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Good luck on that, Patrick. The business may want to consider consolidating their websites so that all branding and marketing efforts are feeding a single super site instead of being bucketed into two sites.

Makes perfect sense, Paul! Thank you for the detailed account and what to be aware of. I was already planning something along these lines. The trick is getting people to see the new page once they are redirected. I'll work on this and a header bar or a pop up window may work best. All URLs will be redirected appropriately as well as it's standard practice in shutting down one site to pass authority to another. Thanks again for your insight! - Patrick

Hi Patrick, It's true, you will be somewhat limited by that, but with the exception of citation building, you should still be able to make a good effort at content development, linkbuilding, etc. Sounds like you're working with a really neat, diverse company that could become the answer to so many local homeowner needs if the brand becomes locally famous. Wishing you good luck

Thanks so much for the response, Kane. She is very particular in the content placed on her website. I didn't work with her on her website or her existing pages, navigation, and content, so I'm coming in fresh and from what I know, she was tough to deal with on the content portions. Adding more pages about her services probably isn't realistic as she doesn't dive into her "services" on the website nor does she want to. She has this false sense that her clients KNOW what she does and will search for her "method". Yet, when you Google her "method", nothing shows. This led me to talk with her about and be very honest with her, that her name, her method and her book need to be the focal point. So, when people do hear about her, and then Google her, they will get the bigger picture vs just searching for a service keyword and her showing up. Another challenge is, her budget is low. It will increase, but have to prove it works. I explained this is a limiting factor, but will see where it goes. We will focus on blog articles, a few press releases, a couple SlideShare presentations about her method and book outline and wish we could do videos, but she will never do a video, but she enjoys and does do speaking engagements. We also discussed getting her to do more podcast type interviews and try to get her in front of bloggers or podcasters as she speaks very well and would be comfortable doing that. This will make for an interesting case study if it all works out the way I want it to. One thing I won't allow is for it to ruin or soil my reputation or our mutual brand consultant's image. Thanks again, Kane! I do appreciate your input. - Patrick

Hey! Yes, we made the switch to SSL and everything went smooth. We set up our 301 redirects and submitted to Google right away. No real loss in traffic and our rankings for the 100+ keywords we monitor either remained the same or increased a little over the first couple months. So, that was pleasant to see and experience. The real test is when we finish and launch the new design, however, we will be working to keep our URL structure the same, but will be adding many more pages to the site focused on more educational/SEO friendly content. Not really caring if searchers stumble across it in their browsing, but moreso that Google indexes the content for our targeted keywords those pages are designed to capture and rank for (inner landing pages). As long as we're keeping our authoritative pages un-drastically changed, the URL remains the same and the content is about the same, we shouldn't experience much loss in rankings of traffic. If anything, we should see new keywords ranking very well in a short amount of time and our traffic increasing. We'll see come end of 2015, into 2016!

Thank you, Patrick! I'll check all of these out and share all aspects with the clients so they know what potentially lies ahead in terms of rebranding and using a new, different domain name. Really appreciate the article references too. - Patrick McCoy

No real resolution. Spoke with someone from India and they told me to follow the search business angle and I informed them the business was not showing to be clicked on, in order to "Request Admin Rights". Then waited for 10 min on the phone for them to come back and tell me that there is nothing else they can do. I was on the phone for 35 min to get nowhere and will call back again to hopefully speak with another person who can escalate to a more technical person. It is the strangest thing... oh, and frustrating!

Absolutely! I've seen discrepancies like this before with other sites as well. Glad that link helped answer your question. Saved me a TON of typing!!

Thank you for the explanation, Prestashop. I'll have to look into this ASAP. We thought we had set all of that up, but now seeing something went awry.

A great weekend to you too, Patrick !

Thanks for the tips, Highland. Per the PPC info, they aren't running any PPC now and will be using another company for those strategies. On the optimization side of things, providing a "Disclaimer" in the footer or even on the individual product page could do some help. We did discuss implementing content on the site for "Comparison of A & B Products" type blog articles, but my clients feel the other company is simply protecting what they built, even though my clients essentially bought over their market share. Big brand ego's! Appreciate your tips. Any others would be great to read. - Patrick

You're welcome

Hi Patrick, My name is Erin, and I'm on the Moz Help Team. Thanks for reaching out! This question is a little tricky, as I can't see any historic page level data from OSE. All I can check is historic domain level data within your campaign. I looked at your historic data in your Competitive Link Metrics, and I didn't see any dramatic change there to reflect this kind of a drop in your LDR's. We are kicking around ideas on better historical databases, but there's nothing set in stone right now. Currently the only data points we have are based on domains in the current index. I apologize that I don't have a more concrete answer for you, but this is the best I've got with the tools available to me. If you have any other questions, feel free to reach out to us at help@moz.com. Happy Friday! Erin

I am using both... Godaddy WP Hosting and WebSynthesis... everybody recommended me to use WebSynthesis but unfortunately as a beginner you are very limited if you are not familiar with additional coding... there are just a few free child themes available and ... well they are not really "hot"... I can`t recommend that... and I will cancel it when the transfer of the content is finished... GoDaddy WP Hosting fits my needs best at the moment although the settings there are incompatible if you want to use JetPack... by the way: I also tested pagelines but well drag and drop sounds fine but you are also very limited if you can`t find the right (child) theme...

You're welcome! The fix was pushed out a few hours ago.

Thanks and assumed that was the case, Chris. Actually, I emailed them from their contact form, then saw a direct email link on that Contact page, so I emailed Tarek as well. He replied by email and also then called our office to apologize for the inconvenience and let us know the link was removed and we have confirmed this. Now, if every other webmaster would respond this quickly and politely, it would make our jobs a LOT less frustrating. Thanks for responding Kevin and Oren! - Patrick

Hey Federico! Thanks for your note about the images linking from a site to the author's site with a NoFollow link. We thought that was the answer, but wanted to get confirmation and appreciate you reassuring our gut feeling. I may have not been too clear in my question, but we aren't trying to rank images for SEO as we know the original authors will get top priority (hopefully). Per the stock photo accounts, we have spoken with the copyright teams from iStock/Getty and 123RF and they are of the same nature. If we, the company, buy images on behalf of our clients, then we are not allowed to send the client the raw file or a copy of the raw file, as that would break their copyright rules. However, we can use that said image for any number of websites or blogs as we choose since we have the royalty free rights to that file. It really is such a grey area, but when we talk with clients we inform them that if they want any images for the website/blog and wish to use those same images for any print material (brochures, magazine ads, flyers, etc) then we ask them to open an account with the respective site and purchase the images, so they hold the rights. We then upload the images and then delete from our systems. It's too much of a hassle. I will review the link you shared for the FlickR CC images. Thanks for sharing that! - Patrick

Thanks Federico, Moosa and Keri for your input! I was guessing that's exactly what the responses were going to be, especially Keri's with respect to making sure it's stated that credit is provided where credit is due. I get referencing data, but just copying word for word, even the title of the articles is a bit much, and very lazy. At least change the title to be somewhat unique and summarize the content into your own words, THEN provide the source link for "Read more here....." Thanks, again! - Cheers! Patrick

Thanks for reconfirming what we found out, Takeshi. That is exactly what is going on after we did some more digging. Then we read your response and it all made sense. The #1 page is tied to our main whiteboardcreations@gmail ID which was auto-created when G+ rolled out because of the email account. The #2 page (the one we want to continue to build out and brand) was created as a "Business" page through Google's verification process years ago and then converted to G+ local page. We're going to leave them both as the main local page is the only one tied to our website with Authorship and the one we are posting to and promoting. Again, thanks for your input. - Patrick

Just wanted to mention that it's possible that the client themselves still has the original message in their Webmaster Tools.  I have worked on some sites where even though I was given full access to WMT I could not see their messages.  But, the original site owners could still see them. Regardless, the date doesn't really matter, does it?  You've got work to do!