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There has been several debates on the topic of the geo location of hosting provider and the impact on SEO and rankings. As a best practice, it is recommended to host in the same country you are targeting but are there any studies available that confirms the web hosting providers location influences rankings?

Make sure you follow the steps as listed on https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=83105&hl=en.

Proper 301 direction, new sitemap upload, change of address notification and retaining your old domain for atleast a year will make your transitions smooth.

I totally agree with Casey. I have be pushed to build keyword focussed microsites but unless you are willing to put efforts in building a content rich site registering domains with keywords is not useful.

A good example of content rich site used for seo purpose is http://www.privatecloud.com

The site is owned by EMC and is definitely designed well and updated with high quality content. Some of the content on this site is duplicate but it is done properly while giving credit to original link. A right mix of good quality content, regular updates, clean design and keyword rich domain has helped the site to be on first page for a competitive keyword.

Hello Spencer,

I recommend two tools

1. Xenu link sleuth (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html#Download)

2. Gsitecrawler ( http://gsitecrawler.com/en/download/)

Both will report all the linked pages throwing a 404 error and other status codes including "forbidden request", "no connection", "no such host" and more.

Hope this helps.

Sameer

I heard Rand saying in one of the SEOMoz webinars that they are working on incorporating the SERPS analysis report on the web app. Unfortunately at this time it is a manual process but well worth. We spent nearly 4 hours per keywords in order to just populate date and run analysis but we were able to improve rankings on some highly ocmpetitive keywords based on this analysis.

Hey Vineesh,

I would suggest you should perform SERP analysis (http://seomoz.box.net/shared/g3vz0kxbbp) on the top 10 listings for your target keywords. It is quite possible that backlinks is not the only key issue here. There could be several reasons why your website is not ranking and some of these are

1. Authority of the domain

2. Authority of the pages your are trying to rank

3. Total number of backinks

4. Quality of the backlinks

5. Social syndication by users (mainly Twitter / Fb)

6. On page optimization

Identify the pattern using the statistical calculation mentioned in above linked excel file and focus on the gap.

Thanks

Sameer

As a standard practice, a webpage will not be considered duplicate if the content is 60% unique. However, having a "id" tag on the indexed pages is not a good user experience and Google certainly will not like too many pages will the id tags.

Here are three options that you can follow -

1. Go to "Parameter handling" in Site configuration settings in Google webmaster tools for your website and add "id" as on of the parameter. There is a good chance that Google will read this and ignore all the pages on your site with the parameter "id". We have tested this and found to be successful for ton of the parameters we use on our website including campaign tracking codes.

2. Continue using rel canonicals for duplicate pages so Google bot may not index it.

3. Make changes to your site code to each time a user creates a new page it will be created as a seperate url without any "id" parameter (similar to url shortners like bit.ly). This will allow you to tap in the UGC easily.

Thanks

Sameer

On average, how long does it takes to recover 80% of the rankings if two high authority domains are combined without chaging any content? I totally understand that each domain is different and search engines can treat them differently but if all the steps are followed to the T what are the chances?