Thanks for this information! All of the support agents I spoke with told me that it was not possible. They were all extremely professional, but perhaps they didn't understand what I was asking. I'm glad to hear there is a way to make it happen. WPE is a great platform for us.

Just thought I'd shoot an update - according to WPEngine the redirect will always be there. No way around it on their platform.

Hi guys,

Had a quick question that I wanted to verify here. After reviewing a Moz report we received some redirect chain error on all of our sites hosted with WPEngine. We noticed that the redirect chain appears to be coming from how the domains are configured in their control panel.

Essentially, there is a redirect:

• from staging/temp -> to live
• from non-www -> to www
• SSL redirect from http -> https

The issue here is that the non-www is redirecting to www and then redirected again to https://www

According to support the only way to get rid of this error is to drop the www version of the domain and to host everything under https://domain.com. To me it seems very odd that you cannot just go from http://non-www to https://www in just 1 301 redirect.

Has anyone else experienced this or am I just not looking at the situation correctly?

While I was doing research on UK Flower companies I noticed that one particular domain had great rankings (top 3), but has slid quite a bit down to page two. After investigating further I noticed that they had a drastic loss of referring pages, but an increase in total referring domains. See this screenshot from ahrefs.

I took a look at their historical rankings (got them from the original SEO provider's portfolio) and compared it to the Wayback Machine. There did not seem to be any drastic changes in the site structure. My question is what would cause such a dramatic loss in total referring pages while showing a dramatic increase in referring domains? It appears that the SEO company was trying rebound from the loss of links though.

Any thoughts on why this might happen?

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Another very helpful answer - thank you.  Moving forward, I still think the best approach is one website at the end of the day.  After all, the saying is that it is better to mine one mine deep than to mine several at the same time.

In this particular niche, service industries like plumbing have exact match domains with less notable content.  We're still working on the ability to offset this advantage they appear to have.

Thanks again!

I think these are great guidelines and recommendations.  Quick question though - what if a small business has multiple locations and a different phone number at each location?  Would it serve any purpose to have a microsite for these locations which are also branded accordingly?

Another strategy I see commonly used are subdomains under the main umbrella site.  Any thoughts on that one?  The client really wants to take up more space on the search results.  So I want to make sure that we do a legit and unique approach to this.  It may be that we instead create niche landing pages on the main site like:

acmeplumbing.com/sacramentoplumbingwarranty

Where this page is a specific section dedicated to plumbing warranties, faqs, warranty changes, newsworthy stories, etc.  That way we continue the size of the site and keep our efforts focused in 1 place.  One our main challenges is that competitors are finding ranking opportunities using keyword specific urls and different google voice phone numbers attached to the same business and location.

Howdy Moz,

Over and over we hear of folks using microsites in addition to their main brand for targeting keyword specific niches.  The main point of concern most folks have is either in duplicate content or being penalized by Google, which is also our concern.  However, in one of our niches we notice a lot of competitors have set up secondary websites to rank in addition to the main website (basically take up more room on the SERPS).  They are currently utilizing different domains, on different IPs, on different servers, etc.  We verified because we called and they all rang to the same competitors.

So our thought was why not take the fight to them (so to speak) but with a branding and content strategy.  The company has many good content pieces that we can utilize, like company mottos, missions statements, special projects, community outreach that can be turned into microsites with unique content.

Our strategy idea is the take a company called "ACME Plumbing" and brand for specific keywords with locations like sacramentoplumberwarranty.com where the site's content revolves around plumber warranty info, measures of a good warranty, plumbing warranty news (newsworthy issues), blogs, RCS - you get the idea...and send both referral traffic and link to the main site.

The ideal is to then repeat the process with another company aspect like napaplumbingprojects.com where the content of the site is focused on cool projects, images, RCS, etc. Again, referring traffic and link juice to the main site.

We realize that this adds the amount of RCS that needs to be done, but that's exactly why we're here.  Also, any thoughts of intentionally tying in the brand to the location so you get urls like acmeplumbingsacarmento.com?