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Unpaid plug: WPMU DEV is a good service for Wordpress as well. With their backup, optimization, CDN, and compression tech their annual fee is still below what you'd pay trying to piece together all those services somewhere else. Plus GREAT support.  There used to be a coupon code here in Moz's partner section as well. They might still have a special deal if you ask.

For your situation, you'll want to check to see that your database is still referencing the same URL structure as well (look for things like switching from www to non-www as default or HTTP vs. HTTPS.)

As Sean says, focus on URL structures. If old URLs are working just the same as the ones on the new server, things should be fine.

Do you see any crawl errors in Google Search Console?  That will give you some of the best insights.

There are a lot of factors that could be contributing to this, for example, the tracking isn't implemented properly or implemented differently than on the previous platform. Or on the non-technical side maybe the search volume is down overall for that time period that affects that particular page, or your rankings decreased due to competition strengthening even if your site stayed completely the same...  It's hard to say exactly without more precise details from Search Console, Analytics and so on.

If the dip isn't major, you know for a fact that your code is implemented properly, and the site loads much faster for your user base, you should likely go ahead and finish the complete transition.  A low site speed is a conversion killer and a major factor that should be addressed.

You can submit sitemaps as often as you like to Google Search Console. Many large scale sites would even be doing so multiple times a day as they publish new articles, add or remove new products, and so on. For example, News Sites have a high touch need for fast crawling (hence AMP and specialized sitemap methodologies) Here's Google's help article on this: https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40392

Here's the more generalized version of Sitemap recommendations: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/75712

The best PR strategy is to gain articles written by online publications that people read, sending both referral traffic and helping improve rankings. Press Releases can work within industry--if the brand is major and niche industry publications are going to pick it up. A recent example: StarWars.com did a press release on Colin Trevorrow leaving Episode IX. Link: http://www.starwars.com/news/a-statement-regarding-star-wars-episode-ix  This article is referenced and picked up without even having to go through a PR service because it's a major brand in the entertainment industry that's going to have a lot of coverage by movie blogs, vlogs, and so on.

All the above is to say, work on creating articles that can be featured on major news services. They'll have their own take that they spin for their audience, but you'll have a lot more traction from being featured on sites that refer you interested visitors versus a press release service.

Nice update Kevin!  And a good use-case of sites that could really benefit from AMP: heavy mobile traffic / users, content heavy pages, ability to mitigate technical constraints.

Call-in based service businesses in competitive markets would also be prime candidates for AMP as well.

Great follow up!  Thanks for that. :^)

Great!  Glad I could help.

If that's what you're seeing it looks like someone used a relative href link instead of a mailto link for emails on the about us page.

Hello. You can check the Submitted vs Indexed count within Search Console to see whether or not your regenerated sitemap is being picked up already, but resubmitting a sitemap isn't an issue, and fairly easy to do, per Google:

Resubmit your sitemap

1. Open the Sitemaps report
2. Select the sitemap(s) you want to resubmit from the table
3. Click the Resubmit sitemap button.

You can also resubmit a sitemap by sending an HTTP GET request to the following URL, specifying your own sitemap URL: http://google.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.example.com/my_sitemap.xml

Via: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183669  Also from a FAQ in the Webmasters blog they state that, "Google does not penalize you for submitting a Sitemap."

Hi Ian. You can go to Google Search Console, register your ownership of both domains, then go into the gear settings for .co.uk and select "Change of Address" and supply the .com domain. That's one step in the process that can help speed up the change.

Another is changing from the old address to the new in as many locations as practical where you were linked from the old one. As Google constantly crawls the web it will also notice these changes and add them to the list that says your .co.uk site is now on the .com.  Places include social profiles, business listings, reviews--pretty much any place online where your site interacts.

A big part of PR is the relationship--heck that's half of it.. ;^)--so reaching out to the reporter with an email like, "Thanks so much about your great story on Company B. I'm working with them in a PR capacity (ONLY IF TRUE) and am happy to help with any other inquires. Here's the company website (URL) and press kit page (page with photos, contact info, basic stats, approved quotes, etc.) which you can use at any time. If you see anything missing that you'd like on there just let me know. For example, if there's a certain company boilerplate that the LA Times likes to add to these articles, [Company Name, Employee Count, Website, Founded Date,] I can be sure to get you that.  Thanks again!"

You get the idea. You're not even asking for the link directly but instead building your relationship with them as a contact.  The more you make it as a way to make their job easier, the better.

Again though, only do this in your capacity of PR relationship with the company.  If it's beyond your scope and they have a PR person, forward along the article to them and say, "It'd be great if they linked to the company's website! (URL)" That person should already have the relationship in place.

There was an interesting blog post on this lining up well with what you're experiencing it seems (especially in the comments) here: http://moz.com/blog/1-dollar-per-day-on-facebook-ads.  The video they reference is this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag which is pretty interesting as well. You might have to employ more cross-over in your social, i.e. using twitter to drive better Facebook engagement. Ultimately though it seems to be more alignment within Facebook's walled garden approach.

Hi Ron. Yes, having a Name Address and Phone (NAP) that matches queries and listings on your landing page is part of what goes into ranking a specific page. See: http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors and, "HTML NAP Matching My Business Page NAP" You should be able to set your service area within Google, see: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038163, which shouldn't conflict with your landing page. Be sure to avoid creating something like fake business addresses though, as that and other factors are negatives. Cheers!

It could, but it's mostly a broken way to go about doing it. Per Google's guide on it: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/181708, "Because of the time Googlebot spends on non-existent pages, your unique URLs may not be discovered as quickly or visited as frequently and your site’s crawl coverage may be impacted (also, you probably don’t want your site to rank well for the search query [File not found])."  So it's best to fix them to either return a custom 404 page, redirect via 301, or correctly land on a page of content without the 404.

I would choose #1, because the most important part of the title (that it's a pet store) should come before Boston, MA. Additionally, the most common word ordering for most people in terms of local is the address format: Thing, Area, City, State.

There's a nice write up on title tags here: http://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag  Note that Moz also says:

Place Important Keywords Close to the Front of the Title Tag
According to Moz's testing and experience, the closer to the start of the title tag a keyword is, the more helpful it will be for ranking—and the more likely a user will be to click them in search results.

Cheers!

You'll come across some sites that rank well despite themselves. Still, it's hard to believe that pages like those will do anything for the users visiting them, plus their bounce rate is going to be incredibly high. Chances are you're going to be getting some--if not all--of the visitors that try their page as a #1 result, don't find anything worthwhile, then go to your page.

Matt offers you some excellent long term advice on the best path to take. I'd only add that you can emphasize your competition's lack of content all the more by offering content/services/products/usability that blows them out of the water. Cheers!

With your site being so new, you were probably getting a fresh content boost and now that it is gone your site is ranking where it most likely stacks up against the competition.  Here are few problems right off the bat though:

1: A large % of pages' title tags are duplicated - | Get Your FREE Trial NOW!!! | Shiva23
2: The title tag itself is kind of spammy with 3 exclamation points
3: Your content is all highly similar to "acne scar removal" so as you add more content, you're getting too dense around that phrase.
4: Your text is almost the same color as your background.  Old school, but still a spam penalty to have "hidden text".  It's best to stay away from styles that could cause this.

Many websites rank well that are using a CPA model.  Use the tools here and else where to see how you really measure up to your competition and you'll have a lot more insight into what you need to change.

I would recommend getting the link from their root domain(s) to the service hosted on your own domain as that wold most likely be more valuable.  This would do a few things.

1. Referral visits. You could see pretty quickly how many people are coming from the university site to your site using the link.
2. Endorsement strength. By having the link and university's explanation of your service on their site, they're providing additional trust based on people's past interactions with the university. This is partially an SEO thing, but also a conversion factor, i.e., "I trust my Uni's opinion so this is probably a worthwhile service."
3. Simpler. You'll be managing fewer domains (just you're own) and won't have to worry about technical changes on the uni's side regarding the redirection and subdomain.

There's all that, plust the newly created subdomain wouldn't carry nearly as much trust and authority as the root domain. It's why Wordpress.org doesn't get in trouble in Google if someone creates: reallyspammysite.wordpress.org.  Hope that clears it up. If someone else has compelling reasons for the other method, I'll let them expand on it.

Hi Dinesh. DA and PA tend to fluctuate after updates, but here's a blog post from a few months ago explaining why:

Every index, we get a lot of questions about why a site's/page's PA/DA goes up or down. The answer's not easy because the inputs vary quite a bit, but basically, four things can cause change in these metrics from index to index:

1. The site/page received more or fewer links or more/fewer more/less powerful links. Your site's link profile may even remain completely unchanged and still see fluctuation in DA/PA because the sites pointing to you have been recalculated to have better or worse metrics.
2. Google changed things in their ranking algorithm and thus our models for DA/PA, which measure and attempt to track to correlation with Google's rankings changed, too.
3. The web's link graph changed, and what was "0" (the lowest possible score) is now lower/higher than before and/or what was "100" (the highest possibly score) is now higher/lower than before. Essentially, think of this as the goalposts moving because the field's gotten bigger or smaller.
4. Our web index changed in size/structure as we toss our more spam/junk and crawl more/fewer webpages, potentially biasing against links we were counting or hadn't counted in prior indices.

Thus, it's very hard to know for sure whether an increase in DA/PA for a particular page is entirely tied to your efforts, Google's changes or changes to the web as a whole. This is why I strongly, strongly recommend tracking your metrics against your competition.

That last part that I bolded is key. Hopefully you're still competing well with sites similar to yours. Cheers!

The disavow tool is a the last step of a process Google outlines for dealing with spammy links. The first step being asking for the links to be removed... Since you control those sites and have deleted them you've accomplished the removal of the link, so no need to disavow. Mozscape will catch on as the index is recrawled.

For the second question, the spam score is calculated on site, so if the site where the content finds a new home has a low / non-spam score the content should lose its spammy associations.  It sounds like you're cleaning up things appropriately.