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They are a society that is linked to an academic institution. I don't know if there are any other factors pushing them from ac.uk to co.uk I'm afraid. It sounds like this is something that I should clarify with them when I talk to them.

Thanks for the advice!

I'd be grateful if I could check my thinking...

I've agreed to give some quick advice to a non profit organisation who are in the process of moving their website from an ac.uk subdomain to a .co.uk domain. They believe that their SEO can be improved considerably by making this migration.

From my experience, I don't see how this could be the case. Does the unique domain in itself offer enough ranking benefit to justify this approach? The subdomain is on a very high authority domain with many pre-existing links, which makes me even more nervous about this approach.

Does anyone have any opinions on this that they could share please? I'm guessing that it is possible to migrate safely and that there might be branding advantages, but from an actual SEO point of view there is not that much benefit? It looks like most of their current traffic is branded traffic.

Makes sense - I understand now. Thanks for the clarification

Thanks for your response Sheena, it's great to hear that I'm on the right track with this!

I was wondering if you could further explain the following part of your answer:

"What I can say is that the 'better way' depends on what words might already be in the domain, as I try to not be redundant (when possible) so it doesn't appear spammy/kw stuffed."

Are you suggesting that you'd tend towards not including a keyword if it appears elsewhere on the site and so search engines have enough context? Also, what do you mean by 'redundant'?

First of all, I fully appreciate that I may be over analysing this, so feel free to highlight if you think I’m going overboard on this one.

I’m currently trying to optimise the URLs for a group of new pages that we have recently launched. I would usually err on the side of leaving the urls as they are so that any incoming links are not diluted through the 301 re-direct. In this case, however, there are very few links to these pages, so I don’t think that changing URLs will harm them.

My main question is between short URLs vs. long URLs (I have already read Dr. Pete’s post on this). Note: the URLs I have listed below are not the actual URLs, but very similar examples that I have created.

The URLs currently exist in a similar format to the examples below:

http://www.company.com/products/dlm/hire-ca

My first response was that we could put a few descriptive keywords in the url, with something like the following:

http://www.company/products/debt-lifecycle-management/hire-collection-agents - I’m worried though that the URL will get too long for any pages sitting under this.

As a compromise, I am considering the following:

http://www.company/products/dlm/hire-collection-agents

My feeling is that the second approach will give the best balance between having the keywords for the products and trying to ensure good user experience. My only concern is whether the /dlm/ category page would suffer slightly, but this would have ‘debt-lifecycle-management’ in the title tag.

Does this sound like a good approach to people? Or do you think I’m being a little obsessive about this? Any help would be appreciated

Thanks both - I wasn't expecting that answer. I suppose you learn something every day. I have now submitted the reconsideration request so hopefully that will go through fine!

Over the weekend our website received large amounts of spammy comments / user profiles on our forums. This has led to Google giving us a partial manual action until we clear things up. So far we have:

• Cleared up all the spam, banned the offending user accounts, and temporary enabled admin-approval for new sign ups.

We are currently investigating upgrading the forum software to the latest version in order to make the forums less susceptible to this kind of attack. Could anyone let me know whether they think it is the right time for us to submit a reconsideration request to get the manual action removed? Will the temporary actions we have taken be enough to get the ban lifted, or should we wait until the forum software has been updated?

I'd really appreciate any advice, especially if there is anyone here who has experienced this issue themselves

Thanks for those answers, that's really useful. It sounds like this is not something to worry about too much, but something that is not ideal for the site's appearance in the search results!

We’ve had some success recently by reducing the number of duplicate title tags on our website. We have managed to fix all the simple cases but there are a number of stubborn examples that we don’t know how to fix.

A lot of the duplicate tags come from the website’s forums. Many questions have been asked multiple times over the years where the user has phrased the question in the same way. This has led to many cases where different forums posts have the same title tag. For example, there are six title tags with the words ‘’need help”!  These are being highlighted as duplicates and currently we have several thousand of these. Would this be a problem? I’d be tempted to say that we should leave them as they don’t seem unnatural to me.

One solution other solution we are considering is to append the forum name to the question to any post after the original, falling back to appending the date if that doesn’t distinguish it.

Do people think that this is a good solution to implement or would it be better to leave these duplicate title tags as they are?

Any help would be appreciated

Thanks all that's good advice. It sounds like this is a fairly grey area. Based on this, we've decided to run some checks on the domain first before proceeding.

I’m currently getting a lot of external links to my website from ‘xyz’. This a series of sites with near identical content and duplicate URLs (xyz234.com, xyz63.com, xyz456.com etc). There are 15 of these sites which are contributing 6236 external links.

Would you agree that these URLs are candidates to be disavowed? I currently have no unnatural link warnings in GWT  but I’m concerned with watching out for negative SEO and keeping our link profile healthy. Would pruning spammy links like these be a good step?

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks both - it's interesting that there is no 'standard' method, but it makes sense that this would very much depend on the situation.

Does Google penalise content that sits behind a read gate? Currently, most of the content on our site sits behind a read gate. People have to register before they can view the detailed content. Currently, our forums are accessible to all which draws a lot of long tail traffic.

Google does seem to be indexing some of our gated content, but can someone advise me how they view this content more generally please?

I’m currently planning to a retire a discontinued product and put a 301 redirect to a related product (although not identical). The thing is, I’m still getting significant traffic from people searching for the old product by name. Would Google send this traffic to the new pages via the re-direct? Is Google likely to display the new page in place of the old page for similar queries or will it serve other content? I’d like to answer this question so that I can decide between the two following approaches:

1)      Retiring the old page immediately and putting a 301 redirect to the new related pages. This will have the advantage of transferring the value of any link signals / referring traffic. Traffic will also land on the new pages directly without having to click through from another page. We would have a dynamic message telling users that the old product had been retired depending on whether they had visited out site before.

2)      Keep the old product pages temporarily so that we don’t lose the traffic from the search engines. We would then change the old pages to advise users that the old product was now retired, but that we have other products that might solve their problems. When this organic traffic decreases over time, then we will proceed with the re-direct as above. I am worried though that the old product pages might outrank the new product pages.

I’d really appreciate some advice with this. I’ve been reading lots of articles, but it seems like there are different opinions on this. I understand that I will lose between 10% - 15% of page rank as per the Matt Cutts video.

We’re a software company. Would someone be able to help me with a basic process for retiring old product pages and re-directing the SEO value to new pages. We are retiring some old products to focus on new products. The new software has much similar functionality to the old software, but has more features.

How can we ensure that the new pages get the best start in life? Also, what is the best way of doing this for users?

Our plan currently is to:

• Leave the old pages up initially with a message to the user that the old software has been retired. There will also be a message explaining that the user might be interested in one of our new products and a link to the new pages.
• When traffic to these pages reduces, then we will delete these pages and re-direct them to the homepage.

Has anyone got any recommendations for how we could approach this differently? One idea that I’m considering is to immediately re-direct the old product pages to the new pages. I was wondering if we could then provide a message to the user explaining that the old product has been retired but that the new improved product is available. I’d also be interested in pointing the re-directs to the new product pages that are most relevant rather than the homepage, so that they get the value of the old links. I’ve found in the past that old retirement pages for products can outrank the new pages as until you 301 them then all the links and authority flow to these pages.

Any help would be very much appreciated

I'm trying to convince people that we need good marketing reasons for starting multiple domains, as it will be more difficult to rank multiple sites. Does anyone know if Google actively discourages multiple domains from the same company appearing in the search results for the same keyword? We are creating a separate content website which is related to an existing company website. Would you agree that is best to have these sites on one domain with the content site on a sub-domain perhaps? I'm worried about duplication of effort and cross-keyword targeting in particular.

These sites would not have duplicate content.

Excellent advice Federico. My first reaction was, "but that's not a server-side sitemap generator". I just looked at their website though and it turns out that it is! Looks like I need to read things more carefully!

I'll look into that as an option but if anyone else has any server side sitemap generators that they'd recommend then I'd be really interested to hear about them

I've been looking into sitemap generators recently and have got a good knowledge of what creating a sitemap for a small website of below 500 URLs involves. I have successfully generated a sitemap for a very small site, but I’m trying to work out the best way of crawling a large site with millions of URLs.

I’ve decided that the best way to crawl such a large number of URLs is to use a server side sitemap, but this is an area that doesn’t seem to be covered in detail on SEO blogs / forums. Could anyone recommend a good server side sitemap generator? What do you think of the automated offerings from Google and Bing? I’ve found a list of server side sitemap generators from Google, but I can’t see any way to choose between them. I realise that a lot will depend on the type of technologies we use server side, but I'm afraid that I don't know them at this time.

Thanks Marc for answering what is in many ways an unfair question.

I definitely agree that the long term objective should be different and relevant meta descriptions as you say. It's also good to know that each of the approaches I suggested were ultimately bad practice, even if one of them is less bad than the other.

I’m currently trying to implement Matt Cutt’s advice from a recent YouTube video, in which he said that it was better to have no meta descriptions at all than duplicates.

I know that there are better alternatives, but, if forced to make a choice, would it be better to remove all duplicate meta descriptions from a site than to have duplicates (leaving a lone meta tag description on the home page perhaps?). This would be a short term fix prior to making changes to our CMS to allow us to add unique meta descriptions to the most important pages.

I’ve seen various blogs across the internet which recommend removing all the tags in these circumstances, but I’m interested in what people on Moz think of this.

The site currently has a meta description which is duplicated across every page on the site.