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Nailed it completely....experiencing with one of my clients.

The benefit is too little (if there is any) but if anything go wrong it will harm your website more.

wow Matt, this was new to me to be honest.

That’s great that you can get a link from Gov website but the link will be in the footer and this means every page of the website will be linking back to you as normally websites share the same footer across the website.

Google like natural links and when you will use a key phrase to link back to your client’s website (especially in the footer) this will hurt you as Google can easily guess that the link has been created to manipulate SERP results.

My opinion, if you are linking from footer is to get link on brand name instead of a keyword this way you will get the link juice. I am not saying you will be able to achieve your goal but still you will increase the website authority which will help you in different ways.

You also said that you don’t have lot of unique content for each page. There is no shortcut or pass here you have to create unique content for pages in order to increase your chances to rank for different county related keyphrases.

Honestly, this strategy in my opinion is not good and Google can easily guess what you are doing and reward you accordingly.

I think the better idea is to get a link with a brand name to increase authority, create unique content for county pages. Get some quality links from different industry related websites and you will rank better in SERPs from the targeted key phrases.

Just a thought!

This is pretty much complicated so let me summarize what you are up to and then will move towards my suggestion.

You have 2 domains at the moment, one targets US and the other target AU market. Now you are planning a global launch on a third domain where most probably you are going to redirect your existing pages.

The global domain is not with you so you want to go with a temporary strategy and that is to create a sub folder. US sub folder on AU website and AU sub-folder on a US website.

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WOW, saying that this strategy is ideal for one or not will be difficult as there are lot of things missing which includes brand reputation, market share, audience trust on the brand and more.

I mean if you can wait for few months than going for a new domain is a better idea than going for a temporary strategy as this will be a very quick change for audience, first in November and another change in January.

Try to give the amount of time to audience in which they can adjust. Again, if the audience’s trust level with the brand is good and they can accept this kind of quick change then I don’t see a problem.

I am assuming that on sub folders you will link to another website instead of creating a new content on a sub folder. I believe create separate content on a sub folder is not a good idea as SEO issues and ranking will take months and within few months you have to move to another strategy.

I don’t see a problem with moving to a new domain but you have to keep in mind that when shifting two different website to a 3^rd domain you will see lot of ranking fluctuation so if you have a good migration plan but no back up plan then you should consider having one right now or else you will see a big loss from the organic traffic.

Again, there are lot of points that can be discussed but this is what I think it is having the limited knowledge about the domains and business.

Hope this helps!

I think this way the Ranking fluctuation will be none to minimum.

Thanks Dan! I totally agree with you...

You said but still link it to fraserisland.co.au. From this you mean a same blog post can be access from this and the new URL?

-          Two different URL containing the same content will be considered as duplicate content, which is defiantly not a good idea when it comes to rankings!

-          If you 301 (let’s say you do it right) the URL from old domain to new domain. This will eliminate the duplicate content issue but redirection does lose some amount of link juice so your rankings will see a dip for few days and weeks if not permanent.

-          If you set cross domain canonical, this will allow the user to see the same blog post on two different URLs but search engine will only crawl the preferred version so it will be two pages for user but search engine will only consider the preferred version. Not really a good idea in my opinion as I hope most of your blog traffic is coming from search engines anyways…

I think whatever step you will take the rankings are going to change (temporary or permanent) so you have to keep your strategy designed accordingly.

Hope this helps!

Hi Dino,

Never heard of this term before but I believe SEO is simple and logical and the description you provide doesn’t sounds simple or logical to me.

Just a thought!

I would advise checking your link profile in ahrefs.com or Mozscape and see if those websites are appearing. If yes then this is not a big problem sooner or later Google will add them in the index. But if you don’t find in Ahfres.com this might be a problem.

Again why rankings aren’t getting better have to do with quite a few things which includes your website content, technical issues, 404 pages, redirections, duplicate content and more!

My advice is to ask someone to do a website audit and see where the problem is so that you can fix things accordingly.

Hope this helps!

I personally believe that Addthis is a decent tool and not only you but many ecommerce websites and blogs are using this to share their content to many different social profiles!

You cannot make all of your customers happy all the time so see if this widget is giving you some extra traffic that is converting and if it is really a good idea to drive traffic to your website from social media and the other way around.

If yes, stick with that if you think that customers are really irritated, just change that. I always prefer using custom code that social websites provide instead of a third part tool.

#Justathought!

Honestly, if you don’t want to lose your current traffic shift it to new domain, I am not saying it’s not possible but you will see a dip (maybe temporary) but there will be a dip until Google figure out the new website, index their pages, recognize the link juice pass from old domain to a new domain.

I believe if you are doing PR and PPC to let people know about the new brand, in that case Google will soon figure out that the old brand has been shifted to new brand and allow the new brand to appear in search results when someone search for old brand name.

Again, what activities you have mentioned are great but there will be a dip so you have to take in to consideration and act accordingly.

Hope this helps!

I agree to the fact that Mozscape’s link index is limited and that is why the links you see your competitors are getting are not the complete list. I would suggest using Majestic as they have a bigger link index as compared to Moz.com

The links that you mentioned in the question as an example, I am not sure how they are appearing in the list but there is a possibility that when website owner (or someone on behalf of him) built those links, the website where available and later get removed or turned down due to some issue.

The domains you mention are not even index in google but some results give a clue of their existence in the past.

Hope this helps!

Here are some good advices from Umar and Clever PhD but here is one thing I would like to add here. When looking in to competitor’s link, always keep in mind that not every link your competitor is getting is a good link. You have to make a decision if the link is good or not.

When build link on any website, make sure that the website is a good website for your business: http://searchengineland.com/5-metrics-to-quickly-assess-site-quality-when-link-building-87028 this guide will certainly help you doing that.

Build few but quality links instead of building every link that your competitor’s are building.

Hope this helps…

If the URL can be accessed via one page, there is no way Google will be considered as duplicate content. 301 redirects should certainly help avoid duplicate content profiles. But, when it comes to Google search console, it usually takes time to update things under it.

I personally like the idea by CelevePhD, adding rel canonical to your finally page will also help you confirming Google that what is the preferred version and after the crawl Google will deindex the alternate URL from the index.

Hope this helps!

I always use a very simple logic when it comes to redirections. You have an old website and blog that you want to redirect to the brand new website. If this is the case, here are the few things you should consider before coming up to any final decision.

1. Users Reaction: You said that old website has some traffic, when you are going to redirect to the brand new website, how users/visitors are going to react? If they will be fine, just go for it, if not just leave the idea immediately.
2. Link Profile: If the link profile of the old website/blog is clean just go ahead and 301 redirect to the new domain. But, if the link profile contains some spammy links, you probably should leave the idea as it is.

If users and link profile support the idea, probably search engine will also like it and if not, you probably should avoid the idea as a whole.

Hope this helps!

Personally speaking, this is not the case with me. The niches in which I work, content (to be exact quality content) are getting more and more importance. We are primarily focusing on quality content and getting few but quality links back to our websites and I am glad that we are getting more and more visibility for some of the most competitive keywords.

If the websites who are getting above you contain few quality links and many spammy links in their link profile, you can always report about them in Google.

One reason why they are outranking you is because they have disavowed their spammy links and few quality links are helping them staying above you in search engines (possibility).

There can be more reason which includes their website content, which could be of better quality as compared to you.

This is just the general analysis, if you want me to look more in to it, I would love if you can provide me the keywords where they are outranking you.

Just a thought!

Hey Lana, If you really think that 301 does not make sense in that case you can always add the URLs in the robots.txt file and once Google will recrawl your website, Google will de-index the pages from the index.

Another thing you can do is using the de-index feature in Google webmaster tool. You can do that by getting in to your GWT, Optimization > Remove URLs and do that accordingly.

Hope this helps!

Your question is kind of confusing to me but if you are asking about having all internal links on the home page. This is fine. I take a quick look of your website and from the indexing point of view it looks just fine to me!

Although your URLs are very much over optimized it will not take more than a second for one to realize that you are pushing SEO here. I think this is not really a very good idea so my advice is to optimize your URLs and make it SEO friendly instead of inserting your keywords in to it.

If you are asking something different, I would love if you can elaborate your question a bit more.

Hope this helps!

When I create Title tag I usually target one or maximum two keywords that are available on the page. If you have 3 major services why not create dedicated page for each service and target one keyword per page.

This way you will be able to create title tags more specifically instead of general titles and title will relate to the content of the page accordingly.

In my opinion, title tags that are more targeted to the page works well.

Hope this helps!

Eric, If I would be at the place of your consultant, I would have suggest you Wordpress (not drupel though). I don’t think there is a problem with blogger platform but things are really difficult in blogger platform whereas in Wordpress things are really easy.

Let’s say you need to set customer Meta description for a blog post in blogger (not saying it’s impossible) but as compare to this in WP all you need is a Yoast plugin and even a person without acode knowledge will do that.

Another reason I will suggest you is that I have seen very few blogger blogs ranking well in search engines as compare to WP. And another important reason why I will suggest that while back Matt Cutt recommends WP over blogger.

I am sure any SEO with a development background can give you indepth reasons for this.

Hope this helps.