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I love the 'marketing angle' spin to this whole thing for the shelter structures. !! Great idea.

Just optimize your pages to focus on INTENT now, rather than specific keywords, thus reducing the chance of keyword cannibalization. Have an idea where you are going for each page, but really narrow down and focus the efforts. It's not really all that long, but Rand did an excellent write up on this (it's from 2007), but worth exploring further for sure to get the basics down. There is also a WB Friday from March this year where he touches on it. Anyways, hope it helps!

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!

You'll have to have a very technical list of stages and list items closely monitored to ensure the best possible chance of success. In fact, in some ways, this could be a blessing if you have taken time to analyze the marketplace, the customer persona's, the sales funnel of your client, etc, etc. It obviously a tough call and you have some difficult recommendations to make to the client. I've been there!

Best thing is to be fully transparent and make sure they understand the implications of making a major move like this and the kind of time and work it will take to ensure a clean transition (well, cleanest it can be!)

You know they need it, but are worried about all the background work and critical technical steps to ensure a smooth transition to the new site.

Glenn Gabe wrote a great piece detailing some really important steps to take when going down this road! Check it out here.

Hope it helps! Rob

You could look at AWR 's (Advanced Web Ranking) software. I use it and it's awesome for tracking and reporting. Has the largest search engine depth for reporting (add any search engine you want/need) and product support will help you get it if they don't have it! It can be tailored to track any language KW needed and in any country. Reporting is awesome if you buy the PRO or AGENCY level software (I included the link above), but does require a little time to learn. It's costly as well, but proves to be a tool I can't operate without in my practices for client projects.

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

You could use this strategy, if you wanted. There is nothing wrong with assimilating an x-competitors domain URL and turning that ownership into a site your company uses and 301 redirects (perhaps they had a strong brand following?). You might be able to leverage some of that related traffic and turn those visitors into customers. You will want to look at the DA/PA, but as well, the # and quality of the backlinks that were acquired during the process when they owned it. Make absolutely sure it's a clean URL, with clean related backlinks that aren't tied to bad areas, because that will funnel down through to your site via the 301 redirect, if you go this route.

I had this happen to a company/client site. They stole an expired domain from the main competitor who was still in business and re-appropriated it for their own use in PAY DAY LOANS (which had absolutely nothing to do with the original destination URL it was originally taken from). Then, that SPAM site/company went out of business for whatever reason, and I was tracking the domain to re-acquire it myself (through auction) and hopefully be able to re-use it for the main site. The site's profile will probably need a major backlink analysis to see if it has been corrupted by this company who bought it when it expired and used it for spam related work. Auugggh.

Sometimes, these types of strategies do work, but you have to carefully evaluate and plan the benefits vs the cons and cost. I'll leave it up to you, but that's my 2 cents

Cheers!

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.

Hi Sina,

For your first question, make sure you have Google Webmaster Tools setup (which I gather you do) as you have received a 'low quality/spam links' message by them. I should add that dealing with an 'unnatural link profile by Google is a whole other project!) and super important to boot so get on top of that also! Open Site Explorer is a perfect place to start, to crawl the links and to profile your entire linking domain profile. From here you can begin to examine domain link profile by filtering through options to identify ones which may be causing you that warning from Google. This will need to be rectified in order to ensure solid indexing of your site pages. You will need to clean these up in order for the rest to work and be effective

Now, to look at the indexing issue you asked on. If you look to the right in Webmaster Tools once you login, on the dashboard, you will see a section called SITEMAPS (3rd on the right once you click into the domain) from the main panel. Click on the TITLE of this section from the dashboard, and you will land on the SITEMAPS report file. There is a wealth of information here from Google about the indexing health of your site.

There are 3 steps here, Google needs to have done in order to identify which to help you figure out the information you are looking for:

• Crawling
• Indexing
• Ranking (what you see in the SERP results pages using search terms or Google Operators for site review.

In order to see any results at all, you need to ensure you have a SITEMAPS.XML file built, loaded and submitted to Google. It also needs to be configured properly and have no errors for proper processing. This is the only way you will get clear snapshot of what has been indexed based on your XML file by Google. This will tell you have many pages you have indexed in their index, but not identify. If you don't have any at all, it will state it.

it's also time to look at your robots.txt and .htaccess file to ensure those are configured and installed properly. This would be another troubleshooting step, but seeing as you have a unnatural link profile, you may want to take these steps first. Ensure you don't have any of the   <noindex>meta fields listed here as well site-wide.</noindex>

So, from here, once you login to Webmaster Tools (dashboard for the site you are referring to you) under SITEMAPS, you will see a section saying XXX number of pages submitted and XXX # of pages indexed along with any errors and warnings you are getting from them now in that box (link warnings will be here too!). This will give you some important informtion which you can log in an Excel file later Here is where you will most likely see that linking domain link alert from Google as well.

Now you have Google's 'indexed pages' view. Now you have to dig a little.

----- GOOGLE OPERATORS ---- Now, once you have some data from Google WebMaster Tools as mentioned above, You can now go to Google.com (or the Google index you want to see like .ca. or others) and use Google search operators to speficially see which URL's and pages have been indexed by the engine. There are a few different ones you can use below. I found a great resource below and copied in the link.

Domain search with - site: Operator 
(site:google.com)
This should returns results only from the specified Domain.
So you will need to be careful if your site is with a SubDomain (or multiple SubDomains) ("www" is a SubDomain).

Domain search with - inurl: Operator 
(inurl:google.com)
This should return results that contain the specified Domain.
This may not be only from the site in question though!  It is possible for other sites to contain your domainname in their URLs (whois.domaintools.com may have such URLs etc.)

Domain search with - site: and inurl: Operators 
(site:google.com inurl:google.com)
This way you limit the results to your Domain Only ... and it seems to generate more "reliable" results than the site: operator alone.

Domain and Path/Query search with - site: and inurl: Operators 
(site:google.com inurl:/somepath/somedirectory/)
(site:google.com inurl:?this=that&rabbits=lunch)
This way you limit the results to your Domain Only ... and focus on a specific directory/folder or set of paramters etc.

Domain and FileType search with - site: and filetype: Operators
(site:google.com filetype:html)
This limits the results to those from your Domain, and to a specific type of file.
Please note - the filetype: operator may not show All of that type - it may only work for URLs that end in that type.  thus if you serve content as html, but without the .html in the filename - they will not show in the results!)

Domain and Path/Query search with - site:, inurl: and inurl: Operators 
(site:google.com inurl:google.com inurl:/somepath/somedirectory/)
(site:google.com inurl:google.com inurl:?this=that&rabbits=lunch)
This permits you to start limiting the results to specific parts of your site if you need too.

Make sure that your site pages also don't include in the section the <meta-noindex>or <meta-nofollow>tags. This would tell Google not to index or follow the pages from your site  </meta-nofollow></meta-noindex>

Ensure that you have, in your .htaccess file the proper redirects for the site if you find you have duplicate content. Ensure you are 301 redirecting the non-www to www versions of your site and pages (or vice-versa), whichever you prefer to have indexed by Google to ensure clean indexing of the site. This will make sure you don't have problems indexing wide for search.

TO NOTE

---- SERVER LOG FILES ---- (Note: please make sure that you request log files) from your hosting company too. If you don't have access to server log files for hosting traffic, switch! Log and keep an eye on these as well for information for your needs. This process is not a fast or easy one and does require some work to detect. Don't get lazy. This is a crucial step to keep an eye on.

What I recommend next is starting to keep log files if you aren't already and tracking those on a weekkly pr monthly basis (which ever is easier). The reason being is once you get indexed to Google, you always want to keep an idea of what is indexed and what isn't (dropped) or de-indexed pages. This can also help identify early problems (or penalties) from Google if you see trending things happening day over day or week over week.

Hope this helps point you in the right direct. Remember don't be lazy here Exhaust all options to indentify your problems! Cheers,

Rob

Hey Justin,

I've done the complete DistilledU training. It's advanced in sections and at times, very basic. It's pretty much covers everything tho. It's very much learn at your own pace, as is MarketMotive and I have all my strategists or consultants work through Distilled and Moz as part of the their training for in house work. I don't know anyone who has done the Market Motive courses, but I can tell you after spending a little more time on it today, that I will be going through and possibly ordering it. We are also HubSpot certified as an agency so many of these certifications would benefit that tie we have with their products.

My guess, the advanced training you would be looking for - would be MarketMotive.com as I am looking at it myself for our agency and our teams! That's my 2 cents I plan on getting budgets set aside and getting it all lined up. I'm sold and going to move it into the pipeline.

My suggestion would be to go beyond creating 'yearly' top lists for the site (these are old and tired). Look to create an 'Evergreen' content page that you can use and leverage year over year, build on and create a community and discussion around. Discuss the changes each year by revamping the list, ask people their input (UGC) and discuss why some of the one's that fell, did, while also pointing out new one's didn't fall and why

By creating a page like this - you leverage the long term effect of a page that never gets old, or outdated (as one does with regards to a specified URL like 2012 or 2014) in your examples. This will also help you create a very strong profile from a backlink perspective as your links will accumulate into 1 evergreen/lasting URL - that never gets outdated with yearly updates you will make. Might want to use the META information for data posted and date expired to ensure that the crawlers know to come back and recrawl when a page is live. Ensure it's mapped and setup properly in the Sitemap XML file too

I think the advantages of moving towards this will help your link profile, leverage a great piece of content year over year, making it move 'sharable' from a social media perspective and leverage long-term value.

Just my 2 cents to help you out

Cheers, Rob

I would say there is another option Julien. Just because your 'primary' KW is the focus of the homepage, it doesn't mean it is the highest converting KW for your company/site or for that specific product. Of course, you have to dig for data a little looking at how best to approach it and how that internal page performs, what KW's drive traffic (digging deeper than not provided)

Yes, your homepage has the most domain authority value (mainly, but not always). It's again, not the best page to rank for all your terms, if the bounce and exit rates are above average and/or high. This indicates that those KW's are not converting for your homepage at the best possible rate.

In the past, I have moved the KW focus to the actual product landing page and taken the focus away from the homepage, optimizing and working on improving the UI/UX, information, product, image, video etc, on that specific page - in hopes it would outrank the main primary page and thus, convert at a higher rate. As these product pages when worked on helped the 'visitors' get directly to the page that they are looking for, without having to search for it and navigate to it from the homepage (yet, another click). Why not simplify the process sending them directly to the main page of information?

Work to identify other KW's you can use to draw focus for on the main homepage and shift that focus around.

When building out your product page for the KW, I suggest as I mentioned above - work everything about the UI/UX, design, information, photos, videos, etc etc making it an extremely valuable page (think - make it THE MOST valuable page you can think of) to help visitors, thus, more than likely converting at higher rates, decreasing bounce and exit rates to the page.

As well, the added page authority, which will strengthen the domain authority overall on the site will improve the overall experience to users.

Just a thought to help you out on success I have had with similar issues.

Cheers, Rob

Where did they get the information for your original 40 rank, before it shot up to 80? Do you know what software they were using to gauge this value? More information would help us put 2+2 together and help get you an answer. Happy to look into it for you if you need and get you a domain authority and page authority score/value.

In my experiences and tests (although some disagree in search) don't forget to consider that (folder depth) IE - number of directories beyond the URL may have an impact on your search performance I can have an impact/factor in how deep spiders both crawl and index sites with regards to relevance and competitive landscape mapping. Just keep in mind

So you with www.domain.com/category/images/anotherfolder/ might be much longer to get your images ranking vs www.domain.com/images/ - but again, it doesn't always work in a framework for architecture if you have multiple, hundreds or thousands of /category/ sections in the sites design.

Try to trim down your URL to make it the most simplified, but user friendly (as possible :). Keeping it short for any pages and or directories also makes it more user friendly in that people can remember where the file was and the URL it was on

Folder location still has impact on crawl depth and rankings. The above mentioned features to improve relevancy for images are still useful (see post above), so ensure to name each image, and use hyphens between words, use the IMG ALT text on every image to identify, and the location of said images on various location page/URL's.

If you can get around removing the /category/ folder and reducing the URL to www.domain.com/images/ where all your image files are located, that might be better, but I have only used this in a handful of cases. Usually, more often than not .

Hope that helps!

Hi Natalie,

I would stick to trying to find a ccTLD that is US based, if you are going to be operating in the US. Buying ccTLD for other countries and trying to rank those in the US/CAN marketplace would be, essentially, VERY difficult and require extra long hours of link building strategy (content development, news, media, etc) to even consider ranking a high level ccTLD from another country in the US index, and for a top ranking.

I would not recommend this strategy, even around top level country domains outside the US (These countries also have strict rules and are usually specific to each country) about purchasing ccTLD's from areas you don't reside in, or have an 'administrative contact' address for. The geolocation issues associated with this are a problem too.

UNLESS, you have a company already up and running, buy a ccTLD from another country, are moving your companies based of operations to that country, could release press and news media about the move, and why - doing this will have little benefit and the work involved in ranking it, US based, would be much more than it's worth with regards to an advantage weight.

Also - just to note that KW rich domains don't outrank brand counterparts anymore, as Google has removed weight in their value. Sure they still rank and are here and there in the index, but I seldom, if ever see KW rich domains dominating the search index now. Sounds like it's a new domain, and either way, you are going to have to develop one heck of a digital marketing strategy around it, to build up the sites domain and page authority (links).

Best bet is to find a US based ccTLD and move towards building a brand around it, from within the US. Take the time to effectively build something of value that will WOW people, and have them coming back for more

Hope that helps a little

I think you should register the .sg domain for sure and get started. It's going to take some work to help get the domain built up with authority. If you start with the .sg, and later want to move into the more .com.sg, you could then strategically plan a 301 plan for all your sites and move the site to a new domain.

There you have it .sg is the best option for now. Just build a solid strategy around your site, social media, content and inbound marketing and help push and drive traffic to your business. It won't happen overnight and will require work Good luck!

There is no real tool I know of that you just plug and play for KW data, specific to 1 URL.

I would plug into various analytics platforms that you can collect data from (without keyword not provided) by Google now. Also consider setting up (if you haven't already) both Google and Bing Webmaster Tool accounts to collect KW data directly from the engine.

I still suggest you use the KW Planner by Google to identify more KW's once you look over the Webmaster accounts mentioned above. This will help you reach a little further. Plugging into Moz, creating that campaign for a site specific domain is also a MAJOR plus and should not be ignored. Build the campaign, run it, analyze the data and then move it to 'archives' to save the data and not delete it should you need access to the setup again

Once you have KW's targeted for specific URL's (best practice), you should also consider picking up the AWR application (Advanced Web Ranking) software. It's a bit pricey, but worth every penny. I have been using it for 3-4 years now and is a major asset in my toolbox.

Just to note: I don't rely to much on KW rankings anymore, but more about conversion KW's. Because you have the top ranking for KW doesn't mean you are going to convert visitors. It just means high amounts of traffic. It's about analyzing and finding out which KW's drive sales or conversions on your site. Just a pro tip!

Thanks, hope this helps a little.

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

|

The .SG domain has 9 extensions as shown below :

|
| 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. |

Absolutely. It makes total sense!

You are referencing the keyword you are targeting in the TITLE and Article TITLE (make this an H1 in your HTML) and as well the URL TITLE reflecting the article H1 targeting. It's all relevant to the goal of trying to signal the engines about the great content you are creating.

Make sure to write unique TITLES for each URL you create and target the keywords for each you are mapping against those URL's. Keep the Page TITLES in line as well and tie it all together. Very important to have a planned strategy around either working on a site that is already in place (and you are changing everything), or a new site with completely new development in and search targeting in place.

Although the Moz software is awesome, it only works to configure and setup campaigns if you are a PRO member which comes with a 99$ fee per month. This isn't for everyone unless they can use the software more than once.. I would suggest grabbing a few free tools online to use. You can check out : ScreamingFrog and/or Xenu Link Sleuth

Each will provide you with detailed reports to filter through and see content from your site. ScreamingFrog will provide you with data for up to 500 URL's for free. You will need to purchase the license to go deeper, depending on your site.

This one is a great for getting HTTP header checks and site wide duplicate content error notifications.

If you want to try a tool to verify online duplicate content - PageSpotter is a checking and monitoring tool.

A great post by Google Webmaster Center Blog about Duplicate Content and why you need to address it to help with your site.

If you plan to go the route of moving the site to a new domain/URL this is a great forum piece on the steps you need to plan and execute for a clean move.

Hope some of this helps you out!