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Do you have the URLs or the HTTP-status code? Any HTTP server will always return a status code such as 404 (not found) or 401 (unauthorized) or 403 (forbidden). Provided that other pages display, it can very well be a permission issue or a rewrite problem.

A blanket 301 from all pages of the purchased domain to your domain will work without a problem.

If the previous owners transfer GWMT and GA access of the domain, then it is worthwhile reviewing also search terms (optimize your landing pages and campaigns for them too).

Look at the top landing pages of the purchased domain and the PR of the inbound links. In some cases it will be worthwhile to discredit links based on reputation and in others it is worthwhile to 301 to new landing pages directly.

I don't think it is the canonical. I would first look at GWMT (crawl rate dropped? errors increased?) and then look at Google Analytics as well.

For what it's worth, your current site has duplicate keywords and descriptions and plenty of errors (JavaScript).

You could have very well been dropped due to a manual review - your site looks very much like an affiliate with plenty of advertising and not much original content (that was at least my initial opinion)

Google will not really care about FB likes. Not even FB cares too much about artificially inflating likes.

Almost all FB competitions attracting likes are short lived and hardly ever engage your brand with the user and there will be zero stickiness. Consider the FB likes a vanity number and nothing else. If a company has no social engagement on the FB wall (i.e. no shares or comments), then it's not worth it to run a campaign.

I would rather look at an all-inclusive social campaign where you stretch across Twitter, FB, G+ and Pinterest. We had good engagement from users with our photo- or Pinterest competitions and actually saw backlinks and referrals growing from this.

Also look at engaging new / existing users on your site and/or blog - this will have more value than just artificially growing some meaningless number.

I would carefully monitor the reputation of the IP as well as the IP-range (and even the ASN) the IP falls within. If any of those loose reputation - for example if one of your 80 sites hosts a trojan, all your 80 sites will be flagged.

I personally would only host domains and subdomains on the same IP but would not share an IP with multiple domains.

I have seen several sites completely die due to IP reputation issues.

BTW: If you want to advertise with someone I would do the following:

• Get them to share key traffic and demographic figures (Google Analytics)
• Track their campaigns and click-throughs - use the Google URL Builder to build your destination campaigns, you will then be able to analyse in your GA account how your external campaigns perform.
• Generally websites accepting advertisers have inflated rate-cards and inflate their traffic. I would compare their CPM with for example running similar campaigns through Google Adwords (you might get more value from Adwords)
• I would also base your payment on performance - don't work on impressions or clicks, try and work on conversions - i.e. you pay nothing for impression/click but you pay a conversion rate - i.e. 10 USD for a user registration or xx % of revenue for any referred transaction.
• Be careful with paying for registrations (especially those not resulting in revenue), many sites will drive lots of signups to you but no actual revenue.

Don't look at Alexa, especially if the website is not certified (i.e. has the Alexa tracking code installed). Even if a site is certified and has the tracking code installed, the traffic (both PV and visitors) is hugely underreported.

Almost all their stats are still some guesswork and fluctuate. Remember that Alexa will only track traffic if the toolbar is installed and it will use the JS tracking code to for additional metrics. You will typically find that only techies will run Alexa.

I would do perhaps competitive comparisons (if this is what you are looking for) with Google Trends, SeoMoz or any of the other tools, but in most cases it will still be guess work as your competitors will not openly share information. Another means is Google Adwords.

I consider Alexa a nice "vanity" rank and good for marketing purposes - i.e. "We are #5 on Alexa" - it means really nothing and has no impact on PVs, revenue etc.

Have a look at this Q&A which touches on similar points: http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-much-copy-should-there-be-on-a-category-page

I would get rid of the product descriptions on category pages - I think it is more an user-experience issues and I do think that having so much copy on the category pages it will weaken your category pages.

I would either look at http://www.dmoz.org/ or http://www.alexa.com/topsites/category

Google Trends might also assist in research and comparison - http://www.google.com/trends/

Splitting a client's website into multiple domains could affect you in branding (unless you incorporate the brand name and the vertical you want to split into the domain).

Subdomains only make sense if you really want to target different audiences and there is little chance of cross-over (i.e. there would be a slim chance that customers would overlap if you sell cosmetics on one domain and DYI products on another). The danger of subdomains is that if content is not properly managed, you will run into all sorts of content issues.

I would rather focus on a single domain with a good product category structure, product pages and a good set of landing-/conversion pages to target the different verticals.

I also think that a single domain will afford you better long-term value (both from a SEO and SEM perspective).

If your syndication partners are reliable, the noindex option would be the best choice. This will however not guarantee you that your content will rank above the content of the syndication partner.

I would be reluctant (personal preference) to place a canonical link on the syndicated site pointing back to your domain. My biggest concern would be possible reputation issues with the syndication site hurting you.

Although I can not verify it for sure yet, it does seem that when you embed authorship information in your and the syndicated content, Google seems to favour content from the original source.

I guess the question is really why you want to have your content syndicated? If it is an attempt to build out links, I think a better option would be to provide a snippet to the syndication site, linking to your full content.

I would do a few things in addition to what you have done already (I think the results you are seeing right now really also depend on when you did the switch):

• Introduce a robots.txt and hint it with a Sitemap. If you have not manually submitted a site-map, do this as soon as possible. This will push Google to re-crawl your content.
• Fix your PageSpeed - you are scoring 58/100 which is really bad - see here: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/121004_PY_42T/
• Although you have RichSnippet product information on your site, it looks wrong - i.e. http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.customonit.com%2Fcustom-slap-bands-silicone-bracelet-wristband.html&html=

I would try and fix the above - those are all simple and quick technical fixes. The Sitemap submission is probably the most important aspect and you should monitor the GWMT health and index ratio as well as the crawl rate.

I would then also compare the traffic on your new domains with your old domains. I would look out for change in traffic patterns and change in search terms. Your drop might be related to different copy on the new site.

I personally do find your site, categories and product pages a bit confusing (perhaps I am not your target-market), but it does not quite feel like an eCommerce site, but others might think differently. I am saying this in regards to UI/UX and not onpage SEO.

I found (although many SEO's don't think it is necessary anymore) to have good title,meta keywords/description. And then structure the category page as follows:

• Your general navigation (menus, cart, search etc)
• Your category title as a H1 (should ideally be the same as your page-title)
• A category description (not more than 2 lines) - ideally the category description should overlap with the on-page content, title, keywords
• Your category bread-crumb, annotated with the Breadcrumb-microformat/RDFa markup
• You will obviously have some category drilldown (i.e. sidebar menu) - those should be crawlable links with relevant anchor texts
• I would present the multiple products per page with hProduct annotation, but would limit the number of products per page to not more than 40.

I disagree with the sentiment of the presenter, that text / additional links are unnecessary/irrelevant below products. We have found that we achieve good ranking on keywords by moving the category description from the top to the bottom of the category page.

From my experiments there is no noticeable difference in placement of the category copy, but then again this might very well depend on the overall site- and category-structure.

Since last week we have chosen to append the page number to the title. Let's see if/how GWMTs status changes.

I would think that the next possible flag would then be on the page-description on paginated pages

I have never worked with Actinic, but any web-application would have a HTTP server serving content. If your domain remains the same but your new site's URL structure changes, then I would look at rewrite rules for pages/categories redirecting to the new content.

In essence you have an old application which you will turn off (it will not serve any data) as it will be replaced with something new. So on your new system (I sounds like it will be IIS) you will configure a series of rewrite rules  - any indexed traffic or linked pages would then redirect.

GWMT will be a good guideline (as well as your server logs) for 404's. If you can't fix them pro-actively, looking at the logs will be your best option.

If you don't rewrite you will pretty much drop pagerank and SERPs.

SEO 101: Don't ever pay for links, artificial content. I think paying USD 5 on Fiverr will have the same affect as paying thousands of dollars to a SEO consultant offering the same "link building" services. Your traffic and your backlinks should occur naturally and not via paid services.

Unless a SEO can understand your business it is not worth it engaging in their services. I think you would be better off just following some of the more authoritative SEO blogs.

I love Ray's work

I would honestly not worry too much about the too many page-links. The only issue you will run into is that search engines will not crawl all your content. This you can fix with sitemaps to hint what should be crawled.

You can also hint certain links with "noindex/nofollow" based on what you would like to hint to be indexed/crawled.

The duplicate titles could be fixed by making the title unqiue - either by appending a pageNo or something unique about the page (a username, a date, a title with a category etc).

The canonicals make sense where you have cases where different URLs result in the same page being displayed.

Thanks for that answer. I am already using the pageNo in GWMT (as paginates). None of the searches spin out other copies - what I see in GWMT is only related to browsing through a product category and paginating.

I raised a similar question in the following Q&A - http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-title-tags-with-pagination-and-canonical

My concern or question (we have rel=prev/next) would be more towards what the canoncial should be. There seems to be different opinions:

1. Use the current paginated page as the canonical - in our case GWMT reports duplicate titles (I suppose appending a page-number should sort this out)

2. Use the base search URL as the canonical - perhaps not a bad choice if your site's content changes and Google indexes page 50, but over time you only have results for 40 pages (resulting in an empty result page)

I currently only can conclude that having the prev/next implemented is a good thing as it will hint Google in pagination (in addition to setup the URL parameters in GWMT). I do plan to change the canoncial to the base search URL (and not having multiple paginated URLs) and see how this will affect indexing and SERPs.

I would use http://www.domain.com/en/search/london/ (the search-path included in the URL).This has worked quite well for us.