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Hey Steve, I think what you might be looking for would be a heatmap study like this one: https://moz.com/blog/the-new-snack-pack-where-users-clicking-how-you-can-win You might be able to find others. Hope that helps!

Hi Steve, I'm sorry to hear about the trouble your company has had with this. First, I want to clarify that the actual sentiment in your reviews is unlikely to be the primary cause ranking failures. In fact, there have been famous cases like that of the dentist who shot a lion in which hundreds of people left him scathingly negative reviews which, unfortunately, led to him ranking highly for his query (though Google might now have adjusted for this). In other words, negative sentiment in reviews may/may not be the cause of ranking problems you are having (there are believed to be several hundred factors that contribute to local rank) but I can totally see how they would impact conversions for your business. So, what I think your decision here is whether you need to start your business from scratch, completely re-branding the business and starting with a fresh brand, fresh website, fresh citations and fresh reviews, or, whether the company can overcome its past reputation. The answer to this is going to lie in how extreme you feel the negative effects of these reviews are on your bottom line and the ability of the business to have a future. The answer is really going to vary, depending on the situation, and without being able to evaluate your unique situation, the community here can only give general thoughts on this. You might want to consider consulting with a good agency with whom you can share the full details of the company's history. Things to consider: If the complaints refer to mere inconveniences or annoyances the customers experienced, then it may be possible to keep your brand and, by implementing a very active review acquisition strategy, to balance out and eventually surpass the number of old negative reviews with new positive ones. But, if the complaints refer to something severe, like accusations of illegal business practices, then no amount of better reviews may suffice to remedy the problem, and you might be justified in wanting to start over. I recommend consulting with a reputable agency with whom you can share your company history in private so that you can get advice that is specific to your scenario.

No it's not possible. Let's say you have http://foo.com/a and http://bar.com/b and both have the exact same content, google will choose one, index it, and forget about the other. Let's say you have 1000 pages on both foo.com and bar.com exactly the same 1000 pages, google will analyze each page one by one, and choose one version for the index, and forget about the other, depending on a variety of factors (like the domain itself and backlink profile) will pick some pages from foo.com and some from bar.com, but you will still have only 1000 pages in the index. How much of the content of each page you need to change to differentiate is unknown since no one knows the code of google algo. You can try with guess and test, you change something and you see what happen monitoring changes in the indexing of the edited pages.

Could not get the site to load, so I could not take a look at what you have going on. I'm guessing you are messing around with some redirects. But I can help with the MOZ and Yoast graders. The tools you are describing are only tools. If you look at the report that MOZ gives you, its only there to point out any areas where there may be missed opportunities, or if there are any standout errors. If the report is showing the page to have an F grade, it most likely is not set to target the correct keyword, or is trying to check multiple pages for the same keyword phrase. People often have issues with the MOZ grader, but don't understand how to set it up. I hope that one of the Admins on here can direct you to a tutorial, as I did a few Google searches and didnt find any worthy results. Yoast is a great tool and plugin. One thing you have to watch out for is again: its only a tool and will recommend best practices based upon the settings you enter. If you have followed its recommendations to a perfect degree, that may get you a green bar and a nice score, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the page is well optimized for that keyword. For most SEO-graders, as long as you stay with a set character limit, and make sure the URL is search engine friendly and all fields are filled out, you will get a high grade. This can have nothing to do with the content that populates those areas, only that you met the predefined requirements to get you a high grade. Once you fix all these redirect errors, I would resubmit the entire site and sitemap to Google, as they probably have a mixed idea of what the real destimation URL's are after all the issues.

Sorry, but this isn't particularly a true statement. They were indeed hit by some rankings drops for their category based pages which featured automated results, however their item pages and pretty much everything else still completely dominate. This is due to a combination of relevance, age of the domain (1995 or so? almost 20 years!!), and the fact that they have such a diverse, huge amount of content on a high authority domain.

Thank you your insights and advice. Now that I know the direction my business is growing, there are three changes I want to make for my business site: Change the hosting from GoDaddy to Bluehost - do you agree? Replace my Wordpress theme from Thesis to the new Headway Themes 3.0 (so site can grow w/o me learning or hiring a coder) and of course changing the current domain to www.ImpactMMAfitness.com - Thank you for your help with this! In which order or combination should I proceed with these steps? Sincerely, Steve

There is one other possibility and that would be the "canonical redirect." If your site is PMA (only one I saw with PA 21 in serps), when you put www.yourdomain.com in you get a page auth of 33 to go with your DA 21. But, when you put in the root without the www, ( yourdomain.com ) you get a PA of 18 and your linking root domains drop a bit.... from 42 to 1. In WordPress, with any of the SEO plugins we have used (All in one, Genesis, etc), the canonical redirect does not happen. You have to do it in the .htaccess file. There are plenty of good directions for how to: query .htaccess redirects. Or, there are several gurus around moz who can post directions here..... (I'm not one) My guess is that when you do this, you will see a change in short time (few weeks at most).

I would base this on the number of pages and your ability to get into the database of the CMS environments.  Depending on how deep your link structure is, this may be a quick process.  If you are able to map the fields correctly, you can duplicate the aliases with a little elbow grease.  Simply export the main drupal content table and reconstruct it as a wordpress table, then upload. If you don't feel like handling the MySQL for this, I would still recommend duplicating the aliases... 301's are very useful, but it does seem like their is a small bit of decline as the SE's reset your info. Do keep in mind the your page code will also need attention.  Drupal vs Wordpress in its rendering will produce different code.  Your SEO capabilities are also going to be effected by the plugins that you are using in WP

Thanks for the help!

Thanks for the help - that fixed it! If you lived in Austin, TX we'd give you some free Muay Thai classes!! logo-figure-solo-12.jpg