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Again, my advise would be the same as Bryan's - leave it alone and build more links to the insurance page.

I don't see a problem with that page out ranking your home page?

I would either use rel canonical as Nakul instructed above, although this is a bit of hack IMO.

Or just build some better quality links at the page you want to rank, I don't see a problem with building links to the /insurance page?

I suspect his home page is just not ranking for the keywords, could you post the URL in question?

If not then type

_site:www.yourdomain.com _

Into Google and let us know if your site is listed.

Thanks,

Optimise your home page for your chosen keyword and 301 the page /insurance to your root domain.

To do this you need to create a .htaccess file in the / directory on your server and enter the following information.

Redirect 301 /insurance  http://www.mydomain.dk

About 90% of the link juice "should" flow through if you use a 301 redirect, you can test the above is working by visting http://www.mydomain.dk/insurance and making sure it redirect you to your home page.

Note that a 301 can take a few weeks (possibly longer) for Google to pick up so do not expect overnight changes.

Hope that helps.

Yeah, I heard Matt Cutts talking about this and his answer was "Google will discount those links and not count them" (or something similar to that affect) along with paid links.

I would also check out this post, this directly addresses your concern. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/lets-kill-the-%E2%80%9Cbad-inbound-links-can-get-your-site-penalized%E2%80%9D-myth/32426/

It would also depend on your current back link profile, if you have a bunch of poor quality / border line junk links and one of your competitors point a bunch or really bad links at you I can "imagine" (I don't know for sure, I have not tested this) you are going to take a hit in rankings.

Bottom line is, build good quality links and you should be golden

Hi Todd,

A site can still rank for the keywords you are optimising for with on-page alone - if the area is niche enough (or the other pages have poor on-page SEO).

If you mean that you are appearing on page one and you are not getting people link back to you organically... That's just life

If you mean you have built links and they are not showing up using Open Site Explorer then either Roger has not crawled the site with your links on or the index has not updated (IIRC OSE's site index gets updated once a month).

Hi Hannah,

"I think" I will just leave the .com in place...

I can see a lot more .co.uk's in the SERP's for my keywords but perhaps that is just because I live in England and everyone has bought .co.uk's

I have already done the geo targeting in web master tools and claimed a places page etc.

Thanks for your help

Keith

1. I would 301

2. Who knows, it's possible... But not right now

3. mostly UK

4. Nothing at all

I would love to hear from a person who has actually done this to find out if it's worth while from a ranking prospective.

I own both domains, when i say swapping I mean go through the effort of 301'ing the .com to the .co.uk

I have read up on this and I know most people will say that swapping domains won't make much difference, however it would be great to hear from some one who has actually done this.

Thanks

I currently own the domain lionseo.com and I also own the .co.uk variant some of the keywords I am targeting will have UK in them. My thoughts are that a .co.uk may help improve rankings on google.co.uk and click through + have a keyword match in the home page URL.

**Do you guys think it's worth swapping to the .co.uk domain from .com? **

Thanks in advance

Keith

Hi Vjay,

TBH it's probably your back link catalog... It's mainly built from blog comment spam.

The links are still going to exist, they are just not going to pass page rank once they have been no followed.

I personally don't see this making much difference, it might help you hang on to more page rank but the client won't see a benefit IMO.

From Google's prospective it might look a bit spammy having a large number of links from a single domain all at once, but then this start some times works... It is hard to say.

I guess for the client complaining about too many inlinks you could suggest they list in a category that is called something like "Nationwide UK services" then companies that have 1 office but want to provide a service to the whole of the country could list there.

I know this does not answers your question directly, but I don't think there is a definite answer to "will a lot of links from my site to my clients damage there rank" as in some cases it will and in some cases it wont. IMO the best practice would be to try and reduce the amount of multiple links to their site if possible using the suggestions above.

Another thought, create a page / category for national listings and place all the national listings there instead of listing them in every location category for the UK.

If they have offices in each town then advise them to create a listing for each office and point their link at their local contact us page for the area they wish to list in.

Make sense?

Sounds to me like you have a built a bad back link catalog and Google have hit you for it.

Comment spamming and free article directories are not good links, try to build better quality back links and see if your rank improves.

Perhaps guest posting on other blogs in your niche if you are stuck for link building ideas.

Why not have it linking internally to a profile page for the client then linking out from there?

It's the same thing the rewrite is a 301 it's just using Apaches mod_rewrite to achieve it.

You can use either option, after you have setup the 301 you can check the Apache status code, If you have shell access you can tail the access log file.

If you don't have shell access I am sure their are Chrome / Firefox plugins that will verify your 301 code, or you could use Screaming Frog.

Personally, I would always try and host the server in the country you are trying to target for a number of reasons - mainly performance (and chances are it's going to be cheaper for me, I live in the UK).

However the video "SEO Executive" posted above is from 2009, since then Google have released the following: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html stating that the server location is irrelevant if you own the ccTLD e.g .fr

Martijn you might also want to check out the following whiteboard Friday video about international SEO: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

Hi Dr Pete, Would correcting the current issue with a 301 and adding the rel=canonical tags to each page be the best option? My thought being any future duplicate content issues that may occur (not caused from this issue) would be avoided.

Sorry I just read this again, the 301 will fix the URL issue site wide.

I recommend you update each page, note the rel canonical tag will be different for each page. And 50 pages should take you less than 15 mins