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Wow that's a helluva return! Impressive. I had no idea people actually respond to PRWeb articles. That's fantastic. Obviously less now, but still... Thanks for this thread.

Hmmm... How is this site built? Are you coding, is it in a CMS (Wordpress, joomla, etc) or do you have a web designer doing this for you?

Interesting. I've never seen PRWeb work well for anything post "GET ME A LINK NAO!" era. Can you elaborate on how the 4 PRs per day in the financial sector get good results? What benefit do you gain from them and how do you  measure the results of press release distribution? Reposts, conversions, etc?

Thanks.

Are you sure the old one isn't archived and existing somehow without your knowledge?

Nope. Does not matter.

Well the reason Google has picked the www version as it's preferred version automatically is most likely because of all the links you mentioned that were already pointing to that iteration of your domain. Google can figure this out on their own. That said, it still sees both of the sites (non www and www) as duplicates of each other. Best practice is to 301 one to another.

I've waged this war with a programmer before so I know how it goes. The one I dealt with didn't think there was any reason and told me all websites work that way. So I asked him to go to http://google.com and tell me how it resolves. Repeat that step with every major brand you can think of until he/she gets the point and that might help you.

They should be able to 301 this one time, no matter whether they're using an Apache or IIS server. This should be a quick fix. If they're unsure how to do it, have them Google "IIS 301 redirects" if it's a Windows server or "htaccess 301" if it's a Linux/Apache server.

This is an incredibly easy topic to address because you've already laid out exactly what needs to happen.

In other words, yes! That strategy is exactly the way you should go.

Good job and good luck!

302 passes no link juice

Just to clarify - the topic creator was asking about image title tags, not regular title tags, and my response was that the title tags embedded in images do not carry much weight. The alt tag itself carries a bit more.

Of course a page title tag is probably the single most important thing on a page... But that wasn't what was asked here.

Just wanted to clarify so my original post wasn't misunderstood.

Thanks all!

No problem Simon! This community is always happy to help!

I'm just one of many here. C'mon back there are tons of smart marketers here with awesome insights.

mmmm. ice creaaammmm...

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!

Alt tags still carry benefit. Title tags not so much. That said, be wary of keyword stuffing.

Well as for the 404s, I would run the site through Screaming Frog and see what I get. If you find 404s there, then redirects and edits will be needed to fix them. Otherwise forget about the GWT report.

I think the most important thing for you to do (besides an overall marketing campaign) is fix those duplicate page titles and descriptions. This is a huge factor, undoubtedly.

A PPC campaign (executed properly) can always help, but you shouldn't lean on it as your fix to your marketing campaign. It is only another spoke in the wheel of your overall efforts.

Hope this helps.

• Site redesign happened around June - Don't matter

• We are not doing a lot of off-site and link building in 2013, besides social activities and content distribution to partner sites (top links from OSE are gained long time ago) **   - This is your problem.**

• GWT crawls errors are clean (besides 404s) **   - That's not clean. Fix those 404s.**

• No manual actions from Google or penalty notifications **   - Good. But doesn't always mean the algo isn't hurting you.**

• Serious fluctuations in indexed content in June, but no real effect on traffic **   - Wondering what your anchor text profile looks like...**

• Removal of old content during August **   - ???**

• Top keywords are dropping (may be caused by category pages removal and flattening site structure) **   - or lack of SEM campaign in general.**

• Robots file disallows only search-generated pages **   - Don't matter**

• No sitemap errors or warnings **   - K**

• 2K of duplicate meta-titles and descs **   - ?! FIX THIS FIRST!! **

I would ask you: What are you doing to promote your site, market your business, and increase traffic?

Yes, they rolled it out a month ago. http://searchengineland.com/google-hummingbird-172816

I think the consensus is nothing much has changed on our end. That's certainly what I'm seeing.

This is more of a their-end overhaul from what I understand.

Well I think when you say "possibly help with content" you are on the right track but you should focus more on which of these agencies can DEFINITELY help with content, because most of the other things you are looking for (google placement, site traffic, etc) are all results of awesome content creation and curation. That's what the best SEM agency will do for you.

Personally I am partial to Portent and Distilled because I know some of the fine people there and they are so awesome at all of the aforementioned and more. They have true authorities on the matter working for and running their companies. They are top-dollar, however, but worth every penny.

Honestly they are not the end-all be-all. There are many great SEM companies out there. That list is a great place to start. But mostly I just wanted to say you should really think about who can create the right kind of content for your brand and help you develop your messaging best.

Just direct traffic? Not organic?

What's the URL?

Sharing the URLs themselves should help us to quickly narrow it down as well.