to pitch your page to your potential customer. It is quite possibly the single most important point of messaging on your entire site. Take great care with your Title tags and you'll see positive results.

You need to pick one and 301 everything to it. It really doesn't matter if you go with the www version or the non-www version. That can be up to you or the client. But you need to explain to these web developers that they are absolutely incorrect and that it very much IS an SEO issue. A huge one in fact.

Explain to them that even though all of the listed URL variations are indeed drawing from the same source HTML file, Google doesn't know or care about that and will see each and every one of those variants as a duplicate site indexed separately. This leads to penalties.

Furthermore, your link juice gets spread between them all. So if you have a link built to domain.com and another link to www.domain.com, the authority is split between them and you're basically competing with yourself 4+ times.

301 redirects solve this and every single website in the history of ever does (or should be) doing this. Ask your web developers to pick a major/semi-major brand and try accessing the different versions of said brand. try www.nike.com and http://nike.com - ask them how that resolves...

Silly that they would say that, but this should give you the reasoning to convince them otherwise. And if they still say no... They should be doing what you ask seeing as how your client is paying them and all...

Good luck!

Uhh... Good luck with that.

Isn't that what Moz Pro is for?

Yeah Mike is right on as usual here.

I just want to point out a quick way to find out how many actual links are sitting on any given page (keep in mind this won't be exact but it'll be close.)

USING CHROME:

1. Right click the page and select "View Source"
2. Hit CTRL+F
3. Type in<a href <="" span=""></a>
   <a href <="" span=""></a>

<a href <="" span="">Boom. You'll have yourself a number of results and that's how many links you have, cloaked or not cloaked, give or take.

This is easier to look at I feel like and a fun little (maybe obvious, sorry if so) tip.

Good luck!</a>

Your homepage has this tag in your header:

name='robots' content='noindex,nofollow' />

That's your problem. Remove that.

Not for link building, only if you think readers of the blogs might find your site relevant and click said link. In this case it would definitely be worth your time as you are getting true traffic to your site from people interested, which after all is the ultimate goal. But from an SEO standpoint, it will do nothing to increase your keyword ranking in search engines.

In other words, yes and no.

You dropped just 2 positions?? Consider yourself lucky and go build some organic, natural links!

Well that's too bad. First off I find that very odd he would keep the old site live. I would yank that immediately after I 301'd my link profiles. If you have ANY incoming links that you find relevant or worthwhile you need to have those redirected to the appropriate pages on your new site. Yoast can do that.

Drop that subdomain. The Way-back machine is always there if you need to reference it, but also you should have it backed up locally just in case.

The sitemap isn't a huge issue, Google will crawl your site assuming there are a few links incoming. As for why your SERPs dropped, that could be due to any number of things. You've got some decent links coming in, but of course we could all use more so get to content building and promoting for sure.

You might want to look at what your old sites did differently in terms of keyword placement. Titles, Headers, Ratio, etc are all important. Just keep in mind it needs to stay natural while clearly being about your targeted keyword. This should be easy enough to do. If I'm writing about bankruptcy that word is going to pop up organically plenty of times. Just make sure it's in your URLs, H1s, Titles, etc. The Moz on-page reports can help with this.

This is all I got right now.. Hope it's at least a tiny help.

You got Penguined my friend. In case you've somehow missed it, the 2.0 update rolled out last night, at the exact same time your SERP dropped. Not a coincidence, I'm afraid.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/penguin-2-0-rolled-out-today/

well you can find out how it's been indexed by typing in your domain. For example, if your domain is www.whoopsee.com then google "whoopsee" and see what it returns.

Regardless, this doesn't matter. What you NEED to do is simply do a redirect. Choose one, www or non-www. I prefer www but others prefer other things. It is not going to hurt you if you perform this redirect right this second, no matter what Google has indexed. If you do NOT perform the redirect... THAT is what will hurt your site.

So.. don't delay and don't worry! You will find that things will improve. Keep this in mind - performing a 301 redirect will pass link juice. Meaning if you point domain.com - www.domain.com then all previous links pointing to domain.com will pass juice to the new permanent redirected www.domain.com

Does this make sense?

Long story short - Your site will not be worsened by this redirect. It will be benefited. Because right now, Google sees them as two different sites and they are competing against eachother and link juice is split between them. Join like Voltron and move forward!

no they aren't coming back and I would suggest not using them. I would also suggest tracking your competitors and using that to your advantage. It might be something you already knew, but you might also find a keyword in there you weren't thinking to target that the Google Keyword Tool produces a surprising number of searches for.

That, by the way, is why you should avoid meta keyword tags.

I have experience attempting to do exactly what you are talking about here with very little result. My company used to buy links from "SubmitEdge" and their link building practices are shady at best. Thousands of terribly written articles, directory submissions, message board comments, and other ridiculous penguin-tastic links built through them.

I spent a good month or two working at getting them to help me in the removal of these links. They pretty much did nothing but inform me that their practices are well-established and in-line with Google's policies.. (untrue. incredibly untrue.) So what I started doing was asking for logins and passwords of the accounts created to go onto ridiculous message boards and post terrible links. The beautiful thing is they were able to give me lists of everywhere they built a link. And for the articles, they supplied me with usernames and passwords. This meant several weeks worth of work for me to go through each one and remove the articles and links.

However I was left with all the social links and directory links. Some of the article links also did not allow me to login and upon further review the blog sites owned by Submit Edge were the ones I couldn't log in to. I went back and forth with them and they eventually stopped responding to me and would not help me log in to those. They still exist to this day... I've yet to disavow because I haven't seen results of any penalties but I have this all documented of course.

Anyway I digress... The point is, you can battle all you want and it might get you a little further but ultimately they are going to do very little and claim they have done nothing wrong the entire time. (This is my experience with only one company of course.) It is frustrating to say the least. Especially when I know they could just ask their staff member what "djnaro23" password is so I could go through forumland and remove all the stupid links. But no..

One more note -- I ended up trying to guess a lot of these passwords for the aforementioned social links I was unsuccessful with. I will say that they are incredibly lazy people and several of the logins ended up being simple passwords. I literally copied the username and used it as the password and this worked about 33% of the time.

In summation, good friggin luck getting them to do any work for you; they will most likely refer you to their paid link-removal service which is a huge scam. However you should be able to garner a bit of information and hopefully some logins which will give you the ability to go back and remove them yourself. Or at least, as in my experience, remove SOME of them...

Fun, huh?

Ooops - Mark beat me to it. Sounds like he and I are on the same page pretty much. I'd drop that old site entirely though. The CSS is broken and it looks awful. Just make sure those 301s are in place.

And here's why you were penalized via the Penguin update right here: http://gyazo.com/8b4c324ddc8b83d5be4f746b42dfa550.png

Get to removing the bad links.. Keep good ones, but build a more diverse anchor text. This is not a manual penalty for you it is recoverable. Build natural links and remove the unnatural.

Mike is right.

And it's a pretty dang long title. Too long, really. That could be part of what's going on. But in any case I honestly think your title needs work to begin with. Google's is slightly better even.

Make it read a bit more humanly while still conveying the message you desire. Remember this is the single most important line in your entire site as it is what people will click on to visit your site.

Think about what makes people click on your link and why. What are they looking for? Do they want to know that your systems are battery operated? Do they only care about police approval? Is there a better way to condense this and combine the messaging? What about your branding? Shouldn't that be more prominent?

Spend a ton of time experimenting with this title tag. It is so incredibly important.

I know I've told you this before and I'm becoming the Title-Tag Police around here but you can do so much better with that. There are several things that drive me crazy from a users' perspective with your title:

1.) Keyword stuffed.. Seems like a robot wrote it; not human

2.) Capitalization. Sometimes you capitalize the first letters like a title would and sometimes you don't. This inconsistency makes your page look amateurish and drives my OCD grammar-police brain crazy!

Just trying to help... Good luck!

So it's hard to tell by that graph as the date range isn't listed, but it seems that this is a relatively new site, right? Like maybe 3 weeks old? You might just be feeling the effects of the Google Honeymoon (Thanks to Marie for that term)

Google will bump your SERPs way up when you're  new and then you'll fall back down. That's pretty typical. Your domain authority is 17, you have 7 linking root domains with 22 total links. That's very very small. I'm assuming your targeted keywords are pretty high competition so I'd say you just need to keep building awesome content and gaining legit links.

I couldn't find an example of the duplicated content but didn't spend a ton of time with the site after seeing the small link report. This could also be affecting you but I'd guess it's more of what I was just saying. You just need to get your online marketing campaign into full gear!

Yes. As Kurt said the DA and link-juice will carry over via 301 redirects meaning whichever site is redirected will benefit the site that it's redirecting to. If I were you I'd redirect to the site that's currently being ranked well in Google as this will limit any fluctuation you may have in the SERPs. Even though the other domain has a longer legacy, if it isn't currently being listed in SERPs for your target keyword then you might be waiting awhile for the whole thing to propagate and sort itself out.

Hope this helps.

What Google definitely does recognize is the exact services you are considering. Google's webspam team developed Penguin specifically to target sites that have subbed out SEO to blackhat organizations. What you are describing is exactly what they are targeting.

Don't do it! You WILL be sorry.