Hi Robert

Many thanks for taking the time to answer

It was just a domain name change

What we did was a URL Change where all the relevant URLS got to their new names in just a couple of lines of code Like in Ians example, I cant post the code yet as its the weekend and my developer is not working

You state i should have done this URL to URL however the sites has 17k pages

I Know In Open site explorer it sees the 301 however when you use the crawl test tool it does not and this is what maid me ask this question again and its that which bothers me the most

My site prior had a DA of 68 and PA of 62 (but even if you check the pages in Google Pr for the home page is showing 1 where it used to be 4 but the inner pages are between 2 and 3 so it just seems the home page is suffering

Guys

I really have an issue that i know have but cannot see if that makes sense.

Basically 3 months ago i did a site wide 301 from economyleasinguk.co.uk to www.economy-car-leasing.co.uk

Every thing looks good get all the correct header responses , all canonicals work perfectly , Google webmaster tools is updated fetch as google bot shows the old site is 301

I tried the seomoz crawl test today on the old domain and got this message

Oh no! Looks like the page you were trying to access is temporarily down

which at first thought ok because the site was not there it wont do it on an old 301 domain, however i tried it on a domain i know has just been 301'd and i got this message

The URL http://www.site1.com/ redirects to http://site2.com/. Do you want to crawl http://site2.com/ instead?
Would you like to:
Continue with www.site1.com
Continue with site2.com

I really do not know what to do, its either the redirect script is missing something however its doing what it should or the server is a problem but again its doing what it should so why would SEOMOZ not be able to crawl the old URL like it example site above.

Now the strange thing is Open Site Explorer does see the 301 and asks if i want to check the new URL instead

Ps the redirect is done using PHP redirect which i am asking him to change to a htaccess as its now on a apache server and was wondering if this could be an issue, all pages go to correct pages as requested

Thanks in Advance

I do tend to agree the quality In Google has gone downhill, I blogged about this In March after the latest Panda, there have been so many updates it looks like Google has lost its core reason for being the best search engine out there

I predicted that profits from Google would rise from those last updates as you have genuine businesses that were doing ok on Google demoted to the nether regions to be replaced by garbage sites, non relevant sites or massive brands like Amazon

These business now have to buy their traffic or go under, the same will happen to these garbage sites that have been promoted to the first page their revenue will rise whilst they are there, they will employ more staff to help cope, Google will fix whats currently broken and then cycle continues

Just search for SEO UK , have a look at the backlinks , total manipulation yet been promoted to top spot, the company's earnings have been 10 fold since it's promotion

Hi craig

There is loads you can do, first off get some text on the home page, image only pages do not tend to rank very well

Change titles, you do not need to have your domain name in the title if you are looking to be found lets say the example you gave then a tiltle like

<title><span>Edinburgh Kitchen Fitters, Designers Of </span>Q</span><span><span>uality Kitchens Scotland</span></span><span></title> (each page must be different to rank for its contents)

you need to add a description

As your using word press download the SEO all in Plugin this will help add these Meta Titles, descriptions and help with some other On page SEO elements for you

Just by doing the above there is no reason you wont make page 1 in your local area the competition is fairly low.

Also use the Blog and get some content written regularly, and publish that and article here and there on your own site could do well, or utilise the blog as a diary of current installations, i know a bathroom company that does that and they got all their links from people following and publishing his before and after images and that was enough for them to dominate their local area and booking work out for 6-8 weeks in advance

Good luck the site looks nice but needs content

Hi

It may be worth trying a search in the code of your site for a non http:// on a internal link

For instance search <a <="" span="">href="</a>www.yoursite.com/">

I have seen instances where internal links with a missing http:// will reproduce a 301 and redirect to pages like shown in your example

If the content is followed then yes they will count this, as how will Google know what is a comment and what is not

Its a great way of creating content just be careful you vet what people write as you dont want that content full of foul language and lost of external linking

Good luck i just hope you can keep up with the spammers

I dont think there is a right or wrong answer, except don't do the spam

Some of the best links i ever had i got from a 1 man band and cost me $400 for around 100 links, there were some great gems in there, I have also paid a well established company 10X that fee and got not much more than spam.

• Personally I would go with a bit of a mixture, try some guest blogging, really don't have to be actual blogs but you could approach company's for a link in return for some great content
• You could hire a virtual assistant for $400 per month but do vet anything they will do for you before they do it
• You could submit some great articles or content to your own site and hope they will get linked to

Again all depends on your niche and is such a hard question to ask, if your in the insurance market then 4-5k per month if your a local business then no more than 1k even less

If i have read correctly then i would not have let the old pages over to the new site just to 404 them, also never redirect a whole site to the index

Have you thought about 301 the important pages to their closest match on the new domain, rather than just push all the old site to the index push them to the closest match possible so as you don't waste any of the old link juice.

How long ago did you do the 301?

also noticed hardly any of the new pages have more than 1 or 2 word in the titles,

Is it not possible to rank your contact page for Denver seems like the most obvious place.

I have seen sites with locations based on every page and they seem to be getting away with it, however with the way Google is working its hard to say what they are thinking or what they may do in the future

I don't think it is going to hurt your site as long as it reads well and the way you described them above it looks just fine, however do they really need to be on every page put them on the most relevant page.

Paul

As long as the pages are there it should not be a problem, especially if your just keeping the blog updated, i personally would not link to any page unless its finished.

But to keep a blog updated may not be a bad thing and just add the pages when your ready

It may be a good idea to start the site small with like a home page , contact page and you blog and then add the new directory as you go as not to confuse the search engines

Post your URL , you will have a lot more chance of people responding, as its hard to see without looking at the site and running a few tests

I quite like the new look,

its the first time i viewed the site and the colours look great

you have the email down the right hand side i cannot read it , you need to change the colours, it also looks like you have Google analytics installed twice

I also see many links with the same anchor pointing to different pages, just search hypertension why send the same keyword to different pages, could explain some ranking drops as Google wont know what page to favour for those links, and there are better ways to distribute the sites internal linking

Do you really need 3 forms on one page for a newsletter sign up ?

Other than that great job

And Good luck for the future

Kind of answered my own question to a point

The encoding of a = sign converts to %3D (no idea why SEOMOZ is picking this up on its crawl, the 301 is being done by my htaccess because its an upper case D the 301 it 301's  the upper case to lower case then to a 404 page which is not good, i have fixed this but still wonder why SEOMOZ is seeing the %3D instead of an = sign

It certainly wont harm you having non UK sites linking to you, a lot of the wrong sites may harm you as long as the sites are varied you should have no issues.

If you can find some relevant UK links based around you theme these could do really well for you, but certainly don't discount any link as long as its deemed natural and not a link just for the sake of another link.

HI

SEOmoz has finished crawling the site and surprised me with nearly 4k of 301's

all the 301 are on my deal pages

Example of the 301

http://www.economy-car-leasing.co.uk/van-leasing-deals/ford/transit-lease/transit-lwb-el-minibus-diesel-rwd-high-roof-17-seater-tdci-135ps%3D586165

as you can see from the above URL it returns a 404 but the URL is actually sent as below

http://www.economy-car-leasing.co.uk/van-leasing-deals/ford/transit-lease/transit-lwb-el-minibus-diesel-rwd-high-roof-17-seater-tdci-135ps=586165

For some reason SEOmoz crawler is converting the = to %3d and reporting its a 301 even though it returns 404

Is this an error on SEOMOZ part ? or is there an error on my site

Googlebot when i do a fetch as Google bot returns all on with the = sign and every other tool i have tried is ok too

so not sure why SEOMOZ is seeing it different and then adding the URL as a 301

I am hoping this is just a glitch on the report tool part as im struggling since a recent site 301

HI Doug

Posted twice on this subject and the other 2 are here http://www.seomoz.org/q/301-redirect-how-long-until-the-juice-passes-through-to-new-site

I have checked server logs and response headers and everything looks absolutely correct, not used screaming frog but have used Xeno

I have been complaining for now 10 weeks that i have no traffic since i did the 301, and as i said im only reporting on the new site now which n theory should be 301 clean, except the canonical element part

I am now convinced there is a issue as otherwise the crawl from SEOmoz would not pick up those redirects,

Hi Guys

Posting here again in regard to 301 redirects, SEOMOZ has just finished my second crawl, and its showing me nearly 4k 301 redirects, i am only tracking my new site which by the way changed domain name , however all im doing is tracking the new domain and there are no 301 implemented on that side (Except Canonical), so was wondering how SEOMoz is finding 4k of redirects.

do you think it could be chaining somewhere ? as all the tests look good or could there be a problem with the reporting

Thanks for the replys

@Billy

What i mean by old content wont move, all we have done is change the URL name of the site the new site is a mirror of the old site with all the correct 301's going to the mirrored pages,

Although  all the new site is indexed fully, there are around 100 pages of the old site left no important pages just some really deep linked pages which is normal i think.

My ranking is not ok, it was on the old domain but not the new i am down at least 85% compared to site now and the site as it was.

@CleverPhD

Thanks for the feedback 6 month wait is not what i was hoping but if that what it takes then so be it i just needed a figure to work too, hopefully the site will start to rank again soon