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Category: Technical SEO

Discuss site health, structure, and other technical SEO strategies.

  • lee_greenhill


    Hi Guys, Just looking through our crawl diagnositcs and we have a ton errors, well over 5000 actually, on 404 pages that cannot be accessed. Our website runs a lot of "Hot Offers" that are time bound, so they expire at the end of each month and we remove the page via our CMS. It's making the crawl diagnositcs loook bad, but will this be hindering our seo and Google 'stuff' because they are finding thousands of 404 errors? Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Website: www.vospers.com Lee Greenhill

    | lee_greenhill
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  • gmk1567


    Google webmaster tool reports "DNS lookup timeout" for the past few weeks. What may be the causes? Seeing around 2000 errors. How to clear this issue? Thanks.

    | gmk1567
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  • seoug_2005


    Hi, I would like to know if the following statement holds true today or it doesn't matter whether we use hyphens or underscore If you have a URL like keyword1_keyword2,  Google will only return that page if the user searches for keyword1_keyword2  ( highly unlikely ) . But If you have a URL like keyword1-keyword2, that page can be returned for the searches -  keyword1,keyword2 and even “keyword1keyword2” Thanks

    | seoug_2005
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  • CeCeBar


    Seems it works once, maybe, then replies with a message that it can't complete the process when trying another keyword. _Cindy Barnard

    | CeCeBar
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  • KnutDSvendsen


    With the changes in the Google algorithm emphasizing freshness of content, I was wondering how they determine freshness and what constitutes new content. For instance, if I write a major update to a story I published last July, is the amended story fresh? Is there anything I can do in addition to publishing brand new content to make Google sure they see all my new content?

    | KnutDSvendsen
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  • CanineConcepts


    When ever a browser calls my site canineconcepts.co.uk, it is automatically 301 redirected to canineconcepts.co.uk/en I am not sure if I should be concerned about this from an SEO perspective or not. Any thoughts?

    | CanineConcepts
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  • Cairmen


    Heya! I write a guide for a specific piece of Internet-based software which is about to undergo a major patch release. No-one's going to be using the old version, so my old-version articles are essentially going to be useless, as are keywords related to the old version number. Given that, I'm intending to update all my guides to be current with the new version. However, obviously I want to keep the Google juice for the old guides, as they rank pretty well. The three options I'm considering: Simply retitle the old guides to the latest version number - "How to use Blue Widget 2.0" becomes "How to use Blue Widget 3.0". Disadvantage - my URLs still include the old version number, 2.0. Write updated guides as seperate articles and 301 redirect the old articles to them. I've done this before with some success. So, I'd 301 the URL for "How to use Blue Widget 2.0" to the url for "How to use Blue Widget 3.0", my new article. Disadvantages - possible loss of link juice? Also, I believe redirects can be kinda tricksy. Just leave both the old and new versions up there, with a link from the old version saying "outdated, check the new version". My belief is that this would be the worst idea. Should I do one of them, or something else? And why?

    | Cairmen
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  • 540SEO


    A client has 2 separate pages for video thumbnails. One page is "popular videos" with a sort function for over 700 pages of video thumbnails with 10 thumbnails and short desriptions per page. (/videos?sort_by=popularity). The second page is "latest videos" (/videos?sort_by=latest) with over 7,000 pages. Both pages have a sort function -- including latest, relevance, popularity, time uploaded, etc. Many of the same video thumbnails appear on both pages. Also, when you click a thumbnail you get a full video page and these pages appear to get indexed well. There seem to be duplicate content issues between the "popular" and "latest" pages, as well as within the sort results on each of those pages. (A unique URL is generated everytime you use the sort function i.e. /videos?sort_by=latest&uploaded=this_week). Before my head explodes, what is the best way to treat this? I was thinking a noindex,follow meta robot on every page of thumbnails since the individual video pages are well indexed, but that seems extreme. Thoughts?

    | 540SEO
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  • cpdigital1


    We have a niche keyword domain possibility but I am not sure which way, if any, is better. The .com and .co.uk options are not available but there are various other ones - including .org, .net, .uk.com.  Is there any domain/seo benefit of one version over another? Any thought gratefully received..

    | cpdigital1
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  • digitalclubb


    Hey Guys, Hopefully I can explain this so that you can understand, let me know if you need me to clarify any particular points. I have a primary domain for my website, however someone has also pointed their domain at my server that has nothing to do with us or our website. Typing a keyword in a search engine will list our website as this has been crawled but it's listing the domain as their domain and not our primary. Is this because their domain has greater value then our primary? What's the best course of action to resolve the issue? The reason I ask is because the domain could potentially have a negative effect on business. If I setup hosting for this second domain and setup a redirect on it, all the traffic that is trying to reach us via respective search terms are then directed away from our site. I have been in contact with the domain administrator but they are yet to reply to my correspondence. Has anyone experienced something similar and come up with a good way to resolve it? Thanks guys, any help would be greatly appreciated.

    | digitalclubb
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  • iprosoftware


    Hi Can you please advise if the following website is corrupted in the eyes of Google, it has been written in umbraco and I have taken over it from another developer and I am confused to why it is behaving the way it is. cache:www.tangoholidaysolutions.com When I run this all I see is the header, the start of the main content and then the footer.  If I view text view all the content is visible. The 2nd issue I have with this site is as follows: Main Page: http://www.tangoholidaysolutions.com/holiday-lettings-spain/ This page is made up of widgets i.e. locations, featured villas, content However the widgets are their own webpages in their own right http://www.tangoholidaysolutions.com/holiday-lettings-spain/location-picker/ My concern is that this part pages will affect the performance of the seo on the site. In an ideal world I would have the CMS setup so these widgets are not classed as pages, but I am working on this. Thanks Andy

    | iprosoftware
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  • ClaireH-184886


    Hi i have been told about linkedin and how good it is but every time i look at it, it puzzles me and i am not sure if it is worth joining or not. I am looking to promote in the UK and not abroad and would like to know how good it is. Even my accountant uses it but each time i look at it i cannot get my head around it and how to use it to promote my business. Can anyone please let me know how much it cost to join and if it will have any benefits for me to promote my business and my sites. I look forward to hearing from you

    | ClaireH-184886
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  • ufmedia


    Our main site, www.domain.com, is on an IIS 6 server.  When we started our blog, we wanted to put it in a subdirectory (domain.com/blog), but we couldn't because our IT people refused to support it.  Instead, we built it on a third-party Apache server and configured it to open under blog.domain.com.  However, I came across this SEOmoz post about the glories of reverse proxies, so I've persuaded our IT people to take a swing at it. We got it to work on a staging server, but the permalinks won't change (still appear as blog.domain.com/slug).  The IT guys say it's due to a configuration problem with WordPress.  Can somebody out there point me in the right direction as far as working out the URL issues with this?

    | ufmedia
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  • kortingsplanet


    I heard that Google doesn't use 'meta keywords' for ranking. Is that true and does it harm to use the meta tag? And how do the other big SEs use the tag?

    | kortingsplanet
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  • holidayseo


    Hey Guys, I am about make an important improvement to our site's robots.txt we have large number of properties on our site and we have different views for them. List, gallery and map view. By default list view shows up and user can navigate through gallery view. We donot want gallery pages to get indexed and want to save our crawl budget for more important pages. this is one example of our site: http://www.holiday-rentals.co.uk/France/r31.htm When you click on "gallery view" URL of this site will remain same in your address bar: but when you mouse over the "gallery view" tab it will show you URL with parameter "view=g". there are number of parameters: "view=g, view=l and view=m". http://www.holiday-rentals.co.uk/France/r31.htm?view=l http://www.holiday-rentals.co.uk/France/r31.htm?view=g http://www.holiday-rentals.co.uk/France/r31.htm?view=m Now my question is: I If restrict bots by adding "Disallow: ?view=" in our robots.txt will it effect the list view too? Will be very thankful if yo look into this for us. Many thanks Hassan I will test this on some other site within our network too before putting it to important one's. to measure the impact but will be waiting for your recommendations. Thanks

    | holidayseo
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  • tdsnet


    Hi, I wonder if anyone can help…

    | tdsnet
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  • maty


    Hello Guy´s! The last days I have been surprised to see that the levels of PA, mR, and mT vary when it is or not  the "www" in the URL: 1. http://patagonline.com/viajes-argentina 2. http://www.patagonline.com/viajes-argentina Both URL's correspond to the keyword "viajes Argentina"  our incoming links... In this case, it´s convenient to do a 301redirect from URL 1 to 2? Thanks a lot for your help!!

    | maty
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  • Socialdude


    Hi, I have recently been asked to help www.mycanvas.ie I have a feeling they have a google penalty. All their Google Keywords have literally dropped out of the Google SERP but they are still shown on Yahoo SERP. I recently did a site:www.mycanvas.ie and the pages are still in google index. The only thing that comes to mind is that the site owner submitted to 380 web directories over a period of 2 months with http://www.directorymaximizer.com/ do you think this could be causing the problem with google? Advise and suggestions are welcomed, thank you.

    | Socialdude
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  • RodneyRiley


    Just wondering what experience people have of this widget? I added it to a site I look after late last week and we took an noise dive over the weekend. Any thoughts / comments are appreciated!

    | RodneyRiley
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  • Chammy


    My new client has had his URL for 8 years and built up good SEO, visitors and links. He has now lost it and the cost of getting it back is prohibitive. Apart from contacting all the places he is currently getting links from, is there anything he can do to salvage SEO and site visitors? Is there anyway he can get 301s done if he no longer owns the URL? If he starts again with a new URL, and loads all the new content on it, will submitting a site map help Google understand its not duplicate and all the content is just at a new URL? He is hoping that contacting Google and explaining will help them "look kindly", but I have never heard anything like this happening! Any ideas? Many thanks

    | Chammy
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  • bozzie311


    What is the best Joomla SEO plugin? Hopefully easy to use as well?

    | bozzie311
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  • Cairmen


    Very simple question here . I've redirected a bunch of older pages with decent ranking to some newer pages on my site, using the Thesis theme's built-in redirect function. However, in the SERPS, the older pages (and, importantly, older titles) still show up. When clicked on, they redirect to the new page, but it's still irritating because the older titles make the site look out of date. Is this Working As Intended, or have I or my theme done something wrong? And if it's the latter, what's the best way to achieve a redirect, preferably with a Wordpress plugin?

    | Cairmen
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  • Paul78


    Hi Everyone, I have a questions on 301 redirects, i hope someone can give me some help on this. There was some 301 redirects made on some of the URLs at the beginning of the year, however we are now re-structuring the whole website, which means the URLs which had been given a 301 redirect are now getting another 301. The question is, should i delete the first 301 redirect from the htaccess file? Kind Regards

    | Paul78
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  • PokerCanada


    I am certain that I have hit a google penalty filter for my site http://www.playpokeronline.ca for my main keywords "play poker online" in google.ca I rank 670th and used to be on the first page between 1 and 10 in June. On Bing I am like 9th On my site I found the entire site duplicated as follows Original: www.playpokeronline.ca Duplicate www.playpokeronline.ca/playpokeronline/ this duplicate was not intentional and seems to be a result of my hosting at godaddy. for every page on my site and it shows up in webmaster tools I blocked the duplicate with robots.txt and a few days ago dropped it and wrote a rel=connonical tag in the top of each page visitors dropped from 100 per day in august to 12-20 in the last month. Google says that if duplicate content is made to try to game serps they may filter or penalize my site. Have I triggered this penalty or a different sort of over optimization penalty? Will the rel= canonical tags fix this or should i do something else? This Penalty Business is Not my Idea of a good time Thank You Jeb

    | PokerCanada
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  • AndreVanKets


    Hi All, Out of all our keywords their are 3 that are showing our home page in the serps rather than the specific product page URL on Google.co.za (Google.com ranks the correct URL) Im not sure why this is happening as most links built using the anchor text are pointing to the correct page. Why would google prefer ranking our home page on local search and rank the correct page on Google.com? (only 3 keywords have this problem) I have tried to correct this by creating links from strong internal pages with anchor text pointing to the correct URL. I have also concentrated on building links from .co.za domains using the anchor text and correct URL but to no avail. It has been 2 weeks now, since i tried to sort it out, but im not sure what else i can do to tell Google to rank the correct page. Any ideas? Regards Greg

    | AndreVanKets
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  • idreams


    Hello this is so strange i have just noticed when looking in webmastertools there are some pages of our website it is showing like 404-like content but in reality the page is getting 200 response and it is good. but why does google read that as 404-like content! we have product information and image of the product and even buy button in the page.. not only product pages but also for some content pages it showing 404-like content! thanks in advance for your valuable opinions on the topic..

    | idreams
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  • PedroM


    Hello, I have a website http://digitaldiscovery.eu that I have been working for 7 months. Everything is alright in the index of the search engines like Google, Bing e Yahoo. I also have like 1000 visits a month wich is not bad for the topic Im pointing at in my country. However my pagerank insist to be on 0, and I really dont understand why. Some of the my competitors that started at the same time, already have a pagerank of 3 and they do not have the same visitors that I do. In the rank system of Alexa im climbing very fast and the visits of my website are growing. So why does the pagerank dont climb aswell?! Tks in advance, Pedro M Pereira

    | PedroM
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  • FidelityOne


    I have a domain with a domain authority rank of 16 and 0 inbound links.  I have owned the domain for over 6 years and no longer have any use for it. Additionally, it has no good keywords in the domain. It has been a one page website for about 4 years. The broad question is what criteria do people using in deciding whether or not to renew a domain name? I have a bunch coming due and am interested if I should take the time to try and sell on SEDO or just let them expire. Whould love to hear how people handle this situation.

    | FidelityOne
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  • Horlogeboetiek


    Hi All, I would like to hide all the products that are out of stock on my category pages, for example with a display:none (maybe there are better options/techniques do this....tips are welcome). The visitor has the options to reveal the out of stock items by using one of the filters, or by using a check-box "Show out of stock items". Would this still be in line with Google's guidelines? Am I taking a risk to get a penalty cause I'm hiding content? In my opinion it would not, cause I'm doing this to achieve a better user experience. Items are most of the time out of stock for a week not any longer. Hope to hear from you guys. Thanks in advance Richard

    | Horlogeboetiek
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  • sesertin


    Do you know any methods to block robots.txt file from external users?

    | sesertin
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  • Bush_JSM


    Hi Mozzers, Can you answer something for me please. I have a client and they have 301 re-directed the homepage '/' to '/home.aspx'. Therefore all or most of the linkjuice is being passed which is great. They have also marked the '/' as nofollow / noindex in the Robots.txt file so its not being crawled. My question is if the '/' is being denied access to the robots is it still passing on the authority for the links that go into this page? It is a 301 and not 302 so it would work under normal circumstances but as the page is not being crawled do I need to change the Robots.txt to crawl the '/'? Thanks Bush

    | Bush_JSM
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  • seoug_2005


    Do search engines Read RoR sitemaps ? Are they necessary ?  Isn't xml sitemap enough.

    | seoug_2005
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  • digitalarts


    Noticed a search result recently that really caught my eye and certainly stood out among the other 10 results on the page, the META description contained the following snippet: "Learn more about our ★★★★★ rated service..." Any opinions on how using such alt-chars might effect search positioning when used in either the title or description META tags? The starts certainly looked very different to anything else on the page... The claim of 5 star rated service was pretty much accurate so it was genuine and fair to use it...

    | digitalarts
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  • stevecounsell


    I have a site that has been developed to default to the non-www version. However each page has a rel canonical to the non-www version too. Could having this in place on all pages hurt the site in terms of search engines? thanks Steve

    | stevecounsell
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  • Stevej24


    We understand that some companies offering class c ips can still  be fingerprinted.. Is there any hosting site that does offer class c ips that prevents that? Or is the best bet using privacy on all domains and then using multiple hosting companies, checking the ips they offer as you go?  If that is the case, are there any recommendations for the best host companies that offer the  least fingerprinting?

    | Stevej24
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  • tdsnet


    Hi there, I'm trying to create a 301 redirect for the file "index.php" but I keep getting a "fail to redirect" message in Firefox whenever I insert it into the Web.config file. <location path="index.php"></location> Is there anyway around this? Thanks for any help According to Open Site Explorer, there are about 500 links to my index file but it only has a 302 status so will not be passing link juice.

    | tdsnet
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  • dbuckles


    I've read that page titles can't/shouldn't be more than 70 characters long. Out of around 1,000 products we have about 150 that have legitimate titles that exceed this character limitation. We plan on automatically truncating these. Should I just cut the titles off at 70 characters or should I cut them off and add a "..."? Does it even matter?

    | dbuckles
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  • seoug_2005


    I want to redirect non www to www in blog hosted by wordpress. Where can i find .htaccess file ? Shall i have to create a new one ? If yes, where should i upload it ? Thanks

    | seoug_2005
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  • bozzie311


    Anyone know the best / easiest Joomla SEO extension?

    | bozzie311
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  • ClaireH-184886


    Hi i would like to know if blogger through google is a good way to build links and traffic. I have started to use blogger and would like to know if i am wasting my time using it for link building and traffic building for my main site

    | ClaireH-184886
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  • SGIMarketing


    Hi, we have just had a shocking experience moving from shared hosting to a dedicated server with a very large service provider.  Our website slowed down, the server has been down more times than up so we have moved back to shared hosting until we can find a supplier that can deliver.  nightmare!!  If anyone can recommend a good company it would be appreciated. Thanks

    | SGIMarketing
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  • seoug_2005


    SEO best practices says that one should put blog in a subfolder. Like www.example,com/blog In the above case, should we say that the blog is in folder or subfolder. Actually, i have been unsure about this folder vs subfolder thing. Some examples of this would be appreciated. What is the example of a blog in a subdomain ? Thanks

    | seoug_2005
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  • adell50


    I launched my site, InternetCE.com, and blog, www.continuingeducationjournal.com, a few years ago. I then learned I should probably merge the content, and foolishly created a subdomain, http://blog.internetce.com, and 301 redirected the blog to it.  As an aside, my site is on a microsoft server, thus cannot host my wordpress blog on it. After a bit more study, I realized that my blog wasn't helping me nearly as much as it could be, so I 301'd it again to http://internetce.com/blog. In just becoming a pro member (long overdue) I realize that my entire site needs to be 301'd to merge non-www and www versions. I read somewhere that mr. cutts says not to 301 more than twice for fear of mistakenly being construed as something a bit to spammy. So, here I sit..not sure what to do. Does anyone have any advice on how to most efficiently correct this spaghetti bowl? Many thanks!

    | adell50
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  • MoA


    The SEOmoz crawler has pointed out this warning on my Magento store.. http://mydomain.co.uk redirects to http://www.mydomain.co.uk Is this a problem? My site is new, so don't want to get penalised this early on! Any advice appreciated.

    | MoA
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  • sesertin


    What plugin should I use to make a webshop taht is good for seo as well? Should I use wordpress indeed or should i use some other open  source CMS?

    | sesertin
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  • adriandg


    Should i change my all the page titles for pages that show up in local SERPs to reflect this new limit?  Is there any benefit to leaving it at the old limit and having more keywords in there?  Or would there be benefit to conforming to google's new standard and having shorter titles?

    | adriandg
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  • TakeLessons


    Hey Guys, I'm curious if there are ways a page can get indexed even if the page isn't linked to or hasn't been submitted to a search engine. To my knowledge the following page on our website is not linked to and we definitely didn't submit it to Google - but it's currently indexed: <cite>takelessons.com/admin.php/adminJobPosition/corp</cite> Anyone have any ideas as to why or how this could have happened? Hopefully I'm missing something obvious 🙂 Thanks, Jon

    | TakeLessons
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  • pauledwards


    Here's a question, if you put the date in your url (often a wordpress format) would that be seen by Google now as 'fresh' content? - part of their new update.

    | pauledwards
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  • Trigun


    Hi, There are some websites that keeps on scraping my content. I have blocked them already from accessing my website using .htaccess but they still get my content via RSS feed. I have tried delaying the RSS feed but I think this affected google rankings.  My question is, is there a way to change the URL of my RSS Feed? From: http://www.mysite.com/feed   to http://www.mysite.com/feed2

    | Trigun
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  • MaxRuso


    We moved the site to a new hosting. Previously the site used Godaddy Windows Hosting with white domain masking. After moving the site we just mirrored the site. We have to use mirrored domain for PPC campaigns because it mirrored site contains true BRAND name and there is better conversion with that domain plus all trade marked keywords are approved for mirrored domain. Robots.txt User-agent: * Host: www.hermitagejewelers.com Disallow: /Bin Disallow: /css www.hermitagejewelers.com is the main domain. Mirror site is www.ermitagejewelers.com (Without the "H" at the beginning) Most of the keywords are now picked up by mirror site. I have not noticed any major changes in ranking except that it ranks for mirror site. We updated the sitemap. Website is designed very poorly (not by us). Also, we submitted the change address request for ermitagejewelers to hermitagejewelers in webmasters. Please let me know any advice to fix that problem. Thank you.

    | MaxRuso
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