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There is a wide variety of criteria to consider when choosing a domain name. The TC509 domain has the advantage of being substantially shorter which is one criteria. Another important factor is whether the domain is memorable. If you have an opportunity to explain the meaning of your TC509 domain name, then there is a decent chance for people to remember it. It otherwise will appear as a meaningless jumble of letters and numbers to the majority of searchers who have not visited your site.

.coms are available for around $10 each so I would never use a domain simply because you owned it. The cost to build a site and provide SEO and advertising for it can quickly exceed $10k. Take your time, find the right domain name, then build upon it. Gather feedback from friends, family and clients.

I'm looking for SEO insight and the customer experience viewpoint as well.

Ideally these are the same. Practically we aren't there yet, but you should design your site for the customer experience and for the most part you will do very well with respect to SEO.

Your second example seems spammy to me. I would suggest finding a way to naturally write the content. Write your content then ask an English teacher to grade it. I am quite serious.

The rules we learned in school: tell your audience what you are going to talk about (page title, meta description, H1 tag) then talk about it (content with keyword usage a few times) then tell them what you talked about (a summary which often is not relevant to short sales content).

I would also recommend using your keyword as early as possible in your content. "Widgets are available in many styles: plastic, paper, brass and steel."

Your CMS will have a database. All links to your articles will be contained within the database.

The concept would be an additional field would be created in the database to separate out the actual URL from the public URL. The actual URL would be redirected to the public URL.

To improve your results you need to make the following changes:

• specify a cache date for your images of at least one week. Your images are showing up properly on your cdn but they still need a cache date for improved scores and results

• specify all your image dimensions. Your html for an image should look something like <img src="/images/mustang.jpg" width="200" height="100" alt="Mustang GT5.0" />

Try making those two changes and your speed and score should noticeably improve. I would recommend PageSpeed to check your speed in the future as it is an industry known tool. YSlow would be another great tool to use.

** Is it a problem for SEO, that there is a copy of all my images and content at cdn.mysite.com?**

None at all

There are numerous tools capable of crawling the pages of your site and reporting on your page titles. Since you are a PRO member, I would recommend you await the SEOmoz crawl report.

With respect to your CMS, you have not shared what the name is of the software you are using. Most popular CMS solutions will offer a means by which you can append the site name to your titles. By simply unchecking a box, you can turn the feature off. For this particular question you may want to ask in the forums offered by your developer.

For the site name, as a general rule you want it to be as short and memorable as possible. Ideally it should be easy to spell as well. Some ideas which come to mind (all the .com's are taken for these unfortunately): WashingtonRealty, TriCityRealty, ProgressiveRealty, PattonRealty, etc. I also tried matching the names up with "homes" and "realestate" instead of realty.

It can take weeks or months to come up with a name you like which is also available. The rewards are worth it.

Take a look at the traffic on each version of the keyword phrase. Your primary focus should be the version of the phrase which generates the most traffic. I would also try to use each variation of the phrase throughout the article when possible.

Hi Robin.

If an item is created, images of the jewelry are taken and the product is listed for sale? The question is, when the item sells doesn't that product page still have value? I would think you should keep the page so potential buyers can view products which have been made. A customer could request a similar item be made. If that is the case, keep the pages, mark the item as sold and offer links to similar products or a custom order link.

If the desire is to only sell items presently in inventory, you can 301 old links to similar pages. If there is a link to a 1 carat diamond ring, find the most similar item or category on your site and redirect the link to that page.

Thank you. That is an exceptionally well written article and I am sure the moz community will appreciate your sharing it.

From what I can tell, the change has not been fully implemented yet.

Query 1 - "Sacramento Pizza". The results appear in the new Place Search format.

Query 2 - "London Pizza". The results appear in the old 7-pack format.

So I theorized that like with many changes, it was rolled out with US sites first. But then I tried...

Query 3 - "NY Pizza". Of course "NY Pizza" is more of a pizza style then a locality, but the 7-pack appeared at the top with the organic results listed below just as in the past with the expected title "Places for pizza near New York, NY".

Queries for "Miami Pizza" and "Los Angeles Pizza" showed the new Place Search results.

Based on this limited testing, it appears the change has been rolled out in the U.S. but there are probably a few tweaks necessary.

Has local and general search algorithms merged

The idea behind the change clearly seems to offer local search priority in results. As the article shared, Google stated that the old results were still present but in the author's testing it seems the old results were replaced by the Places result and that would indicate a form of merger.

Moving your files to CDN is not any different then changing web servers. Your content and pages remain the same. The only change would be which servers deliver the content.

As long as the move goes as planned, there will not be any negative consequences to your site's SEO performance.

I would look for other creative ideas such as branding. If you forced me to choose between the two given options, I would take the second option. Hyphens should be avoided in domain names whenever possible.

There are really two many factors to properly answer the question without knowing the words involved, but I can understand your desire not to share them.

There are several methods used by Alexa to collect data about your site.

1. The Alexa crawler. It can be blocked using robots.txt as follows:

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

2. Alexa analytics. Similar to Google Analytics, simply remove the code from your site's web pages and Alexa would no longer have access to this data. This method only applies if you have installed Alexa Analytics code on your site.

3. Alexa toolbar. The toolbar is installed on user pc's. It tracks all web traffic by users. In order to prevent this tracking, a user would either need to uninstall the toolbar, change a setting on the toolbar, or block traffic to Alexa. These form of data collection is a primary source of information for Alexa, and is why Alexa data is relatively unreliable.

There is not any reasonable step you can take to prevent this form of data collection.

As Rand had previously suggested, a Google's Places listing sends a signal to Google and others that your business is real. It is another link which has to be earned. There is work required to obtain a Google Places listing and there are minimum requirements as well.

Based on the above my answer is yes, it is my opinion that a Google Places listing would have a positive effect on organic rankings. I don't have any evidence to this effect, but I believe strongly enough in it that I work to obtain Google Places listings for clients that don't have a local physical location. If you wanted to sell vitamins online but did not have a local store I would advise you to still create a Places listing because of the impact on organic rankings. It certainly can't hurt.

With the Places change that you mentioned in your original Q&A, it is now even more important to obtain a Google Places listing.

You wish to canonicalize the pages. That is the SEO word which describes exactly what you are trying to achieve.

domain.com

domian.com/

www.domain.com

www.domain.com/

domain.com/index.html

Above are 5 URLs which can possibly lead to the exact same page. If you add the following HTML in the code then the pages will be canonicalized.

You may wish to consider results by other factors such as difficulty, conversions, page views, etc. as well.

I would recommend the following WBF video: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/keyword-metrics-for-seo-and-driving-actions-from-data-whiteboard-friday

Thanks for the reply Peter. By reviewing your site I can share the following:

• your site is still indexed by Google.

• you could open a Reconsideration Request with Google to determine if your site has received a manual penalty: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration

• you need to analyze your traffic using Google Analytics. EXACTLY where is the traffic drop? You need to analyze specific sources such as Google organic search traffic for specific keywords.

• I tried a longtail keyword search for your site based on the first blog article I located "top 5 reasons to visit honduras". You ranked #7 for the phrase. It's not surprising as the page has a PR of 1.

• have you noticed any ranking drop for a specific keyword or page?

The only way to troubleshoot this issue is to dig into your analytics data.

In the past the 7-pack results displayed in addition to the organic results. If you perform a "NY Pizza" search in Google you can still see the 7-pack at the top along with the 10 organic results.

Now the Places results appear mixed in with the organic results. Since the majority of users never make it past the first page of search results, they will never see any organic listings.

When I perform a search for "Sacramento Pizza" there are 12 results on the first page. The first 7 results are the old 7-pack results listed in a similar format to organic results. The next 4 results are all review sites like Yelp, Yellopages.com, etc. There is only a single remaining result on the first page for Rico's pizza.

Before there would have been many organic listings on the first page of SERPs. Now there is only one. That's a game changer.

With respect to blogs, you can use those comments along with forum posts for link value. However, you should check after the first time you use this method. Many blogs have their comments set up to automatically apply the nofollow attribute.

For link directories, I would recommend using the free directories. ODP is great but takes a very long time to get into. Many other directories wish to exchange links which isn't the best idea for many sites. The links shouldn't hurt but I would suggest not paying for a listing in the directory unless you have a high value site and the directory is of high value as well such as Yahoo's.

There are many articles on choosing a domain name. Some suggestions:

• try to obtain a .com URL. If the one you want is not available, then consider the ccTLD for your country or a .net domain.

• avoid hyphens in the domain name. If you do use a hyphen, don't use more then one.

• Branding is an excellent means of distinguishing your site. If you can successfully establish a brand, you will earn branded searches and have opportunities to perform well in ranking.

• you may want to consider building a brand and mixing your site focus. For example "SEOmoz" is a brand, but it also includes the site's focus, SEO, in the name.

The actual name should come from your ideas. What is your inspiration for creating this site? Is this one of 20 sites you run? Or is this a longtime focus. Do you have a physical location where you have offered job services for years? Or is this an idea you whipped up to earn a bit of side money? The answers to this questions along with your niche will help to create a name for your site.

While Google may have some technical ability to crawl flash, they don't actually index flash content.

My suggestion is to take a look at the site the way Google sees it. Disable flash on your browser, then look at your site. The method to disable flash varies by browser. For FireFox use your menubar Tools > Add-ons > Plugins > Shockwave Flash and press Disable, then restart your browser.

Once the flash is disabled, visit your client's site. Now you can gain a much better understanding as to whether or not there is a problem.

It is possible to develop a flash-based site AND have it fully indexed. It requires extra development effort. The site needs to be developed in HTML in addition to flash. Basically you are duplicating the site in HTML so users without flash can view the site. When Google crawls the site, they will see all the HTML content and can index it.

Keep in mind the HTML site should be almost identical to the flash site. Stuffing extra content or altering the content of the HTML would be considered a black-hat technique which could cause your site to incur a penalty. Just use the practice as intended, to offer your site's content to those without flash.

Hello PMC.

I've seen you around SEOmoz for the past couple months and I recall your struggles with Google Places. If I may make a suggestion...the SEO world is unfortunately full of a huge variation in quality. I would hesitate to grab anyone based on a nice website. Since you have a large focus on local SEO and Google Places, my recommendation would be to do some google searches on those subjects. Instead of looking for websites, find blog articles and forum posts which cover those topics. Look for someone who repeatedly shares articles on those topics or responds to Q&As.

Another though to share is if you find someone you have confidence in but their rates are too high, consider hiring them for just an evaluation of your site and talk about your goals. You may be able to do a lot of the implementation work yourself and save some money that way.

Another idea for your business. In Las Vegas there are a lot of show animals. I am unsure if your clinic focuses only on traditional pets or if you are able to service some of the tigers, dolphins and other show animals. It can be great PR to share that you are the official vet for Casino XYZ.