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Using Majestic historic link function

If you are looking specifically for link analysis tools then a pretty good alternative is http://linkrisk.com/

I have managed to get many penalties overturned based solely on using them as an analysis tool.

You could get the original CCTLD back up with a single page asking people to visit the .com - linking to the .com version with a nofollow instead of the 302.

I have seen penalties pass through redirects and ideally I would try and not redirect a penalised domain to your main site without any in between padding to halt the flow of the penalty.

So my question is, should we redirect all the old product categories that we are shutting down to the new website on another TLD where we are opening them again and the same for the products (e.g. superstar.dk/garmin -> xxx.com/garmin)? Or would it be better to keep the redirects within the same website/TLD (e.g. superstar.dk/garmin -> superstar.dk)?

Historically my answer would have been straightforward. Redirect to the new site. However with the changing rules in search engines I would advise caution. Does your new website have stable rankings? Is it worth the risk of 301's from another site?

My opinion is use of 301s for ranking cross domains may be a tactic that borders on the grey area and could lead to a penalty in the future.

Looks like its part of a dropped domain network - if you look through the historic, you will see the trend of its backlinks. Its not a particularly difficult keyword to rank for to be honest. I think 10-15 decent backlinks would get you there.

They have been attacked time and time again - its not happened yet, and MC keeps saying they are looking at it. Quite a few took a bump when I put that comment out, but weeks later most were back in the index.

two questions: do the lowercase URLs work? (i.e have you set up rules to allow them on your system?)

Could you ping me an example? This is a policy of google Adwords, however I have yetto com across one in SERPs...

If you are serioulsy looking at changing CMS - then wait till you are closer to implementation - and then run it all in one go...

A rel canon will solve the duplicate content issue - telling Google that the "real" and "original" content sites on A not B.

Read up on rel canonical - that will help with:

Keeping the old site live and giving direct load users the same experience instead of being redirected elsewhere, and transfer all the inbound link juice to the main site... (also takes care of cross domain duplicates)

Thats just one option of course...

Best way to get that info is to hit up Site Support - via http://www.seomoz.org/dp/rogerbot

I dont think that they will specifically turn anything "up". however the things to look out for in terms of increasing signal to ranking factrs are the building of "Brand Perception" and Social Signals...

I always advise people NOT to use the robots txt to block off pages - it isnt the best way to handle things. In your case, there may be two options that you can consider:

1. For variant pages, (multiple parameters of the same page) use the rel canonical to increase the strength of the original page, and to keep the variants out of the index.

2. A controversial one this, and many may disagree, but depends on situation basis - allow crawling of the page, but dont allow indexing - follow, no index, which would still pass any juice, but wont index pages that you dont want in the SERPs. I normally do this for Search Result Pages that get indexed...

extract, and use excel - pivot tables are your friends http://www.powerpivot.com/

The best guide out there IMHO is by Yoast http://yoast.com/video-seo/

1. I wouldnt advise redirecting the robots.txt to redirect to home page. It seems that they hve a dynamic 404 redirect system - which when a URL doesnt exist the site redirects it to home. There are god and bad points about this strategy, hoever I would prefer NOT to do it.

2. Re getting site indexed - no it wouldnt hurt them, but would give you much less control over the robots directive, in case you want to add custom instructions. If Google crawlers cant get to it (as in its not user agent cloaked to allow the google bot) you will not be able to do so (eg excluding pages from being indexed via robots wont be ossible).

DM me and lets talk privately - dont want to out anyone in a public forum, which I am glad you didnt. But let me give you a few insights - seems like the co you are talking about is a UK one by the way...

Hi Mathew, a bunch of UK SEOs are keeping an eye out on the UK Roll out of the Panda update - however there isnt any hard evidence to prove that it has been rolled out. Infact, since Mahalo still ranks in the UK, I would say that itdef hasnt been rolled out. I would look beyond the algo change to investigate your traffic loss, UNLESS your traffic loss was from outside the UK?

Have you run an analytics segment analysis where your traffic is from normally and if its lost out regionally?

That def seems to be an issue  - as daft as this may sound - could you double check the URL?

If thats OK - try creating a new campaign and see if that replicates - if it does, it may be a bug with the campaign tool and one for the moz staff to look into.

This is my personal opinion, and others may disagree, but I find the more cometition on a PPC KW, the harder it is to rank in organic. The other piece of info you get is  that the more competition, the better the potential return, as most competitrs are honing into their profitable KWs more.