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? 56VD5jD

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?