Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Firstly, is there anything wrong with the move? Could I have lost my rankings for this reason? It appears there may be an issue with the redirects.  I am seeing strange headers resolving elsewhere beside your new domain.  I would ask your guy to look into them. The 301 is hitting the new domain but there are 302s in the header response codes pointing to another location as well.  SEE: http://screencast.com/t/53MnOfHCK3 ADDED Below due to a complete lapse in memory of country specific functionality. Keep in mind that could just be country specific redirection based upon the tool so don't quote me but I would disable the functionality after a move. My notes on disabling this are to add the following to blog head section:

I can watch soft 404 errors increase and know there will be a week to two week period with lower SERP scores. They absolutely can affect your campaign.

Hi Xoffie, Google passes around link juice based on the version of the site that Googlebot is served when it crawls your site. Googlebot has a few IP addresses (which will indicate it's location for your server to choose a version of your homepage), but most of them are in the US, so it's likely that Google will see the US version of your site. So the question is, is the US version of your site what you want Google to see?

In two of the sites I work with out of 3, we had stable ranking when we added new pages. For whatever reason after a couple of months, they started shifting up and down. Once, we built some links to them the rankings remained.

Hi Guys Thanks for the answers. Will stick to Wordpress then!

I thought I would give you some more things I think might be of assistance to you during this time. http://netdna.copyblogger.com/documents/WordPress-Emergency-Checklist.pdf here is more on the checklist for hosting http://www.copyblogger.com/wordpress-emergency-checklist/ And this is the SEO checklist http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/seo-website-redesign-checklist sincerely, Thomas

If the new pages are fantastic content, this will only help. They will likely attract more inbound links if done well. I would focus on ensuring that the link real estate (taxonomy, navigation) doesn't change in this case if you want to retain the rankings you have. If the new pages are sub categories / children of the current pages, then link down to them from those pages, and back up to the current pages in breadcrumb (which will further reinforce those rankings) Hope this helps!

Definitely an interesting situation. You are trying to prevent a duplicate content issue across domains by using both noindex and a canonical tag. Typically it is used for similar pages within the same domain. Google does say, " Can rel="canonical" be used to suggest a canonical URL on a completely different domain? There are situations where it's not easily possible to set up redirects. This could be the case when you need to migrate to a new domain name using a web server that cannot create server-side redirects. In this case, you can use the rel="canonical" link element to specify the exact URL of the domain preferred for indexing. While the rel="canonical" link element is seen as a hint and not an absolute directive, we do try to follow it where possible." http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394 As such, with Google you would probably be ok just using the canonical. Bing however does not follow the tag so you could face issues with them. The link juice question is very good. I would hesitate to say that Google would fully take the directive of the canonical on a page it has been told to not index or follow. There is a chance they could hit that directive and then ignore the canonical.

Note sure if this is exactly what you are looking for, but I found this site.  It aspires to do this for the consumer. http://alltop.com

There's no way for you to force the affiliates to do a canonical tag from their website to yours. For you it makes sense, for them it doesn't. Because once they do a canonical tag to your website, their pages won't be indexed any more which means if their traffic source is SEO, they won't get any of that. There's no reason for them to do it. The best way to think is if you can do the datafeed without descriptions or maybe much shorter version of the meta description, like a lot of merchants do Short Descriptions. It helps both the affiliates as well as the merchants. Less duplicate content. I hope that helps.

I'm not quite sure I understand what the other 10 translated products are below it, but my gut reaction is that, yes, I would probably canonicalize these particular pages. They're not going to be high-value pages in Google's eyes. From a user perspective, it's good to have a placeholder (until you can put up a translation), but you may want to keep it down to a single page in the index until the translated versions roll out.

"Your site wont get any penalties as long as your site was indexed first." Who is indexed first  does not matter.  What matters is who has authority.  Authority often wins even if last published.

Hi Xoffie, What country are you in? Are you saying that no ads like the ones featured in the SEJ article are appearing where you live? I want to be sure I understand your question. Miriam

Whilst I know you said you aren't looking for software, others who find this thread might be, so for them, there's a tool I recently saw tweeted about which, on face value, appears to be an "SEOmoz of PPC" (of sorts). https://www.syracusa.com/ I wouldn't normally post about a tool I haven't tried, but it's been put together by a respected agency, Forward, so has potential to be really rather good. Would love to know if anyone has given it a try.

Well, it doesn't have to be PR Web, but writing a press release is just another way to repurpose content...

At a high level, SEO is based upon 3 factors: website architecture, content and site promotion (i.e. links + social media). With any site, but especially a large one, it is critical every aspect of your website architecture is solid. There are tons of design issues which, once resolved, help a site to rank better. A few quick examples: are coding errors or site speed issues interfering with the way search engines crawl your site? do you have an automated process for internal linking? (i.e. like Wikipedia) do you offer users the ability to sign in with 1 click from their social account? do you have a mobile website? do you offer solid social engagement? comments? etc The above are just a few sample questions. Anything which can be done via code should be perfect on a large site like yours. The changes effect every single product offered on your site. Next, evaluate your content. How good is it really? Good is not good enough, and neither is great. You need "absolutely fantastic" and "best on the web" content to rank at the top. Being unique is only the beginning. Be "engaging". Offer detailed pictures of not only the products but images of the products being used. Allow users to share their experience with testimonials / comments, etc.

My conclusion would be to look elsewhere and as you said, sit back and watch them closely.  Maybe some linked sites got hit hard and lost their weight in Google over the last week with this latest algorithm change and it indirectly effected your product pages.

The true power of Press Release submission is not in spammy press releases but in having a real issue to write a press release about and then making sure it gets printed and posted online by a real news site. If you can do that then you will get a coveted journalistic link that google loves. What your competitor is doing is not a long term strategy. Even if it is working now, at some point google will catch them and they will spend a lot of time fixing the issue. Just continue posting legitimate content on your blog and site and every now and then do something news worthy so you can then get a media mention online, in papers, radio and on tv. Charitable giving and actions go a long way.

That article is great.  I would emphasize the video sitemap and adding rich snippets. If the videos are a great resource then you probably won't have much trouble getting links.  Just do a search for your local area "blog:city name" is a good place to start.

Ok Tommy Thanks a lot