Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Kanya. That makes more sense. I would inform the client of the risks, restructure the contract to address those risks, then move ahead as though it is a completely different and non-client business.

In addition to the risks of some sites not wanting to list both businesses (I'm guessing that when people answer the phones from either one they say, "KM Realty") the other site would pretty much fall under the realm of competition if you're only contracted to work on the new site. From that perspective you're obviously not engaged in trying to affect it negatively, but you are trying to rank the new site as highly as possible which could in turn cause the old site to rank lower.

If the client wants you to perform a balancing act between the two, the contract should likely include both sites.  Cheers!

Per Google's recommendations here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2620865?hl=en, yes you want to have pages correctly tagged with their alternate language translations. Per the blog I cited earlier, you'll want to organize the sitemaps to break out the 200.000 pages in a structure that's more refined than just 'all', specifically in ways that will help you find if there are problems creeping up in one section or another. Good luck!

You can also test the m.mysite.com version of your site in Google's PageSpeed Insights here: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ and then scroll to the bottom of the mobile portion of the score and see your usability score there as well. This is handy for breaking out a score from GWT. Is the m.mysite.com domain also listed in GWT?

Ideally you'd be able to have a 1 to 1 relationship from desktop pages to your mobile site as that would be the clearest signal that the two are tied together closely and only separated for usability purposes. The video Chris linked to also has quite a few additional insights from Matt Cutts, so worth the watch.  Cheers!

Hi Donald. Are you talking about the pages that group the older blog posts or just older blog posts themselves? If the latter keeping the links in them as standard is fine.  If you're having crawl issues with your site you may consider funneling link strength down specific sections of your site.  A little clarification might help with a better answer.  Cheers!

I would list all five as it gives the customer a better since of which location is nearest to them as well as your size of company. You can also consider including the locations within your footer of the site as well.

Getting consistent Name Address Phone across listings is definitely a best practice and one of the core aspects of local optimization. That's one thing I'd make a priority. Cheers!

There are several examples of sites that do this which you can reference: Verge, Metafilter, HuffPo, BoingBoing, etc. but as far as allowable text goes, you'll want to look up fair use rules for wherever you're located, but here's the US and Wikipedia discussion of them.

http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

Typically, you'll want to write some surrounding editorial content (unique) and of course link back to your source. If what you're doing is purely link based, popurls.com or alltop could be good examples.  Cheers!

You're welcome. If your goal is to maintain and grow the rankings associated with the desktop version of your site in mobile, one of the best ways to do so currently is by using a responsive frame work. From a user perspective that sort of site is serving mobile, tablet, and desktop all from the same URLs. Something like Layers would be an example for Wordpress (http://www.layerswp.com) while Squarespace (http://www.squarespace.com/) is a common example in the smaller site realm. If you're thinking of transitioning over a larger site it'd definitely be more of a dev-based commitment. Currently Google houses the bulk of its guides on this here: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/.

Looking at that first example here's the meta description code:

So the Meta Description for that page is "nofollow7" plus Google is being told not to index that page. Is that supposed to be the case?  If yes, you could remove the URL in GWT. If no, you'll want to get that cleaned up.

The in head css also isn't a best practice. Have you ran these through Google's Page Speed tool and other markup validators?

P.S. Meta Tags that Google Understands: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812

A big factor that can really help with long tail matches is getting a few quality backlinks to the specific long tail pages, and the best way to do this is by proving that your site will be a reliable resource to the type of people that would link to it. Wikipedia is an excellent example of this model. People linking there always know what they're linking to and that the page won't change or crash.  In your instance, how are you going to get people linking to your copy of the case, versus the government hosted one, like so: https://www.ustaxcourt.gov/InOpHistoric/DynamoHoldingsLPDiv.Buch.TC.WPD.pdf

Solving that will go miles in solving your long tail.

This reminds me of one of Rand's WBFs from early last year: http://moz.com/blog/what-should-i-put-on-the-homepage-whiteboard-friday...  Although it's a bit of the opposite of what you're seeing now. It'd be harder to break down without looking at some of the keywords and specific site design elements at play, but it sounds lie the homepage has a lot more breadth than it did previously.  There could be some branding at play depending on the keywords as well.

The general consensus is that no they shouldn't affect desktop rankings, but the move towards making sure your site has mobile usability is one that should take place regardless because Google is definitely emphasizing it.

Hi Allison. I think your new format is fine as your older format seems to be similar length when you consider the amount that gets cut-off by the membership login. Here's how the combined page looks in Google's cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BLtwig_9MFsJ:www.chemengonline.com/november-chementator-briefs-5/&hl=en&gl=mx&strip=1

With separate briefs you'll be able to title and describe each one more accurately. Whether that impacts your business model is larger question. Cheers!

Hi Eslam. You're on track with considering keyword difficulty in the early stages. You might also want to take a look at the Fresh Web Explorer and see how popular your considered blog topics are. That will give you some better ideas on social engagement. What topics are coming up quite a bit or generating a lot of conversation. Follwerwonk can give you similar insights into Twitter.

To get a better idea on the difficulty around the percentages in the keyword tool, put the pages that rank for your given term into Open Site Explorer and see how many links those pages have, what kind of domains they're on, the strength of those domains and so on.  You'll be able to begin to get an idea around difficulty in that way.

This post: http://moz.com/blog/the-right-keyword-data-for-the-right-job has nice insights into keyword research as does Cyrus' recent Mozinar: http://moz.com/webinars/seo-basics-the-fundamental-signals-used-to-rank-our-content-higher. Cheers!

Hi Fredrik. Google will pull description text from snippets throughout the page as per their documentation here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?rd=1.  While it's a best practice to write titles and meta descriptions, that Google will use them is no guaranteed. Here' s the part pertaining to your situation:

The description attribute within the tag is a good way to provide a concise, human-readable summary of each page’s content. Google will sometimes use the meta description of a page in search results snippets, if we think it gives users a more accurate description than would be possible purely from the on-page content. Accurate meta descriptions can help improve your clickthrough; here are some guidelines for properly using the meta description.

Cheers!

Hi George. Links aren't affected by title tag changes, if that's what you're asking. It's a little confusing though, so if you could clarify that would help. Cheers!

You'll have more content on the page if it's not gated, but it's really difficult to say one way or the other at this point when comparing the non-gated page versus the gated one. Testing between both types, non-gated would give you a good idea via Analytics.

If you're in Moz Analytics look at your settings. What you'll want to do is check the 'Website' portion and make sure that you have "tracking all sites at this domain" selected. If the /ep/ portion is a folder on this domain it will be tracked once it's crawled.

If it's a third level domain, i.e. ep.yourdomain.com, you might consider making a new campaign to track it specifically as you're going to be working with a completely different set of words / language. Cheers!

This doesn't look like a manipulative or paid link on your part, but is in the correct section on a relevant domain  and in proximity to other forums on the same topic. It should be fine.

Are you trying to deal with a manual action in your GWT account?

Hi Eric. I'd recommend using folders as being navigational and/or site-section specific. As such, they can be shorter--like the two letter abbreviation for states--and create less worries about URL length that way. A ton of other signals are going to be contributing to a page being recognized as being about a resort in Florida than FL vs Florida in the URL alone.

Once you have your structure figured out, using hyphenated URLs that often mimic the title tag of the page is generally a best practice as this gives the user the best idea of what a link is about while also containing keywords when someone links to the page solely via URL.  The Moz blog has plenty of examples such as: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-stop-spam-bots-from-ruining-your-analytics-referral-data.. Short domain, short folder name, then the content. Each bit is readable and understandable as to why it's there.

See: http://moz.com/learn/seo/url for more.  Cheers!

I think your tech might be missing something. When done properly, GA's Enhanced Link Attribution merely adds an attribute to the clicked internal link and sends along the information via Google Analytics. The content isn't seen as duplicate by Google in these cases and most people when linking to a specific page will use the address from the URL bar or some kind of sharing button.