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If you believe your old site does not have much SEO value and a rebranding of your company would help, I believe it would be a good idea to go ahead. However, you mentioned that you plan on going into social media and content marketing. In that case, roidirectmail.com may not be a good representation of the services you are offering? roisolutions.com or the original site name sounds like a better representation to me.

Even if your old site does not have much search traffic, you should consider doing a 301 redirect of your old site to the new site. You would want any possible visitors to your old site to be redirected to your new site, and not be lost in a sea of 404 pages.

I think it would be a good idea to redirect your select-location page to your new homepage. You will be able to take advantage of the link juice obtained, before Google re-indexes your pages. Moreover, doing a redirect is better than directing your visitors to a 404 page - they will be annoyed with the latter and likely to leave your site immediately.

Hi pikka,

I believe there is no fixed rule for the name of the subfolder. However, it would be useful to keep it consistent (es-es, en-gb, de-at) and short. There's a question previously on Moz that dealt with this: http://moz.com/community/q/best-url-structure-for-multinational-multilingual-websites

Hope that helps

Hi Trenton,

If I understand correctly, you are restructuring your site to a product-centric structure, as compared to a location-centric structure? If that is the case, I certainly think this is a better structure. From what I see, you have similar content across each of your city site, which doesn't look good from a SEO perspective since they can be treated as duplicate content. If your company is offering the same range of products across several locations, it will be a good idea to focus on developing product pages as compared to city pages.

You may notice a slight drop in SERP temporarily by when changing your site structure, but with proper 301 redirects and some time, your SERP shouldn't be greatly affected. Consolidating information on your site will go a long way in improving your SERP in the long term.

Hope that helps!

If I were you, I would consider switching to ToyZoo. Having 2 domains will require separate SEO efforts and Google will penalise you for having duplicate content on both sites. It wouldn't be worth the effort to try to make both sites "unique" in content. It would be a better idea to consolidate your SEO juice in just one domain for both your eCommerce and brick & mortar presence.

That being said, the act of changing domain name for rebranding purposes will affect your SE ranking temporarily. To minimise such effects, you would have to 1) Redirect PuzzleZoo pages to ToyZoo using 301 redirect, and 2) Use the Change of Address tool in Google Webmaster. Here's a link by Google that will help you: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83105

Hope that helps!

Hi Brad,

If I were you, I think my first concern would be to gain control of the collection of websites. Losing the ability to update content on a website and trying to perform SEO on it is like trying to sell an old product. It may work in the short run, but I don't think it will work in the long run if the content is outdated.

Back to your main question, trying to get backlinks in this case can be a tough exercise. Have you considered promoting your content through social media? If you have quality content, it is likely that it would be picked up by your followers. Submitting your website to quality business directories (if your site is a business site) may also help you get some backlinks.

I agree with Chris, it depends on how "closely connected" your subdomains are. If you are sharing a lot of links in between the subdomains, then its likely that all the sites will be affected once detected by Google. However, do note that Google treats subdomain separately. This means that if you ensure the content in each of your subdomain is unique and perform different linking activities on them, it shouldn't be an issue.

On top of SEO concerns, if you are aiming to establish a review community under a common brand name, it would certainly be a good idea to use subdomains. For example, if a visitor looking for car reviews is impressed with your car review site, it is likely that he/she will look for healthcare reviews from your healthcare review site. One good example of this is Tutsplus, which has several subdomains under the giant umbrella of web development.

Hey Guy,

I'm not sure why you are thinking about stopping guest blogging activities. I believe guest blogging is still a great way to achieve greater brand exposure and obtain backlinks from authoritative sites within your niche.

Granted, Google has mentioned before that links in guest posts should be "nofollow"ed. If you are guest blogging in massive amounts for the sake of link building, then sure, you better nofollow your links. But if you write quality content of decent lengths, I don't see why Google will penalise you for linking back to your site.

Hi Christopher,

Just to add on to Vadim's suggestion, if you wish to disable attachment pages for your previous posts efficiently, you can install plugins to redirect attachment URLs to parent post URLs. This will reduce the chances of visitors going to your attachment pages unnecessarily.

One of such plugins is Wordpress SEO by Yoast, and the relevant option can be activated under the Permalinks tab. This post should be useful for you too: http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-disable-image-attachment-pages-in-wordpress/

From a UX perspective, infinite scrolling will only work on certain type of sites (e.g. sites with lots of user-generated content that are short and concise). If users are expecting a never-ending list of info, such as Twitter, Facebook, this will be a good idea.

However, for an ecommerce store, infinite scrolling may not be ideal. What the end-users want is to obtain the most appropriate result, rather than a variety of results. Using infinite scrolling in this case will be counter-productive instead. Users may be put off by irrelevant results and may feel difficult controlling their experience on your store, amongst many other reasons.

There are reasons why Google has not implemented infinite scrolling for search results yet, and you should take these into account. Here's an article that may be useful to you: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/reach-a-definite-logical-end-using-infinite-scrolling/64008/

Gotta agree with you on this. Having a "blanket" rule to render all links nofollow will certainly help to discourage spammers, but may not help in encouraging contributors. Everybody loves a little incentive here and there.

Many popular forums, including Moz Q&A, have adopted structures to remove "nofollow" tag in links or include more links for top quality contributors. You might want to consider adopting such a structure for your forum.

WIth reference to your question on edu & gov backlinks, it wouldn't be worth spending a lot of your effort on gaining them. Matt Cutts mentioned once in a video response that .edu & .gov backlinks do not necessarily worth more than .com links (http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2010/01/do-you-still-care-about-gov-or-edu-links.html).

Besides, it is important to obtain more backlinks from sites related to your business/niche, as compared to getting backlinks from edu & gov pages which have no relation to your business/niche. It won't help much in building up your site's authority if you go for the latter.

How about guest posting? Asking them to allow you to write a quality post on their site helps to build deeper relationships, which may come in handy in the future if you're looking for support and participation from sites within your niche. Moreover, guest posting lets you tap on the audience of other sites, and gets your name known out there.

Here's an article about how Buffer managed to propel itself to success with guest posting: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2194396/How-Guest-Posting-Propelled-One-Site-From-0-to-100000-Customers. Worth a read!

Have you tried using social media to promote your infographic? Infographics are meant to be viral content and social media sites would be a good platform to do that. You may want look into using Facebook (if your infographic is too long, you may want to include a link to the full image). Pinterest would be a good idea too, since infographics can be viewed in full and easily repinned for more exposure.

Hi Garry,

You are certainly right - SEO is far from being dead and it has only started getting more interesting. Despite all the buzz about social media marketing and content marketing, search engines still bring in the bulk of the traffic for most sites and is responsible for many of the conversions.

If I may add on to the list, the recent introduction of Google Authorship has certainly changed the SEO landscape. It shows that Google is focused on recognising authors for their content. By linking up your articles with your Google+ profile, you would be able to have a snippet of your profile picture and a link to your profile underneath search results that correspond to your articles.

Studies have shown that these rich snippets improves the click-through rate, which is why content marketers need to work on setting up their Google Authorship now.

No doubt it is difficult to come up with keywords for a growing fashion brand, it is certainly worth spending some effort to work on long tail keywords. Despite the growth of social media and content marketing, search engines still bring in the bulk of the traffic for most sites and it would not be wise to neglect optimising your site on search engines.

Focus on creating keywords based on your client's USP - what's so special about their products? Is it the design, the material or the quality? You don't have to come up with the most unique keywords, but you can still snatch a portion of the traffic for "branded black sunglasses" or "polka dot cotton dresses" (just examples).

That being said, you should still invest some effort on social media and content marketing. One suggestion I have for a fashion brand is to work on Pinterest. Given the high traffic and the female-dominated user base, it would be a good place to promote your brand and engage with potential customers. Develop a holistic approach by pinning quality photos of a selection of your products, other interesting photos, and perhaps run a contest.

Hope that helps!

Hi there,

As with what Kevin mentioned, I'm not sure why would want to include dummy links in your posts. The only plausible reason I can think of is that your website is teaching HTML or you are creating dummy design pages.

If you would like to ensure your posts are SEO optimised, you may want to include a rel="nofollow" tag in these dummy links, while linking them to actual websites that of irrelevance (e.g. linking to Google or an internal link). Adding this tag will tell search engines not to follow this link, which thereby won't affect your pagerank. This should help you get started if you have not used the tag before: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en

I believe if you go to your Facebook page -> Edit Page -> Settings -> Notifications, you should be able to manage your notifications from the page to your email through a checkbox. If you still do not receive any emails from Facebook, you may want to check the notification settings on your own Facebook account.

Hi Melissa,

I'm assuming you are designing a mobile-friendly version of your client's real estate website. If that's the case, it would certainly be preferable to go for a responsive design. The main reason for this is SEO. Responsive designs maintain the same URL, which keeps your "SEO juice" regardless of whether visitors are viewing your website on mobile phones or on computers.

Mobile versions of websites are created before the concept of responsive web design was fully established, and it is my guess that other real estate websites developed mobile sites long before responsive versions are mainstream. As such, it would be a good idea to develop a responsive design for your client now, to differentiate his website from others in the same niche.

Moreover, responsive design caters to all screen sizes within one CSS version, while mobile versions can only cater to one screen size. Given the variety of screen sizes throughout new and old smartphones/tablets, it would be unimaginable to create mobile versions to suit all of them.

That being said, there are considerations to be made as mentioned by Bede. You would need to ensure the backend of  your client's site is suitable for easy & quick loading on mobile phones and tablets. Otherwise, a responsive design wouldn't help at all.

Hi Bill,

Google claims that this shouldn't be an issue "as long as the content is for different users in different countries. But if you're not careful about this, it will affect your pagerank if search engine crawlers treat your content on both sites as duplicates, since most of them are looking for original content.

To be on the safe side and help search engines understand better, you should include a rel="canonical" link in pages that have same or similar content. Once detected, Google will only index one of the versions for their search results. Here's a guide from Google that will help you: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394

Hope that helps!