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Here's an SEOmoz post about it that may be of help. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos

Thank you, Irving From my initial look at things,  there is one particular term that links to one particular old URL across numerous directories that all seem to be connected, which I never sanctioned at all. I'm starting to suspect part of this problem is related to someone purposefully trying to hinder our rankings, and I'm having the 404 for the affected page (old URL) implemented. Is having the 404 something legitimate to include in the reconsideration request?

Hi Dave, Just make sure you do all the usual SEO work on new content, tags and headers. Keyword density (although not too important but still effective). And combining older content, just do redirects from the old URLs and that will help with any problems for backlinks. The most important thing I emphasize on when moving to a new site structure is the redirects, and I think most would say the same.

i dont think it will be down to popularity, more like stronger links to the homepage. have you done a site report on your clients site from seomoz? does it get an 'A' grade? does it have good meta descriptions? if you can't beat them in the SERPS you can still write some great copy for your search listing.

Absolutely anchor text is still important. Google will even use anchor text to tell if a page is relevant even if can't crawl the page due to being nofollow or noindex. In a blog you would want to consider organically using anchor text. Your links should be part of a sentence few words or so and vary but be related. A couple examples: Recently while remolding my 1955 Desoto I had to find a power steering kit to work with my FIREDOME 4.8L 291 engine, I found it local shop Ronnie's Deals for Wheels. The second thing to note is you should probably limit the amount of links per article to 2-4 as to make sure the link juice and context is maximized. Hope that helps.

Thanks. I see how my sentence allowed longtail to be merged with PPC.  I actually wanted that to mean going after long tail with SEO efforts. This is a good strategy, but to recommend looking for a new job in a less developed industry is almost like saying just give up and try something easy. Some people can interpret it that way. I think that it is a mistake for an SEO to accept jobs that are above his ability level or jobs where the resources that the company plans to put into an effort are not adequate to become competitive. A lot of SEOs are selling the $500/month package to business owners who really should be spending the $5000/month needed to compete in their industry. One of my favorite quotes is... "It's not the size of the dog in the fight, its the size of the fight in the dog." But even with that powerful attitude a smart chihuahua will stay in his weight class.

I usually instruct affiliate managers to write their own company bio and/or product descriptions for affiliates to use. Treat every single piece of content on your site as if it were an asset, because it is. You can have 2,000 affiliates linking to you (though their links should probably be nofollowed) from within the same company bio or product description as long as that is not ALSO the same company bio or product description you use on your site. If they all want to share content that's their problem. Just don't let them share YOUR content.

That's a great help. Thanks Doug for being so thorough.

Using media selectors you do not need to have a separate mobile site on a different domain, nor do you have to use a redirect. Instead it resizes your corporate site based on the users screen resolution. For example, here is my portfolio site (not anywhere close to being done). However, it uses HTML5 and CSS3 to resize based on the size of the browser screen. So try slowly resizing your browser when viewing it and you will see what i am talking about. The SEO benefits of this are: No duplicate content since it uses the same page You link splitting since there are not multiple domains or subdomains of content So instead of creating a new mobile site, you would make updates to your current corporate site. edit: It is also important to mention that only current browsers can render CSS3 so anything before IE9 or early versions of Chrome or Firefox will simply display the website in its full version. Any newer browsers (especially smartphones) will render CSS3 hence giving the graceful degradation to the users!

Thanks, That's the tool I've been using and it is very handy. I can now show the company that I know exactly what's going on. After reading this SEOmoz post though - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/weed-out-your-lowest-performing-pages - I am considering removing the old news articles from 4/5/6 years ago. They have no page authority, and they receive no traffic. My developer thinks it's a bad idea. Any thoughts on doing so?

If you're changing IPs, I would be sure to lower your DNS time-to-live(TTL) to 1 hour about a day before the move. This would make your DNS rollover much faster. Not an SEO thing, per se, but something that certainly helps Googlebot.

Where do people usually source these blogs which typically contain material on a range of different topics? Are these probably paid links? If they are small articles on a blog, they may be using blogvertise.com. A blog network that lets you buy links on the blogs on the network. The owner of the blog writes you a very small article with your link for a fee. How do they get so much content out there, albeit similar content, to so many of the hastily cobbled efforts? Would that be an agency with connections or a blogging community site? blogvertise.com again How can any search engine lend credibility to my competitor’s links when the article below has nonsense for penis enlargement stuff. Seriously?!? Often these kind of tactics work for a time, but often they eventually do get some kind of penalty. These grey/blackhat tactics can work for months, or even years..often depending on how black they are. How are they not being penalised? They might at some pont. It’s frustrating because these aren’t the tactics I want to employ but they seems to offer success, but also, if your link is in an article that followed by another on penis pills, how I can take Google seriously in its stated aim of making things this prone to manipulation. I always think a lot of link building is somewhat grey unless someone is linking to your content because its awesome without any incentive or encouragement.  It's not perfect, but you have to work with it.

1stly Google might notice some hacked pages and flag them as potentially harmful. But your main problem is these: potental client will most likely not come back if they tried once and failed google might have tried to access a page and had looong loading times or a server error when trying to load a page when a client loads a page and the server is under a DoS or simular attack the server will slow down and the page load speed will do the same resulting in bad loading speeds. All of the above and more that I probably forgot will harm your SEO efforts and end user experience, harming trust. some of the above you should be able to see in GWT and GA. in particular the loadtimes and HTTP error codes, bounce rates ex.

I see. We have set up a blog on their own domain.

Thanks, Heather. Getting a clearer picture now.