Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for all the responses! Much appreciated.

Yep.

Hi  Karl If it is a brand new PPC account with no or very little history I would advise you to start bidding on brand terms only to build up your quality score. Use exact and phrase match only. Once your CPC has come down a bit do your generic keywords research and try to find keywords that are a) relevant to your brand and its target audience, b) have decent search volume and c) affordable d)are present on the landing page of your PPC campaign. You might have to select / create several landing pages for your PPC tailed for individual PPC ad groups each with its set of narrowly themed keywords. Keywords' components like "luxury", high-end", "quality", "designer" etc may be relevant, but it depends on your product category and brand. You can also right away add certain keywords to negative list e.g. second-hand, cheap, ebay, gumtree, amazon etc, basically all the keywords that are opposite of luxury and premium.

I don't know. A good decision would require me to understand the content history, SEO history, and technical history (CMS, htaccess, canonical) of both domains.  I would need study the site and talk with all of the people who have done these things and compile that history as it occurred through time.   I would then get technical advice from a consultant who really really knows the technical details and be willing to pay them for research and study. That history would be only as good as what the people who did the work were willing to share and could remember.  I would not be comfortable with that information, because, the people who did the work have methods and views that are very different from mine. One thing that I can say with certainty.  When I was done with this site the ecommerce pages would be reduced to product pages and a very small number of category pages.  That is all. Would that fix the problem?  I don't know, because I would worry that penalties and technical problems in the history of the site still hang over it.

Just a quick question, the client in question, in their wisdom, decided to put the US website live without telling me and our UK rankings have dropped significantly, do you think the tag will start to fix this?

Hi Karl, I second Dany's advice. Additionally, and while it doesn't give you the direct data you are asking for, you can use Google Analytics Flow Reports to get a better idea of what your readers are looking for. Since you had mentioned conversions, this type of data will give you insights beyond just click numbers, and help you optimize the most sought after content. -Josh

Just wanted to clear up a bit of confusion. There is a difference between what can be redirected and what will be indexed by search engines. It is absolutely possible to redirect the old URL to the new one that includes the local anchor (hash). In this way, user experience is preserved as for example, the old "what is matcha" page can be redirected directly to the new "what is matcha" tab, landing the user exactly where they expect to be. This is done in .htaccess as normal, but don't forget to escape the # symbol in the URL when you write the redirect. But as Schwaab says, Google will index all the tabs' content as if they were all one page. If you look at the page source for any of those the tabbed pages, you'll see it's actually one primary page that includes separate sections for each tab - you can use GWT's Fetch as Googlebot to confirm this. So getting the main URL indexed means all the tabs' content are indexed, just not under separate URLs. Having separate pages each targeting different but related matcha-related keywords can be beneficial, but so can having a single, longer-content, authoritative page with many more incoming links (as would be the case if the old separate pages were redirected to one primary page, consolidating all their separate link authority). That becomes a judgment call and is where the "art of SEO" come into play Hope that helps? Paul P.S. Little quirk of local anchor URLs. If you're adding parameters to them such as Google Analytics tracking for incoming links, you need to add the hash after the parameters, or the local anchor won't work. e.g. mysite.com#localanchor becomes mysite.com?utmsource=foo&utm_medium=foo&utm_campaign=bar#localanchor

Yes, you would most probably give them your IP, except that if they are an agency you would not want them to still have domain control - So just personally, I would get registrar access and get it switched to network solutions or some host like that. Then, once the registrar transfer is complete, then you have control to point the domain where-ever you want.

Thanks Phil, I've used join.me in the past when trying to show clients reports etc so I'll give that a go.

The concept at the back of it's miles terrifi. And if there's interest in something like this, we're going to surely start working through some thoughts and get more feedback approximately it from the network!

We use bing and see the same as Stephen and Branden report, however for our market segment (Financial) we also find this chanel to be better risk with lower bad rates. Evidently not sure how this would correlate to other segments but an interesting behaviour for us.

Ok, thanks Peter, really appreciate the advice! Ill give that a go and see if that brings down the errors on the website.

This question is probably best to ask in its own question, rather than appending on to this one (as it's about a year old). If you can add some more context, that'd be really helpful. Thanks!

Hi Chris, Thanks for the reply. We have seen a few drops in rankings since the unconfirmed update last week so I've noted all our current rankings so I can compare them once the changes have been made. We have been SEO'ing the website for a while now but the web company made some changes to their CMS and messed things up!

Thanks EGOL, very much appreciate your time. I think I'll have to do a little more research with my clients then because it will obviously mean more budget to be allocated.

Ah, thanks Rich. I think I've know which one is mine! Time to implement....fingers crossed...!

Thanks for your reply Ian, yeah I was reading that on SEL. I guess we have to just sit back and wait for Google to play along!

Hi Tom, I know, we always make sure that we are doing ethical link building and to ensure the quality is high then you get some cowboy SEO-ers doing this and getting rewarded for it!! I guess I just have to put my hopes in Google and the fact that they'll (one day!) figure them out and all will be well!! I can hope anyway!

Thanks guys, much appreciated. Think I'll implement the canonical tag.