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Ok thanks alot. I know its important to maintain good rich, rather than thin content on posts (listings). I was intending on using categories and tag them with regions - so the content is more like an actual post rather than like a telephone book.

Cheers

Thank you for the great ideas you have suggested here, would be great to incorporate these.

We are an adventure travel tour company, who run hiking, kayaking, biking adventures in several countries. We have a travel tour operator website with a blog in a sub folder of the site. We want to add a section/category in the blog itself with a hiking club mini directory, that lists all hiking clubs in 1 or 2 specific countries.

The reason we want to do this is because the people searching online for these clubs are our target market and potential clients. We hope to rank for some of these searches, and encourage interest in our blog/website in the process. We also want the potential to build relationships with these clubs.

The question I want to ask is: if we add say 100 to 200 listings, and make all outgoing links no follow, will this harm our page authority, reputation with SE's or pose any other risk for our site. The other question is, do you think that this will dilute the context of our content - as its slightly different in context to the rest of our site content.

Are we better to set up a separate site for this purpose.

Hi People,

My client has a site www.activeadventures.com. They provide adventure tours of New Zealand, South America and the Himalayas.

These destinations are split into 3 folders in the site (eg: activeadventures.com/new-zealand, activeadventures.com/south-america etc....).

The actual root folder of the site is generic information for all of the destinations whilst the destination specific folders are specific in their information for the destination in question.

The Problem: If you search for say "Active New Zealand" or "Adventure Tours South America" our result that comes up is the activeadventures.com homepage rather than the destination folder homepage (eg: We would want activeadventures.com/new-zealand to be the landing page for people searching for "active new zealand"). Are there any ways in influence google as to what page on our site it chooses to serve up?

Many thanks in advance.

Conrad

Hi There,

I have three separate questions which are all related. Some brief back ground. My client has an adventure tourism company that takes predominantly North American customers on adventure tours to three separate destinations: New Zealand, South America and the Himalayas.

They previously had these sites on their own URL's. These URL's had the destination in the URL (eg: sitenewzealand.com). 2 of the three URL's had good age and lots of incoming links. This time last year a new web company was bought in and convinced them to pull all three sites onto a single domain and to put the sites under sub folders (eg: site.com/new-zealand). The built a brand new site for them on a Joomla platform.

Unfortunately the new sites have not performed and halved the previous call to action rates. Organic traffic was not adversely affected with this change, however it hasn't grown either.

I have been overhauling these new sites with a project team and we have managed to keep the new design but make usability/marketing changes that have the conversion rate nearly back to where it originally was and we have managed to keep the new design (and the CMS) in place.

We have recently made programmatic changes to the joomla system to push the separate destination sites back onto their original URL's. My first question is around whether technically this was a good idea.

Question 1

Does our logic below add up or is it flawed logic?

The reasons we decided to migrate the sites back onto their old URL's were:

1. We have assumed that with the majority of searches containing the actual destination (eg: "New Zealand") that all other things being equal it is likely to attract a higher click through rate on the domain www.sitenewzealand.com than for www.site.com/new-zealand.
2. Having the "newzealand" in the actual URL would provide a rankings boost for target keyword phrases containing "new zealand" in them.
3. We also wanted to create the consumer perception that we are specialists in each of the destinations which we service rather than having a single site which positions us as a "multi-destination" global travel company.
4. Two of the old sites had solid incoming links and there has been very little new links acquired for the domain used for the past 12 months.
5. It was also assumed that with the sites on their own domains that the theme for each site would be completely destination specific rather than having the single site with multiple destinations on it diluting this destination theme relevance. It is assumed that this would also help us to rank better for the destination specific search phrases (which account for 95% of all target keyword phrases).

The downsides of this approach were that we were splitting out content onto three sites instead of one with a presumed associated drop in authority overall. The other major one was the actual disruption that a relatively complex domain migration could cause.

Opinions on the logic we adopted for deciding to split these domains out would be highly appreciated.

Question 2

We migrated the folder based destination specific sites back onto their old domains at the start of March. We were careful to thoroughly prepare the htaccess file to ensure we covered off all the new redirects needed and to directly redirect the old redirects to the new pages. The structure of each site and the content remained the same across the destination specific folders (eg: site.com/new-zealand/hiking became sitenewzealand.com/hiking).

To achieve this splitting out of sites and the ability to keep the single instance of Joomla we wrote custom code to dynamically rewrite the URL's. This worked as designed. Unfortunately however, Joomla had a component which was dynamically creating the google site maps and as this had not had any code changes it got all confused and started feeding up a heap of URL's which never previously existed.

This resulted in each site having 1000 - 2000 404's. It took us three weeks to work this out and to put a fix into place. This has now been done and we are down to zero 404's for each site in GWT and we have proper google site maps submitted (all done 3 days ago).

In the meantime our organic rankings and traffic began to decline after around 5 days (after the migration) and after 10 days had dropped down to around 300 daily visitors from around 700 daily visitors. It has remained at that level for the past 2 weeks with no sign of any recovery.

Now that we have fixed the 404's and have accurate site maps into google, how long do you think it will take to start to see an upwards trend again and how long it is likely to take to get to similar levels of organic traffic compared to pre-migration levels? (if at all).

Question 3

The owner of the company is understandably nervous about the overall situation. He is wishing right now that we had never made the migration. If we decided to roll back to what we previously had are we likely to cause further recovery delays and would it come back to what we previously had in a reasonably quick time frame?

A huge thanks to everyone for reading what is quite a technical and lengthy post and a big thank you in advance for any answers.

Kind Regards
Conrad

Hi There,

My client has a website (www.activeadventures.com) which they relaunched in April 2013. The company sells inbound tourism trips to New Zealand, South America and the Himalayas. Previously, the websites for these destinations were on their own domains (activenewzealand.com, activehimalayas.com, activesouthamerica.com).

With the launch of the new website those domains were all retired (but had 301 redirects put into place to the new site), and moved into sub directories of the activeadventures.com domain (eg: activeadventures.com/new-zealand).

There has been no indication that this strategy has improved organic search results (based on analytics) and in my opinion I believe that having this structure has been detrimental to their results. My opinion is based off the following:

• Visitors to the websites are coming into the site with a specific destination in mind that they want to travel to. Thus... having the destination in the URL I believe provides more immediate relevancy and should result in a higher CTR.
• I also feel that having the sites on their own URL's will provide a more concentrated theme for the destination based search phrases.

The new site is a custom Joomla build and I want to find the easiest way to keep the current Joomla set up AND move the country specific sections of the site back onto their original URL's.

It seems on the face of it that the easiest way to get this done is to use the htaccess file and use "RewriteRule" to push all the relevant pages back onto their original domains. Obviously we will ensure we also cover off pointing the existing 301's from the new site and the old sites to this new structure.

My question is, are their any potential negative SEO implications of using the RewriteRule in the htaccess file to achieve this?

Many thanks in advance.

Kind Regards
Conrad Cranfield

We are an adventure travel tour company, who run hiking, kayaking, biking adventures in several countries. We have a travel tour operator website with a blog in a sub folder of the site. We want to add a section/category in the blog itself with a hiking club mini directory, that lists all hiking clubs in 1 or 2 specific countries.

The reason we want to do this is because the people searching online for these clubs are our target market and potential clients. We hope to rank for some of these searches, and encourage interest in our blog/website in the process. We also want the potential to build relationships with these clubs.

The question I want to ask is: if we add say 100 to 200 listings, and make all outgoing links no follow, will this harm our page authority, reputation with SE's or pose any other risk for our site. The other question is, do you think that this will dilute the context of our content - as its slightly different in context to the rest of our site content.

Are we better to set up a separate site for this purpose.

Thank you for the great ideas you have suggested here, would be great to incorporate these.

Ok thanks alot. I know its important to maintain good rich, rather than thin content on posts (listings). I was intending on using categories and tag them with regions - so the content is more like an actual post rather than like a telephone book.

Cheers