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Hey Stu! In a case like this we recommend purchasing a listing for the new company (xy) overall. We have tools that allow you to enter alternate names/addresses/phone numbers for the old listings that will help us identify, update, and/or remove them. If you already have an existing Moz Local listing for company x or company y, you can shutter those listings, but we do not recommend buying new Moz Local listings for outdated company information. You only need one account to manage this new listing! Also, please be aware that we expect updates through Moz Local to generally take 8-12 weeks, so if you're looking for immediate effects by purchasing the new listing right before the company merges, there may be some lag time before the listings are updated.

Hi Stuart There could be many nuances to every situation (essentially, what type of sites they are and what type of content it is), but in general I'd go with what's most user-friendly - what will reduce any confusion, and send old traffic to the new home of the acquired company. A subdomain is fine if you want to clearly show to users a distinction between the acquiring vs acquired site. Definitely do your 301 redirects. I would highly recommend reading up on Cyrus' article here about 301 redirects. In general, the content should be basically the same from the old page to the new page being redirected to. I would try to migrate the site "as is" as much as possible to eliminate other factors/changes that could affect things. You can update things later, but this was it makes it easier to analyze if any rankings are lost. In other words, be systematic and keep track of when/what you change.

Hi Stu, How are you setting up these 301 redirects? In the code itself? Or, nginx/apache config? Could you please share the redirection rules you've mentioned for this? It seems an issue with redirection rules itself.

You need to look at the CSV version of your Moz crawl.  It will show what pages link to it.

Many thanks both. Stu

That's great - thank you both. Stu

You can actually accomplish exactly this with a special feature of Pingdom's Uptime Tracker, Stuart. When you set up an Uptime Check for your form page, you can designate the check as a Transaction Monitor. You then use the excellent little editor wizard to create a multi-step process that will automatically fill in the fields of your form with your designated text, and then trigger the submission of the form. (Hint: use a unique email address or content submission to make downstream filtering of the submitted form and email notification easier). You can do this kind of tracking for 1 URL/form with the free account, or you could monitor several forms with the paid accounts (about $120 for up to 10 URLs). Downside is, the slowest you can set up the monitor is for once every hour, so you'll be getting a lot of emails You'll want to set up some automated email management to handle this. The upside is, you can be immediately notified by Pingdom alerts (email, SMS) if the web form is failing for any reason. You'll need to set up your own monitoring of the downstream email delivery process though to catch issues like spam blocking. (Though surely you've got a whitelist entry in place on the spam filter to ensure those form submissions get through?) In addition, if you wish, you can also set up a check that monitors an IMAP email server as well to know within a minute whether your Exchange server ins't responding correctly. Lastly, if you're using Google Analytics event tracking on that form submission, you'll need to apply an IP address filter for Pingdom's IP addresses to the Analytics profile to keep the form testing from totally screwing with your Events data. Does that sound like what you're looking for? Paul P.S. Have never tried this with a captcha-protected form - no idea how you'd handle that.

I doubt it would have a negative impact, but I would make sure that the alt attribute accurately describes the image. The alt attribute is just a small factor in ranking, so I would not spend too much time on it Just make sure that you're using the most appropriate image: if you're re-using the same image to target different types of keywords, you might be using images that depict something too broad. You be the judge: if you think it's a good image for the user, I can't imagine it getting you into trouble.

Thanks for your help with this. In the end we decided to go down the nofollow route after consulting the developer with your suggestions. Stu

Yes, the tool will show if your business is using publisher markup.

Sorry... I just had to jump in on this since the other members of the Roberts Tribe of Moz have chimed in. I agree completely with their assessment.

This is an area a lot of SEOs face, and a lot of folks screw up, frankly. The big question you have to ask yourself is wether or not the keyword are distinct enough to warrant separate pages for each? The way to answer this is typically user intent. Obviously a user seeking "divorce solicitors" wants something way different than "landlord solictors" so it makes sense to keep these on different pages and target them seperately. The next step is making sure each page is relevant, unique and provides a good experience. This goes way beyond copying and pasting your keywords into a pre-written "solicitor" template, and includes telling a story for each. On the other hand, if user intent and/or content can be combined into a single subject, it's usually best to do so. A couple of blog post by Rand Fishkin that might help: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/keyword-targeting-how-to-employ-multiple-keywords-for-seo-conversions http://www.seomoz.org/blog/mapping-keywords-to-content-for-maximum-impact-whiteboard-friday Keep in mind Google hates thin content that repeats itself. Take this advice from the Google Webmaster Blog on quality guidelines: "Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?" Avoid this and you should be okay! Best of luck.

Hi GMan, Thanks for your feedback. I have since checked analytics and organic traffic for that keyword mentioned has not decreased drastically. In fact, it has highlighted that the landing page for that keyword needs quite a lot of attention. Overall, organic traffic has fallen, but only slightly, andisn't a cause for concern. Probably a storm in a teacup! Thanks, Stuart