Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Donna,

Miriam is truly an expert in Local SEO. Listen and learn from her and you will be given the best advice. She really helps a ton of people through Moz and one or two other forums.

Best

If what you are trying to achieve is to have a canonical that is the www version, you are better served doing two things: First go to Google webmaster tools and select a preferred domain (from GWMT):

To specify your preferred domain:

1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
2. Under Site configuration, click Settings.
3. In the Preferred domain section, select the option you want.

You may need to reverify ownership of your sites. Because setting a preferred domain impacts both crawling and indexing, we need to ensure that you own both versions. Typically, both versions point to the same physical location, but this is not always the case. Generally, once you have verified one version of the domain, we can easily verify the other using the original verification method. However, if you've removed the file, meta tag, or DNS record, you'll need to repeat the verification steps.

Note: Once you've set your preferred domain, you may want to use a 301 redirect to redirect traffic from your non-preferred domain, so that other search engines and visitors know which version you prefer.

To do the 301 redirect of the non www to the www here is the script from Scriptalicious:

**RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]**

Hope this helps you.

Having dealt with photographers for many years I would say that it is, but does not have to be. Obviously, there are more Spring and Summer marriages, school pics during school year, etc. Many photographers put their businesses in too narrow a niche and by virtue of that limit themselves to other opportunities. If a photographer is to build a name for themselves it will typically start in one city. They have to become known to a level that someone will say, "This family photo was shot by Bill Photo." But, there are many other areas to be explored: If a photographer is digitally savvy, the real estate market loves a person who understands what parallax is and how to best display a home for sale. They pay very well (Maybe a low of $150 for the lower end real estate up to $1,000's for high end homes). Be willing to set up drop boxes, etc. and teach agents and mls' how to retrieve photos and be prepared to assist them early in the process. Seasoned realtors are good at this, but new ones need help. You never know which new one will become a top producer.

Industrial/Commercial photography is another area where they can make money and reduce seasonality. Make it easy on them to get what they want and then have it available when they need a copy, etc. (Get away from the "I own the copyright and a copy is $500 BS - charge a fee, but make the money on the schedule time, difficulty of shoot and setting, etc. - no one likes to feel nickel and dimed).

Like any other business, you must be telling people you are there and constantly working the sales pipeline. If you are an "artist" and cannot be bothered with the mundane....good luck.

Best

Cody

Well, since I have accepted his advice in the past I should agree with Dr. Pete again. That said, why not take it one step at a time. I have done this with one client (three sites redirected to one over time). First, take whichever other domain you decide on and redirect it url to url to your main site. Sit on that a month or so and then do the same with site two. Again, wait a while, then redirect another.

To me, I do not see where it would present a problem done this way. You state that [some of the domains have a significant amount of link value] and this would seem to say others do not. If that is true and ultimately you are only going to redirect 3 or 4, I do not think it would be a red flag to OZ...I mean Google.

Looking forward to other responses.

Keri,
I would appreciate it if while I am taking certain medications you refrain from emotional statements. People in this place know me as a former Marine and I am having to explain the difference between misty eyes due to allergies and that other thing that occurs to those less uh, you know, uhh strong manly Marine types.

Best to you and anyone whomever called themselves a Mozzer.

I was going to leave this lie and I already thumbed up Gianluca for his (as always) excellent response, but whenever I see the word spinning it bugs me. There was another question today re finding duplicate content on your own website. I went to copyscape.com and put in a portion of an article I had written about a drug in about October of 2010. I was looking to see if it showed up in two client websites as a blog posting. Imagine when I saw it in several other sites with poor grammar added and misused modifiers, etc.

So, the whole idea of using some crap spinning software and churning out anything in twenty different and bad permutations is the most counterproductive SEO tactic today. Then to submit it to clowns who are going to have links to you for a fee is the second most counterproductive.

Lastly, in SEO, when you have found the easy way to do something, generally, it is wrong or at best very temporary. Think about it, if it is easy every clown who professes SEO knowledge is doing it so there is no advantage. Those who truly work at SEO are the ones who succeed for themselves, their companies, and their clients. Write good content. Do the work to get good links. Then sit back and smile when you smoke these chumps.

Sorry for the rant. I had a moment

Attiya, The only way you can do that is to have separate memberships. So, if you are on a Pro membership and need additional capacity for campaigns, rank tracking, etc. get a second pro as opposed to a Pro plus. 
We are on Pro Plus and are going to add a pro as opposed to going to Pro Elite. If we get to the point where we need  additional campaigns provided by having the elite versus two pro plus (one campaign), we will likely just get another pro so that we have an additional staff member on Moz. For me, I see the value as an agency for my people to be involved as themselves so that they are more engaged.

They can all be on moz without paying and set up accounts prior to going to pro, etc.

Best of luck to you,

Robert

xenu linksleuth is the answer to your question. Good luck. Nothing better I am aware of.

OK, this is not really different than many of the directory sites doing this. I work with a lot of professional practices and it is a bit of a pet peeve that google allows such, but that is not what you asked.

If you look at this the actual "site" is a subdirectory of plasticsurgery.org. Go to plastic surgery.org and look for the menu item where you can "find a surgeon." When you follow that, you are redirected to a sub domain 1.plasticsurgery.org. You can then enter various zips or states, etc. His zip when entered allows a sort option and when you find his name you will notice a badge with enhanced listing. He is paying the ASPS additional to be "enhanced" - no pun intended but I did lol when I first wrote this. So, they are likely setting up a program in which they potentially do the local listing etc. and allow the site as a subdirectory.

What is really bad about this is his places page is not even filled out 25%, there are no reviews, etc. I could not find a different site using variations on the title or searching on him as a surgeon in Phoenix using name only. I would think that means Phoenix is a great market to go after Plastic Surgeons if you are an agency!

Yes, it is not really reasonable, but maybe in Panda 99.90.

Hope this helps

Steve

Frankly I am curious as to why you wouldn't just name them. If they are so well used by others they certainly shouldn't mind.

I cannot imagine an SEO need I have for a single client or for my company that any site wide link could provide enough value for. Anything you read will tell you that it is rare that anyone needs this much access. I would not give someone I have no knowledge of, have no work history with, etc. access to my FTP file no matter how temporary. It is quite typical of those who scam to state we do this for the XYZ company. Frankly, I cannot tell you how many Google Adwords Partners in an unnamed country have badges with links that when clicked on then state they are not partners. (Most people do not check it out.)

Think about 20 bonus links: Are they from high value authorities around what your site is? Or, are they links you could go out and get by providing your email address to a directory?

Most people I have known who have been scammed (OK, including me) have fallen for something that was going to make them richer quicker or something that was going to alleviate a headache, roadblock, etc. without real effort. Everyone in SEO is faced with choosing between the quick and easy and the steady and methodical every day. The biggest hurdle we face as an agency is that our clients hear every day how quick and easy it is: "Get you a hundred leads a day, Rank you #1 on Google, get you off the back pages we noticed you on."

Our job is to say, sorry, we cannot do it. If you think they can, I would suggest giving them a try with say two or three pages that are lagging behind for some term. If they can get you to page one within a month, you won't owe us a thing for all the work we did in that month.

My experience is, there is rarely a quick and easy that does not have a concomitant cost that most are unaware of until they are forced to pay it.

Good Luck

84 Thumbs UP!!!!! Override the system Rand. This is true Rock and Roll...over.

Made my week. I have to have 5 of these. Really, really, really.

Oh, I am in trouble now with a new Hobby. Robert, Marine and now, Naval Captain!

Hello Jeff and welcome to the land of Moz.

As to sub domains, yes www is a subdomain of www.example.com. But, my.example.com is a sub domain of example.com and your.domain.com is a subdomain of example.com. So, based on your question I am going to give you a question:

Have you set a preferred domain in GWMT, Bing, etc.? You need to tell them whether or not you prefer www.yoursite.com or yoursite.com otherwise these are seen as two sites. Now, the other thing you need to do is correctly set them in your .htaccess file if you are using Apache for example. If you are unsure of how, let the community know here or in another question.

Once that is done. Assuming you are only using your domain and not a sub domain, you will simply submit your preferred domain. The reason for this is: For ranking purposes, a domain and a sub domain are not treated as a single site/entity; they are treated as separate domains. So a link to one does not attribute anything to the other per se.

Hope it helps,

Nice response Martin. Very clear cut.

Per Google from WebMaster Tools:

"Google treats some ccTLDs (such as .tv, .me, etc.) as gTLDs, as we've found that users and webmasters frequently see these more generic than country-targeted. Here is a list of those ccTLDs (note that this list may change over time)."

Within the list is .co. So, Google treats .co as a gTLD. Eyepaq makes a good point re the UX issues and .com with same domain.

Hello Bob,

I agree with Alan re the hold off on scrapping the site. And, if there is a way to utilize what weight it does have, use KW research and see what type of quality domain that is exact match you can come up with. An example would be LodiCosmeticDentist.net, etc.  (Then use 301 redirects from Dentist90210.com as you know to do.)

Handling dental sites, I never use smiles, smile, teeth, etc. as they are not terms that are searched for and I prefer a domain have some semblance of a keyword in it, if not an exact match.

Thanks to you both. If anyone has any Unicorn dust or batwing hair, I could use it.

Still smiling cause I just love what we do.

Best

I don't know that it will help your site or not, but it should not hurt it. All recipes is not a poor site in the black hat sense, etc. It does have some serious ads going on but not totally over the top.

Whether it helps will depend on what page you are linking from and how good your content is. If your page rank on recipe site grows as the result of your recipe or someone else's, it should help by sending a bit of juice to your site. How much help will depend on number of other links from that site. Where the link is in the content and on the page, anchor text, etc.

BTW, what is your favorite item to cook...(uh, not meat please kinda like my animals a bit.

Best.

On dedicated IP address, I really think it depends on you and your site. As an agency, we have some that are dedicated by virtue of their SSL, etc. Many are hosted on the same (with all on our dedicated servers). As to whether it is helpful for SEO, I would say not in the sense that if you have versus don't it is better. I think you are thinking of whether or not you have multiple sites on same IP linking to each other (or same C block). Even with that, I don't know if the benefit of totally different C block outweighs the issues of changing for most.

As to domain purchases, again that is a judgment call. When we purchase a domain like HotLawyer.com for example, we typically purchase the .net, .info, .org to go with it. On the main domain, we will purchase typically for one to three years and the others all on one. The reason is that we don't typically keep them after a year unless the vertical is hot and potentially they are EMD's.

Just a note in case you are looking at it. The other thing we rarely do is take the "free" privacty. The reason is when it is time to change something, it is a pain dealing with the privacy and the domain registrar. So, unless we have a particular client with a privacy need or some compelling reason we don't.

Hope this helps you out a bit,

First, this is one I thought I would never ask, but: Could this be true?

I had noticed my MacBook Pro was eating some power and wanted to see if I could optimize my settings so to take advantage what battery life was available. (I swear that is the truth). So, I am at a Starbucks on someone and typed into Google search bar the following query -

Best way to conserve - and, received the following instant search results before I could type - power on a macbook pro

I am not putting it here as I want you to ask yourself what came up. I have attached a screenshot.

My colleague arrived and without prompting she retried and got the same. So I am curious:

Do you get the same result and why do you think that result is so predominant?

This is funny.

efuts.png

I was going to ignore all until I read this, so I will respond to the thread separately.

But, in your response to Igor, you state you essentially ignored on page optimization, failed at PPC, and used no PR agency. (and no bought links).

Then you state you did other marketing outside of web based: relationships, events, conferences and that worked.

So, here is my question: If you were going to go to this tremendous effort (and include social, content, etc. What was the purpose/reason for not doing on page optimization utilizing key words significant to the page?)  
Do you get business from your site? Is it driven by a query on a search engine?

To go to the trouble of creating dynamic content and then ignore basic SEO is anathema to me.

I did like all the rest though.