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Hi Robert, Just want to be clear: you're going from having the website lovelytraining.com and the blog lovelyblog.lovelytraining.com to having the website lovely.training and the blog lovelyblog.lovelytraining.com. Right? If so - yup, you're going to lose that subdomain connection. There's no formal way you can tell Google that lovelyblog.lovelytraining.com is essentially part of the lovely.training site, but you can link to the blog in your header or footer so they're clearly partners. Have you thought about migrating your blog to lovely.training/blog/? That's the best way to consolidate link equity. Best, Kristina

Hello Robert, This is a question many businesses struggle with, as you might imagine. There really is no "perfect" solution for every situation so I won't try to speak in best practices other than to say don't annoy the user. If I'm trying to get to your .com home page but I just happen to be travelling in Germany for business an automatic redirect to the German page would drive me nuts. If it were my site I'd probably take the third option. Specifically, I'd sniff out the geolocation based on their IP address and serve a custom pop-up in the language of that country offering something like "Would you like to see the [Country-Language] version"? If I'm in Germany and land on the English default ".com" page I will not be surprised or frustrated by a pop-up or a custom message on the page asking "Möchten Sie die deutsche Version zu sehen?". I'd probably just X-out of it and move on. That's pretty much what this site does when I view from a US location: https://www.gsport.no/herre/klaer/bukse-shorts . It asks me, in English, if I want to translate to English, and offers two clear options along with a third x-out option. Or I could ignore it because it's pretty unobtrusive on desktop. No matter which approach you choose, be sure to research best practices on using attributes and tags like  rel="alternate" hreflang="x" and rel="canonical". I'll leave this question open for discussion since there are many potential approaches that might answer your question.

Hi Robert, It seems like your strategy is right now and you were unfortunate to hire an agency that has resulted in the penalty. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but I have seen websites that have never recovered from a penalty, even after having the reconsideration request accepted. However, looking on the positive side, and with the links you are/have built there shouldn't be any reason why you shouldn't start to see a recovery. When you got them to remove the links, did they get them removed or use the disavow tool. The problem with using the disavow tool is that some agencies aren't sure what is a good link and what is a bad link so if they just got rid of everything then you have effectively started from scratch but with a penalty hanging over your head so it is going to be hard to rank again. Look at your backlink profile again and compare it to what it was before the penalty (if possible) and then see if you still have any links that look suspect. Any article directores or poor quality directories that are still there, get them taken down.

Agreed, I'd approach this as a custom acquisition and brand awareness project as well. Especially given that the website would have a short life span and SEO is a long term investment. If this was me I'd optimize the website for the competition name and use social networking to build awareness (ie. facebook, twitter, pinterest etc).

Hi Robert, One possibility: A few months ago Google Webmaster Tools changed it's user interface to visually separate sitemaps submitted by you, and sitemaps submitted by others. The default view shows only sitemaps submitted by the Google account you are currently logged into. If sitemaps were submitted by others, or under another Google account you have access to, the screen may appear blank with the following message: "You have not submitted any sitemaps for this site." But sitemaps may still exist if you hit the "All" tab. (See screenshot attached) Hitting this tab will reveal all sitemaps Google has on file. This confuses a lot of webmasters, including myself, because it makes it look like the sitemap has disappeared, even though Google has a record of it and is actively crawling it. CnBIW.png

Thanks for the responses guys, looks like an SQL Injection. We have cleared the import and all is back to normal. We'll be looking in to beefing up protection. Thanks for the advice. Will be keeping my eye on the traffic via analytics and watching out for messages in Webmaster Tools

This is a decision you only face at blog creation time, once you have strated your blog and it is established, I don't see anything that should push you to change unless it is a "business reason" A subdomain is arguably not the best practice, but it is not a bad one either

Hi Robert, two good answers above - it depends on your aims and intent (i.e. is it solely about links or would you like to built up reputation and readership?). I would second the point that Debdulal made - is it possible for you to put the content on your own site? That way you could get the best of both worlds - reputation and readership, plus inbound links if the content is high quality and you work to promote it. Good luck!

I received my invite to the Google Plus Custom URL today. I'm adding it. (Well, the url choice wasn't what I wanted. Will be posting a question about changing it before I go for it.) Here's some more information on it. https://support.google.com/plus/answer/2676340?hl=en&topic=2400106

Pranav, I suspect you are misinterpreting what has been said and you are also getting your words confused. Characters are different to words. For example the url http://www.this-is-an-example.com has four words (this is an example) and 33 characters. What you have been saying is that character number 1 has more weight than character 33. This is inaccurate. What I believe you are trying to say, is what Matt Cutts mentions in the interview you posted, that multiple keywords in a URL are given less weight after about the fourth or fifth keyword. I suggest that you read the articles you quote more carefully before offering erroneous advice.

I try to stay away from these paid submission infographic sites. There are plenty that publish your infographics for free. I agree that it is better to target sites that are relevant to your industry. If someone has published a similar infographic in the past, use Google image search to find out where it was published. These sites may also be interested in publishing your infographic.

It is best to use the domain.com/blog as the link juice and authority picked up by your blog will be passed in part to the root domain, therefore increasing you domain authority etc If you take the subdomain route the link juice and authority doesn't get passed and the blog is treated as an independent sites in Google. Therefore i'd go domain.com/blog every day of the week

That was the original email - Google has detected evidence of unnatural link building. We're still not entirely sure what caused the issue. I assume it was in our last reconsideration request but at that point we were just hoping.

Thanks for responding guys.... After some back and forth and research from the Web Dev team, turns out our hosts messed up when upgrading RAM to our host server.....site was down for 3 hours overnight. All appears to be fine now but will keep my eyes peeled. Thanks

Hi Justin, thanks for the feedback. I'm not sure I would have been concerned had it just been a couple of links from the sites. The sites linking are credible well established blogs, with great content. And the response on the sites are genuine unique responses in the comments section to articles created. It seems to be the nature of the comment form and the set up of the blog plugin that makes this look suspicious. I believe I will see if its possible to keep the comment and just remove the link.

No worries We release property every week and I do a blog post about each one, probably 2-5 properties each week then smash it out via social media (facebook, twitter, linkedin, etc). This seems to work quite nicely, though I only have to sell it once to be fair. After this, we will also email the property out (with new content from that week), this gives that page a massive boost in traffic, which definitely slows down the process of dropping off the rankings, in my opinion. So perhaps do a weekly email about new products and include some relative content in the email as well (as Matt said, link to the products in the content too!) Doing this I have been steadily climbing up the rankings for my main keyword, last week I went up 15 ranks according to SEOmoz Pro! (It’s been about a month or two since I started doing this). I think my main problem is that the site has a lot of old pages. Also the main pages need a bit of on-page optimization, so this may be something to look at as well J