As Mike said, it could take months for Google to remove all the indexed content from the DEV side (that was crawled and indexed). Looks like you did it all right too. I wouldn't worry, let it filter out. You won't be able to rush it any faster.

My advice is to purchase a domain you can/will build a brand around. Stick to the brand URL/domain as exact name match domains have been flagged by Google for top rankings. Optimize the site for both targeted traffic and local and national/international search traffic. I'm a big believer now of brand domains, and developing links to those sites with links that reflect, brand mentions, KW mentions for correlation, social mentions and inbound related marketing content development to strengthen the domain's total overall market presence.

Another reason to keep the domain 'brand related' is about the UI/UX for recalling it. If it's some crazy long typed domain name with KW's and brand mentions, it becomes tedious to remember and type out Using the brand name as the focus and URL will keep it straight to the point for the user and marketing behind it. NOTE: Make sure to research out the social profiles of any URL you are looking at, to build up around as you want to ensure you can lock them all up prior to purchasing anything

Either way, your best bet with a completely new domain will be to focus on developing out a local SEO strategy and supporting that with targeted content and social media profiles. This way, when you are ready to gain and target a larger audience (national?), you have the backbone profile on the site to reinforce the effort.

Hope some of that helps

Both Lance and CleverPhD have some good points. Really go page by page and map out the entire domain. Both on the PR4 and PR5 sites. Create excel spreadsheets to align up the location and destination of your 301 redirects.

Then, calculate the # of pages you have listed on the PR4 site that need redirecting but really don't have a home. IF the number is small enough, just redirect those pages/URL's for visitors to the homepage. Google doesn't like mass 301 redirects to the homepage, but if those pages have small inbound links, and some value - that will get pushed back to the main index URL.

You could also let it 404 as CleverPhD said, but what I would map out, is a kick-ass 404 redirect page. Include elements like a search function for people to look for new content, add a link to a form that people can fill out to advise of the 404 error. Offer up alternatives and/or pages-URL's that might offer something similar. Have fun with it and add some creativity to help convert those almost lost users to possibly visitors and then clients. Don't just let the 404 page be the end all of the site visit. I have found by really focusing on 404 error page improvements, you can improve both the bounce and exit rates of said pages, and as a result retain users that become clients in the end - all because you were able to take the time to build something that caught their attention, and thus - kept them inside the site Some great examples of creative 404 errors might include this or some creatively funny ones like that. This is another one I liked here.

Hope some of that helps Cheers!

Hey there,

Are you linking these domains just form the main level TLD (homepage), or all the product pages from within each company/country site.

If yes, absolutely! Use <nofollow>on any of the domain/brand or country level TLD's to avoid any kind of penalty. Penguin being as picky as it is, you would want to stay away from any of that to in a 'safe' zone. I would stear clear and use these best practices for interlinking cross country domain sites and products. </nofollow>

Work on building your outside links to the site through content development and social media/mentions, while using the <nofollow>links within the site at the brand and product level. </nofollow>

Thanks, Rob

Are these FORUM posts/page URL's part of the primary root domain? Are they in a separate FOLDER or DIR within the ROOT of the site? How is it structured? Are they still being crawled and indexed? Are they still indexed?

My bet is that you could map out these old post/URL's and possibly 301 them to more relevant information on your site, that deals with, or discusses the topic at hand. You don't want to flat out remove them, have a pile of 404 error's show up and then have to worry about salvaging the damage later. Map out the pages you want to dump - see if there is relevant more up to date conversations that are within the same topic and 301 redirect them to those locations.

You might want to considering removing the one's you can't 301 to more up to date relevant information, if there is no page to do so. You could map these out and possibly create content on the site or BLOG that answers the forum's post, but that might take time and money? That way, future people would find information to handle that very question and not be posting a question about it in the Forum

Unfortunately, in my experience, FORUM's have this issue and I think will continue to have this issue. There is no once recipe to fix the problem of outdated forum posts, or outdated URL's  - but you can leverage some of that and turn it back into traffic for the site - and traffic that is still valuable if it has a purposes (redirect). If not - you can remove the old URL's/posts, let them 404 and remove them through GWMT systematically as they begin to populate your crawl reports from Google.

Either way, it's an option to look at to clean up the site and site pages/depth if you feel those pages have little to offer UX or visiting customers Remember, Google has confirmed that pages that hurt your overall site score, can pull down your natural rankings in the SERP's if pages that are of low-quality don't help the site, users or the user/customer-visitor experience.

Hope that helps a little! Cheers

Yes, it looks spammy too and really isn't helpful to users and visitors who are reading the information you are writing and sharing. Don't scare your users away with spammy looking links. It's probably affecting the on page elements as well as constantly reproducing the same (internal or external links) on all these blogs posts. These type of 'footer' links at the bottom of all the posts also look spammy to the engines. If you do keep them there, select only 1-2 that are of importance and rel=nofollow the others. I

My recommendation if to link naturally inside the site and blog. Don't just link to yourself., your products, or your pages. Be bigger than that Link to other outside sources as well. Don't be afraid to expand on the type of links you use inside your content. Most people are, but when you link intelligently, and for the benefit of the user, the page's performance, click through, time on page/site, etc will improve. It's a win/win for you and your users experience. Not only will you see in time that you are linking to other really valuable sources for your clients, those sites will be watching who is linking to them, and might garner the attention of the staff there for a natural link mention on their site, or request for a 'quest post'.

Hope some of that helps! Cheers

You generally want to have the

tag at the top of the page, above the content paragraph. Keep it close in relation to the content that is below it also for correlation. Typically, you don't place a

inside the HEADER of the page, but rather the of the site.

Make sure to limit your use of the

to only 1 time on a page. Use other elements of <h2-h4>throughout the page, but again, only use each element for various sections 1 time on the site page. I've worked on clients sites that had 5

tags, 10

tags, 15

and so on. The pages focus was a real mess. It gets a little stretched out, the engines have trouble determining /or narrowing down what and where the importance of what you are trying to say on the page is, thus affecting you negatively in the SERP results because they can't figure it out.

Keep it clean, watch the code on your site, use elements carefully and do not overuse them. Keep this in mind, and you should be good to go!

Cheers and good luck!</h2-h4>

Mike and Jesse are both correct!

Here's an old video from Matt Cutts and Google which might help explain a little further what is happening and why. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en . This talks about the site TITLE and DESCRIPTION elements for Google indexing. Always a good reference point

Another good article I have referenced before is: http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/google-changed-my-title (from 2011)

Thanks!

Oleg might have a point. A quick tool you can run to get a snapshot of his analytics, overlayed with the various updates for Penguin and Panda (and other non-named updates) that could have affected it. Use this tool quickly, and you should could correlate a penalty with his traffic. Titled the PANGUIN tool It's useful to get a quick look at his analytics when you connect the Google account. You will see a drastic drop in organic traffic, and it will align with an update Google did which may be the penalty Oleg was referring too.

Without direct access to his analytics, the site, his URL, the non-ranking keywords, the competitor site, etc, it's about the best we can do!

Hope it helps, if it's the case!

Jesse's right. AS much as your client doens't want to upgrade and rework the entire site (build an equivalent in HTML or PHP), there isn't much you can do. This is a full FLASH site, locked SWF and Google isn't going to crawl or index any of the content or information.

You could do a few other things to help the business on a local level:

1. Build up all the social profiles and media needed to support Google local search. Social media, Google+, FB and Twitter sould be a good start. Even a LinkedIn profile to support the company and business.

2. Add in a WORDPRESS customization feature to the site, and build up a blog for content marketing and development. Work to create content around each of these categories and redirect users back to the company site. You don't have specific landing page URL's to use and optimize, but it's a cost effective start if they are unwilling to bend on going the route that will benefit them the most.

I've had clients like this and it's the hardest thing to tell them everything they have or are doing is wrong on many levels. It's probably the most sensitive area when dealing with a client you don't want to upset Tough road ahead for sure.

Cheers!

Hey Bob,

This might be an older post from 2011, but Cyrus does a great job getting to the root of what you are searching for. I don't want to rewrite his suggestions, but let's say I have this page bookmarked to reference whenever I need it Understanding Google's freshness factor and how it affects search rankings

Oh, and read Justin's post on this as well! Great insight into the technical Google patents and breakdown.

No trouble! Glad I could help out

Make a list of each site you want to look for guest blogging and posting opportunities. You are geo-located in the UK, so I would even segment those lists into 2, .com and .co.uk sites. Then look at the domain profiles, DA/PA and back-link structures. Map out all the data to profile each site you can (use Moz! tools) and list out all the data.

I would then start to prioritize them in each category. I would certainly look to use the .co.uk sites over the .com, unless the .com sites are heavily authority related. That's about that. The .com's aren't a total loss, and consider using them when the domain profiles you gather show that they are themselves authorities in their niche markets.

Cheers!

It all depends if you want (or are going too):

1. Short URL's usually work best with regards to indexing and product correlation (too long means characters get left off by Google when indexing). Keep things within a short URL length also helps Google index the full length and get the full value of the URL - using your <keywords>to reinforce the URL relation.</keywords>

• Also - Having these URL's linked too from the main page will help flow 'link juice' through the site, providing you keep the amount of links on the homepage to a minimum amount, and mix with other links that are <nofollow>. Usually links beyond 100 will not be crawled by Googlebot.</nofollow>

• Also - If your URL's are strings - make sure to have 301's setup for URL's that include any type of string (?=question123456 or something to that alignment) Make sure to change that string = www.domains.com/keyword-rich-content. This might be nothing for the site/domain you are working on, or might be a step that needs to be included in the site's overhaul project work.

2. Longer URL's (like adding directories or sub-folders) can be good too, depending on your product breakdown in you site architecture. It might not be needed though. If you have hundreds of thousands of products, directories will most likely be needed to sort the data and organize the database being used to work alongside the CMS. Then you would want to go this route, other than having an unorganized ROOT directory with thousands of pages in it (even if dynamically generated)

Each option works, in their own way. Each with supporting documentation and methods. Just something to consider in helping you steer the SEO sea

Cheers!

HI Gene,

Once you figure out this list from the data gathering - you'll need a tool to build, and run against that list (or lists if broken out by channel), so you can show the client where they position in the ranks.

You can use a tool like the MOZ (rank tracking utility in PRO) although I find this tedious as you can't build a singular report as easily when compared to something, say like RavenTools (this is another tool my team uses for site rank audits) or AWR (Advanced Web Ranking)

You could also go about getting an independent software like AWR (yearly licenses which can be costly) which isn't cloud based, and I prefer this software over any other. The flexibility of this program is great, and the custom reports are fantastic for moulding as needed to export data in multiple formats. You can take it anywhere, and provided you have an internet connection, run it anytime you like.

Looking over the current KW list they rank for (also looking at Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Tools (if you have this setup) is a good place to start Nice call Brian!

you might also want to take that list you extract, and build out an excel file using the MOZ 'keyword analysis and difficulty tool' to map our the competitiveness, and difficutlty score for each keyword, so you can organize them in terms of performance (and attribute that to either short and long tail KW traffic). You'll also extract some nice data through the API from Google on Exact and Broad match phrase search volume

Hope this helps. Cheers.

Rb

This isn't a PRO option yet, but they may have something on the docket going forward. I'm sure it's been something that's been brought up to the product team tho for agency level accounts.

Well, that makes more sense now !! I didn't read it correctly then. Sorry, my mistake. Well, to address your question in that regards then;

1. If I were you, and you have access to their amazon-like site, code and ability to modify, you could very well implement the canonical tag, and redirect all value and links to your clients domain. I wouldn't count on that other site driving any traffic at later points though once the value shift takes place. Those product pages will become mute.

2. Option 2 -> By keeping both sites open (amazon and client site), you have the possibility of driving multiple sources of traffic for the client domain and products, and building the main client site out to out perform the amazon-like site.

Still, following the steps above will help you plan a good solid strategy going forward and will help support the sites performance, user experience to ultimately improve sales conversions and revenue

Cheers!

This information might help you make a decision, but it sounds like your strategy will be mainly focused on the Signapore marketplace. I would read this to help you decide which domain you want/should run with based on the business or personal site and geolocation for operations. Hope this helps you a little. Without more information from you, it's difficult to give you points on which one would be better based on your goals

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The .SG domain has 9 extensions as shown below :

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| sg | This category is available to all with a valid Singapore postal address. A foreign applicant may apply for a domain name in this category as long as it appoints a local agent having a valid Singapore postal address as the Administraive Contact. |
| com.sg | Commercial entities may wish to register in this extension. Applicants registering for a .com.sg will need to be either registered, or in the midst of registering, with the Accounting & Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA), IE Singapore or any professional body. A foreign company which is not so registered may only apply for a .com.sg domain name if it appoints a local agent as the Administrative Contact. This local agent shall be a legal entity that is similarly registered by any of the afore-mentioned organisations and is duly authorised by the foreign company. |

Hey Hawk,

Better give it some time. Your profiles won't just show up in the SERP results because you create a brand account. You need to build up that account with content, video's, twitter feeds.. become active in your niche, get invovled with others who you are following, who follow you etc. It's not going to happen overnight and without some work on your part will probably take longer than you hope. No one could put an exact # to this type of request because there are too many factors. Create some create account and share some equally great things, and stuff will happen

Really detailed overlook. Nice touching on everything.