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Seems fine to me as long as you keep everything in the same case (preferably lower case) and use the exact file structure you had before.

If you're worried, use the redirect tracker at WhereGoes.com to verify that it is working.

Not currently. You would need to download the CSV each month, and compare via Excel. Not terribly hard to do once you've got a process in place.

There are other tools that will do this, some better than others. Raven is the most popular toolset that offers this feature that I am aware of. They're a competitor to SEOMoz, but they also offer Open Site Explorer link data, so I'm assuming it's still in good taste to mention that one on here.

Responded in the other thread per your request - hope I got all of your points from this thread:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/is-it-better-to-have-urls-of-internal-pages-that-are-geo-targeted-or-point-geo-targeted-links-to-the-homepage#post-117343

Option 1:

One option would be to set up a normal 301 redirect and have a pop-up message on the new site that explains the branding change to all new visitors.

Option 2:

Another solution would be to set up all 301 redirects to forward to the new URL + a tracking parameter, such as http://www.newdomain.com?redirected=true.

You could then instruct Google to ignore the tracking tag by (A) not displaying the parameter in the canonical tag, and (B) telling Google to ignore the parameter via Google Webmaster Tools.

You should be able to display a message when that parameter is present, and when they click through to another page on the new site, it can go away.

A variation on this would be to do the same thing and use normal Google Analytics UTM tracking parameters. Google will definitely know to ignore those and you should be able to display a popup based upon those as well

Theoretically option 2 shouldn't cause any problems. In an ideal world, you would test this first.

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There are probably other options that would work - but those two come to mind first.

Does this message need to be permanent or is the client ok with leaving it up temporarily?

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In case you haven't already, take a look over the rest of Google's suggestions on migrating the domain: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83105

If it's included in the SEOMoz directory list, and if it's relevant to your site, then it's a quality site.

The second questions becomes, which of those is the most valuable, and how much is it worth?

The first part is relatively easy - look at the Domain Authority and then the Page Authority of the most likely page that you'd be on. Rank them high to low. Don't worry about Pagerank, it's infrequently updated and somewhat unreliable. Get the SEOMoz toolbar and focus on those metrics.

Value is also going to be related to content of the directory. Big wide open directories like DMOZ and Yahoo Directory aren't really used by actual people, they're just quality links. On the other hand, vertical niche directories are often great sources of traffic, and they're highly relevant links. Domain quality metrics like PA/DA might not be as high, but that's OK, the value goes beyond PA/DA.

So, how much is it worth? That's probably going to tie in to your budget. When I see high value directories (in terms of traffic or link metrics) that only cost $20-50 as a one time fee, there's a decent chance I'll jump on it. If it's a recurring annual fee, my best recommendation is to gauge the value based upon potential traffic, and try to ignore the link metrics. If you think it's worth it for the traffic alone, then try it out for a year or whatever the minimum time period is.

As far as number of directory links, just spread it out amongst your other link building. Spend more time producing content than you do link building, and you'll be OK.

1 - Can't say regarding nofollow - you could always try adding rel="nofollow" to the <area> tag and give it a shot.

Whether the links are followed depends on whether they're indexed. In my opinion, they shouldn't have any issue crawling the links. If you look at the source code of a page with an image map on it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_map for example) you'll see that the links are pretty clearly listed (and in Chrome's source code view they're even hyperlinked - which alone suggests they should be crawling them just fine.)

That said, I have not tested this, and I can't find any references to actual testing done online.

If I were you, I would test this by doing the following:

1. Create an image map somewhere on your site (we'll call it the Map Page).
2. Link that image map to a 2nd page of the site that is not linked anywhere else on the Map Page.
3. Feel free to tweet the URLs of both pages to speed up the indexation process.
4. Go in to Google Webmaster Tools, and see if a link is reported to the 2nd Page from the Map Page.
5. If there isn't, double check the cache date of the Map Page to see if it's after the image map was added to the page.

• If you go through that test, and GWT doesn't report a link from the Map Page to the 2nd Page, then I would go ahead and use the image map, but I would also add text links on the page to ensure your optimal site structure is in place.
• If GWT does report the link, then that seem sufficient to me, so long as you specify the alt and title text for each individual link since that will function as your anchor text.

2 - The image will probably be considered one image as far as indexing in Google Images (would be strange if they indexed portions of the image), however the alt and title attributes should behave more like multiple images.

3 - I would just do the test I described above and you should be set. Also, take a look at what popular websites using Image Maps do in this situation. National real estate listing sites are a common one for image maps IIRC.

Well, it could just be that lots of organic search traffic was finding you through blog posts and resource content and then leaving the site right away. That's normal and OK - it can mean that they found what they wanted and then left. I wouldn't worry about that as a ranking factor - I doubt that it's going to cause any significant change in rankings in your niche.

Luke makes a good point. In certain industries (vacation rentals comes to mind) almost all referral traffic will come from paid directories. In this industry, the big companies will spend 200-500 per years on sites like VRBO and Tripadvisor because it absolutely makes financial sense to do so, regardless of any SEO benefits.

In other words, don't let link metrics get in the way of making a good business decision.

+1 for Corey's response. Different categories, different levels of corruption, and many categories are without editors.

I'll add that you can often get added as a volunteer editor for a category if your intent seems to be in line with their guidelines. Never hurts to try.

So, for the most part I don't see any issue with this.

The only thing that comes to mind is that all 4 domains would suddenly be on a single IP address. While that's fine for the brands that aren't competing with each other, it looks like there are a few store location in KY under competing brand names. In the event that there are geographic areas where you have competing locations that are suddenly on the same IP address, I could potentially see one of the domains being affected if the SERP for "city name KY mattresses" is highly competitive. I don't have any tests I can point you towards to support this, it's primarily a theory that Google might display just 1 in the interest of domain diversity. That said, I wouldn't worry about it too heavily.

Another option is a paid service such as ManageWP.com. This would allow you to manage multiple Wordpress installations on separate servers and mitigate any unforeseen consequences of having the domains on a single IP address. I can't say that the risk of experiencing issues simply due to server IP address is enough to justify the expense, however, so that should show you that I'm not very worried about the IP consideration overall.

I'm guessing that because they have an exact match domain, where CadeirasTiffany.com.br matches the search term "cadeiras tiffany" exactly, Google is showing additional results for their site because it appears to be especially relevant.

You can definitely still beat them, but since they have a slight advantage you'll have to do a good job with both on-site optimization as well as building more quality links than they have.

OK, so assuming that the large jump in links is coming from internal links, here are a few ways that Wordpress might create that many pages:

• Creating an extreme number of categories (more than 20-30) while using permalinks that contain /%category%/ and applying posts to multiple categories.
• Using a theme that contains parameterized URLs such as ?reply-to-comment at the end of every comment reply button.
• Using a strange permalink setting that causes issues.

If all of those pages are really new internal URLs then I suppose it could have confused Google and affected your rankings but since I have not dealt with such an extreme amount of duplicate content added so quickly I couldn't say for sure.

There are also plenty of ways that you could have triggered that many external links. Any sidebar or footer link on a large site could easily add thousands of links. I highly doubt this type of link would have caused a ranking drop on its own - it's no different than someone adding you to their blogroll.

This is a difficult question to answer properly without looking at the site or the exact links, because all I can do is list of lots of hypothetical causes. If you'd like to include the domain or PM it to me I'm happy to look at the website itself.

Hey James,

Seems like this may be troubling you still. I see 6000+ urls still indexed under the old domain.

A couple other things to try:

1. Make sure the domain is properly marked as changed in the Google Webmaster Tools backend.
2. Link reclamation (changing links from the old domain to the new one) is valuable and should be done, but the fact that you haven't done it yet won't stop the transfer process from working properly.

Let me know if you have other questions I can take a look.

Assuming that the directories are indeed low quality, I'd say that you probably wouldn't be penalized for it, they'd be more likely to just devalue those links. The odds might increase if you were overzealous with exact match anchor text in your links, but that would probably be more of an issue with anchor text than an issue with those specific directories.

I have clients that ask me this question (eg "how can I add quantity links to the quality stuff you're working on?") and I tell them to go ahead and do it if they're determined to do it, but the ROI of time spent is minimal in most cases. Some go ahead and do it anyways, which is fine in most cases as long as they're avoiding spammy practices and using branded anchor text.

Blog commenting, forum posting, and spending time answering Q&A sites can be effective and produce a good return - but the value is in the click-through, not the nofollowed links. They're rarely effective tasks to hire out to a VA unless that person has an understanding of your product and native English skills. You need to be able to provide value above and beyond the generic comments with an obvious link or cry for attention that most people use.

Here's one decent way to interact in forums, provide value, and see a decent ROI: http://pointblankseo.com/ecommerce-forum-link-building. Emphasis is on "interact" and "provide value" - without those two things you're just another spammer. The same concepts can be applied to blog comments and Q&A sites.

GWT will take awhile to update sometimes, as mentioned above. Are you still having trouble with this or have the errors started to decrease?

Aside from that, if Moz isn't reporting a duplicate title or duplicate meta description, issue, I would guess that GWT is simply reporting old data still or something along those lines.

I'm going to mark as answered for the moment but jump back on here and let me know if you're still having trouble - happy to take a look.

As a follow up to this question, you need to take a look at Dr. Pete's article on the Penguin update:

Penguins, Pandas, and Panic at the Zoo

Correct, I don't see a duplication issue.

Hi Sarwans,

Did Anders' answer help resolve the problem? From the sitemap page he linked to, it looks like the minimum information you need to provide includes:

• Title ✓
• Description ✓
• Play page URL ✓
• Thumbnail URL ✓
• Raw video file URL and/or the video player URL

You're sending the video file page as which looks correct, but as Anders mentioned, I think you need to specify and/or video:player_loc</video:player_loc> as well.

You're right, but don't get totally caught up in the follow/nofollow, it's not the only value provided by the links and if it's a driving force in your link building, you're probably missing out on some valuable nofollowed links.

That said, here's a better answer to your original question - a more complete list compiled in March 2011:

http://www.searchrank.com/blog/2011/03/ultimate-social-media-profile-chart.html

There may be others once you finish those - this SERP has a few articles that might contain more options:

https://www.google.com/search?q=followed+profile+links+social+media