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If all your marketing materials reflect the .com I'd keep that; however, you can consider rolling out the .ca for localized branches. Still, there are trade offs there as well, for example, if you're currently hosting your local branches on the .com main site they're likely experiencing a boost from its domain trust and authority. Things like that would be in play specifically for the branches. For corporate I'd leave it at .com. Cheers!
I agree with Miriam and give a thumbs up to her thorough response. I would only add that not having an additional number for the separate business is pretty inexcusable. With Skype, Anveo, or any other myriad of VOIP and cell options, getting another number is a dirt cheap cost for someone running a legitimate business. Plus the value it adds for the business should more than cover the $50 or so they'd spend yearly. If they still want the number to ring to the same line, the could just set up call forwarding on the new number... Again, all that should cost less than $100 a year and probably be even cheaper than that. Best of luck!
Excellent. Thanks for the clarifications. Within your paid campaign you can split test two or three different landing pages to see which ones convert the best and that might further inform your decision as to what you want to do. I think it's mostly a user experience question than one for SEO as Google has gotten better and better at sending multiple keyword results to pages that have clustered semantic relevance; meaning, a page can talk about boat sales in Michigan, focusing on pontoon and sail boats, seasonal watersport recreation unique to Michigan, other localized events, etc and see strong results in each, all delivered to the same page.
Now that you have the campaign running though, work on some landing pages to split test as that would give you some of your best insights. Cheers!
Here's a back story on the oldest Networked email: http://openmap.bbn.com/~tomlinso/ray/firstemailframe.html
According to Wikipedia and itself, http://symbolics.com/ was the first registered .com domain name and is still active.
Someone could argue that the oldest active link is a telegraph line that's still hung and running somewhere, but DNS in general would be a better, and more precise still the invention of HTML during 1990-93 with anchors.
Tim Berners-Lee's HTML editor screen shot: http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/tims_editor
And HTML in general: http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/MarkUp.html
Hav you crawled your redesigned site with a tool like Xenu or ScreamingFrog? That will help ferret out any bad links / 404 pages. Also, did you submit an updated sitemap with the redesign? Use 301s? Etc.
Edit: Looks like Dirk above hit on the most likely issue regarding 301s. You should be set with that.
Not to be overly obvious, but part of the answer to this question is that Google is using the metrics included in the XML feed (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=80472#4) Things like, video:title, video:description, video:tag, video:category, etc. In addition Google is combining those with the authority and content of your website. Since your website is an authority on painting vs youtube (videos on anything and everything), there's likely an associated benefit to sending a user to website where they can find a collection of painting related material, not just videos. That's a benefit to the user.
The benefit to you is that you're receiving qualified web traffic that has an interest in painting and has a better chance of becoming a customer in the future. You may receive the same benefit from a user going to youtube and then being interested in your services, but they will certainly be another step away from that, either figuring out how to contact you via youtube or leaving youtube, going to your site, and then contacting you. For visitors outside of your area you could offer a starter kit or educational material for the DIY crowd. If they like your style of organization and view you as an authority on how to make painting projects a success they could conceivably become customers of that sort of material.
Your link from your home page to your video uses the text, "Recycle Paint" which further contributes towards ranking for that term, and the text around your link lines up semantically: take away, old paint. All the things Google would expect to see are present in your content and links. Basically, everything is organized and categorized very well on a website that is clearly an authority in regards to painting so it makes sense to be a beneficial ranking for both users and yourself. Well done!
You'll likely need a combination of the two. You can bulk upload images in the dimensional range of 1000x1000 to 3000x3000 "We recommend adding photos that are larger than 1000 x 1000 pixels and smaller than 3000 x 3000 pixels." (https://support.google.com/business/answer/6031953) and then select what you want as a cover photo within Google+. See this guideline: https://support.google.com/business/answer/4791112.
When disavowing links, you can also disavow by domain, like: about1.typepad.com... This can help speed up the process in some cases.
The work you've done currently seems in order. 410 is fine to use per Cutts himself: http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2340728/matt-cutts-on-how-google-handles-404-410-status-codes.
Has the press come before or after the problem with the spam? It'd be nice to get a similar amount of press as link recency plays a part too.
With the .hk top level domain you'll have enough of an indicator to get localized boost so you could continue to maintain hosting in a different location. A few things to check in to:
1. Localized load times. Do HK customers experience slow or speedy load times of the site?
2. Customer privacy. Is the hosting in a country that matches up well with HK (or UK) laws on privacy?
3. Localized conversion rates. Does having a site with the HK extension help or hinder conversions?
Most of the other best practices when it comes to domains are going to be pretty universal and similar to what you've done with your others I'm guessing.
I see. In that case, sure, any short folder would be fine. Maybe even 'a' as it reads a little nice: website.com/a/us-en/store/product-name.html. Reads like, "Website, a US, English language store with the product named X." Someone seeing the link would have a pretty good idea of what it is going to be.
Great question Neil! Google uses optical character recognition (OCR, more specifically OCRopus) to convert visible print into search searchable text; hence, you're able to find terms in Google books via Google search. Link text is also recognizable due to the standard 'http' format, so even though you'd never be able to click it via an old book in the library (who knows what new ones will do!) Google Books is still able to recognize the link and treat it as such in the digital, Internet realm. Now, a website that is being mentioned in books has a high likelihood of having a robust backlink profile, but that notwithstanding, I'd bet that Google would give an high amount of trust to a link that makes it into its OCR database.
As for street view, that is pushing it! Who knows though, there's merit in giving a website online exposure for the offsite work they do via billboards, store fronts, etc. I think you and I both would love to know the people that could truly answer that one though, huh?
They've been discussed in the past here: http://moz.com/community/q/is-it-okay-to-use-elocal-services, and Kristy's thorough answer at the time still rings true, "There is nothing blackhat about using a citation building service like eLocal, Yext, etc. Rather, there are other considerations that need to be taken into account in determining whether this is the right move for you." And I agree with her. It seems like you've got a handle on your site's listings and they wouldn't bring much additional value to the work you're already doing.
From the details you provide, it sounds like the SEO benefits would be non-existent to worse than before. Are they not an academic institution? Is there some other factor pushing them from ac.uk to co.uk? There is no tld that carries an inherit SEO benefit and typically only SEO risks in migrating a site.
Hi Margaret. Here's the Guide on rich snippets for products: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/146750 What you'll be interested in making sure price and priceCurrency are correctly used. The snippet "priceCurrency" is, "The currency used to describe the product price, in three-letter ISO format." Cheers!
You can make the links manual instead of 3xx and use a pop up like, "It looks like you're from [Country].. would you like to browse with those currency and shipping options enabled?" That way they have to click to enable it and then go to the folder via a static link.
For load times, there are several CDN options out there that could help speed that side of it up... Cheers!
Hi Jac. You have a few applicable things going on here, but here are some posts to help point you in the right direction.
These should give you a really good idea on what will work best for you. Cheers!
Have you used Google's recommended structured data to identify your company's social profiles: https://developers.google.com/structured-data/customize/social-profiles? You're also going to need to have enough searcher side input to trigger the knowledge graph as well, so that might be a sticking point for a while if the brand isn't well-recognized: http://youtu.be/mmQl6VGvX-c?t=1m18s
You're welcome. Definitely get to the 'whys' behind what they're doing or thinking about doing. Also ask them who they hope to compete with by doing so, or what problems they currently see that they think this will fix. Things like that should give you a much better understanding of what they're doing as well as ideas on alternate solutions.
Without resources for multiple sites, you'll likely want to create separate folders for the regions, ex. yoursite.com/usa/, yoursite.com/uk/, yoursite.com/au/ and so on. To further guide users you could employ location based redirects to their applicable portion of the site. As far as Wordpress design goes you'll want to clearly label each section and state the the services and products being offered are (US/UK/AU) specific.
That's weird. Isn't the IP for that domain: 208.68.72.102 with most of your other domains on the 208.68.72.### root? Maybe there's some sort of conflict from your A records subdirectories like experts.covers.com and spaces.covers.com... I'd lean towards using a more advanced crawler like Screaming Frog to uncover what's going on there, or work with your DNS admin as this could be connected to a lot more complicated issue than WMT would display.