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That would take a lot of time in Webmaster Tools...

As long as you create a 301 redirect which works correctly, and it still links to related content which is similar to before, it shouldn't be an issue in the long run.

However, you may notice a slight dip when you first make the changes, whilst the search engines adjust and re-add your new, correct URLs.

As long as you can avoid 404 errors (page not found) from happening at any time, that should reduce the risk massively. It's when a page changes and a good link goes to a 404 that you will run into ranking issues.

The same rule applies with the images. If someone clicks an image on Google images, and it goes to the wrong URL and lands on a 404 page, it could lose it's ranking. I can see the new platform uses Wordpress going by the wp-uploads/ path, so you might be able to rely on a plugin to ensure this doesn't happen, such as a redirection plugin.

I had a similar issue with a Freelancer who basically took 9 months to design our website, and it lacked the functionality I was after, yet because of how Freelancer.com milestones work, I could not redeem the money back.

It's good to put it behind you and learn from that mistake and realize you can do some stuff on your own once you learn how to, spending minimal amounts on what is important, ie a Moz Subscription.

I would get on to some reputable link building guides. Moz has one posted a couple weeks ago:

http://moz.com/blog/beginners-guide-to-link-building

Point Blank SEO has a good one:

http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

And there is another good one on Money Making Ninja:

http://www.makemoneyninja.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-link-building/

Be creative, learn how to get authority links relevant to your industry. Article based mentions will most likely be dofollow, forget about bounce rate, I ranked a 95% bounce rate aggregator and got 1 million visits a month with just 40 Domain Authority, it can be done with the right links and right content.

Ash

That is a lot of money on SEO.

If the old domain had relevant content, domain etc, then I would usually 301 redirect. It helps to redirect it to a relevant page on your new site as opposed to just the homepage, such as a similar category, about page > about page etc. Match as much as you can, and the rest leave for the homepage simply for potential traffic when a user clicks a search result for someone appearing on your old domain, or a referring link etc.

Ash

Hi, when you click on the error, it should list the URL of the page which has one title, and then underneath that, the other page(s) that have the same title.

Hi, this means you have redirects set up which are not particularly SEO friendly. Moz has the following description of Meta Refreshes.

Meta Refresh

"Meta refreshes are a type of redirect executed on the page level rather than the server level. They are usually slower, and not a recommended SEO technique. They are most commonly associated with a five-second countdown with the text "If you are not redirected in five seconds, click here." Meta refreshes do pass some link juice, but are not recommended as an SEO tactic due to poor usability and the loss of link juice passed."

So, if you have something on your site saying something like "you are about to be redirected", it is basically saying you should not have this, and instead use a direct redirect which passes link juice more.

Ash

Wouldn't less links mean less saturation?

No link checker will pick up everything. Life would be much easier if that was the case.

That's not entirely true and not future proof either.

As long as you create a 301 redirect which works correctly, and it still links to related content which is similar to before, it shouldn't be an issue in the long run.

However, you may notice a slight dip when you first make the changes, whilst the search engines adjust and re-add your new, correct URLs.

As long as you can avoid 404 errors (page not found) from happening at any time, that should reduce the risk massively. It's when a page changes and a good link goes to a 404 that you will run into ranking issues.

The same rule applies with the images. If someone clicks an image on Google images, and it goes to the wrong URL and lands on a 404 page, it could lose it's ranking. I can see the new platform uses Wordpress going by the wp-uploads/ path, so you might be able to rely on a plugin to ensure this doesn't happen, such as a redirection plugin.

Don't use both - just use Yoast and add %%page%% to the Archive title, and it will add the page number, therefore removing the duplicate title tag issue as nothing will be the same.

Hi, when you click on the error, it should list the URL of the page which has one title, and then underneath that, the other page(s) that have the same title.

Very important. We do this ourselves and have seen true results from image file names, even when they are on a page with no relevant keywords and a different title element. It's the file name that always wins in the SEO, ie celebrity_name.jpg.

You can use a number of seperators, such as -, or +, but our favourite has been the underscore. I tend to avoid using spaces as the %20 part that fills it in the URL is attached to the keywords, which may harm the SEO. The seperators indicate them as seperate words.

No problem, remember to also add %%sep%% so it adds a seperator, so example:

%%term_title%% %%sep%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%

would appear as:

category name - Page 2 of 50 - domain name

of course, domain name and the final seperator are optional.

Be sure to create your sitemap so that one individual URL has it's own content, and there is not another URL on the domain which has 100% of the same content.

You can set it so that Ajax loading pages have their own URLs and change as they load, and also have their own page title. This is used by sites such as USA Today. Click any news article for an example:

http://www.usatoday.com/

Is that the kind of loading mechanism you mean?

I don't believe this is the case. They used to be active on my Feedburner feed posts and there did not seem to be any ranking difference from it. We use a custom short URL (smt.io hooked up to bit.ly) and this seems to work fine. I think the focus of a short URL should be to show your relevance of your website. ie, mash.to, buff.ly, nyti.ms. You know what those companies are and therefore trust those links more. Goo.gl links can link to anything and might not be trusted as much.

Remember back when short URLs first came out with tinyurl, and everyone was using it to mask out shock sites etc via MSN messenger? Nobody trusts them unless they look reputable in my opinion. Would you click a bit.ly domain in your email, what about one from on.mash.to?

As long as the products you are promoting fit with the feel of your site and are not straight up advertisements, they will unlikely mess with your customer loyalty.

When a user clicks on a 3rd party link, they get a cookie on their computer. How long that cookie exists for depends on the program. Amazon is only 24 hours, but others can be from 30-90 days. That means that a user could come back within 30 days and buy the product (or related product depending on the program) and you would still receive credit for that purchase. However, if the user clears their cookies, you will lose that affiliate lead. That's why in my opinion the 24 window is ideal, and that is probably why Amazon sticks with it, being one of the most popular programs.

There is endless material to read online, and Keri's suggestion is a good place to start. Put some hours into it and you will understand affiliate marketing inside out in no time. Some famous blogs using this type of approach include ProBlogger, and they have some nice tips etc on there for beginners.

Hope I helped.

Hi, I assume the 118,000 links are from 118,000 pages which feature the footer-wide link?

I have read many times that these links are "bad for SEO", but in all honesty all major content networks have to do this, because how else will they link to their parent company, or other sites in their network.

It does of course help if the other sites are on the same domain, and just subdomains or subdirectories, but I understand in most networks this would not be the case.

Many large publishers do this, especially in the UK, with companies like Future plc, Newsquest, Immediate Media Co etc. They all have footerwide links on all pages.

Whilst they may be rather saturated in providing link juice, they should provide a better user experience and not be bad for SEO, but I always read conflicting information about this kind of thing.

Your title is too spammy, shorten it.

Have a much higher quality image for the slideshow on the homepage, and this can be something assignment related to help bring in image search traffic also.

It's very hard to say how long it takes to reach the first page of Google, but there are many things you can do in order to boost that timeframe, such as regularly creating original and fresh content, ideally on a daily basis through the means of a blog or new pages.

Ensure your sitemap (http://www.makemyassignments.com/sitemap.xml) is submitted to Webmaster Tools and you are keeping an eye on it for any errors with crawling etc.

I notice you are giving people the opportunity to purchase through you also, so in that case I would recommend you switch your site to https mode instead of http. This was recently discovered to be a ranking factor:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html