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Totally agree with Alan, it can cause circular navigation problems for crawlers too.

Definitely, 100% do the 301 in any case... to whatever has been put in place of that page (assuming it's the same or similar content)    

Okay yeah, if the domain name is okay for the one that's ranking you could just replace the existing site with the one you want then. I know there is still an exact match bonus for keyworded domains but it's far from the be-all and end-all if everything else is right. And there's plenty of talk of it being worth a lot less now.

Mind you, I've seen some contradicting stuff. On the one hand there's the fact it can improve CTR as people see the keywords they've searched in the domain, but on the other hand it can be seen by some as a bit spammy... although I have no idea what the ratio of the advantage vs disadvantage there would be.

There is a hell of a lot of abuse of exact match domains though so it wouldn't surprise me (and this is only my own humble opinion) if the value of them went down considerably sooner or later.

*Edit:

Deleted this due to not understanding question and giving wrong answer... sorry.

Will give myself a thumbs down for that lol!

Have you been link building to the practise sites? If not, don't bother with the 301's at all, just put the real site on to the practice domain that is ranking well (if you're okay with the domain name). Exact match domain isn't everything, and in some instances it can be seen as spammy. Exact match bonus is a lot less now than it was anyway.

Hehe, well spotted!

No problem

That's what I thought originally, but on sites like ripoffreport and blagger.com, among others (btcomplaints.com is good) they simply have a disclaimer, that any of the views expressed and stories reported are that of other peoples and not necessarily shared by the site authors.

Plus, chatting to a lawyer friend of mine before revealed that if something is true, and can be proven as true... it's okay to share your negative experience of it if the point is to warn others

As there tends to be a risk for clients due to the fact that we can't ever guarantee anything, what we do is tell the client that they're not under any contract tying them to us so if we don't deliver they can cancel at any time. That minimises the risk a bit for them.

Also, if you're thinking in just terms of rankings with them for the moment you can say that if you don't get x number of keywords (whichever keywords you decide between you are optimal) to page x by date x, and then page y by date y, etc... then they stop payments until you do.

That's not a penalty, it's just losing rankings... happens all the time. And yes Google can put permanent punishment on do but they don't tend to, in fact my understanding is it would be extremely rare... and if they did do that, it wouldn't be just for one keyword. If they penalize you, you fix the issue causing it and ask for re-inclusion. But that's not what's happened to your client. It could be the Panda/Farmer update or any number of things.

I haven't seen or heard anything about Panda making any changes to how Flash is crawled or indexed. It would count towards page content though yeah, just not in the sense of that page content in a normal way. Videos, images, everything counts as content in some way or another... it just doesn't have a lot to go on for what that content is about.

Yes Xenu will do it, it checks all the links and then offers you a sitemap as a report at the end

I like Xenu, it's quick too

If you're talking about the SEOmoz campaign app report, download all errors as CSV (there's a link to do so) and you'll see all the dupes in the spreadsheet

Yes, you need links, and the same on-page SEO, mobile search works much the same way as organic search BUT, you're much, much better off not having a separate mobile site. If it's an option, just have the one site and make it mobile friendly

Just make sure page load times are minimal and actual file sizes aren't too large.

Yeah I was going to make a thread on something like that actually to see what others thought about the creation of a sort of "SEO Company Hall of Shame"

Whatever you do, don't guarantee any position ever... first page or not. It's a big red flag for bad SEO's.

You'll likely need an on-going link campaign whatever the case is. How competitive are the keywords?

Yeah I didn't even spot that. Damn these fools, they make us all look bad!

Haha I like it!!

But no I'm not considering his services, I just feel bad for the fact that other people probably will, and if I'm right they're just going to be scammed.

I see this kind of stuff around loads and it really frustrates me, it's usually a lot worse than this though.

We had a phone call at work once with some guy trying his hardest to sell his SEO services to me... apparently he didn't realise we were an SEO company ourselves, so I kept him on the phone for ages playing dumb and then told him how everything he'd just been telling me was completely wrong afterwards.

His company had a "special relationship" with Google where they could guarantee position one for any term in organic search, and they could even our company to DMOZ for £50!

Some small business that guy called that day would have signed up to their yearly contract and is still paying through the nose for nothing.

Okay so I keep on seeing stuff like this, I know it's been going on for ages but it seems to be increasing in intensity. Anyway, thanks to Facebook knowing I click on their ads to do with SEO it shows me pretty much just those ad types now.

I'll get to the point. I saw an ad for the "Search Marketing Business Academy", or "SMBA" so I was curious and clicked. There's a chap who professes 12 years experience in internet marketing and has a bunch of companies and blah, blah, blah. Anyway, he's offering himself up as basically an expert of experts, one that can show other search marketers how to make it. www.searchmarketingbusinessacademy.com/

There's a few things that look fishy though.

• The testimonials have common names and no business names
• There's no mention of what these companies he runs are
• There's no work to see in the form of case studies or a portfolio
• Under "Meet Lee Gilbert" it states that they've been supporting other SEM companies since 2004, yet a quick Google of the company and the name shows little to support this.
• Googling the chaps name just gets you his own website www.leegilbert.co.uk which professes more of the same and just a bunch of products
• Of just a few pieces of advice given for how to rank on Google it includes keyword density
• The chap seems to still place a lot of importance on Page Rank (As in the old PR that we all know means nothing now, and his blog about this is only a month old)
• From searching, it doesn't seem that there is any history at all, let alone this history of mass success
• There doesn't appear to be any social presence for the company or the man, except that ad.

It seems just like an average SEO (albeit one that's a bit behind on the times) who knows an average amount, trying to say he can tell other SEO's how to master the arts.

He's not even a member on SEOmoz, that's the biggest give away haha.

So, could I be wrong? Am I being too harsh?

I totally agree with Daniel, it would be a huge mistake!

Don;t forget that all of those links that are coming in currently, whether natural or built will have some relevance from sites/pages with anchor text relevant to that homepage. You won't just be losing a bit of link juice, you'll be losing what the search engines currently see as recommendations of trust and relevance from one page to another with that other being altered to a different page with whole different content (in the fact that it's a shop)... so the keywords and relevancy "bonuses" you did have on the homepage from all those links will no longer match up.... if that makes sense.

i.e. link from page about bananas, to page about bananas, with anchor text of bananas.

If you change the homepage it will become:

link from page about bananas, to page about apples, with anchor text of bananas.

That's an extreme and simplified example but you get what I'm saying