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Excellent. Good luck with your new site.

If you do have links sending traffic, those should be the first to update to avoid the slight but unnecessary burden and delay of a redirect. For Google, though, it doesn't really matter. As long as you 301 the whole site correctly to new URLs and change the address in Webmaster Tools, there will be no additional load time. It's true that you want to avoid big .htaccess files, redirect chains, and inefficient redirects, but that's a rule for live sites. For example, if you were wanting to maintain the domain but move the entire category around, you wouldn't want to add 3000 lines to .htaccess. You should still write a rule rather than going line by line, but it doesn't really matter if it's on an old site that's moving. Search engines will only have to access it once per bot before they get the message and start crawling the new site. In any case, redirects from the old site to the new won't impact load time unless the redirect is happening all the time, which should never be the case in a site migration. Do make sure to get the right redirect rule and check that it's working, especially on your most-trafficked pages.

Hi Jane, Thank you for you advise. Regards Mark

Hi William and Jennifer, Thank you for your words of wisdom. Regards Mark

Hi Jane & Spencer, Thank you for the additional information. Regards Mark

Hi Mark Glad I could help! Regards, Gary

Hi Mark, One of the verticals we work with is the legal industry (lots of lawyer related sites). In our experience, we have gotten good results with both structures, sites with pages just one level down from the home page and others that have pages 2 or 3 levels down. In both instances the pages in question were ranking quite well and a lot of times at the top of the search results. In Matt Cutt's own words: I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike.

Hey Mark, Your old URL might drop in ranking b/c it lose an internal link; it depends on how many links (both internal/external) it currently has. If it has a lot, the loss of an internal link may not matter that much. The new URL should rise in ranking for green shoes. There's no guarantee it will rise to replace your old URL. It depends on its link profile, competition, and on-page SEO. Here are some additional thoughts on strategy: If you can, maybe ADD the new link instead of REPLACING the old link. Then you won't lose the internal link. I'd test it out for a week by making the proposed changes. If you don't like the changes, revert the menu. Hope that helps. -- Andrew

I'm meeting with one of the Q&A project leads this afternoon, and will show them this question. For monitoring a thread, if you click Email Updates, you can get an email each time there's a new post on the thread, without having to make a post yourself. We don't have a way to show you which threads you've visited, but we do show you if a thread has new answers when you're browing the list of questions.

Hey Mark, In answer to your question, yes Google does see more value in body links than in navigation links. That is because they are pretty good at detecting what is the reoccurring code across the site. As Dave said the navigation itself is a question of usability, so build it in a such a way that users can easily get to the right pages quickly. With the body links, however, it is about branding the other pages throughout the site for relevance. As you might imagine, it's a little harder to create relevance from just a list of links. Whereas if you have a paragraph of text surrounding a link you can programmatically identify context. All that is to say, what you've read is right. There is more value in the body links for search engines due to context and there is more value for the user in the navigation due to user experience. Account for both, but don't go overboard with either. -Mike

Hi Alex, Thank you for your insight and words of wisdom. It's comforting to know that using G+ Social, NAP (company name, address, telephone number), marker location and website url can be changed without losing user reviews. Thanks Mark

Hi Mark, If there is zero relationship of data between the old site and the new one (such as you've described) you should likely be okay. Regarding blocking bots from crawling the new site until it is ready, this falls a bit outside my area. I expect you could set up the robots.txt file for this, but I recommend starting a new question on this topic to get expert advice from our technical SEO experts. You have to be sure to do this correctly to avoid problems. Hope this helps.

All, Thank you for the quality information. I was not aware that 'out of country - bad influences' would not affect your UK site performance. I agree with your logic that untold ip addresses would slow down site speed thus affect Google rankings. Thanks Mark

Hi Andy, Thank you very much for the great advice. Thanks Mark

Hi Mark, I would say that there will be negligible results in redirecting these pages unless they happen to have a high number of good inbound links from other sources. Redirecting the individual pages alone is unlikely to make a huge difference to the authority / strength / rankings of the high-traffic pages you redirect to or the domain itself. If you were to do this, I would do it with usability in mind. Do people arriving on the low traffic pages regularly bounce? Do you believe that they would be more likely to convert if they arrived on the high traffic page? I am not a CRO expert so would stop short of making CRO testing advice. The one SEO benefit I can think of would be if those low-traffic pages are contributing to any duplicate content issues on your site and redirecting them would count as "cleaning up" the site. This is definitely not for sure, so I'd still stick with the mindset that you'd be doing this for the purpose of directing traffic, not search engines. I hope this helps. Jane

Hi Mark, Is the link part of a navigation menu? If so I don't see any problem with leaving it as 'Home'. If you're linking within the body of a page (for instance in a blogpost), something like 'visit the homepage' or just a branded term should be fine.

You should be able to use the Google Places API to include ratings and reviews. Or you can check out how to Embed Google+ Local Business Reviews On Your Website In 3 Easy Steps - which might be easier than tinkering around with their API. Hope this helps. Mike

Hi Remus & Kurt, Thank you for your advise. Mark

As Mike pointed out, this is pretty subjective and I think you can pretty easily make either argument. I think I'd tend to avoid the slider as it takes up a lot of space, but that's just an opinion. If you really want to find out if one is better than the other for conversion, test it using software such as optimizely! Otherwise, I'd go with your gut. To answer your questions: 1. I think the practice you described sounds good, should help establish credibility and trust, right? 2. Using the SEM Rush example, I might add a quote from one of the above clients for added credibility. On your /clients page, I'd probably do a couple things: I would add quotes/testimonials for each logo if possible - it's one thing to work with someone, but it means a lot more if you have a quote from them. Second, I'd look at doing case studies if possible. As I mentioned earlier, you should really test everything. Everyone has an opinion about CRO that's based on their experience but every vertical, niche, and company is different as are their customers so don't just take someone else's word for it. Test everything!

I used pages for my category specific cornerstone articles that tend to get updated and then use posts to point to those cornerstone articles.  Works for me ...