Welcome to the Q&A Forum

This is what I would suggest if you wnat to keep all those ads (I have an editor's mockup here to illustrate the idea http://www.dreambuilding.com.au/content/in2town.pdf ). Keep the articles as main focus on the site and use the top of the sidebar for related articles and move the advertising to the bottom of that column.

Think of it this way, if you get 20% of your visitors clicking the ads in your current position but you only 100 vistors/day would it not produce better revenue to get 10% click through and have 1000 visitors a day, by marking the site article centric rather than ad centric?

If you also HTML5 mark that ad content as 'aside' and the main atricle as a 'article' then your may even find Google changes the way it interperates the site design and moves up your ratings.

The long list I supplied was to give an indication of what I saw when I visited the site. Since these change regularly, I included what I saw as I found them to be sending the reverse message to the story which showed the wife forgave him yet the ads encouraged flurting etc. It was just a snapshot in time to highlight my point. The righthand column now looks more on topic since your change.

I agree with Steve and Ryan, in that the site is either about the story or about the ads and at the moment it's still about the ads and Google will rank acordingly.

In webmaster tools in site configuration you can set prefered domain (if you have .co.uk and .com for the same site) and you can set the prefered local for the .com site and set locale to united kingdom. Since you will be keeping the US site and adding a new one for the uk, the .co.uk domain is automatically set to the uk and is not changable.

So, but choosing a .co.uk domain name Google does that setting for you. You should also set locale in your tage of the pages. That should make it clear to search engines that the site is designed to show to uk visitors.

It is work having standardised endings via a url rewrite or 301 redirect. If both exist Google will flag it as duplicate content, which you will see in 'html suggestions' in webmaster tools. Since it is classed as duplicate (as if different case - upper/lower) the link juice will be split between the variartions.

On thing that stands out is the 12 ads (below) that send the opposite message to the story. If you want to have articles that stand out and get return visitors, you need to have less of the ad revenue look to the site. I know the idea of having return visitors on the site is to attract adsense revenue but it has to be much more subtle to get a following.

| Cheating Partner?Find out if they really are! Private Investigators Australiawidewww.SpouseBusters.com.au |

| Marry Armenian Woman100s Pretty Armenian Girls Seeking Real Men for Serious Relations!AnastasiaDate.com |

| Married Women HereJust Cute Aussie Women. Just for You. Sign Up Now & Enjoy!www.GirlsDateforFree.com    | Married AffairsLooking for fun, flirt and affair? Prepare to meet Australians here!www.Flirt.com |

• | Find Marriage: AustraliaLooking For A Serious Relationship? Register With be2 Now For Free!www.be2.com.au/Serious_Relationship |

  • | Cell Phone Spy - TRY ITRead SMS Messages - View Call Logs Undetectable! Works With All Phoneswww.PhoneStealth.com |

+ banner ads for Bingo, Groceries, Music and travel. |

That was a good catch Alan and Ryan, I just looked at the Alt and Title and did not even notice the example used them in an anchor. Doh! I would only ever use them in images. Since I develop on the Microsoft platfrom using it anywhere other than img flags a syntax error.

Egol you may have some insight on this: When I did a site analysis on www.onemedical.md it 301 -> www.onemedical.com -> 302 -> www.onemedical.com/sf/doctors if it detects the cookie that says I pre-selected sf on the last visit.

How would you suggest they do instead of the 302 to pass juice to the desired page sf or ny?

This is the section where the social networks are :

<ul class="aff-social"><li class="aff-twit"><a title="Follow Us On Twitter" target="_blank" href="http://twitter.com/growyourcareer">Follow Me On Twittera>li><li class="aff-fb"><a title="Find Us On Facebook" target="_blank" href="http://www.facebook.com/realestatecareers">Find me on Facebooka>li>ul>Your would addbefore the and add a class aff-plusone to the CSS stylesheet 'style.css'.But it depends on how these pages are served, as to whether you can edit this page directly or it is coming from a virtual page in a database which is most likely for a wordpress site. If in doubt, ask the designer where you can edit the site content.

Quite the opposite, these are very desirable if used for their intended purpose.

The Alt tag is for accessability handling, so it helps people with visual disabilities to understand the content of a picture.

The Title tag is used to provide tooltip information to the user when they hover over the image.

Both these enhance the user experience as thus are looked on favourably by Google.

BUT, it's an important but - seo's in the past would stuff these tags with useless spammy content. e.g. You have a automotive business so the alt tag:

'car gmh fast cars sports cars red cars porsche' that is bad.

'Our new sporty red porsche makes an easy ride through the windy roads of Denmark' - good

The title tag could say 'Porsche 911 2005 touring the roads of Denmark'

It's all about adding value to the site for the user not manipulating the search engines. So, use alt tag to describe the item in detail and the title to provide extra details. Do not have the same text in both as they have different purposes.

Hope that sheads enough light on the subject.

Shane, it tends to be the sites that manipulate the rankings (black hat) know all those tricks and if all it took was a seal from an SSL company, they would have a different one on each page. It would be surprising that the seal actually gives you page rank, it most likely does the opposite since an outbound link only passes juice to the destination and all those seals link directly to the ssl provider.

As Ryan points out contacting Verisign directly will give you some insight, they are a company built on reputation and would not say it adds Google rank when it does not. You have to consider what their product is 'trust' and if they give you false information that hurts their marketting when you discover that is not the case. They would tell you what I said in my first reply, that their seal brings customer conversions, which is ultimately what you are after.

Generally ecommerce sites exclude their ssl pages via robots.txt or nofollows so the question does not get raised. If the content on those pages is secure but not authenticated then the value is limited as it is public and open to exploit. As a developer, I have attended many seminars on this topic alone.

The rank gain you get is secondary (from more tweets, blog links etc because people trust your site and like it) rather than a direct corelation.

Read the paper (relevant section below) from the link:

If I use SSL on my pages, will we be PageRank'd higher then non-ssl pages? So far, there is NO conclusive proof that a SSL site will get higher Google/MSN/Yahoo search rank listing compared to the same site which is unencrypted. In fact there seems to be no positive or negative result if you have your pages encrypted or not. This is because the quality of the data on the site is not validated by SSL, only that the certificate is independently verified. The most important factor in Google's PageRank for example is the amount of high quality sites linking back to your site. The idea being that if a site like Digg or CNN link to your site then your page rank will increase because their page rank is high. This is completely independent of whether your page is encrypted or not.

I do tend to watch my main keyword as it teaters between 10-12 as page 1 tends to create large spikes in traffic for us, but I'm not an SEO, just a developer keen to keep a site on page 1. The rest of the keyword, I just watch the summary.

Googles view is:

301 when you can and canonical when you do not have direct server access to do a 301. But, I would and do, have both to ensure both case and endings are correct for the landing page. i.e. someone might tweet http://www.funderstanding.com/V2/Coaster instead of the lowercase version and google will report dupe content if it is not dealt with.

<link href="http://www.funderstanding.com/content" rel="canonical"> is the only one that does not pint to the old site from those you mentioned. With links from that page it may find enough of the old site to produce the dupes.

You can fix it and then request a crawl

Thanks all, I hoped it would be fine and I will proceed with your advice.

The fact that the site you are talking about is selling link will mean they will probably be hit by the next round of Panda updates, so save your money and hire a marketting person to create you some great content that people will want to tweet about or post links to.

If you look at the data from the last round of updates, sites droped rank upto 90% so your DA60 could become a DR6 and no value anyway.

Look at your top competitors and what they are doing right and do it better have a look at the current whiteboard Friday video from Rand to see how it is all changing.

By the way we are PR0 but have 8 keyphrases top 3 and 16 on page 1 which equates to a huge continual growth in traffic. We took the hard route and contribute to the industry blogs etc.

It can help your click through conversion rate if it is on the checkout page near the 'pay' button as it can build user confidence. I agree that a lot of users do not know all the safety measures developers put into a site, but if you give them a warm and fuzzy feeling when they are about to purchase and a place to check your security or privacy policy, then they are more likely to complete the sale.

I would doubt it adds rank but with Google's emphasis on usability it may be a factor on legitimising your site, especially if you have an EV SSL as the process is more rigerous to be validated.

If you have relevant links from other countries they would help your rank but with the recent Panda updates from Google, if they are spammy sites, webfarms or paid links they will hurt your rankings. We participate on blogs and provide articles internationally that are on topic which help boost our rank, we even send products to reviewers overseas for evaluation.

This one was discussed recently in another post but the bottom line is resources. There is a reaserch Tool 'Rank Tracker' that you can use daily, but 300+ keyword for each of SeoMoz's customers every day automatically would mean they would need more resources and add costs which they would have to pass on to us. Most people would probably net check daily anyway. Even Google analytics are a few days behind in their reporting.

Are the canonicals in the old site pointing to the new site? The new site one looks fine, I cannot see any links to the olds site to check.

standarised endings \ - Ok

https: rejected - OK

url match canonical and sitemap - Ok

It seems very odd.

If you are doing this at the the DNS level (i.e. CNAME) you actually want an A Record to point all the domain names to the one IP Address. You would then need to do a ReWrite to handle the 301 redirects. You would also need to ensure you verify all the domains in Google Webmaster Tools and set the prefered domain to www.mainsite.com (note you we need to use settings -> prefered domain in site configuration). I would also add a canonical meta tag to the head of each page.

Since you have the .au is you site Australia wide or international. If it is Australia wide you should have the .com.au as the main web address.