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Hey Neil Wow, we are really chuffed here at Effect Digital! I guess... we have a lot of combined experience - and we also try to give something back to the community (as well as making profit, obviously) We didn't actually know how many people used the Moz Q&A forum until recently. It seemed like a good hub to demonstrate that, not all agency accounts have to exist to give shallow 1-liner replies from a position of complete ignorance (usually just so they can link spam the comments). Groups of people, **can **be insightful and 'to the point' Again we're just really thrilled that you found our analysis to be useful. It also shows what goes into what we do. Most of the responses on here which are under-detailed have the potential to lead people down rabbit holes. Sometimes you just have to get into the thick of it right? I think our email address is publicly listed on our profile page. Feel free to hit us up

Hi All, I will just give you all a quick update. I am more confused then when I first started!! I am telling my team from now if it's on the first page already we don't touch the keyword. Of course other keywords may also be trying to rank for the same page on page 2, so it's going to be a tricky one, I have just done a quick experiment on a ecommerce page the keyword was on page 6, the changes I did yesterday made it go to page 7, further tweaks made it go to page 9!! This is mental! I am using Ryte to make sure semantics are mentioned, maybe using this tool and getting the averages that each keyword and related keyword is mentioned, is not the best idea. But without a guide how do we know what to optimise for? I will give it a week as Nigel above said and see what happens. At least I know resetting to their original values before we started for any keywords that have declined will work. Regards Neil

Cheers Guys, Great answers here! now I come to think of it the site was already ranking high worldwide for the co.uk site. The reason for the different domains is the difffeent distributors and currencys. Definitely won’t go down this route again. Will try the canonical hack and let you know, how it goes. regards Neil

Hello, the canonical should be enough in this case as it helps Google determine which page is the original out of the many duplicates. 301 is used if you want the duplicate pages gone and its link authority transferred to the original page. From Search Engine Watch: 301 – Hey, Search Engines: My page is no longer here, and has permanently moved to a new page. Please remove it from your index and pass credit to the new page. Canonical – Hey, (most) Search Engines: I have multiple versions of this page (or content), please only index this version. I’ll keep the others available for people to see, but don’t include them in your index and please pass credit to my preferred page. https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2288690/how-and-when-to-use-301-redirects-vs-canonical

Hi Neil, Thanks for your reply. So, the thing is, it's typically much, much harder to rank national pages (you're competing against the nation) than to rank local ones - if the searcher is local and the search is perceived to have a local intent, because these pages are only competing locally. So, another question from me: Are the local pages ranking well for local searchers? As in, your office in Atlanta is telling you they see the Atlanta landing page come up instead of the national page? And your office in Dallas is telling you they see the Dallas page come up instead of the national page? Or, are you saying, you have a searcher in San Francisco (where you have no office) seeing the Dallas page instead of the national page?

Hey Neil! Short answer: Not Yet. Martijn made a great point, this is likely something that can be done on Google's end, but currently is not a targeting option by default in AdWords. That's not to say there's not a Beta out for it, though I am not aware of one. I'd highly recommend talking to your AdWords Rep and asking if there's a similar Beta available. They will be your best source for this. Veronica's link to google's post about store conversions is the closest existing solution, but not quite what you're wanting. To achieve what you're wanting, you'll have to get store visit conversion tracking and then create an audience and target that audience; however, this will only work for your stores and does not allow you to target any specific place or business that you cannot setup store visit tracking. Hope that helps! Let me know if you have any follow-up questions and I'll respond ASAP! Regards, Trenton

Neil, Unfortunately this is not that easy - while you can create tables for delivery based on item (weight, handling time, perishability) the settings for location based variations are only available for the US, Australia and Japan. https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6324484?hl=en-GB You can see here that 'location_group_name' is a supported sub-attribute...but, like I say, it is only supported for the US and Australia (and location_id for Japan as well). Without being able to show these location specific variations you are then given an unattractive option...but unfortunately I think this is the one you will need to take. "Overestimate if you can’t provide an accurate delivery cost. Match or overestimate the cost users would pay. " Hope that helps. Richard

If the different parts of the business are unique enough I would recommend going with either separate websites. On the other hand, you could separate the business in a subfolder. I would avoid putting the other business in a subdomain. Rand does an excellent job explaining the difference between sub domains and subfolders in a Whiteboard Friday.

Hi Neil, I quite like Sucuri as a tool for monitoring a website as to whether or not it has been blacklisted by any of the malware/hacked tools.  I don't know this to be fact, but my professional observation is that even if a manual action has not been placed by Google but those other web sources say "We don't trust this site" then that can have a negative impact on that site's rankings even though Google hasn't reviewed it manually. We've had sites that were repaired also stay on one platform or another's blacklist for weeks after the problem was removed just based on how those tools work, some may require clean scans for two weeks, for example, before fully signing off that the site has been repaired and that the malware or whatever won't just pop back up due to poor server security. I would check out those sources first, make sure you don't see a blacklist by any of those big security companies, and then work on disavowing any of the bad links to the now deleted pages, and making sure you clean up your indexation so any 404'd pages are properly forwarded and the sitemap is cleaned back up so as not to be throwing errors. A little spring cleaning after those types of issues goes along way, especially if you're 100% sure you aren't blacklisted by any of the website scanning tools.  I wish we knew exactly how they interfaced with Google, or how much weight they gave, but I have observed what you are describing and found that it wasn't Google's shit list but say Norton has the site flagged and Google doesn't, it's a pretty safe bet that Google at least knows about it and they become a little wary. Hope this helped!  Cheers.

Would you recommend using the pdf as lead gen where people need to enter their email address and name to download it I would not do that. If you put it on a pdf and require email to see it, the number of people who actually see it will be fractional.  If I was an "influencer" I would not tell my tribe... "hey, check this out!" if they have to give up an email to see it.  They will not appreciate that and will be hesitant to go see stuff that I recommend in the future. Influencers get "hey, look at this!" emails three times a day.  So if you are going to solicit them you better have something that is better than freeking awesome, OMG! That's the best I have ever seen!.   So, the first thing that I would do is, revisit the article and see if I can improve the text and kick it up three notches with great photos, images, maps, graphs, downloadable spread sheets pre-loaded for their data, links to relevant documents, sources where they can get the supplies that they need.  Have the courage to link to documents that are superior to yours for different aspects of the topic.  If this document isn't good enough to drop everybody's jaws then the effectiveness of it for your purpose is fractional. Now that you have that make sure that your most important audience doesn't miss it.  I would give it away for free, and promote it on my own website so everyone who visits can't miss seeing my ads for it.  It would be on my website and promoted by obvious banner ads, and headline ads to it on every page of the website.  Do the same on your Facebook page and on every social presence that you currently use.  Invite your tribe to share it with their friends, colleagues,  employees, suppliers, customers, family, pets and enemies (the content should be good enough that they do this spontaneously, but suggest this as a trigger).  Have obvious share buttons on the page for easy use and as another trigger.   If you have a news letter, a news feed, or other method of communicating with your own tribe, send them a really short message that will get them to your website to see this.  Have smaller, less vigorous promos that you can include at the bottom of routine email messages, receipts, packing slips, swag and other small items/documents that you spread in the normal course of business. Now that you have notified your tribe you can go to work on the influencers, who is each worth similar, but customized efforts.

Hi Alick! Thanks for turning up that response - hey, it's an oldie! Kind of fun to see

If you're trying to include this script in the Optimizely editor, it wouldn't work because the code in the editor is already Javascript, so it's like you're trying to next a

I just looked at the site and it doesn't appear to be on Wordpress. Is it on wordpress right now? http://www.allsee-tech.com/ Is that site on Wordpress?

Hi Neil, My personal favorite would be ScreamingFrog SEO Spider as recommended by Donna. Its highly recommended to go in for a yearly subscription and it worth every penny. It gives you a wealth of information that can be handy for a quick SEO audit. Used to use Gsite crawler earlier about till 3 years back but have been using ScreamingFrog SEO Spider and it has never let me down. You have a ton of options like being able to select User agents, regex for including or excluding certain sections or to crawl only certain sections of your website, list mode for finding HTTP header status codes for thousands of URLs along with many other options in no time. I use it daily. Best regards, Devanur Rafi

Hi Neil, As Don says there is nothing technically wrong with serving the site from a subdomain, google will simply see all the content as coming from the www domain, so no issues with indexing, getting page authority etc. The issue is likely to be the 'keeping some of the old links live' - I cannot think of a way you are going to be able to do this unless you recreate the old joomla content on the new wordpress install and either make the wordpress install serve the same urls as joomla did or 301 redirect the old urls to the new ones. When you say that you have advised that google will not be able to crawl them this means also that users will not be able to see them, that YOU will not be able to see them. So - they are not really live in any real sense (unless I misunderstood something!).

Hi Once the 301 redirects are in place and they should be done page by page not domain to buy domain. Creating a separate new URL that will hold content will not help actually it will hurt because that new URL will not have any authority. Simply redirect the URLs to the most relevant or exact URL on Wordpress. Take any of the quality content from the old (CMS A) and move that over to (CMS B) a.k.a. WordPress You will need a few of the things below. One of the most important ones is either a copy of screaming frog preferably the Pro version or deep crawl My preferred method is to use both but deep crawl rocks look at this article about site redevelopment it will index both sites and really make your life a lot easier http://deepcrawl.co.uk/use-cases/site-redevelopment http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/ Definitely download the free version! & a pro- of screaming fraud there is a paid version it is 100 British pounds Read this guide it has incredible insight on how to use both tools http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/screaming-frog-guide/ Here are the basics that you don't want to stray from at all take all this in before changing the URL. http://moz.com/blog/domain-migration-lessons http://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos http://moz.com/blog/achieving-an-seo-friendly-domain-migration-the-infographic http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2067216/The-10-Step-Site-Migration-Process http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-move-your-site-from-joomla-to-wordpress/ http://www.reviewzntips.com/migrate-from-joomla-to-wordpress/ I hope this helps, Thomas

Does he benefit from the images ranking so highly? I haven't seen many studies where image clicks result in good traffic, especially in terms of revenue if it's an e-commerce site. It seems a strange way of doing things. Are you saying the images don't match the text content of the page? The context an image is placed in can help it rank, so it seems strange that these images are ranking based on their historical context. Google reads CSS so should see that the images are hidden. Unless you're blocking Google from seeing the CSS which is now against Google's Webmaster Guidelines: https://plus.google.com/+PierreFar/posts/TLeHSDRwjhB If you're not blocking Google from the CSS, all other things being equal, then 301 redirects of the page and images could be enough, though I wouldn't be surprised if the rankings drop as from the information you've given (and assuming they're relatively competitive keywords) I'm surprised the rankings have remained for so long! The best way to preserve the image rankings would be to have the images on a page with relevant content.

Hi Neil, Through no fault of their own, some sites end up being blacklisted, so it is worth always checking this. A useful service is www.urlvoid.com. This will tell you if it is has any worrying markers attached to it. Marty has also given you some good pointers there. On top of this, check to see if the page is actually indexed by Google. Doing a "site:...." can often show interesting results. If a page isn't indexed by Google, there is normally a good reason why. -Andy

Just to let you know it was an issue in the DNS servers a records placing a wildcard *. all sorted now!!